Monday, April 18, 2011

A to Z: Orks in Space

GW takes a lot of heat.  And ok, maybe they have a lot of stuff that is derivative, maybe without Tolkien a great portion of their foundation wouldn't exist (though that could be said for a great portion of fantasy authors as well).
But there are a few things that they've taken the ball and run with, and some have been a thing of beauty.

One of those is Orcs, and well, Orks.

Something about them just appeals to me. I've liked them in fantasy, the high seas, the Blood Bowl pitch, planet-spanning battles and I've liked them in Space.

Of course, just because GW has made Orks their own, doesn't mean I'm not going to make them my own as well.

This is my Ork Battleship. What a piece of junk.  Literally.

My concept of Orks is that there are only 2 types of spacecraft that orks actually make.
One is 'rocks' -which I do love the concept of that: tunnel into asteroids, mount engines & weapons on it and good to go.
The other is small simple attack craft.  The "Brute Ram Ships" of Battlefleet Gothic.

That's the extent of Ork original engineering.  Not that they can't make bigger ships, but they're too lazy: it's easier to slap parts of wrecked ships together to make their own.  So while the GW Ork ships look fun, they're too uniform for me.I can't imagine orks having such big ships all looking the same.

Besides: I made my fleet on the cheap ;)


The flagship is made from an Imperial battleship, with the neck cut & shortened (I figure that was the first part to be destroyed in a battle) with various ship parts from imperial & chaos slapped on to keep atmosphere from venting (too fast).


The cruisers are from chaos & imperial mostly and one space marine cruiser combined with parts from an ork ship. The observant might notice a couple of the ship parts are 'upside down'.  No one said Orks are bright... besides, parts of the ship might have the artificial gravity working a bit off anyway.

Escorts: captured ships. This is what happens when you can't prevent orks from boarding your ship.
The 2nd from the right is a 'scout' ship. I always want a 'scout' ship for a fleet, even if the rules don't address it.
OrcFleet006.jpg
Ram ships: the lifeblood of an Ork Fleet.  Punch into an enemy ship, cut down the crew, add a new ship to the fleet.  Rinse & Repeat.

Not the whole fleet pictured above, but a sampling from the previous pictures.

A friend of mine borrowed my space mat, so this quick photoshop bash will have to do:

To Infinity... and Be-headings!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Reminds me almost of reavers from Serenity. Take others ships and make them your own and decorate accoardingly.

Awesome Idea, the Rams remind me of the old pulsa rokkits.

Laughing Ferret said...

oh yes, when I saw the reaver ships in Serenity my first thought was "Ork ships!"

The ram ships are a lot like the pulsa rokkit, but bigger than the epic ones & much smaller than the 2nd ed 40k ones. I made these from the metal 40k ork stormboy rokkit jump packs. One of the last orders I made before GW closed down their Bitz Service... how I miss the Bitz ordering.

Unknown said...

I think it would be cool to have the ram ships have hinges and a part that opens on the front for a boarding party to ride the missile then after it hits, it opens and a flood of green enters the ship and takes it that way. Even is space combat I see orcs are melee fighters.

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