May is Mad Machinery Month!

Stand at ease! Now chaps, settle down and pay attention, especially you at the back. This fine example of a World War II British commanding officer is Major General Percy Hobart of the Royal Engineers. He designed a number of adaptations to battle tanks to overcome anticipated problems in the planned invasion of Normandy, better known as D-Day. Tanks were adapted to build bridges, to clear minefields, to lay temporary road over marshy ground and overcome many other problems associated with amphibious operations. These weird and wonderful vehicles had fittingly bizarre names, such as the Crab, the Crocodile and even the Rhino (40000 years ahead of his time obviously). Collectively they were known as Hobart's Funnies, for more information you can browse this article on Wikipedia.

Apart from a tenuous link to a Space Marine personnel carrier, what has this got to do with Warhammer? It's an example of how the strangest thing can determine how my army is shaped, of course. I was intending to paint savage orcs in the coming month, but I have hit a wall with that particular project so have decided to put it to one side and do something else. Reading about Hobart gave me a flash of inspiration, to have a mad inventor character in my orc and goblin army. With a one letter change and a slight re-arrangement of letters, Gobrat the Goblin was born. He is going to invent and build some wacky contraptions for my army, known as Gobrat's Gizmos. May is mad machinery month!