warhammer 40k Archives - Page 35 of 79

Warhammer 40K Diorama

This Warhammer 40K Diorama was one of the displays at Warhammer World.

Legio Custodes Pallas Grav-attack

Beautifully painted Legio Custodes Pallas Grav-attack on display at Warhammer World.

Designed as a high manoeuvrability hunter-killer, the Pallas Grav-attack is a rapid strike vehicle utilising advanced repulsor-lift technology. Filling a similar battlefield role to the various patterns of Land Speeder and Attack Speeder of the Legiones Astartes, the Pallas has superior agility, improved armour, inbuilt shielding technology, and more powerful weaponry in the form of its twin-linked Arachnus blaze cannon – an expertly engineered weapon that can successfully eliminate both infantry and armoured targets.

Legio Custodes Coronus Grav-carrier

This beautifully painted Legio Custodes Coronus Grav-carrier was on display at Warhammer World.

Armed with twin-linked Lastrum bolt cannon and Arachnus blaze cannon, the Coronus Grav-carrier is perhaps one of the most recognised vehicles used exclusively by the Legio Custodes. This heavily protected transport skimmer provides them with a degree of speed and agility unmatched by the grinding armour of others who fight in the name of the Emperor, allowing the Legio Custodes to deploy rapidly into a range of terrain whilst reducing the risk of being pinned down by enemy forces.

Principally used as a transport, the strikingly-designed Legio Custodes Coronus Grav-carrier served as the technological basis for the Pallas and Caladius grav-craft. While its primary function is transporting a unit of warriors into battle, its armaments – hull-mounted Lastrum bolt cannon and turret-mounted Arachnus blaze cannon – ensure that it is more than capable of mounting appropriately aggressive defenses.

Cerastus Knight-Lancer

These Cerastus Knight-Lancers were on display at Warhammer World.

There is a certain Eldar quality to these Imperial Knights, light footed and all that. Even the weaponry appears to be Eldar like.

The Cerastus Knight-Lancer is a first strike weapon, attuned to rapid assault tactics and lethal outflanking charges against a foe. It is justly renowned for its speed and its power, as well as for the temperamental and restive nature of the machine-spirits which dwell as anima within its colossal frame.

Because of this reputation, the most impetuous and glory-hungry of the Knight Households are driven to bond with these war machines, their own souls a match for the fury caged within their mounts. The greatest of these pairings will go on to create martial legends among their lineage, while for those whose temper cannot fully master that of their Knight-engine or whose own lust for glory might see valour outweigh caution on the battlefield, their triumphs are likely to blaze brightly, if briefly, in the chronicles of their Households.

Mechanicum Castellax Battle-Automata

The Thanatar-Calix class Siege-automata is a potent war machine and a wonder of the Mechanicum’s craft. Combining arcane and secret technologies, it carries a twin-linked mauler bolt cannon alongside a rare solex pattern heavy lascannon, whose beams of coherent light can reach far across a battlefield to lethal effect. The Thanatar-Calix’s most destructive armament though is the graviton ram, a weapon whose origins are lost in the Dark Age of Technology. The ram’s crushing waves of gravitational force can pulverise infantry and vehicles alike, and it can be utterly devastating at both range and close quarters.

The Thanatar frame, designed as a heavy weapons platform, is well armoured and further protected by atomantic shield generators, making it nearly impervious to all but the heaviest of weapons fire. Whilst it is slow to advance, the Thanatar-Calix’s durability allows it to close steadily on its target, moving ever nearer until its formidable weaponry can be brought into range.

Questoris Knight Magaera

This beautifully painted Questoris Knight Magaera was on display at Warhammer World in July 2018.

Magaera type Knights are most often used as shock assault units, breaching the most heavily defended enemy positions, while shrugging off heavy weapons fire and self-repairing even devastating weapon strikes in a few minutes. To aid in this role it is armed with a complex lightning cannon, using focussed electro-magnetic beams to vaporise infantry and blast apart armour.

One mean looking machine.

Triaros Armoured Conveyer

This beautifully painted Mechanicum Triaros Armoured Conveyer was on display in Warhammer World.

The Triaros is the primary armoured battlefield transport of the Mechanicum Taghmata during the era of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. Eschewing the more commonplace STC designs, it relies on a number of unique technologies held as arcana by the Magos Autokrator and never divulged for wider Imperial use, even by the Legiones Astartes. Designed for use in hostile environments, it incorporates multiple galvanic traction drives and its defences are comprised not merely of brute armour, but layered techno-cant wardings and interlocking energy shields, particularly around its seemingly exposed control dais, as well as independently animated weapons servitors.

I rather like this style of models from the Horus Heresy that Forge World have been designing. They strike me as really fitting the gothic future that is Warhammer 40K, more so than the existing models. I also like the fact that they also use futuristic technologies such as anti-grav.

I took my eye off what Forge World were doing over the last few years, so I feel I am seeing many of the models for the “first” time.

Cerastus Knight-Acheron

This beautifully painted Forge World Cerastus Knight-Acheron was on display at Warhammer World.

The devastation wrought by Knights-Acheron is terrifying to behold. Armed with a fearsome reaper chainfist, twin-linked heavy bolters and an Acheron pattern flame cannon, they are employed as weapons of extermination and to inspire fear in their foes. Nothing will sway their attack until the enemy is utterly crushed, never to rise again from the flame-scoured ruins of their strongholds.

Ork Mega Dread

Just what every mekboy wants; an even bigger `Dread! A smoke-belching, hydraulic monster able to tear apart enemy tanks and smash a side lesser war machines with contemptuous ease.

These two were part of a display at Warhammer World.

The Ork Mega-Dread is a very large walker vehicle. This monstrosity of a walker is to Deff Dreds and Killa Kans in the same way the Contemptor Dreadnought and its offshoots are to Space Marine Dreadnoughts. Thus these things are actually rare, since constructing one requires a Mekboy of both uncommon talent, and high levels of Orkishness, so a Guardsman won’t be seeing one on every battlefield.

I have one on my workbench, but it needs to be finished off…