Constructing the Typhon

The Typhon is named for the ‘Great Beast’ of Terran myth, and lives up to its namesake in sheer brutal strength. Sharing a basic chassis with the Spartan Assault Tank, this heavy tank serves as a mobile gun-platform with enough power to operate a single massive piece of siege artillery – the dreadhammer cannon. The Typhon was created to meet the demands of the Primarch Perturabo of the Iron Warriors, who sought a war engine that could rapidly deploy such fortress-breaking firepower to the battle line alongside his Legionaries. Though unsubtle in design, its overwhelming effectiveness is beyond question.

I’ve always liked the Forge World model and so was pleased to one of the new plastic kits for my Imperial Fists force.

The Typhon is an extended Land Raider, and as the model kit uses the core parts from the Proteus Land Raider, there are components within the kit which extends the sides, adds an extra wheel and track parts. There are also additional parts to widen the hull, as the Typhon is wider than the Proteus.

I can see why they did this, but it does make the construction of the kit more complicated then I think it needs to be. I think it would have been better to create completely new sprues with the bigger parts needed, rather than additional parts to widen the existing sprues. I think it potentially makes it a weaker model as a result. 

I remember when we first saw the Spartan (and the Typhon is basically a Spartan with a big gun) and I said when they announced  the plastic Spartan.

With the announcement of the plastic Spartan Land Raider Assault Tank it got me thinking, will we also a plastic Land Raider Proteus? It wouldn’t be too much of a step to have a plastic kit of this Land Raider? Essentially the Spartan is a stretched Land Raider.

What I didn’t realise (as I didn’t buy the Spartan at the time) was that literally what Games Workshop had done was create a kit which was a stretched extension kit for a kit they hadn’t released yet.

The Proteus Land Raider is the core of both the Spartan, the Typhon and (obviously) the Proteus. The Typhon comes with some additional sprues, which provides new side parts and the big gun. 

This was not quite the simple construction kit that it could have been. 

The first stage is to construct the track units, which have a fair few parts to them.

I did have one problem in that the polystyrene cement I was using wasn’t very effective. It was a replacement for a nearly empty bottle of my usual Humbrol polystyrene cement. I had constructed the track units, and then they fell apart on me. So I then re-glued the units with the Humbrol polystyrene cement which did work.

The internal hull components went together well, but I did think that they were difficult to stick (and keep) together.

The main weaponry, the dreadhammer siege cannon went together really easily.

Next step will be bringing all the parts together.

See the workbench feature on the Typhon Heavy Siege Tank.

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