"Crusade" Dreadnoughts

The Astartes Crusade Pattern Dreadnought are used by the Death Guard in dense terrain where more heavy armour is unable to traverse or be re-supplied. Armed with a range of heavy weapons, these dreadnoughts focus on ranged attacks and firefights over close combat. They are often formed into talon's such as the one shown, and dropped onto the battlefield as a part of the initial orbital assault.
They form a valuable armoured support unit for the Death Guard infantry, providing additional heavy firepower and resilience to the infantry formations.

These are the old plastic dreadnoughts from the second edition of Space Marine from about 1990. I bought them when new, and added them to my Chaos force as a support card for Mortarion and his Death Guard. So they have been killing loyalists (and dying for the cause!) for quite a while!
The styling of the models is based on the Space Crusade dreadnought that came out around the same time, and pre-dates the castraferrum miniature by half a decade or so. I suspect that some of the styling was used as the basis for the deredeo forgeworld model, but it's a shadow of that armoured behemoth.
I recently re-based them onto some 25mm round steel washers, and painted them up in the scheme you see here.

The banner is scratch built, with an old epic banner pole glued onto the top of the dreadnought, and a cross bar made from a paper clip attached to the top.
The banner itself is a thick piece of foil cut to size and glued on, before being added to with questionable freehand painting.

They are armed with assault cannons and missile launchers. So effectively two heavy weapons and no dreadnought close combat weapon, which was unusual back in the day, where chaos armies were close combat oriented. Luckily this is an option for space marine dreadnoughts in most of the Epic marine lists, but the Epic Armageddon Plague Marine list only has dreadnoughts with a mix of hitty and shooty weapons. I may just have to ask my opponent to squint a bit and pretend it has a hitty arm if I use them in those games.

So in most of the current army lists I will use them as a twin heavy weapon dreadnought. I thought about adding some missile pods to the top to convert them into deredeo dreadnoughts, but I decided to go down a different path for the deredeo's in the end, as they are pretty big lumps of metal.

On the table in Age of Darkness games of Epic Armageddon they will probably drop in using dreadclaws to try and eliminate enemy anti-air and pick on smaller units to reduce activations before the air assaulting primarch and his posse arrives in their storm eagles and the like.
If I'm not running an orbital assault, then they can either be added to a garrisoning infantry force, or used as a fairly resilient garrison themselves.

So that's it for now. More old models given a refresh.