Dangar Pirates!

Hello everyone, it’s been a while!  We’re looking to revive the painting spotlights going forward so let us know what you think of them and if there is anything in particular you’re looking and of course if you have an army you’d like to highlight then feel free to reach out to me on the discord or forum and your force could be spotlighted here too!

With that out of the way lets take a look at this article’s feature army:  the “Dangar Pirates” by John AKA Johnnycat93 on Discord.  I selected John’s force to relaunch the paint articles as it’s lovingly crafted NuCoal army with a ton of modifications and a very interesting pirate aesthetic.  I hope you will all enjoy it as much as I have.

  --Jaeton

Name of the force:

The “Dangar Pirates”

When did you start playing in what system?

I have played roleplaying games since I was very, very young. In grade school I learned to read partly using rulebooks for various systems that my father owned. I think my very first interaction with wargaming was buying a T’au Crisis Suit at a military gas station as a child. I thought it was a lego/Bionicle type thing, and you can likely imagine my surprise in discovering that was not the case.

It wasn’t until around 2013/2014 that I took a serious interest in wargaming. I had seen a lot of battle reports online and was especially inspired by a blog on DakkaDakka called “Leave No Model Unconverted”. I was working a minimum wage job, living in a place with no heat and doing my dishes in a bathtub, and somehow I still scrapped together enough cash to get a tactical marine kit and some basic supplies. Like many people I started with Warhammer 40k. By the time I got enough models, assembled and painted them it was 8th edition. I was terrible at the game, by the way. I think I played something like 60 games and lost all but 2 of them.

What drew you to heavy gear?

Being a longtime mecha fan I had lurked or participated in a number of niche communities and forums, and I would occasionally see Heavy Gear mentioned. A lot of talk was reminiscing on the old PC games, but occasionally I would see mention of the wargame and miniatures.

Anyways, like many people I had been kind of burned by the 7th edition to 8th edition era of 40k and was sort of disillusioned with the direction in which those things were developing. I still wanted to do hobby things, and I still wanted to play games, but I wasn’t sure how to do that. Coincidentally, I had also gotten into watching Gunpla content around that time and I had wanted a way to try out those techniques and ideas in miniatures. Heavy Gear Blitz stood out to me because it had a very reasonable model count, was largely mecha focused, and had rules that were more on the skirmish game side of things. I originally planned to get into the game with a friend, but that didn’t work out. Nonetheless I took to the game with enthusiasm.

How long have you been painting models?

A little over a decade, but actually, and this may be a little bit controversial, I don’t really like painting all that much. By that I mean I don’t paint for the sake of painting, I paint for the sake of having a painted model. From a hobby perspective what I really like doing is assembling and converting models. To me I relate it to the sensation that someone has working on a project car – that sort of blending between creativity and work. I love the tactile feedback; being able to feel the shapes and run my finger over a pattern or manipulate a piece in a specific manner. It’s hard to put the sensation into words for anyone who doesn’t already know the experience.

But as much as I love working on my models, they aren’t really done until they’re painted! The paint is the presentation or the packaging, and a model is like an unfinished thought without it. I especially can’t stand to leave things unfinished in such a manner. So, I took to painting and practiced a lot to try and develop skills that could compliment my conversions.

Unfortunately, the downside of this mindset is that my productivity waxes and wanes. My average pace is one model a week. Sometimes I will go months without painting a model, and other times I will get my pace down to one a day. This is especially a problem when I get in the mood to do some conversions, but then realize that I have a ton of painting on my bench.

How long have you been painting heavy gear in particular?

I think technically I started at the tail end of 2022 but largely in 2023, so 2 or 3 years. Honestly, not very long at all. In truth I didn’t really know anything at all about the setting and kind of learned stuff as I interacted with the game! For veterans of the game, there’s all this institutional knowledge that comes from the earliest days of the universe and its roots, but there was no way for me to know any of that. When you just start with the rulebook, you see some very broad descriptions of things and the reference images for gears and that’s about all you have to go on as far as “rules” for how things should be painted. It’s very freeing, to not know how things are “supposed” to look. I can understand how that can be a barrier for someone who is brand new to hobbying, but since I was already an experienced hobbyist in the general sense it instead enabled me to be more creative with how I approached my gears.

What is the backstory of your army?

I ended up choosing NuCoal for my first army. I can’t really remember why I settled on them. I think it was that I thought the Hussar looked cool? Anyways, I started with a two-pack of Espions and then picked up the plastic army box. Only a short way in I knew that this was the game for me and invested on collecting the entire NuCoal faction, or at least all the NuCoal-unique gears. The whole collection is 38 models and only cost me about $450 (you can’t even get a 2k army in 40k for $500 at this point!).

I named my force the “Dangar Pirates”, inspired by misspellings of “danger” that appeared in 90s anime. I really tried to embrace the creative process with my force, so I also gave them a proper background: 

Originally a rover gang of little renown, the Dangar Pirates were suddenly made major players in the Badlands when they received backing from Royz Malkom in an attempt to assert control over Wounded Knee. The Pirates were chosen from among countless other rover gangs for no particular reason, or if only because of the malleability of their leader, Bobby Baba, a man of competence, but little ambition. Regardless, the move came as a bid for power - NuCoal had long eyed Wounded Knee as a potential partner in their trade alliance, but the presence of a CNCS force, the fierce independence of the cartels, and the ominous scheming of Captain Jeremiah Dupree all complicated matters. Royz made a proposal: fight fire with fire; by engineering a proxy out of the Badlands bandits, the trade alliance could advance their interests without the appearance of open conflict.

The goals of the Pirates are threefold: establish themselves as the preeminent cartel in Wounded Knee, disrupt the operations of the Northern Guard, and redirect smuggling in a way that is beneficial to the trade alliance. A tall order, but their sponsors have gone to great lengths to ensure they are equipped for the task. Namely, a full complement of Gallic series gears, all top-of the line and fully armed. Royz even went so far as to establish a backchannel for the Pirates to secure parts, munitions, and service (which the Pirates have already employed in modifying their gears).

As a force, the Dangar Pirates are still a rover gang at heart, even despite their NuCoal backing. Many of their personnel have little in the way of professional military experience (in fact many are Wounders who have been “shanghai-d” into service) and their approach to tactics is to simply leverage their gear advantage with virtually no combined-arms support. Even so, in comparison to any other run-of-the-mill Badlands gang, they are a force to be reckoned with (keeping in mind that 95% of rovers don’t have a single Heavy Gear to their name). They remain unbloodied against conventional military forces. In order to seem more legitimate and in line with assigned goals, Captain Baba attempted to rebrand the Pirates as the “Dangar Cartel” (the 13th of Wounded Knee’s 12 cartels), which only served to provoke the other Cartel-Captains, and even Wounders have continued to refer to the Pirates as such.

I really tried to put in work learning about the setting and grounding the pirates as a faction among the existing players in the setting. I dug through sourcebooks looking for a good “hook” and found it in the criminal underbelly of the badlands. You couldn’t necessarily tell by reading the current rulebook, but the Terra Novan desert has a handful of city-states that are still resistant to the New Coalition. I wanted my force to have a justifiable reason to fight anyone for basically any reason. I also wanted to be able to justify their appearance in any given theater (“why are the Black Talons bothering to deploy in this random border skirmish?” is the sort of question I wanted to avoid. Also, I like my goons weird and enigmatic. With all of that in mind, making them well-funded criminals seemed like a great choice.

Shortly after writing the fluff and after I had gotten a good number of models assembled and painted, one of the members of the mecha community I frequented at the time drew a custom insignia for the pirates. Unfortunately, my ability to freehand is not up to the task of putting this on my models, but it was still an amazing moment in the process of fleshing out the Pirates. A proper Terra Novan Jolly Roger.

Favorite model in the army

That’s a real tough question. I’ve got a lot of models that I’ve poured a ton of work into, and I even submitted Dangar models to both Golden Gear 23 and 24. Of all of those, though, my favorite is this one Jerboa. There’s nothing particularly special about him from the outset – he wasn’t a duelist, he wasn’t prepared for a competition or anything like that. I didn’t intend to make him special is what I’m saying.  Somewhere along the way in building and painting him, he sort of came into a life of his own – a proper little Pinocchio. He’s just a normal Jerboa (okay, technically a Jerboa Paratrooper), and I have a bunch of Jerboas because they treat me so well on the tabletop, but there’s just something about this one in particular. He’s got this pose that is dynamic and evocative, so much personality in his gait and how he’s leveling his weapon. It may be self-aggrandizing, but this model tells a story, and it’s one that I didn’t intend to tell. I can’t even put to word exactly what it is, but when I look at him, that’s what I see. It’s sort of an ephemeral quality that only emerges when every part of the hobby comes together in just the right way. Also, he has a cute little cape.

Favorite unit / any characters?  What's their story?

I’ve got a couple of other models that stand out among the army. Particularly, my Hussar draws a lot of interest. He’s magnetized so that I can run any variant I want. He was one of the more difficult builds to pull off just due to the size of the model. I actually thought I would be using him more, but it turns out I don’t like bringing a gear strider to pickup games where my opponent doesn’t know they’re going to have to deal with AR10 4/4 and 6” movement. So I’ll only bring him out when I know I’m going to be dealing with something equally big in my opponent’s force.

How did pirates get a gear strider? Who knows? Maybe someone left the keys in the ignition.

Any conversions? What did you do?

Every model in the army is converted in one way or the other. Most common is just giving them custom weapons and extra greebles, or messing with their overall poses. Some are significantly more extensive. Particularly my Arbalestier, who I submitted as part of the Golden Gear 2023 competition. As you can see in the image, his entire lower half was replaced with the legs from a Gundam Artifact Zaku III. He also had custom build weapons that draw from too many parts to list. Really the only thing stock on him was the chest, head, and arm assemblies. It’s actually hard to tell from the painted model just how much work went into the build!

Here are some other conversions I did. Again, most of them are custom weapons or reposing of the existing kits. I find that I like working with DP9s metal models more than the plastics because they can stand up to a lot more punishment during the conversion process.

Could you provide an overview of the paint scheme and any techniques used

(can list paints, airbrush, oil wash, weathering technique/powders etc.)

I sometimes have to account for minor hand tremors while painting, so I’ve tried to practice techniques that don’t rely heavily on precision. That means leaning more heavily on things like drybrushing, washes, and zenith highlights, and minimizing things like free handing and edge highlights.

The Dangar Pirates start with a coat of black primer, then I do a heavy drybrush of dark blue and then a second dry brush of silver paint. After that they get 2-3 coats of black wash so that the silver only faintly shows through in a weird sort of gradient. From there I pick out some edges to highlight with a light-blue grey. Lenses are green, weapons are red. Hazard stripes on anything explosive (safety first!). Everyone gets a yellow stripe on their left hand side. White is built up from brown, then tan, then bone white. The skull and crossbones are waterslide decals, along with pretty much anything else that looks like freehanding on these models. Learning how to do decals well has been a great experience with these models. Finally, I drybrush orange over the legs to help blend in with the basing, which is supposed to be reminiscent of a badlands desert.

For paints I generally stick to either Vallejo or the Two Thin Coats line. Citadel is fine but too expensive at this point, so I really only use them for washes, contrast, or technical paints. I’ve also included a picture of most of the tools I use for modelling.

1 tip for new painters

Don’t force yourself to adopt techniques based on what others say works. Experiment and find methods that work for you. This hobby has a lot of trends, and you’ll learn to recognize them over time. What’s important is that you find a style that you are comfortable with and produces a look that you want. If you force yourself to do a bunch of edge highlighting or glazing just because that is what this or that personality is telling you to do, you may end up getting yourself burned out. Tutorials and painting guides are great, but you should be skeptical of anything that tells you that painting can be broken down into a specific list of easy to follow steps or rules. More often than not, such approaches aren’t going to teach you something so much as they are going to train you on how to create a specific look under a specific circumstance, and you may end up finding that you struggle to recreate that look outside of that specific circumstance. Treat styles, or techniques, or tutorials, like tools, and try to decide for yourself if that particular tool is going to be useful to you, and when you think you should use it.

What would you love to see more of in the setting?

The Arbalestier doesn’t have a proper write up! Amazing model and a great stat line, but there’s only a couple of sentences of lore about it. I was so flabbergasted that I ended up writing my own take as part of my Duelist and army background, but I still want to see the official lore if and when it manifests itself.  [CENSORED BY NUCOAL INTELLIGENCE]

During the initial planning for the Gallic series of Gears, certain city states lobbied aggressively against the adoption of CEF technology, Their insistence on a design that did not involve the work of PAK technicians was likely driven by distrust that still lingered from the War of the Alliance. In a surprising move, either as a show of good faith or on the word of Andrea Sinclair, Colonel Arthur agreed to step aside, on the condition that the dissenting states would otherwise give their full support to the rest of the modernization program. With the deal struck, Colonel Arthur kept his word - PAK technicians focused on the rest of the Gallic line, while the city states would be left to work with the Humanist scientists directly. Prince Gabel, representing the interest of the city states, excitedly proposed the development of a fire support Gear that was drop capable, something that would compliment their own considerable air force.

Humanist scientists would go a step further, with plans to incorporate a number of other technologies that were being developed for use in other Gallic designs - jetpacks like those found in the Jerboa and Chasseur Mk 2, a version of the Gear Portable Launcher System that had been created for the Lancier, and a hybridized Polar armor casing. However, implementation proved elusive. While they were eventually able to adopt the GPLS the design team struggled to achieve a working jetpack, even after including more than a dozen thrusters on the prototype. Prince Gable, for their part, funneled a staggering amount of money into the project in a desperate effort to reach production alongside the rest of the Gallic line; ultimately to no avail. Despite funding the creation of dozens of prototypes, the Arbalestier was ultimately left out of the NSDF modernization plan. The project became known as "Gable's Folly" and the prototypes were quietly mothballed. Eventually officials from Prince Gable would swallow their pride and turn over the plans to the NSDF, who would in turn commission Neil Motorworks to revisit the design and, alongside PAK technicians, finally perfect the production model of the Arbalestier.

The original prototypes were suddenly pressed into service by the Second CEF Invasion and local militia technicians were charged with recommissioning them with whatever they had on hand. In an unexpected twist, the earlier problems with the prototypes would now prove to be a boon. The increased thruster output meant that the prototypes could be loaded with extra equipment and still maintain the maneuverability of the production version, all of which coalesced into the Grand Para variant. Snub cannons were sourced from the nearby northern divisions and the Gear Portable Launcher Systems was reconfigured in a rough facsimile the standard paratrooper assault rifle. A spike gun was added on request of the pilots, who themselves were veteran paratroopers and thus more comfortable with that configuration over the standard model's vibroblade. In all, the variant sports a decidedly anti-tank loadout, no doubt intended to engage CEF/PAK forces.