Heavy Resin: That's Not a Knight Titan, This is a Knight Titan!

Cast your minds back to the early 1990s. Giant walkers shaped like beetles, men on stilts or even horses bestrode the battlefield. Human and aliens formed 'Houses' with these walkers, called them 'Knights' and they fought intense battles. Correction, this was the case only if you played 6mm games. Here's a memory refresher:

Horse thing alongside a Beetle thing

Then, along came the talented Mike Biasi in the good old USA, and said to GW...can I make some of those Beetle things in 28mm scale? And lo and behold, a licence was granted and giant walkers did indeed bestride the battlefield, but this time in God's Own Scale.

 

Actually the Armorcast version, but it's the same thing, right?

Like the upscaled Tempest tanks I covered back in January, the Towering Destroyer knight had a couple of incarnations, firstly released by Mike Biasi Studios, and then later reworked and released under Armorcast's licence.

The model itself is a fairly towering 6.5 inches in height (foot to head); 8.5 inches if you include the pretty massive lascannon.

So, how to the Biasi and Armorcast versions compare side by side? For the most part, the two versions are pretty similar, both cast in resin, the Biasi version is a single piece cast, whereas the scatter laser (smaller gun) on the Armorcast version is a seperate piece. What is instantly noticable, is that the sculpting finish is much rougher on the Biasi version, and that the cast quality is much poorer, with numerous holes from air bubbles.

Biasi version = bare resin, Armorcast version = black undercoat

Note the cleaner casting and sharper lines on the later Armorcast version

Armorcast also clearly reworked the scatter laster to look more like the Citadel scatter lasers of the time

Rather basic design for the original shoulder weapon (top)

 

Scatter laser from the grav plaforms set, c.1993

 

Apart from a bit of polishing, the Towering Destroyer details are almost identical. The only other real differences are on the feet, where all the critical copyright information is displayed.

 



The date on the Armorcast version is 1990, which confusingly pre-dates the reworked scatter laster. I wonder if that was the date the Biasi licence was awarded?

If you can read through all the air bubble, the left foot reads 'Mike Biasi Studios'

 But that's not all on the subject of Eldar Knight Titans...there's this model in the centre:

Bright Stallion flanked by Towering Destroyers

The Bright Stallion is a very unusual model; I believe there only a handful in existence. I'm a bit woolly about the actual story, but I believe it was sculpted as a proof of concept model and may or may not have been cast by Armorcast. You can see a picture of the unassembled version over at the Collecting Citadel Miniatures wiki. The assembled version stands nearly 10 inches tall.

Not quite as elegant as Jes Goodwin's 6mm version, but comparable to the Biasi Knight

Shoulder assembly is similar to the Armorcast Phantom Titan, but lacking any mechanism to join the arms to the torso (these are pinned with wire)

Today, this low level of detail is unconceivable

 

 

So there we have it, a retrotastic review of yet more old resin. I think it's worth repeating, That's not a Knight Titan GW, this is a Knight Titan!