Skyray Missile Gunship conversion

The Tau Skyray is a tank based on the same hull as the Hammerhead. Although it's role on the battlefield differs greatly from the main battle tanks hammer and anvil approach. Instead it uses laserpointers to mark enemy positions to aid firesupport in form of target designation. Additionally it is equipped with eight smart missiles, which can be fired without line of sight to support infantrysquads.

I won this kit in a tournament and did not really intend on fielding it since I prefer the rather straight forward approach of other heavy support choices in my Tau army. Instead I had a vision of transforming it into something more agile looking- like a plane.

I totally ripped the mainbody apart and removed the parts that made up the mainhull because they looked too heavy to fly. By doing so I became a very slender base and the idea of putting a figter canopy onto it struck me. I opted for the eldar falcon cockpit an merged it with a Tau tank comander sprue with the result you can see. It was quiet a mess but finally with the help of some greenstuff everything worked fine.
The frontal mounts for the secondary weapons were also too massive and looked out of place when thinking of an aerodynamic plane so I cut them off- I would use the place for something else- namely the turbines.
I moved the engines with their giant air intakes to the front and glued them on the body. Thereby I lost the tilting feature of the original but it I destroyed their mount incidently when seperating them from their original place.
The weapon platform is by default stuck on a turret on top of the tank and flanked by the two massive engines. I chose to move them to the side of the tank which now made them look like wings.
When thinking about weapon options I thought that the support role of the vehicle would not need it to see direct fire, so I chose the smart missile system as a secondary weaponsystem. These are basically small rockets wich can find their targets by themeselve and can therefor be fired out of cover- Perfect fit flluffwise. I constructed my own because I ripped of the original mounts and mounted one under the nose and in the place of the former turret. They fitted in like a glove.
Finally I had to cover up the parts of lesser atention like the underside and the backdoor of the tank. I did so by using plasticard and also placed a rare earth magnet into the middle section. The reason for this was the flyer base.
Like every other 40k-player I soon found out that the clear plastics which come with jetbikes and skimmers tend to break of very soon during play because of their fragile design and the plastic used by GW. I had the idea to use a simple nail before but I never realized this project. SO it was time. The construction was as easy as one could think - nail into the base, fix it with greenstuff so it gets more stable and voila. Works perfekt.