We can eat our enemies, and our enemies can EAT THIS!

Brother Erasmus, Flesh Eaters Terminator

My work on the Warhammer 40,000 ‘Leviathan’ Terminator squad continues this week with Brother Erasmus, a Flesh Eaters Terminator with a LED motorised assault cannon! From the moment the Leviathan contents was previewed, I knew I’d have to give this miniature some special treatment.

Modelling

To make this miniature I followed my own LED Motorised Assault Cannon tutorial, with only one small difference: I placed a miniature slide switch in parallel with the ‘push to make’ switch. With this modification, turning on either switch will activate the assault cannon, regardless of what position the other switch is in. This means I can still use the ‘push to make’ switch to “fire” the assault cannon during a game, whereas the slide switch can be used to keep the assault cannon on for photography and display purposes.

The image on the left below shows the two switches connected in parallel, with the ‘push to make’ switch facing up and the slide switch facing down. The image on the right shows the assault cannon construction in progress. The motor used was 4mm x 8mm so was small enough to fit inside the assault cannon without modifying its shape. The holes you can see drilled in the side were covered up when the magazine was glued into place on the side.

If you’re trying this yourself, just be a bit cautious when attaching the barrels to the shaft of the motor. I used too much force on the shaft and pushed the plastic back off the first motor, destroying it completely. I had to pause work on this miniature while I waited for a replacement to arrive. If it hadn’t done this, then we probably would have seen Brother Erasmus last week. This mistake can be avoided by bracing the plastic back of the motor with a pair of tweezers when you are attaching the barrels.

I decided that an unhelmeted head was the best choice for this model. As there was only room for one CR2032 battery in the base, the motor, the muzzle flare and the helmet eye lenses would have all shared a single battery. This meant that when the assault cannon was operating, the helmet eye lenses would have dimmed, which I felt would have been too immersion breaking.

The head used is from the Leviathan Terminator Captain. I had this going spare as I had already sourced an alternative head for my Captain. I decided to shave off his hair and one of the service studs with a hobby knife, just so it looked like a different head. The Captain’s head is normally facing to his left, but I placed the head facing to the right, following the line of fire of the assault cannon. Unfortunately, some of the detail was missing from the left side of the Captain’s head as that is normally obscured, so I had to sculpt in the missing parts with modelling putty, mainly around his left earpiece.

Painting

As with the rest of the Terminator squad, I painted Brother Erasmus using my normal Flesh Eaters armour, Terminator iconography and freehand check recipes. I’m going to do a post taking a detailed look at my method for painting light skin soon, but you can find a brief rundown of my recipe for painting Space Marine pale flesh towards the end of this post.

It’s often tricky to exactly match Rogue Trader-era Space Marine heraldry (above left) exactly, especially when the design of the weapons has evolved over the years. Instead I tried to capture the feel of it with checks on the magazine (above centre) and around the barrels (above right). If you look very closely, you’ll see a version of the assault cannon ‘lightning bolt’ symbol.

As I suggest in the tutorial, the button that activates the assault cannon is hidden underneath a skull. Pressing down on the central skull (above left) will “fire” the assault cannon. I did briefly consider breaking my War of the False Primarch army theme and using a Tyranid skull for the button as a nod to Leviathan, but in the end decided against it. I’ve come this far on-theme and it would have been a shame to deviate from it now.

So there we are, four Terminators done! The Sergeant is probably going to take the most conversion work out of all of them, so I’m not sure how quickly I’ll get him done. Thanks very much for reading today’s post, and please don’t forget you can also follow my work on social media at Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X and Mastodon.