Cadian 101st and Friends

This is my take on Colonel Sparker; Officer commanding of the Cadian 101st Regiment’s 7th Company. For those familiar with typical military ranking and organisation, you might be wondering “Why is a Colonel in command of a Company? Colonel are typically in charge of entire Regiments” and in this case you would be right.
The 101st does have a Regimental Colonel, one Colonel Banting, however the Regiment is an amalgamated force of Mechanised Infantry created from the remnants of an Armoured Regiment and several Infantry Regiments after the fall of Cadia. The loss of the planet and it’s expansive military training programs has led to a dramatic shortage of senior commissioned officers in the right place. Whilst many junior officers are raised from the ranks in short order, senior officers have taken up atypical commands in order to keep the regiment functioning and combat effective. One of which is Colonel Sparker here.

In order to best show off the fact that he is a Colonel, I decided to make him up using the Cadian Castellan Kit. I may yet make an actual “counts as” Castellan if I decide to bring Colonel Banting into the mix but for now, this is my squad Commander.
I gave him a Powersword and a Plasma Pistol as he is the most senior officer I currently have and, whilst the Cadian Honour series doesn’t give us a lot of details on his personal weaponry, I figure such a senior officer would have access to some of the best equipment in stores.

I um’d and ar’d about what head to use for him as, what the books DO tell us is that, he is a fighting officer who regularly gets stuck in with the rest of the Company when they deploy and I thought about giving him the helmeted head option but he is also described as having a prominent moustache so in the end I couldn’t resit the dress hat with the walrus moustache option.

Deployed on a tactical rock he is ready to lead 7th Company onto the field

Colour Sergeant Tyson is the Company Colour Sergeant (who would’ve guessed) so he was the natural pick for the Company Standard Bearer.

The first choice I made for him was the field cap and this was later paired with the sort of casually hanging grip on the lasgun. Have you ever watched the film “We Were Soldiers” with Sam Eliot playing Sgt. Major Basil Plumley? This is pretty much the vibe I got for Tyson and that attitude of “Sir, by the time I need a Weapon, they’ll be plenty lying on the ground”. He’s not here to get stuck in himself, he’s here to make sure orders are relayed and everyone else is getting stuck in. Sure, he’ll fight when it comes to down to it but he knows that’s no longer his primary role in the Company.

Secondly, I picked the skull and laurel stand top for the Company Standard as the whole laurels = veteran theme you see in 40K and it stands it a little above the Platoon Standard (which we will see later) with the winged skull top.

And lasty I gave him the shoulder plate of a Veteran Sergeant. This will come up later with some modification I made but I decided to read the stipes and rank and little Cadian Gate mark as a sort of command/veteran marking. As the Colour Sergeant, Tyson gets both.

We don’t get a lot about Sparker’s Aide Kavik in the novels. Typically he is seen around the barracks, putting up notices and running messages in and out for Sparker. Given his role of being something like an adjutant and a few references that he does indeed take to the field with Sparker I decided to make him the Master-Vox Operator for the squad.

Like Tyson, I gave him a field cap as he’s not particularly on the very leading edge of any attack, more concerned with voxing orders, tracking squads positions and passing on messages from other Imperial forces on the field (hence the magnoclars and the pointing gesture as well).

The build guide suggested the pauldron seen here for the vox build and I decided I like it. The tall pole with the waves coming off of it reminds me a lot of the old RKO Pictures logo and fits in quite nicely as a marker for more senior coms trooper so Kavik gets one to wear.

These two I made as a pair.
On the right is Orderly Evrind and on the left and kneeling down is Chief Medicae Banting.

I envisage these as a little diorama. Evrind, being the Orderly is lumping all the gear so I made her* as the stretcher bearer medi-pack trooper with the upgrade sprue arm holding out the blood pack. Banting is kneeling down with a injector in hand and reaching out for the pack. Put them together and you get the effect of the Medicae calling for supplies to see to a wounded trooper.
This left Evrind without any sort of Rank pauldron but I don’t much mind. I gave her the medicae helmet as a nod to her role as Banting’s assistant and as a field medic. Banting got the full on Medicae looking pauldron as is due his position along with a backpack for carrying more medical gear.

On the table top, I expect to be running Everind as the “Trooper with Medi-pack and Lasgun” and Banting as a “Veteran with Laspistol and Chainsword” just to be table top legal. This is only because Evrind actually has a lasgun and Banting actually has a laspistol.
At some point I plan to go digging through the bits box for a chainsword that isn’t being held by a hand that I can paint up and attach to Banting’s base, like it’s a weapon he carries for defence but he’s dropped it behind him to tend to his medical duty.

* In previous posts, I referred to Evrind as a he. We get very few scenes with Evrind involved in any of the Cadian Honour books but I was going back through it and noticed a passage in Traitor Rock where they are explicitly referred to as she. So for this I picked as more female looking head for Evrind to better represent her as a model. Though it typical Guard model fashion you have to get really close the tell the difference but I certainly feel happy knowing I got this right before anything was glued in place.