By Wunji Lau

This is an Eldar Void Stalker Battleship bashed-and-scratched some three years ago. I was inspired by the old (nine or ten years) concept sketches for Games Workshop's original Battlefleet Gothic game. Most of the sketches never saw the light of day as miniatures or gaming units. A pity; those sketches depicted graceful, elegant ships adorned with gossamer sails, ancient living vessels brimming with alien beauty and power.

I waited eagerly for more models of these ships, but in vain. Hope faded, was briefly rekindled three years ago when Battlefleet Gothic at last saw release, and then faded again when I saw that the new Eldar ship designs were bat-winged horrors hardly befitting the beauty-loving race conceived as spacegoing Tolkienesqe elves. When stats, sans pictures, were released for the long-awaited Eldar "big gun," I decided that I would just have to take things into my own hands, as it were.

Background

The Void Stalker is the most powerful class of ship the Eldar use for war. Its living wraithbone structure is fragile, but as Mr. Miyagi taught us all, "best block, no be there;" the Void Stalker is very fast, and is equipped with holofields which mask its location and make it almost impossible to target and hit. Offensively, the ship is armed with multiple arrays of laser batteries and pulse lances (kind of a cross between a strobe light and the Death Star's converging laser). The Eldar know more about making laser weapons than Martha Stewart knows about decoupage, and they've been doing it for countless millennia, so these weapons are among the most powerful in the known universe. The Void Stalker also carries a sizable complement of fighters and bombers so that its targets have to divide their attention and Games Workshop can sell more miniatures.

The ship's exact size is unknown; Games Workshop is famous for fudging scales on their bigger vehicles. However, from the rulebook fiction, one can guess that the vessel is several kilometers long.

According to the fiction, the Eldar solar sails allow their ships to use the "solar wind" for propulsion. Of course, true solar sails are big, slow to accelerate, and work off photon pressure, not particle impacts, but hey, we're talking about Space Elves here, fer cryin' out loud. Nonetheless, I reasoned that Eldar technology (or Treknology, to misappropriate a term) had advanced to the point that a relatively small sail could be used to collect vast amounts of energy for use in propelling the ship. The sails could also be conceivably used as a stealth/ECM tool by selectively reflecting or absorbing radiation in various directions and arrangements, thus fitting in nicely with the Eldar's defensive holofield technology.

Model Construction

My goal was to blend the old Eldar ship design with the new, and evoke a feeling of sinister grace. The model's final length would be around 4 inches, in scale with the rest of the Battlefleet Gothic miniatures.

I started with a pair of Eldar cruisers from the new Battlefleet Gothic line, a bunch of scraps from the old Space Fleet line, and some power tools. I raided the bits box for additional pieces, and then made use of liberal amounts of Milliput. I sculpted bonelike structures to connect the various parts into a single unified hull, and then added weapons bulges, decorative frills, and a pair of ventral hangar bays. For the solar sails, I used thin acetate sheet with modeling foil on one side for the reflective side. Fishing line was used for the rigging.

The ship was painted, washed, and highlighted with Testors enamels. The insignia decals came from Games Workshop. The Elvish runes were copied from the Internet, Photoshopped, and printed onto decal paper, but I can't for the life of me remember what any of it says anymore.

Image: Poop deck

Image: Top view