I’m sure many people will be surprised to hear that I have only just now made my first ever Forge World purchase! I picked up a Grey Knights Strike Cruiser (for a project I’m doing with Vaaish) plus a Ramilies Star Fort (I’ve always loved the model). Yesterday I was very excited to have a package arrive with my new purchases:

One of the things I noticed is that there are no decent pictures of the Ramilies online (that I ever found anyway), so that is one thing I want to rectify, by providing not only plenty of pictures of the assembled model, but also pictures of parts “on sprue”. Today I’ll be doing the latter.

All up the model consists of 14 parts. I’ve taken photos of all of the parts still attached to the sprues and casting gates to give the best idea of how it arrives. It’s also good for learning spruing techniques for ones own casting. In addition, I have drawn green lines to show the border between the part and the sprue.

PARTS PICTURES

I’ll start with the pier. There are four of these pieces which make up the four corners of the Ramilies.

Next up we have the launch bays/quadrant module. Again there is one for each side; four in total:

And now the upper and lower spires. That’s not what the piece of paper that comes with the kit calls them, but I don’t have it handy right now and can’t remember the proper name! I forgot to do the sprue borderline on this shot, but I think it’s pretty obvious that the giant block on the rear are sprues. Note the peg poking out of the lower spire – this is the stand which inserts into a flying base.

Finally we have the galleries. These sit above the innermost sections of the piers and butt up against the top spire, thus there are four of them:

PROBLEMS
C’mon, this is a FW kit. It would seem that it takes a large amount of luck to acquire a kit in perfect condition even from the factory. Although at this stage all of the parts seem nice and square (all parts are pretty thick and solid so it would be surprising if they weren’t), there is a bit of a problem: many of the little spindly bits have broken off.

In my opinion one of the drawcards of the Imperial BFG models is their highly detailed nature and having such a unique design. “Cathedrals in Space”. Part of this design aesthetic is lots of little spindly bits atop arches and buttresses and along battlements. The Ramilies is no exception and in addition has many lance turrets dotted around it which are actually cast onto the launch bay quadrants (rather than separate pose-able pieces). Despite the box that it came in being filled with a lot of bubble wrap, the parts themselves (some relatively heavy) were all just thrown into a bag and able to knock against each other. And knock they did – by the time the package arrived there were quite a few tiny parts that had broken off and gone missing.

Here’s some shots (missing parts circled in green):

Now I did find a few of the missing bits floating around in the bag, and generally would be happy enough to just glue them back on (so some spots of the model would still be missing bits. Only those really closely inspecting would notice). However for the money I paid for this kit having detail parts missing on the main spire is unacceptable, so I will be calling Forge World today to arrange replacements. I would like them to replace 3 of the 4 galleries too, but we’ll see what they say.

So despite the broken parts I can start assembly of the main body and will begin removing the sprues soon. Very much looking forward to it going together! Stay tuned for more progress.

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