I see no Ships

Ladies, gentlemen and assembled Servojurors, I refer you to the first piece of evidence, this blog article. Some way down the page, note where the accused describes himself as a 'man with no bikes'. I put it to you, here and now, that this is clear evidence of lies and, ipso facto, Heresy! Burn him at once!

So, yeah, this Mantis Warriors army was supposed to be a quick sidebar to other projects. One cannot sidebar in this wretched hobby. Crowbar, perhaps, turn a crack into a gaping hole using main strength and a reliance on nobody noticing what you're doing to obscure your wrongdoing.

This was a rescue mission from eBay. Someone had built this trio of bikers and blessed them with some Blanchitsu-style smeary paints. Snapping them up, I set about converting the one who was driving full tilt into the side of some masonry, and then sprayed them ready for painting.

Whatever that red-brown slurry was, it ate right through the spray coat! Something oil-based, is my guess, although I've not seen it happen before. Luckily, it went inert after tainting the Corax White, and the green went on fairly easily after that. Three coats easily, at least, it's not a very forgiving paint to use (Greenskin from Army Painter, thinner than I want it).

The conversion is a bike captain with stormshield (thanks, Ogryns) and thunder hammer (thanks, a variety of different sources including a Dreadknight and some Frostgrave barbarians). Or he could be a tooled-up sergeant, I guess. Either way, he's a veteran of the Tranquility Campaign, a colour scheme from waaaay back when.

This Rhino was actually finished weeks ago, I just forgot to take pics until now. So there's that for the Marines too.

What is even more embarrassing is that this isn't even all the bikes yet. Oh, Kraken, your willpower score truly is -.