Mantic GCPS Drop Troopers Conversion

I love the way that Mantic Games do their miniatures, and the GCPS troopers caught my eye immediately. Even so, I wanted to spice my little team of them up a bit, rather than just leaving them baseline without any tweaks.

While this isn't done yet, and I there's a long way to go, I'm happy with where I've gotten so far.

The unit's commander. The metal around the neck was used to replace parts of the original head, which I cut away.

The metal GCPS commander comes with a cigar-smoking head attached to his body, as well as a few arm options. Originally, I simply gave him the sword arm and pistol arm, but decided that they would be better suited on another officer further down the line.

Instead, I removed his head (destroying a lot of it in the process, unfortunately) and pulled the arms back off, replacing them with a standard GCPS weapon and a hand ordering something to be placed down near him. Maybe it's artillery, or him just ordering the others to regroup, but I like how it looks, especially from behind.

The duster really gives me some Fallout: New Vegas vibes. Considering the Glactic Co-Properity Sphere and New California Republic both have an unnerving "good-publicity colonialist" feel to them, that makes sense.

Two (unfinished) thruster-wearing drop troops.

It was extremely tempting to simply swap out some parts for cut and re-sized 40K pieces, but I've tried to go a step further. While the two models above are fairly basic so far, I'm planning to make every one of my troopers into a proper airborne unit, complete with thruster jets (made from sprue cuttings), slings, and other assorted equipment that reflects their new role.

The slings are a couple of the few Warhammer 40k parts I plan to use. I want to keep this project Mantic-centric, but the slings are generic enough to not really ruin that goal. The extra bumps and pieces on the sprue parts used for the thruster packs aren't perfect, but I'm leaving them like that to suggest a rough, unreliable design - just like something a corporation would create.

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The commander directs one of his officers - a courier, a medic, or maybe even just the man that carries the team's lunch into battle.

Another of the non-Mantic parts used was the briefcase arm on this unspecified officer, which comes from one of the Raging Heroes kits I got for my partner (which I still haven't finished building and painting for him). This was purely because I didn't have an easy way to get something similar without resorting to existing 40K parts, and it required a lot of trimming to fit.

You might even be able to see the seam where the RH arm is cut. Tey're longer than normal Mantic arms, so the elbow had to be removed and replaced with the top of an unused GCPS arm. In a way, this gives him a single-piece glove, implying that the contents are something dangerous. It's probably the lunches.

These designs aren't done yet, and there's plenty more troops that need to be tweaked and improved, but so far I'm getting somewhere with this. Mantic's miniatures have really captured my attention, so I have future conversion ideas already on the way even befoer I finish this one​.