Relatively minor update. It's been a busy couple of weeks and I haven't been able to get much done, but an ebay winning arrived in the mail yesterday, and I spent a little time today playing around with it. I picked up a second-hand Desolator that, well, was definitely second-hand. I'm still removing whatever glue the person used (either they used a ton of superglue, or some strange yellowed resin glue that, well, either way they applied liberally. Reminds me of some of my first models...), and I'll need to replace quite a few pieces (was missing a couple of gun turrets, the keel stabilizer fin, and a good portion of the bridge), but I have parts to either replace or scratch-build to fix it.
At any rate, the condition made it easier to decide to convert it into a Desecrator (trust me, I didn't take a picture of the gun decks before I covered them over, but nothing short of acetone was ever going to comprehensively loosen/remove the extra glue). So since I'm using the plastic lance deck mountings and not exposing the recessed turret mounts, I need to believably demonstrate that each turret is worth a str 2 lance shot. In the picture below you have my first couple of modified turret ideas. Bottom left is the standard Desolator turret. Top left is part of an Imperial antenna. Top right is a triple-barreled turret styled somewhat like the plastic chaos cruiser turret but, well, thicker, and bottom right is a two-barreled option (I might shorten the barrel length, getting it to feel right is taking some work).
At any rate, which do you think looks better? This is really a first pass at attempting to replace the turrets on the deck using existing pieces and conversion bits. If I really have to, I'll build all of the turrets from scratch to get what I'm looking for, but I'm not entirely sure I'm up for the headache of making a dozen or so matching turrets to use for battleship-grade heavy lance arrays (I plan on using these for other BBs if I get something that works well).
