Zentraedi Quel-Gulnau Recovery Pod
Cost: $36.95 (as part of the Zentraedi Glaug Command Pack)
Release Date: October 2014 (Kickstarter Backers)/December 2014 (everyone else)
Get it here: Palladium Books
Welcome to our first Robotech RPG Tactics miniature reviews. We’ve already done a thorough unboxing of the base game and a full review of the core rulebook. Now it’s time to move on to the actual miniatures themselves. I’ve seen a few reviews of the Valkyrie and Battlepods, so I decided to start our reviews with something that hasn’t really been looked at – the Zentraedi Quel-Gulnau Recovery Pod. These are essentially the medics/clerics for the Zentraedi side of the game. There are over a dozen pictures in this review and if you want a bigger, higher-definition view of each, just click on each picture to view one. Now, let’s do the review.
This is the full sprue for a recovery pod. Notice there are some tiny parts on this like the antennae on this. At first I was worried about cutting these out, but really, they’re only small compared to the carapace. When I looked at some of my Tomb Kings skeleton sprues in comparison, I realized this wouldn’t be that hard. Indeed, everything came cleaning off the sprue without any real molding to have to shave off.
This is the instruction guide for putting your Recovery Pod together. No, it’s not very good. I would have liked some actual pictures of the mini being put together piece by piece. What we have here is sensible to long time mini gluers, but I think newcomers or more casual ones will have problems. The antennae are especially hard to make out in regards to placement. So I decided to do them in two different ways, one for each mini you’ll see here today.
This is the terrible painting guide from the core rulebook. It’s nice that they gave hex codes, but unfortunately, none of these hex codes actually correspond to paints on the markers except for 000000, which is your basic black. None of the others are actually made by Reaper, Citadel, Vallejo or the like. Palladium really dropped the ball here and unless you are an expert at mixing paints, you won’t be able to make either paint scheme happen. I suppose that’s a good thing as they’re both really hideous. I decided to go with two different paint schemes. The first is inspired by the second recovery pod option, but instead of being a very dark green and orange-brown, I went black and dark red. The second is painted in more of a traditional Zentraedi battlepod style – meaning mostly white with a blue for detail.
Here is a front facing view of the assembled Recovery Pods. Notice the different angles I have the antennae at for each pod. I will say that aside from the Antennae and the little jutty out pieces on the bottom carapace, these things came together extremely easy. In fact I found these so much easier to put together than a lot of Warhammer Fantasy/40K figures. The only problem I really had is that one of the bottom carapaces didn’t match the top one exactly so the little dot in the middle looked more like a pair of pursing lips. I tried to fix this via paint to give a visual illusion that it matched up. Look below to see if I was successful. Overall, putting the Recovery Pods together was a breeze and I’m really looking forward to the other Robotech RPG Figures. of course, they all have a lot more in the way of parts…
Top view of the unpainted Recovery Pods.
Tail-end view of the unpainted Recovery Pods.
Here’s a mostly painted version of the Recovery Pod. At this point I have to do some touch ups and smoothing. I primarily used Abaddon Black and Mephiston Red with a tiny bit of Averland Sunset for the dot. The base is Ice Blue and Mourn Mountain Snow texture paint as I wanted to give an appearance of the Pod coming out of a cloud to stealthfully hunt for Zentraedi to repair/save. All of the aforementioned paints are Citadel ones in case you are curious.
Here is a mostly painted version of the other Recovery Pod. Here I went with traditional Zentraedi colours. The base is still Ice Blue with Mourn Mountain Snow for the bottom but I used very different colours for the actual pod itself. The Recovery Pod is primarily Cermaic White with Necron Abyss for the dark blue. By shading just certain areas, instead of going half and half like the paint guide said, I feel this highlights better when an actual Zentraedi pilot would sit. Doesn’t that look like cockpit now? The red dot is Evil Sunz Scarlet (This is the modle with the top and bottom carapaces that didn’t match up properly). I figured since the dot is a pair of lips on this, I might as well make them bright red! The chrome bits are Runefang Steel and there is a tiny biot of Averland Sunset in the engines to give the pod a blasting off feel. This is not suggested in the actual painting guide for these figures but I thought it would make things look a little less white. I’m so used to priming in white that something this blanched feels unfinished to me. Finally, I got all the little grooves and niches with some Nuln oil. Washes and shades are ever mentioned for painting Robotech RPG Tactics minis, but I decided to see how it would look, especially since this pod is so white. The first Recovery Pod didn’t need a black based wash since the pod is already black to begin with.
The finished versions facing each other. Now I’m far from a high quality painter. I don’t have feelings in my fingertips, which makes this a pretty hard hobby for me. I’ll never be someone that impresses Mantic or wins a Golden Demon with my painting skills, but it’s still relaxing and fun and it’s why I do it.
A front look at the finished pods.
A back look at the finished pods.
Finally a size comparison. Here we have a Games Workshop plastic Space Marine and a Reaper Bones Dwarven Wizard. The pods obviously aren’t on scale with either line. This is just in case you were wondering how big the Recovery pods actually were.
All in all, I really enjoyed my time putting these Quel-Gulnau Recovery Pod. They were so easy to glue and even with two different paint schemes, these took me less time than for me to paint a single humanoid character from Bones or Games Workshop. I was shocked at how quickly I ran through both of these. Again, I’m realy looking forward to painting some more Robotech RPG Tactics figures. The problem is deciding what comes next!
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