Tartaros Plasma Blaster Terminator

The plasma blaster is one of the nicer options for Tartaros terminators to take. But, not being made of cash and wanting to do some real conversion work, I decided that I didn't want to go for the comparatively small plasma blaster weapon sold by Forge World. Nope. Instead, I wanted a full-scale plasma-cannon! 

The logic behind this choice is not too hard to see. Not only do I think that that Alpha Legion would have access to some of the biggest, most advanced, baddest weapons possible, but they're certainly not shy of deploying novel creations of their own through reverse engineering whatever they please (cf. Corvus Alpha armour). That, and I'm also quietly hoping that the Dark Angels might have their own terminators capable of deploying plasma cannons themselves, which makes stealing them by the Alpha Legion much more credulous. 

The terminator here is a remarkably straight forward conversion. Having learnt my lesson well about haunched shoulders and the curvy bodies that these guys have on my sergeant, I opted for a variant pose for this guy. Rather than having the plasma cannon levelled, he has it up high as if running, or perhaps attacking with his power sword instead of using the plasma weapon. This made the pinning of the plasma cannon from the Dark Angels terminator range much more easy to do.

The power sword arm comes from the grey knights range -- it is one of the long power swords that the knights in normal power armour wield in two hands usually, but this one is wielded one-handedly (because he's a terminator!). The pinning to the Tartaros arm was not too painful either, but I might add just a dab of greenstuff prior to painting to bring it together better.

As can also be seen, I avoided using more of the puppetswar shoulder pads, instead just going for the Tartaros pattern shoulder pads. Clearly this works well for the power sword arm, but it actually works just fine for the plasma cannon arm as well for that matter. 

Finally, some of you may be wondering why I've opted for a power sword here (rather than a power axe). Let me be honest. This guy will always be the first to die (if I get to select) in any melee. That's because he's served his purpose by firing his plasma blaster once or twice on the way into melee. After that, I'm not firing the plasma and his value is diminished. But more than that, I don't want to be taking on enemy terminators with my terminators regularly. I want to crush weaker specimens if at all possible. That means I don't actually need AP2 that power axes will provide, and can use AP3. It might mean that I can whittle down an otherwise terrifying squad (even for terminators) before the rest of my AP2 weapons start hacking back. Without storm shields, this is not a bad sacrifice in my opinion and shakes up the ordinary paradigm (which is what the Alpha Legion would just love to do in my opinion).