Salamanders on the Horizon: figuring out doors, bits, and the road to 1,000 points
We love those hobby moments that start with one very specific question and then suddenly turn into an entire army plan.
This time it began with end3r trying to figure out a very practical problem: which upgrade doors and bits are actually needed for a Salamanders Land Raider. Simple in theory, slightly less simple in practice — especially when the plan is to get parts printed in advance and we do not want to print a pile of things we won’t use.
At first, wilini was drafted into emergency support mode, but with the small caveat that he had just finished an absolutely brutal shift and was functioning on almost no sleep. So the plan quickly became: let the man sleep, and in the meantime let’s see whether we can solve it ourselves.
And honestly, this is such a familiar hobby situation for us. You start with: “Can someone check the instructions?” and five minutes later you’re deep in PDFs, sprue photos, upgrade files, and increasingly confused messages.
In the middle of all this, end3r also mentioned picking up Impulsor sprues cheaply through hobby connections. The source was especially funny: someone who plays Kill Team and simply didn’t need the rest. Even better, the Impulsor bits apparently came out of the Black Templars Combat Patrol, which immediately made the whole thing a little more chaotic from a Salamanders planning perspective.
That led to the next discovery: maybe the Impulsor also needed custom doors? Except… apparently not in the way we first thought. The instructions seemed to show them, the sprue situation said something else, and for a brief shining moment we had the classic hobby realization that we were trying very hard to print parts that might not even be necessary.
That kind of confusion is peak army-building energy.
Then, because no Salamanders vehicle planning session is complete without temptation, the conversation naturally drifted toward the Land Raider Redeemer. Since it keeps showing up in discussions of Salamanders lists, it immediately started looking like one of those “okay, maybe not now, but definitely later” purchases.
And yes — it is, in fact, very pretty.
Eventually the mystery got solved in the best possible way: after some duck-debugging and a bit more digging, end3r found the Land Raider PDF instructions and matched them with the available files. Final result:
- one hatch
- two different doors
- the top lascannon shield
- two side weapons
So the panic phase ended, the printing plan became clear, and wilini was allowed to wake up to the much nicer news of: all good, we figured it out.
That alone would have been a nice little hobby anecdote, but the really fun part came a couple of days later, when the vehicle question turned into actual Salamanders list-building.
The Impulsor itself will have to wait a bit for assembly, because the queue is already full: first Squats, then Dwarfs, and somewhere in between finishing off the Salamanders for 40k. But once the numbers started getting added up, the project suddenly looked much more real.
The current rough plan looked like this:
- 485 points from the Combat Patrol
- 695 points of infantry
- 80 points for the Impulsor
- potentially Vulkan for about 100
- and, eventually, a Redeemer for 270
That puts the whole thing at around 1630 points if everything lands as planned.
Which is exactly the kind of number that makes us start smiling. Because at that stage it stops being “some cool Salamanders stuff we’re collecting” and starts sounding like a force that can really hit the table in proper Warhammer 40k games.
Even before the Redeemer enters the chat, there’s already a comfortable route to 1,000 points, with some room for options and experimentation.
We really enjoy this stage of the hobby. Not the fully finished army-photo stage, not even the first proper battle yet — but that middle ground where a collection starts turning into a plan. A cheap sprue here, a future tank there, some printed upgrade bits, some list math, and suddenly the army has momentum.
For now, the Redeemer remains a “few months later” project, the Impulsor waits its turn, and the Salamanders continue growing in the background while other systems and armies are still on the painting desk.
But the important part is that the shape of the army is already there.
And, as always, it all started with one innocent question about doors.