Marked for Censure - Ultramarine Sergeants

Ultramarine Sergeants have long had a distinctive red helm, handy for spotting troop leaders in the swirl of combat and making snipers' jobs easier since some time in the 1980's.

It is a nice distinction and has a practical gaming purpose. In fact, when playing games of Apocalyptic proportion I often find that it is simpler to try and keep track of the Sergeants than it is to try and remember the plan for each squad. They are certainly easier to find. 

With the growing fluff of the 40k universe, indeed thanks to the 30k setting and Brother Sargent Aeonid Thiel we have come to know a lot more about the origins of the red helm and in Gathering Storm III we get to use the original artefact as war-gear.In fact Gathering Storm has sent me back to my painting table and over the last couple of days I have produced the Brother Sargents you can see in this post. I have been trying to push up my normal standard of painting and I have spend longer than usual on these, making sure to highlight the models.

Some of the keener eyed among you might wonder why the Ultra symbol is on the wrong arm of the Sargent above. This is because the article white stripe with the inset Ultra is listed as a Tactical squad marking in the Index Astartes and I think it is nice to mix in the other symbols, marking out suits of power armour that may have remained unchanged since a specific feat in their history, or just more generally following the Codex rule of changing up the markings to confuse the enemy.

The whole Ultramarines Chapter list

OK, so I don’t have a full roster as yet and I will not be positing individual points values, but earlier this year I played out a Battle for Mcragge using roughly 20,000 points.

All in all the force contained units from 1st Company, 5th Company, 7th Company, 8th Company, 9th Company, 10th Company and support from the armouries. I tried to drop a complete breakdown in here, but it broke blogger, so I will have to spend some time making it more web friendly.
I have cobbled together a summary of all marines and tanks I used from codex Space Marines and the below is what I got. If you read through you might say to yourself, “only one Rhino?” and I thought something was up too until I remembered I was fighting from trenches, so left the blue boxes at home.

Assault Marines	120
Captains	5
Chaplains	2
Chaplin Casuius	1
Command Squad Veterans	25
Devastator Marines	120
Dreadnaughts	13
Drop Pods	11
Ironclad Dreadnaughts	2
Land Raiders	2
Land Raider Crusaders	2
Land Raider Redeemers	2
Predators	6
Rhino	1
Scout Bikes	10
Scouts	90
Sternguard Veterans	20
Storm Raven	1
Storm Talons	2
Tactical Marines	160
Terminator Assault Marines	20
Terminator Captain	1
Terminator Marines	30
Thunderfire Cannons	3
Vanguard Veterans	30
Vindicators	3
Whirlwinds	2
Total miniatures	684

A long way to go

I am not actually sure when this photo is from. The painting progress, which is post Yorkshire Open suggests this is about September 2012, so I have set the post date to then. I was already at 3 Battle Companies, my favored 4th, 5th and 6th with a smattering of tanks, scouts and other companies.