Death has arrived!

Predator tank commander motto

It’s a quick diversion back into slightly unusual territory this week with a 15mm scale Demios Predator! This cool little model was printed as a gift by a good friend who owns a 3D resin printer. He also included some 15mm MkVI Space Marines and several other vehicles, including a 15mm Land Raider that I shared a few weeks ago.

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. I’m using this cool gift as an opportunity to paint-up a small 15mm scale Horus Heresy Imperial Fists army. Below you can see comparison shots of the Predator next to 15mm infantry, and my trusty 28mm Guardsman ‘Sergeant Scale’.

This particular model was very high-up the painting priority order. For me, the Deimos Predator Destructor is one of the most iconic Space Marine tanks. In fact I think the very original 1980s plastic Predator was the first vehicle I ever encountered on the 40K tabletop!

Painting & Modelling

The 15mm Horus Heresy project is quite light on LEDs – if you’ll excuse the pun – compared to most of my other armies. But many of the vehicles are just too tempting not to wire up! As you can see from the above left image, the Predator autocannon barrel came out of the printer slightly ‘droopy’, so I decided to replace it with plastic rod. This also made it easier to drill the holes for the muzzle flare wires.

The Predator autocannon has a 3V Yellow 0805 SMD Chip LED (available from Small Scale Lights) at the muzzle. The LED is in series with its supplied 100Ω resistor. The circuit is supplied by a single 3V CR2032 coin cell battery and switch in the 50mm base. The muzzle flare effect around the LED is made from acrylic gel. I have a full, detailed explanation for how this whole process is done in my Simple LED Muzzle Flare Tutorial.

If you’re interested in my yellow paint receipe, you can find it in my previous post on the 15mm scale Land Raider.

As mentioned in my previous post on 15mm Horus Heresy, my plan is to use these models to play a few games with my regular gaming buddy Apologist who is building up an Emperor’s Children force. If you’d like to see how that’s going, then search his blog for 15mm Horus Heresy.

That’s it for this week, I hope you’re all finding this slightly unusual project interesting! I’m sure there will be some more posts about 15mm Horus Heresy again in the future. As ever, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on Twitter and Instagram.