This is my counts as Quad gun. 

Custom Tau Defense Line

 I'm participating in a 40K escalation league at Big Kidz Games here in Grand Rapids.  I joined half way through, so I won't be winning by any means, but I thought it would be an opportunity to get in some games with people I don't usually get to play. 

The league has just moved from 1500 to 1750 though the organizer is letting me make up my 1500 pt games during the 1750 period due to my late entry.  At 1500 the league opened up to allowing fortifications, and at 1750 began to allow allies.  I don't need allies as I have way over 2500 pts of Tau, but lacking anything with Skyfire, and knowing I'd be facing a number of Vendetta's, a helldrake, strom eagle etc.. I decided I'd really like to have an Aegis Defense Line, and a quadgun (I'm actually torn between the quad and the Icarus Lascannon as str 7 from the quad is barely effective up to AV12)..  Anyway, as a Tau player I didn't want to field the standard Aegis, not to mention they being hard to get a hold of, so I decided to make my own.   |



I made the whole thing out of plasticard, some bottle-caps off of Nero Drink bottles, and a couple spare bits from my Tau.  This was a quick and dirty effort, it took me 2.5 hours beginning to end this morning prior to one of my 2 1750 match ups, so it's not beautiful, but it works and hopefully will give someone an idea how to build their own defense line.  The process involved outlining a standard defense line onto the plasticard, cutting the bottle caps in half then grinding them down (you could cut them instead) in height to match the Aegis, then super gluing the caps onto the plasticard.  After that I used an exacto blade attachment on my soldering iron to trim the plasticard around the cap shapes, while maintaining the fence like section in between.  After that I used my dremel to grind the excess plasticard off and clean up the bottom of the caps a bit.  I'll probably go back and fill some gaps with liquid greenstuff, and maybe add another layer to the details on the fence area as they are a bit to flat.  Hope you enjoy the pictures.

 Here you can see the original Nero bottle cap before I split them and shortened them to match the height of the original Aegis Defense Line.

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In this shot you can see the symmetry of the pieces which allows an unlikely arrangement to lessen the footprint of the defense line.  Why you'd want to do this.. I'm not sure, maybe to fit it between two ruins or something..  What ever the purpose, I think it's interesting that the arrangement causes the line to look more like the quad-gun base, and vaguely like the Forgeworld gun turrets.  Perhaps when I rework this I'll add the little outrigger legs that they have.

 Last minute edit for Tim's edification I'm adding this shot of the defense line as I deployed it in my first game with it vs Jeff's Chaos Space Marines.  As you can see it's not quite as good for troops as the official defense line, but I seldom put troops on the field, and it works great for crisis suits and broadsides.  Skimmers unfortunately tend to hover above it and get no cover.