Sideproject - Valkyrie Down

Last October I picked up a partially built Valkyrie on eBay for $25.  It was an as is auction, meaning it was missing a sprue. When it got to me it was really only missing a few pieces, though it was enough that I couldn't use it in the IG army I was building.  I didn't mind at the time, because I love bits and you never know when you are going to need 95% of a model to do something.   I finally decided a few weeks ago what I wanted to use it for.  I'm going to make a crashed Valkyrie terrain piece.   I'm going to turn this....

Into this....

While listening to the witty banter of Nathan Fillion I assembled the remaining parts of the Valkyrie to be able to then destroy it.   The previous owner had obviously never heard of trimming the sprue before assembly and there are some pretty big gaps in the hull.  I tried to continue with this method of assembly to make it look like shock damage, we'll see how it comes it out.  I finished up the assembly of the model and now I need to work on details. 

I'm going to build the pilot, gunner and door gunner out of a combination of skeleton and the actual model pieces to make it look like they crashed, fought off some attackers, and then were killed. I'm thinking of picking up a bunch of heavy bolter casing pieces online to add on the ground around the door gunner.  I'm also planning on making the canopy appear shattered (you can see the clipped frame of the cockpit) and smash in the front of the model ( I am missing a piece of the bottom of the nose, as you can see) to cover up missing pieces. 

When I'm done it should make for a nice center piece for gaming.  I'm sure I'll be tossing my objective tokens on it every game I can.