The Land Raider is to other vehicles as the Astartes are to baseline humans.

Rogal Dorn, ‘A Treatise on Tanks’

Here’s something a little different – a 15mm scale Land Raider! This cool little model was printed as a gift by a good friend who owns a 3D resin printer. He also threw in some 15mm MkVI Space Marines and a few other bits and pieces to go with it. Models at 15mm scale sit somewhere in between the 6mm scale of Epic miniatures and the 28mm scale of Warhammer 40,000. They’re small enough that they don’t take super long to paint, but large enough to tackle some interesting details.

Painting & Modelling

Like so many of my other projects, initially I said “no LEDs”. But in the end I couldn’t resist putting a few in the Land Raider to make it seem as though the lascannons were firing. This was quite fiddly in terms of drilling, and as you can see in the WIP picture above I ended-up replacing the lascannon barrels with plastic tubes to make drilling the wire holes easier. Each lascannon has a 3V Red Ultra Nano SMD Chip LED (available from Small Scale Lights) at the aperture. The LEDs are in series with their supplied 100Ω resistor and then in parallel with each other. The whole circuit is supplied by a single 3V CR2032 coin cell battery and switch in the base.

The muzzle flare effects around the LEDs – simulating scattered laser light on the dusty battlefield – are made from acrylic gel. I have an explanation for how this is done in my Simple LED Muzzle Flare Tutorial.

The banner is an addition from my bits box, which I think may have come from an old Black Templar accessory sprue. The miniature is mounted on a 65mm base.

I decided this Land Raider would essentially be a 15mm scale version of my classic 30K Land Raider ‘Iron Duke’. To paint the yellow, I fell back on my tried-and-tested recipe:

• Corax white undercoat
• Averland sunset base
• Cassandora yellow shade in recesses
• Yriel yellow (two thin coats)
• Flash Gitz yellow edge highlight
• Dorn yellow final edge highlight

Although this gives a nice bright yellow, it is quite time consuming, especially with the multiple applications of Yriel yellow. In hindsight I wish I’d invested in the new Imperial Fists contrast paint and given that a go instead as I imagine that would have been much quicker. Ah well!

So now I have this model, what am I going to do with it? Well my good friend Apologist also recieved some of these 15mm miniatures, and decided to paint them as Emperor’s Children so we could have a cool Horus Heresy themed game with them! You can read the battle report on his blog.

That’s it for this week, I hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly unusual project! I have some more 15mm models to finish, so I’m sure we’ll see some more of this project again in the future. As ever, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on Twitter and Instagram.