Hail Hydra! Anti-air Support for the Brood Brothers

The Hydra Flak tank is a newer (though not exactly new) vehicle based on the ubiquitous Chimera chassis for the Astra Militarum. It appears to draw inspiration from several real world anti-aircraft tanks such as the Gepard and Shilka, though it uses an open topped turret more reminiscent of earlier vehicles. I honestly liked the look of the vehicle, and thought it would fill a niche as an anti-flyer vehicle in my Astra Militarum Brood Brothers detachment, so I decided to take the plunge.

While the kit uses the tried and true Chimera sprues, the turret is particularly intricate and requires care to assemble and paint correctly.  I assembled the left and right gun pairs, the gun shield, the turret base and then the crewman/interface all separately and only combined them after painting and weathering. There is a wealth of detail on the inside of the gun shield - representing the controls for the armament, and I wanted to get them painted up to a high standard.

The overall vehicle was painted using the Black and White technique I've used for several other tanks for this army. The interior was painted with a mix of Citadel and Vallejo paints to get the colors I wanted. I made fairly extensive use of Alclad II paints on this vehicle, with the  base coats of the main guns being their dark blue Gunmetal color. I also used Transparent Red and Transparent Yellow for the various lenses on the front of the turret (and the front driver's vision block). I also used their Brass color (airbrushed) for the visible ammunition in the main armament's magazines.

This kit is absolutely loaded with little details, and I tried to pick out several of them to give the final model some additional visual interest. The standing crewman in the turret is actually structural - he's part of what holds the whole turret system together. I think GW could make the center post integration into the overall system a bit more robust, but I was able to get it together - though with more fuss than I'd like.

While this was a challenging build, the end result is absolutely stunning. As always, the primary cult decals are from Scumb4g Kustoms. The turret number is from a very old Space Marine sheet I stumbled across. The screen graphics are from a generic set of aviation instrument panels. I still need to add the second crewman who sits on the rear deck, but he's not quite finished at this point. I have some map decals on order that I'm going to use for him.