I enjoyed painting the Damocles Command Rhino that much, I decided to paint an Imperial Fists Predator as well. When I indicated this was ‘not’ intended to be the start of another legion for Horus Heresy gaming, I may have been mistaken in that belief and underestimating the draw of the seventh legion.
Imperial Fists scheme
Similar to the Damocles, I have opted to do a split yellow/black scheme with the turret picked out in the black. The difference in shapes between the boxy hull and rounded turret gives a really nice contrast, so I thought this would look better than symmetrical markings. To emphasis I also painted the yellow stripe only on one side creating an asymmetric appearance, which personally I think works really well with Heresy era tanks. Stripes always visually look more interesting if they are only on one side, especially on the Deimos pattern hulls.
Simplicity is the key
I deliberately kept the scheme and the decals simple to keep the tank easy to read and let the painting and weathering do the talking. The main weapon is magnetised so I can swap out all of the options for gaming, but the ammo box/capacitor part that is different on each weapon I selected just the one I like and just stuck with it. Although I could have converted them to be magnetised options also, it just felt like unnecessary clutter to fiddle around with. Your mileage may vary and if you do magnetise all options then kudos to you.
The sponsons are fixed as the lascannon option. I was very tempted to make them the Volkites given how heresy-iconic they are, but there’s a limit to how many Volkites someone can do. As they are essentially the same as the ones on the Kratos, which lets me swap options between tanks (oops! spoiler alert), I get to have both anyway.
What about a Predator squadron?
Not for this scale heresy; one is sufficient. Now, ‘epic scale’ heresy could be a very different matter so watch this space. Or rather the Legion Imperialis portfolio page anyway.
