Ghost/Doomsday Ark Conversion

The theme of my army, when it comes to vehicles, is that pilots/drivers should not have limbs, a human form, and instead be integrated with the vehicle directly. It's robotic, it's grimdark, it's foreign.

My approach to doing this is largely inspired by blogger fromthewarp and his Necron ark:

So it made a lot of sense to approach my Ark conversion similarly.

However, I tend to also remove the console (keyboard) that the pilot should have been operating with their hands, and I also remove legs. This was a problem with the Ark. Doing that would leave a huge gap in the model that is visible to the naked eye. In my Barge I just left the space open, in my Scythe I moved the pilot forward and added some pipes to mitigate the problem. Neither approach was possible with the Ark and I needed to add bits in place of where the legs and the console would be.

To make things worse, removing his butt and legs implied removing his chair. The recline part of the chair looks great and I wanted to keep it very hard, but I just couldn't. There was no way to attach it to the vehicle without getting in the way of the large spine pipe I had in mind for the model. I didn't end up using the chair.

After looking at different Necron models and bits I could find on Ebay for cheap. I was looking for something approximately 2cm by 2cm that I would where his feet would be in order to hide the emptiness below. It needed to look machine-y, ideally give me an opportunity to add some orange glow that would be missing when looking at the model from above. I found a solution in the Obelisk model, namely the bug that sits on top of the C'tan in the middle:

I got just that bug, just the plates without the tentacles, for a few bucks on Ebay including shipping. When I received it and got a closer look I noticed that this bug has a very noticeable slant that wouldn't look good, so I flipped it upside down. It is slightly concave on the other side, but only slightly, I could make it work.

I was looking for a bit that would let me paint some glow, but this particular bit also gave me a perfect opportunity to tie all pipes connecting the pilot to the vehicle! I would just plug them where the tentacles would have been.

With all those pieces ready, the conversion was straightforward. I used three thicknesses of old bass guitar strings.

In addition to the pilot, I want paint all my Gauss weapons using the same freehand technique I used for my Warriors. The Gauss weapons that are on the side of the Ark have a textured rod that would prevent this, so I had to remove these textured rods and replace them with smooth rods of an appropriate diameter.

I found these rods on Amazon that are the same diameter as the green rods that come with Necron Warriors. They are the most cost efficient rods I found. Replacing the textured bits with these smooth rods was straightforward:

And, with that, the Ark was ready for painting!