I picked up Battle Fleet Gothic many, many years ago. It was an after thought. I think I’d ended up with some excess vouchers for the Games Workshop store, so I bought the game. I collected a bit of an Imperial fleet, but I never ended up playing the game…
Fast forward over 20 years and I’ve finally painted my second fleet. Last year I painted a Tyranid army for Warhammer 40,000 and this left lots of lovely spare bits. Since Tyranids are organic in nature (are they natural?!), scale isn’t really apparent with the pieces. Following a bit of internet inspiration (check out the great models on this blog), I grabbed some Milliput and began sticking pieces together to produce vessels that I thought would look the part. I wanted shapes that wouldn’t look out of place under the sea. I took inspiration from crustaceans, rays and sea horses for the various void faring ships I created.
I painted the ships in exactly the same style as my Tyranid army. The continuity makes sense – they are all evolutions form the same base animal.
Here are my Hive Ships:
So, very shrimp-like with large claws and tendrils.
My cruisers are a little more ray-like. The very large front pincers give a sense of the sweeping wings of a ray (or at least I think they do).
This cruiser is more like a big gun, because it’s made from, eh, a big gun.
Finally here’s a selection of escorts.
All of the ships are a little ambiguous when it comes to identifying their armaments. This is deliberate: some look more shooty, some look more close quarters(y). I’ll just map the most appropriate model to the type of weapons I arm the ship with.
Now I just need to learn how to play this game I’ve owned for about 20 years! I’m planning to use the fleet in an upcoming campaign that’ll involve Battle Fleet Gothic, Warhammer 40k and Kill Team (and maybe Space Hulk).