Looking good. Fulgrims personal Stormbird actually looks like a bird of bprey. With a beak as nose and feathered wings and all

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For Stormbird converting, how about.....

http://www.revell.de/starwars/produkte/ ... uttle.html


although at 165mm long it may be too big.....

some more:

http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/Frames/S ... S-930.html

http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/Frames/S ... S-530.html

http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/Frames/SC/index.html
the ship on the left is cool....
only 40-50mm long though so maybe too small......

i'll help if i can

and reaver that looks a nice bird

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I'd like to help in anyway I can. I have most of the day open as I work at night. One possibilty for the stormbird would be a firelord model with greenstuff details and covering?

@Reaver - I rather like that version, although I think the nose needs to be a little more streamlined... it's described as 'conical' in the Novels IIRC, so I would have thought it would look more like a modern jet nose than a Thunderhawk nose. And it didn't carry tanks so its probably a bit too big. But I really like the forward swept wing design, fits in well with the descriptions of it having 'raptor wings' and resembling a bird of prey.

@BlackLegion - The 'Firebird' is almost certainly not a Stormbird... it was Fulgrim's own creation, described as
a gunship he had personally designed and constructed in the armourium decks of his flagship.

Thats some great stuff RS- very interesting synopsis.  I can see a number of great scenarios there already.

Ive been thinking about maps of the battle and and trying to get a handle on the scale of things.  The First issue is to get an idea of what Earth looks like.

We know that 30,000 years in the future the Earth should be in the grips of another Ice Age, but Im willing to imagine that climate change has partly put a halt on that.  The Antarctic Ice cap still exists though, so climate change hasnt been run-away.  Im thinking somewhat bigger ice caps than today, but not a full blow ice age.  The nice thing about that is it will allow for different, yet recognisable, continent outlines.

I could easily imagine that a lot of the water has also gone due to space travel: once people start hitting the stars the Earth's ecology is no longer a closed system and you would start shipping your water (as food and drinking water) offworld.

In the 40th millennium Earth is described as the greatest Hiveworld of all.  I dont think that it should be a complete hiveworld in the 30th millennium- But it should be starting to go that way.

Now, onto the location of the Palace.

As i understand it the emperors golden throne is over Nottingham, so that would place the palace in the UK.  Is the golden throne the same as the palace in the Heresy; if so that limits the location nicely.  However, Britain is a fairly geographically dull place.  Terms like Destiny's wall and Lions Gate makes me think that the palace is near to some rather large mountains.

Indeed, in the inquisitor novels I seem to remember that the palace was in the bowels of the Himalayan mountains.

So, I was considering setting the Palace at the centre of the Tibetan Plateaux.  It gives a nicely contained geographical setting, would be an ideal place for spaceports (near the equator and high altitude)and, from the emperors perspective, is contained and easy to control.  Plus it has that whole secret, shangri-la feeling.  

EDIT- Black Legion pointed out I was thinking of the Astronomicon, so this ideas probably a non starter.  Oh well.  

What are peoples thoughts? Does this sound like Heresy ? Is the location already established?  If anyone knows where GW actually located the palace during teh heresy, id love to know!

As too the scale of the battles- im thinking of making the maps at the scale of a small country. The spaceports should each be the size of a large city, so about the size of Manchester or Birmingham, while the palace will be bigger.  Say about the scale of London, with a series of concentric defences.  The palace will in itself be a huge, glorious Hive.

Again, thoughts?

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"Do not offend the Chair Leg of Truth; it is wise and terrible."
-Spider Jerusalem

The Astronomican was in the Himalayan Mountains.

And you surely want a look on the map of the Horus Heresy boardgame.

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@BL- balls, my bad.  Scratch the himalayas then.  I have looked at the board game, but its frankly rather uninspiring.  A desert with some generic Sci Fi blobs for space ports and, possibly, some arcologies. See here.  It would be nice to have it a bit more grounded in Earth

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"Do not offend the Chair Leg of Truth; it is wise and terrible."
-Spider Jerusalem

Stick with Nottingham as the location.  The HH books refer explicitly to their technological ability to literally level mountains and build plateaus.  You could imagine what the Emperor could get done with the power and resources he had at his disposal - building an entire mountain range would not be unbelievable in the context of the fiction.  This also gives you an opportunity to build the terrain in symmetrical and deliberate patterns.  Ex. Washington DC is designed as a series of circles with adjoining streets.  Amongst other reasons, Pierre L'Enfant's (sic?) design allowed cannon to be placed tactically so that it could fire down several streets for better defense against invaders (read: British   ).  So terrain around the palace for miles no doubt would have been modified for defense of the Emperor.

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It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Ahhh, the joys of contradictory GW background

In the Horus Heresy novels, the Palace is once again placed in the Himalayas. The Lightning Tower (which was available at one or two Gamesdays IIRC, and describes Dorn and Malcador preparing the Palace for the siege) mentions 'the thin air of the old Himalazia' and the fact that 'The artisan masters had built it upon Terra's greatest mountain range' - this is supported in False Gods which mentions 'the Emperor's most secret geno-vaults beneath the Himalayan peaks'. The Golden Throne is in the heart of the Palace Vaults, in the same location it is in the 41st Millenium.

As for the overall appearance of Terra, I would expect it to be largely unrecognisable even in 30K... Horus Rising mentions the discovery of 'a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molesta­tion of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.'

EDIT: The Palace should be geniunely huge I would have thought. Bear in mind as well that there is the Palace complex, with hugh gardens, hab areas, administrative areas, and so on protected by the first set of walls and defences, and then the Palace itself, again with massive defensive walls.

Yay, the himalayas is back in play

Dont ya just love GW fluff  

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"Do not offend the Chair Leg of Truth; it is wise and terrible."
-Spider Jerusalem

Had a quick look through the Lightning Tower... probably the best source of info we have on the Palace at present. A few useful bits...

'It was monumental. It was not so much an edifice as a handcrafted landmass. The artisan masters built it upon Terra's greatest mountain range, and transformed the monstrous peaks into its bulwarks.... By the time it was complete, it was the largest single man-made structure in known space. Its footings sank deep into the planet's mantle, its towers probed the airless limits of the atmosphere.'

'Dorn paced the halls of the Kath Mandau Precinct where the organs of the Adeptus Terra did their work. The Precinct, an entire city contained within the terraced compounds of the inner palace, never slept. Robed clerks and burnished servitors bustled along the broad concourses. Ministers and ambassadors conducted business beneath the kilometre-high roof of the Hegemon.'

'They walked as far as Lion's Gate, onto the platforms that overlooked the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau. The Gate had once been a thing of magnificence, two gilded beasts rising up to lock claws in a feral dispute. Dorn's order of works had replaced them with giant grey donjons stippled with casemates and macro-gun ports. A curtain wall of bleak rockcrete encircled the gate, its edge fletched with void field vanes like the spines of some prehistoric reptile'

It mentions several of the Gates of the Palace - 'Annapurna Gate', 'Primus Gate', 'Lions Gate' appear to be Gates in the Outer Place Defences, whereas the 'Ultimate Gate' is for the Palace itself. It also mentions the 'Eternity Gate', although its not clear whether that is for the Outer or Inner Palace. Brahmaputra plateau seems to protected by the 'massive earthwork defences of the Haldwani and Xigaze' as its first line of defence, and is the location of the Lions Gate Spaceport and also 'the delta of the Karnali'. It is the line of approach to  the Lions Gate of the Palace as well. The Annapurna Gate is part of the Dhawalagiri prospect, and overlooks 'the distant earthworks of the Mahabarat'.

So, at least we have some place names and such like to help with map making!

Brilliant. So its Nepal then.

Heres some maps from google:

Terrain
Satellite

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"Do not offend the Chair Leg of Truth; it is wise and terrible."
-Spider Jerusalem

Looks like we have a few real life place names to help give a general idea of how things are placed as well...

Brahmaputra Plateau

Karnali Delta

Dawalagiri Prospect

Annapurna Gate

And, of course, Kath Mandau.

Not sure how well all that will work with a practical Palace layout that is big enough of course! Still, doesn't need to be exact after all, just as long as we take some ideas from it... for example, we can probably infer that the Brahmaputra Plateau and the Lions Gate are to the South of the Palace...