Reinforcements!

 Been a while since I painted any Hagans!

There are lots of reasons, in fairness. Painting large amounts of white armour doesn't exactly make the heart sing, for one. And I've done a decent amount of Scion troopers previously, I still have heaps of spare sprues left and I didn't want to buy any more. But I couldn't find any good alternatives. 

Anyone who smiles this much has been fighting too long.

For a while, I was tempted by some of the Atlantic Wargames stuff, but in the end it was good old PuppetsWar who got me. Their heads are great, but they actually do some very good bodies to go under them, and these Elite Troopers (who look quite a lot like they might play Halo) go at a very reasonable price on their Troopers Unit Configurator page. You can basically select the bits for your resin infantry unit of choice, picking heads and bodies from their usual selection and adding in extras (packs, special weapons) if you want to.

It is very hard to paint eyes under a peaked cap, I have discovered. Luckily, you can't see them most of the time, but I still had to do it. I'd know, otherwise.

The Officers and Patrol Cap heads on display here are great! You'd normally get ten heads of one variety with your order, but I asked nicely and they swapped in an extra sprue, so I ended up with spare Officers too. Good for a Commissar, obviously, but I reckon they make for fine uptight Hagans as well. 

"My god! There's a slug on my lip!"

"Hold still, I'll get it."

The plasma guns might be a bit long, but I rather like them. They're an upgrade that just sticks on to the front and side of the snub-nosed blaster the troopers carry, and there are melta, flamer and sniper equivalents. Plasma for me, this time - nothing like a solid unit of Scions pumping those things into you at short range for a quick bit of ground clearance!

Having found my original paint recipe from a few years back, I found some of the paints were long dead. Army Painter equivalents worked fine, though - Necromancer Cloak instead of Eshin Grey, Rotting Flesh instead of Nurgling Green and so on. There was one last touch I could do to make them fit in with the originals. 

Those have lamps on their pack shoulders, which I'd done in bright blue, but these troopers don't. But their jetpack has a nice hole in the middle, which was pretty much the right size for some of the gem sequins I've got. They all got sparkly power packs in roughly the right colour, one sequin each and only a bit of swearing and gnashing of tweezers to get them there. 

Finally, a mascot! One of the Dungeons and Lasers animal familiars, a nice robo-dog. He was originally intended to go with the Palanite Enforcers as one of their K9 types, but he slipped into a shipment to Kas by accident and took a long walkies to the UK and back. He's still got a Necromunda base, but he's posing with these chaps for now. 

More to come for the Scions - stay tuned!