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Locutarus Storm Squad 'Palatino' || 47th Company, 4th Chapter || Ultramarines Legion
The 47th Company, like most Ultramarines, sported a contingent of expert warriors whose skill and experience earned them the rank of Veteran. Those with a knack for leadership and tactics often went on to become Invictarii Officers, but there are some whose lives started and ended with their bolter and blade - those are the Locutarus.
A big inspiration for this unit was the 5th ed metal Vanguard Veterans kit. Even though I never owned it, it's pretty nostalgic to me. I think they're some of the best jump-infantry poses GW's ever made. I guess I must have looked at their box art a lot as a kid, since they're kinda imprinted in my mind.
Speaking of poses, the newer MkVI Assault Squad kit is done very differently - not really a sense of flight, but more of a running on the ground vibe. I prefer it to whatever Primaris Jump Pack Assault Intercessors are doing (what a great unit name by the way :p), but I wanted to try and get some of that 'descending from low-orbit' look that those metal van-vets have. I did quite a bit of cutting, reposing and filling gaps to this kit until I started seeing some poses I liked. A lot of testing with blu-tack was involved. I started messing around with these guys in October 2024, to give some context on how long I've been taking on them...
Once I had everything in place, I started properly assembling. The trickiest part was probably angling the feet to point down slightly, as it often required resculpting parts of them with milliput. Hopefully it's not too obvious which guys had the most reconstruction done to them!
Since these guys are supposed to be wearing artificer armour, I tried to fancy them up a little where I could. I attempted adding some sculpted chest trim to four of them before giving up. I sculpted these with green stuff, then added rivets with ball bearings and painted over them to try and even out the finish. They're a little puffier looking than I'd like though.
These guys are also sporting a fun variety of shoulder pads! From left to right, there's LoggyK's MkIV shoulders, two guys wearing shoulders from the heresy Command Squad kit, shoulders from the firstborn Ultramarines upgrade sprue, another pair of Command Squad shoulders, a pair of Forge World Emperors Children MkVI shoulders with the emblem removed, oHm's shoulders, another pair of firstborn Ultramarine upgrade shoulders, a pair of Forge World Thousand Sons MkVI shoulders with the emblem removed, and then another of oHm's shoulders. All of the standard MkIV helmets are files from LoggyK, and the MkII helmets are by mildseven.
Painting these guys was where things started to slow down. Between University, other hobbies, and a whole new edition of Heresy making these guys a little less killy, I struggled to find the time to actually work on them. Somehow, I ended up building and painting a whole Leviathan dreadnought for this army in between starting and finishing these guys (not to mention all the other projects...). I think maybe painting heresy infantry is just a little draining…
Nevertheless, it did get done slowly over time. At first I wasn't quite sure what battlefield role to paint them as - rules wise, they're a Fast Attack unit, but they have the statline of a Veteran. Before Heresy 2.0, there was never really a proper generic Veteran battlefield role in heresy (with the exception of a few Legions), and so the Ultramarines never had a symbol to use for it. However, more recently they've been using the Veteran cross symbol on all sorts of things - transfer sheets, veteran tactical squads, and even Salamanders (do they even use standard battlefield role markings???). As such, I think these guys would be Veterans too, and so I've painted them that way. I even made some custom transfers to match the current official heraldry, since the Ultramarines transfer sheet doesn't have any! You can find more of them in my transfer gallery!
Since I decided they were Veterans, I took some more inspiration from those previously mentioned Vanguard Veterans, giving them similar white helmets. Technically this wasn't really a thing in Horus Heresy, and it's more of a 40k thing (although there is an image of a Veteran Sergeant wearing a white helmet with a blue stripe, so maybe?), but I figured it kinda matched the white shoulder pad I'd been doing across my army. Besides, maybe these guys are the ones who developed the practice of white helmeted veteran companies?
One thing that is a thing in heresy is the laurel that often adorns the helmets of veteran Ultramarines. I always thought the hand painted laurels on the sides of the old metal veterans looked so cool, so I really wanted to emulate it here. I don't have the patience for that much freehand though, so I made up some custom transfers to do the job! Once again, you can find the design in my transfer gallery!
There were multiple long gaps in painting these, but eventually, by May of this year, I actually found the time to finish them! Of course, by now we're a year into the 3rd edition of Horus Heresy, and it now costs
I tried to model their bases to assist in the illusion of their floating descent, with many of them attached to the rocks with pins to try and leave as little contact as I could. Hopefully I was able to capture some of that original 5th ed vibe!
This was a bit of a long one, so thanks if you read this far! I've got one more 47th Company Ultramarine coming, so keep your eyes out for that. See you around!
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