Starting Small - Test Tyrant's Legion / Death Korps squad

My first Imperial Guard collection was the original Armageddon Steel Legion released in third edition the regiment raised to defend the system's central world, and I guess I'm finally returning to my roots.

When I started playing around with making a Badab War Tyrant's Legion, I had a number of different ideas.

While I think Elysians look fantastic as sci-fi troopers, they were a bit too high-tech for representing a Planetary Defense Force. Playing with the non-Western naming schemes, I briefly toyed with Tallaran but mostly decided I didn't like the models enough. I eventually narrowed it down to four choices, which were basically two: Armageddon Steel Legion or Death Korps of Krieg, representing faceless masses, or Cadian Shocktroops (current or old metal) representing basically mundane/modern-era human soldiers, outclassed and paired with posthumans. I slightly preferred Death Korps (for their support and better detail) and metal Cadians (for looking lighter and more mundane than the current ones).

I think any good opportunity would have pushed me in one of those four directions, but, ages back, I worked on a commission that left me with a bunch of cheap Korps lasgunners. Besides offering cheap filler, I really liked the idea that a lot of the troops would be kind of clueless, compared to everyone being in action poses.

The project languished until just a little while back, when after playing 8th edition a bit I hit a critical mass of Astral Claws such that I wanted to go back to the Tyrant's Legion build. These are mostly like my earlier experiments with them, except the first I think were a little too drab therefore a little too conceptually close to the Korps. The current iteration includes dull nods to most of the major aspects of my Astral Claws: gold/yellow, blue/bluegrey, brown leather, and grey/raw metal. I played with giving them the same yellow-green lenses, but I thought it made them a little too high-tech, more on the black ops side than line infantry. I also feel that the urban, rather than dirt, bases helped separate them from the trench aesthetic of the Korps.

I decided to use a regular Imperial Guard regimental configuration to distinguish them from the Death Korps rules. For my first unit, I've made up a sergeant with an identifiable chainsword, since it was pretty hard to identify him at a distance, and I got a cheap Death Korps Engineer Mole Mortar crew, which I'll be using as either a regular mortar or a missile launcher.

Also, as there aren't rules for Tyrant's Legion Centurions anymore, it seemed appropriate to at least represent that aspect of the Legion enforcers with a Commissar. I thought the blue did a nice job making him look like a different style of officer than the classic black & red.