I thought I'd simply touch up an image from 2017 but ended up spending quite a bit of time on it than expected. I better post it before it escalated further and the month is over. It's a rather massive lineup sheet, looking at it now. Getting figure proportions to look right is very tricky since there's no consistent scale and it's easy to get lost. I had to use a lot of reference and look for averages.
Anyways, Space Crusade is a game I keep returning to in my thoughts. The miniatures are really a bit all over the place in terms of scaling, with rather small firstborn marines and big hoppity gretchins. What's interesting about the board game is that it features quite a variety of enemies (somehow all on the same team and getting along), so it makes it a good candidate for a "vertical slice" type of product if GW ever decided to do that. It would be nice to get a spread of figures (from the various factions) in a box rather than 10-20 of the same type, right? I still remember the unpainted piles of second edition 40K Gretchins and Space Hulk Genestealers which littered our hobby headquarters 30 years ago...
So I started thinking about what kind of figures would be cool to see in such a scenario and I just started doodling. I'm biased toward oldhammer designs and scaling of course. In practice, due to plastic injection tooling costs, it's probably a hindrance to push for variety, but part of the charm of Space Crusade is that it isn't Space Hulk.
As for what a new Space Crusade game might look like... maybe a solo thing with blips (some false) and troop drafting. In the original you could upgrade the marine weapons as they were push-fit, but it might also be fun to be able to get a wider variety of troops and upgrade that way, starting from IG and beastmen, maybe with some veteran upgrades like extra dice, rerolls, and resurrection chances. Even in 40K you can sort of upgrade a character (stats and cards) without having to touch the model.
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I'm also including some other sketches here, like an oldhammer background for a shelf diorama, a Rogue Trader era marine sketch, and a character based on a design by someone else (mossa). Looking at the old Rogue Trader art, it's not much different in terms of what's going on in the pictures (guys shooting guys), but the narrative tone is very different. The marines are a nasty bunch, alright. Then perhaps as early as second edition the tone changed to something more flattering and aspirational, kind of like imperial propaganda art (unreliable narrator, I guess). The Space Crusade box had such a piece for the cover.