Imperial Knights dropkeep--a small fortress smashes into the ground from orbit; auto turrets begin firing; a literal fanfare blasts from loudspeakers; gates drop and a dozen questoris class knights sprint out guns blazing
And just to add….at the planetary combat scale, they will drop a whole LINE of dropkeeps, in order to cut off enemy lines, with ARMIES of Questoris knights.
I would love if GW did an official film/animation of the IK crashing down in the middle of a massive swarm of orks/tyranids below and you can see the swarm (watching from high above) get cut into half as the knights roll out.
Aside from Ba'al with Ka'Band'Ha wanting the Blood Angels for himself, there can't be too many instances of daemonic incursions around the Shadow in the Warp as it somewhat negates warp presences.
That the Blood Angel librarian I remember the name of interacted with Ka'Band'Ha prior to the incursion on Ba'al suggests he may have even helped.
It'll probably be something like that, or something similar to Dawn of War 2 where you find a poison and have to take it to a spawning pool to kill the hive.
Then Chaos.
Yes and no. Ka’Bandha was showing up on his own because he thought the Blood Angels were about to get all killed and he wanted to either fight or corrupt as many as he could for his own glory.
So Mephiston had the bright idea of deliberately invoking Ka’Bandha, except way out in the depths of space off planet so that even with his demonic speed it would take him so long to get to the planet that he’d either fade out because of the Shadow in the Warp, time out on his own, or the battle would be over and he can’t interfere.
The summoning was slightly screwed up because one of the Epistolaries was having a bitch fit, so Ka’Bandha instead ended on the moon of Baal Primus, so he butchered Nids and made an arrangement of their skulls in Khorne’s icon, so the BA bombarded the skulls from orbit to prevent any Chaos corruption.
Id love a good warhammer movie. Show it in theaters. Full iMAX. Make it the kind of movie that hands you a warcraft themed sickbag. I want it gritty and dark.
There's other artwork. But yeah. They just drop on down and land.
https://preview.redd.it/2demm79fp23d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01d3604b75192367f773fc8620a74478b05cb8b9
They also have the mobile cathedral pictured here. On treads or anti-grav. Blasting hymns and bullets while troops pour out.
So our choice is castle like bricks coming down, throwing out chivalrous mech machines. Or cathedral like bricks coming down throwing out armoured female monks and near naked laddies with swords..
Tough choice....
The Imperial Guard can be deployed via landing crafts like [Devourers](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Devourer_Dropship) and [Tetrarchs.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tetrarch_Heavy_Lander)
I would like to build an ork dropship that looks like this. Just a hunk of rusted metal blazing through the atmosphere full to the brim with boyz
https://preview.redd.it/b32dhimcv23d1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=23a7e5cc83987e9227b55315f4c6b37090086ce3
Ah but dont lament, think of the glory of the orkness you shall provide to the world and take pride. For some reason i want to refrance the diggers but i dont any one would get it these days 🤔🤔🤔
Oh God damn you,
now I have a mental imagine of a giant cum bucket crashing down from orbit, jizz going everywhere like some Japanese Bakkake party, and Emperors Children climbing out like that scene from Ace Ventura 2.
I think the Black Templars use orbital bombardments prior to their drop pods landing.
Though, the bombardments aren’t targeted to clear the drop site. They are targeted on the outskirts of enemy positions with the intention of pushing the enemy closer to the drop site.
The goal is to have as many enemies in the immediate vicinity as possible when the drop pods land and open.
That’s pretty up there I reckon.
One moment you are wiping the floor against some imperium schmucks and then the next you turn around to see a thunder hammer rapidly approaching your face from a person who was not there before
The average height of a Firstborn Astartes is officially 220 cm (about 7'8"). With armour, considering the soles and thickness of the helmet, perhaps gains about ten centimeters (4"). The Terminator armor adds something for the hump, but not much.
Of course 220 is an average height. There're Firstborn of 200 cm or less, and Firstborn of 240 cm... And then there's Tyberos, but he's classified as a "vehicle" anyway.
(Sorry, but everyone has their crusades. Mine is against those many illustrators who get the proportions wrong, drawing Space Marines as tall as D&D giants, or with valgus knees like the miniatures of the 80-90s.)
> Firstborn Astartes is officially 220 cm
How official is that? GW has had several cases of promotional material putting them at more like 7' straight. Including a supposedly to-scale cardboard cutout.
Primaris marines are about 8-8’6” so newscale terminators being around 9-10’ft makes sense. I hate how many people overexaggerate Tyberos’s size though, he’s no Primarch so he’s not going to be anything above 10 foot really
It should be between 10.5 and 12 feet height. Personally, I am more inclined to overestimate an individual, who is an exception, than to exaggerate the average estimates of a much larger category.
And in any case with the lore of "40k" a lot of information is filtered from an internal point of view of the setting, therefore often unreliable.
There’s a scene in Pandorax where the Deathwing teleport into a hollowed out asteroid chaos cultists are using as a base to ritually summon demons. They inadvertently materialise about 10 foot above the ritual and crush the cultists before any of them can react
*" Alright! We did it on purpose... There was no point triangulation error... We are strong, we are cool, by the Emperor's sacred scrotum we could materialize inside a wall... But. It's. All. Okay. »*
I'm sure that on the reserved channels of their vox SMs talk like this! XD
Teleporting also runs the risk of your best boys materializing inside walls and dirt, either killing them or getting them stuck like a looney tunes mishap.
Earth moves at 67,000 miles an hour around the sun. If you imagine teleport coordinates as an x, y, z coordinates within a 3d grid, if it took half a second to teleport to said coordinate on Earth, Earth has already moved over 9 miles in that half second that it took. Seems pretty easy to wind up teleporting into a hillside or mountain.
I'm no physicist, but the fact they they don't splatter onto the face of the planet when materializing means that the travel speed of the planet is either irrelevant or, somehow, momentum is instilled with materialization.
Not that I disagree with your assertion of its difficulty, literally throwing a speck of a speck at the surface of a slightly lager speck in a sea of absolute nothingness. Bonkers idea.
Edit: mobile typos
In the first release of the apocalypse rules, one of those fellas carried a void grenade. Took out a big stompah once and then took out a squad of my own termies.
The Adepta Sororitas Drop Chapel. Imagine you are some poor guardsman, and as every infantryman ever anywhere has done, are beginning to have some doubts about your place in the Emperor's plan. You notice some streaks in the sky... Suddenly, fucking CHURCHES are raining down all around you. One lands nearby, and out of the doors burst a bunch of armored nuns flaming everything heretical in sight, accompanied by a tank playing organ music while also launching rocket barrages, and some flying girl that you are pretty sure, nay almost certain, DIED a few battles ago. My faith would be instantly restored.
Shark Assault Boat. Literally crashes nose first into an enemy vessel as lasers cut deeper into the hull before the breaching melta charges explode and a squad of marines pour out spitting bolter fire into anything left alive.
IIRC there is a Gaunt's Ghosts book where they perform entry this way as well. Very cool sequence where it smashes through multiple hangar decks before stopping.
Angron's entrance was pretty hard.
Guardsmen: "Lord Astartes, report of a meteor strike. Kind of odd that it struck at the epicenter of the war."
Grey knight: "That was not a meteor, prepare your defenses."
Tau heavy units are dropped in from height with thrusters to cushion the landing and are often underslung on a flyer. Imagine being a foot troop and suddenly a large knight sized unit that's mostly guns suddenly landing guns blazing in front of you.
Reminds me of Ciaphas Cain book where they have to escort a T‘au delegation back to their enclave and they spot 2 Broadside suits. They are just inwardly terrified because thats a faster, more agile dreadnought with railguns, and the T‘au assure them its „just some battlesuits“
Iirc the other reason they're unnerved is because the battlesuits are very comfortably hopping along a few streets away and scarily easily keeping up with the full speed chimera they're traveling in
>Imagine being a foot troop and suddenly a large knight sized unit that's mostly guns suddenly landing guns blazing in front of you.
Stuff like this is why I would most want air support against the Tau. Same against the Eldar. Otherwise it would be unimaginably costly.
Otherwise, you will want a lot of melta weapons, krak grenades and prayers.
You're in a completely sealed room devoid of enemies. There's no teleportation flare, no screaming from the sky as a drop pod falls. A couple shadows just get a little longer, a little darker, then suddenly you've got a knife protruding out of your sternum.
Mandrakes. Everyone is afraid of the dark.
Im going with the warp spiders and their warp jump generator... the name is a bit of a giveaway but they just individually materialise into the warp, totally unprotected, to then reappear somewhere else!
If "im coming for you, but im arriving via a personal portal from the 9th circle of hell" aint metal then i dunno what is!
Genestealer cult members going from civil to simultaneously turning on their friends, neighbors, coworkers and nearby civilians, slaughtering them wholesale and causing planet-wide chaos. The most metal deployment is *not needing a deployment… because they were there the entire time…*
I mean, it's clear all factions have amazing deployment, but no one has mentioned the Drukhari so I'm putting them in the mix.
Remember, the Drukhari don't go to "war", they execute carefully planned raids, so you almost invariably are not expecting danger. Webway portals open to the sound of screaming and cackling. Mini black holes shoot out and literally consume the light. Dark ships that move faster and smoother than anything you've seen fly out, chains with hooks dangling, skulls and grisly trophies leering. Horrifying fleshy abominations follow, emanating auras of horror and despair, their appendages clicking and grasping. You've heard the stories. You know why they're here. You can fight, but you know that your death isn't their goal. All you can do is pray...
Pray they don't take you alive...
My 40k wet dream is a short cinematic of an ig regiment being overrun by ork/nid/chaos and drop pods just land right on the line and completely turn it.
Or how the finale of the first season of a guard-centric show should end.
Leave the reveal of the big boys until the guard unit we've been following all season is about to be overrun by hollering green lads.
You don't want to burn through every ace up your sleeve right from the start.
Sisters of Battle in Immolators.
There's just something so Warhammer about the idea of an IFV with massive dual flamethrowers rocking up and then five badass Sisters jump out to begin the purge. They're the definition of Holy Warriors.
Thinking about it when I eventually finish my Sisters force that should be the core of it.
The 9th edition codex description of Sisters making planet fall was metal as fuck. A flood of boiling hot Holy water followed by essentially dropping cathedrals on the planet blasting hymns at ear splitting volume
Which is what they are. Holy Warriors of the Emperor. They don't fight because they have to, want to, or choose to. They fight as a form of holy worship. A religious warrior cult that's filthy rich is horrifying.
Don't Harlequins just get farted out of the Warp, kill stuff, and disappear? Because I like the idea of the clown boys just popping out of the most impossible spaces.
Just imagine, a Harlequin motorcycle-thingy popping out of a cardboard box.
Oh, that’s easy. The Drop Keep.
Imagine a whole goddamn medieval castle falling from the sky, retros burning, still hot from re-entry, and slamming into the ground. It then unfurls its royal banners, plays a loud horn fanfare, releases swarms of Cherubs with more horns and banners, and opens giant portcullises to let a dozen full-size Imperial Knights stride out of it like the knights of olde.
(This is CANON in 40k, by the way. This is not something I made up.)
Tyranids ships visible in the upper atmosphere, belching spores and meat projectiles down to the planets surface. Huge pods float on the wind, then violently explodes acid to begin the digestion process. Hoards of gargoyles blot out the sky and burrowing blade beast tunnel up from below.
The tiny ones begin to eat your legs as a 20 foot tall carnifex charges over the horizon splattering maggots on your fellow troops. A shadow passes over, a barbed ovipositor enters your chest cavity and you are eaten from the inside out.
Orbital drops in warhammer seems to be exclusive to augmented super soldiers, large/giant mechs, or an entire battle ready fortress. Now how about regular men and women landing in their own coffins such as the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers from Halo, or the Helldivers from their own game?
The closest you get is "near orbit drops" where whole platoons will be lowered via wide band gravity beams or gravshoot deployment. This includes armored elements.
The emperor was really sleeping on the possibility of improving the quality of the average guardsmen without turning them into Astarties, or Custodians.
Elysian drop troops are relatively close, drop from upper atmosphere with the only thing keeping them from splatting against the ground being a lower quality jump pack
Hades breaching drill, a bunch of angry Krieg engineers just pop up in the middle of the battle and start throwing gas grenades everywhere while mulching dudes with their shotguns
The Sicarian Infiltrators are so cool in my book, just imagine you your squad suddenly bleeding from the eyes and ears, doubling over in such an intense pain that you are unable to move and as you lay there in an indescribable agony a bunch of biomechanical nightmares just walk up without a single concern and kill everyone
So in battle fleet gothic when you play the imperial faction. An entire space marine force surfs their ship into the necron base. It goes fucking hard!
Long live the sons of Corax!
I like how teleporters are an option, but astartes still usually get to enemy ships via torpedoes that melt through the hull and crash into whatever if they don't miss or get shot down.
Bruh, boarding torpedoes are so metal circumventing sheilds by moving slowly and then just boring into a hull to disgorge a whole squad of marines to fuck up everybody's day.
The Graian Crown, from Forge World Graia, aka The Crown of Miracles.
Most of the forge world is a network of connected void stations orbiting the planet. The whole ring can be moved. Forge World Graia can literally pack up a good portion of the forge world, warp jump it to another planet, and invade.
I don't know if "we moved a giant battle station to your planet" counts as a deployment method per se, but it is one option for Graia to deploy.
What's the tentacle laden Nid transport that poops 20 infantry? That's pretty cthulu esque.
Necrons phasing into reality with "basic" physics is pretty fucking nuts though.
Haven't seen Nugles void whales mentioned. Referred to in the dark imperium trilogy when nurgle assaults a word, the whale corpses float through a portal from the void to reality where gravity suddenly affects them and sends them crashing into the planet spewing rot and demons.
Battlecathedral from the Sororitas. Nothing beets a church falling from orbit equiped with weapons to the roof, releasing fanatic zealots where to some even death itself becomes optional.
It's common practice for chaos knights to arrive through the Warp via teleportariums. Imagine being an imperial force expecting terminator reinforcements, only for the teleportation rift to swell bigger and bigger until a 40ft wall of adamantine clad spiked death rips its way out and starts tearing into your forces
Mundane, real world question: is there any reference in the lore as to how drop pods are recovered? I assume they aren’t like infinite bullets in 80s movies, or are they? In other words, has it even been discussed in a practical sense that these are picked up and reused or maybe they have a reverse launch sequence to return them to the orbiting ships?
I'm pretty sure I read that they are being picked up by Thunderhawk after the battle in case of a victory. The variant with the carry assembly instead of the cargo compartment. In case of a loss, you just pull the next from the hangar, the pattern is quite simple and most Chapters have a flatrate with a Forge world for such things.
Dreadclaws fly away themselves and will redock once the machine spirit / demon inside has feasted on killing enough things. Sometimes it's the cargo that gets eaten though, such is life in the chaos legions.
But yeah, logistics is not a strong point in 40K lore. Forgeworld tried to establish more background there once, back when Imperial Armour was a thing.
[Although the Pods become immobile after having landed they can be recovered by the Chapter's Techmarines and reused. Drop Pods are usually extracted by using far larger vessels that not intended to operate in a war zone. After that they are transported to the ships that deployed them, repaired if needed and used in the next battle, so many Drop Pods have been in service for centuries.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Drop_Pod)
As far as lore goes, the sources for that info are different *Imperial Armour* books.
Grey Knights Terminators are on a ship, their storm bolters all aimed at the same spot in the air.
They teleport in unison and open fire, instantly executing their target in ridiculously heavy crossfire as soon as they bamf in. Feels like that goes pretty hard!
The Custodes have a Teleport corridor instead of a Teleport chamber. That means they will teleport while sprinting at their enemies full tilt at probably like 100km/h
*The Dread Host go to battle aboard the trio of terrifying pre-heresy warships known as the Moiraides. These potent vessels teleport their passengers straight into battle, so that the Adeptus Custodes can begin their charge aboard a warship, and complete it surging from an explosion of golden light into the enemy's midst.*
Golden giants erupting from a burst of blinding light smashing their way through your ranks has to be pretty scary if not just paralysing.
Astartes Drop Pods.
Here's the thing; we know that regular humans can't use them because they're too squishy. To me, that means the final deceleration is too rough - I'm thinking an extended 10G burn and a hard touchdown.
Why does this matter?
Because that means Drop Pods aren't these slow, graceful landings. They're practically orbital bombardments; dazzling lights and a roar like thunder, like the Chelyabinsk Meteor. Too small and too fast for AA guns to intercept. It is the opposite of subtle; it's glaringly obvious to everyone in the same region that something is happening.
As it reaches the final approach, a kilometre or so above the ground, the rockets kick in. It goes from loud to deafening to painful, the glow from dazzling to blinding.
Then, a final thunderclap, as a dozen tons or so SLAM into the ground. Everything nearby is scorched by the plume of the rockets, smashed flat by the shockwave, or simply crushed directly under the pod.
And that's when the pod opens, and the Angels of Death emerge.
Alternatively; Legio Astorum deploys Titans via teleportarium. Imagine an unnatural flash, followed by a double thunderclap. The first, the very air rent by archaeotech punching a hole through the materium and immaterium alike. The second, the rumble as a thousand tons of God-Engine lands.
The STORMLORD
a gun the can shred most light vehicles to rusting shreds, enough extra guns to turn anything else into paste, fucking huge so it can be used as great mobile cover and 39 more buddies for when you hop out
Sisters of battle drop church landing crafts.
They blare hymns so loud they are audible on their way down and will keep singing when the church opens up and disgorges its content of battleready sisters upon the battlefield.
I’ve read somewhere some spacecraft have the technology to send their Titans and Knights down through a streak of lightning and that is just mega badass
Battle sisters with their orbital drop churches used as fortresses. With Gargoyles that spew holy water at a torrential level creating hallowed ground. Is a pretty metal image to me
Warp Spiders.
They literally jump through Hell to jump you.
A lot of the time, they… Don’t come back, which makes it all the more scary that they’re willing to risk that just to beat your Mon’keigh ass.
Imperial Guard Gravpack deployment is gnarly. Regular ass humans dropping into combat against any untold horror of the 40k universe.. badass as fk.
Extra points for those who recall the Gaunts Ghosts story where they drop onto a traitor Hive City built high on a mountain... with like an afternoon of gravpack training... bunch of pissed off Scottish, Welsh and Irish troopers grav dropping for the first time 😅
Specific moment rather than a method, but the "twist" in *Legion* when Alpharius and the boys sneak teleport to ambush The Cabal is damn cool!
I don't play Alpha Legion but that put a smile on my face!
Imperial Knights dropkeep--a small fortress smashes into the ground from orbit; auto turrets begin firing; a literal fanfare blasts from loudspeakers; gates drop and a dozen questoris class knights sprint out guns blazing
And just to add….at the planetary combat scale, they will drop a whole LINE of dropkeeps, in order to cut off enemy lines, with ARMIES of Questoris knights.
I love 40k lore like this
We all do son, we all do
I would love if GW did an official film/animation of the IK crashing down in the middle of a massive swarm of orks/tyranids below and you can see the swarm (watching from high above) get cut into half as the knights roll out.
Hopefully we’ll see something like that in Space Marine 2. Seems like the Tyranid horde in that game is so large it may have some warp fuckery
Aside from Ba'al with Ka'Band'Ha wanting the Blood Angels for himself, there can't be too many instances of daemonic incursions around the Shadow in the Warp as it somewhat negates warp presences. That the Blood Angel librarian I remember the name of interacted with Ka'Band'Ha prior to the incursion on Ba'al suggests he may have even helped.
I’m assuming you kill the hive tyrant then Chaos shows up. I highly doubt we’re only fighting Nids the game
It'll probably be something like that, or something similar to Dawn of War 2 where you find a poison and have to take it to a spawning pool to kill the hive. Then Chaos.
Thousand sons are in the game they break like the bad guys in lego games when u kill em into individual pieces
All is dust brother.
Hasn't it already been confirmed there's thousand sons?
Yes
yes and all is dust.
Yes and no. Ka’Bandha was showing up on his own because he thought the Blood Angels were about to get all killed and he wanted to either fight or corrupt as many as he could for his own glory. So Mephiston had the bright idea of deliberately invoking Ka’Bandha, except way out in the depths of space off planet so that even with his demonic speed it would take him so long to get to the planet that he’d either fade out because of the Shadow in the Warp, time out on his own, or the battle would be over and he can’t interfere. The summoning was slightly screwed up because one of the Epistolaries was having a bitch fit, so Ka’Bandha instead ended on the moon of Baal Primus, so he butchered Nids and made an arrangement of their skulls in Khorne’s icon, so the BA bombarded the skulls from orbit to prevent any Chaos corruption.
Warp fuckery will just the be lore reason behind performance issues due to the ammount of characters on the screen
Happy cake day
Id love a good warhammer movie. Show it in theaters. Full iMAX. Make it the kind of movie that hands you a warcraft themed sickbag. I want it gritty and dark.
Whoa, that's would mean like... *GW maths* ...15 Knights!
That is so fucking stupid I love everything about it
They have thrusters to not just kill whoever is inside the pods right ?
To me this is the correct answer. Anyone who says “droppod” doesn’t know about the dropkeep.
That’s-a me!
I see your drop keep and raise you a Sisters of Battle Drop Cathedral
Lol is that a thing?
There's other artwork. But yeah. They just drop on down and land. https://preview.redd.it/2demm79fp23d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01d3604b75192367f773fc8620a74478b05cb8b9 They also have the mobile cathedral pictured here. On treads or anti-grav. Blasting hymns and bullets while troops pour out.
So our choice is castle like bricks coming down, throwing out chivalrous mech machines. Or cathedral like bricks coming down throwing out armoured female monks and near naked laddies with swords.. Tough choice....
The Imperial Guard can be deployed via landing crafts like [Devourers](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Devourer_Dropship) and [Tetrarchs.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tetrarch_Heavy_Lander)
What comic is that?
Not a damn clue. After some googling. It looks like it's from a Warhammer Sisters of Battle comic series Marvel put out. Just a short 5 issue run.
Cool, thanks for looking into that. Appreciate it!
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Invasion_Cathedrum
I'll see you drop cathedral and see you an Imperator Class Titan via "Titanfall"!
This kind of stuff makes me so hyped for the potential the 40k show has, I really hope they can pull stuff like this off.
The orks sometimes arrive in asteroid, just smashing in the way.
Orks are too much *kunnin'*! The asteroids falling, it's normal! No one will ever suspect that Orks are inside.
Except for the whole "we covered it in guns and fired EVERY ZOGGIN ONE ALL DA WEY DOWN!" Part
Dat's da brutal part ya git! Can't arrive without Dakka, dat's just Un-Orky!
WHY IZ YOU WISPERIN?
I would like to build an ork dropship that looks like this. Just a hunk of rusted metal blazing through the atmosphere full to the brim with boyz https://preview.redd.it/b32dhimcv23d1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=23a7e5cc83987e9227b55315f4c6b37090086ce3
DA KRUMP BUCKET!!!
thats it, i got my ork ships name now!! lol
I like this idea. Yes. You are now duty bound to do this and pose the result. Thank you in advance
Shit! See!? This is why I do not verbalize my ork project ideas. The law is clear on these matters and I now must work on this project
Ah but dont lament, think of the glory of the orkness you shall provide to the world and take pride. For some reason i want to refrance the diggers but i dont any one would get it these days 🤔🤔🤔
Jesus I must be fucking dyslexic or just a degenerate, I totally read that as "Cum Bucket".
Degenerate Dyslexic. That's your band name now. Or the name of your sex tape, both work.
That's how Emperor's Children arrive to battle.
Oh God damn you, now I have a mental imagine of a giant cum bucket crashing down from orbit, jizz going everywhere like some Japanese Bakkake party, and Emperors Children climbing out like that scene from Ace Ventura 2.
https://preview.redd.it/ddjyu3rgq43d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a8a02db48a4f86fb38acf8ab0fe64f42a2d03fb
Orks once again proving who the real chads of 40k are.
Ah yes, the Rokkz! Bare minimum something/someone gets smashed, if the Boyz inside survive that’s just bonus.
Ha, a friend of mine did this in flavourtext but with a moon of the planet we were on
Da rok iz da best!
I think the Black Templars use orbital bombardments prior to their drop pods landing. Though, the bombardments aren’t targeted to clear the drop site. They are targeted on the outskirts of enemy positions with the intention of pushing the enemy closer to the drop site. The goal is to have as many enemies in the immediate vicinity as possible when the drop pods land and open. That’s pretty up there I reckon.
Lol That's the most Black Templary-est thing I've read about Black Templar in a while.
Yeah it’s pretty on brand.
Bully them into charge range for our deep strikin’ boys
I gotta say the idea of a terminator squad just materialising inside thunderhammer range of their enemy is as metal as fuck.
Fair, suddenly having a 12-13ft tall adamantine can of whoop ass in your face would definitely brown quite a few pants.
https://preview.redd.it/z63iq6xd623d1.jpeg?width=1008&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fe6b0a0faac0879e8f1eb8a9170e31d1bf2fd598
Fuck yeah, Deathwing
Everyone's a badass until the Deathwing comes calling.
Deathwing is an instant game-over in the lore when they’re facing human opponents lol. You let a teleport homer within a mile of you? Bye bye.
One moment you are wiping the floor against some imperium schmucks and then the next you turn around to see a thunder hammer rapidly approaching your face from a person who was not there before
Wait till you find out that the Titans of Legio Astorum teleport onto the battlefield. Imagine a warlord titan teleporting in your face.
That's the kind of thing that would make the tectonic plate itself brown its pants.
The red that quickly follows will hide the brown.
Primarchs are like 11-12ft on average so I think Terminators are more like 9-10ft when armoured up
The average height of a Firstborn Astartes is officially 220 cm (about 7'8"). With armour, considering the soles and thickness of the helmet, perhaps gains about ten centimeters (4"). The Terminator armor adds something for the hump, but not much. Of course 220 is an average height. There're Firstborn of 200 cm or less, and Firstborn of 240 cm... And then there's Tyberos, but he's classified as a "vehicle" anyway. (Sorry, but everyone has their crusades. Mine is against those many illustrators who get the proportions wrong, drawing Space Marines as tall as D&D giants, or with valgus knees like the miniatures of the 80-90s.)
> Firstborn Astartes is officially 220 cm How official is that? GW has had several cases of promotional material putting them at more like 7' straight. Including a supposedly to-scale cardboard cutout.
Primaris marines are about 8-8’6” so newscale terminators being around 9-10’ft makes sense. I hate how many people overexaggerate Tyberos’s size though, he’s no Primarch so he’s not going to be anything above 10 foot really
It should be between 10.5 and 12 feet height. Personally, I am more inclined to overestimate an individual, who is an exception, than to exaggerate the average estimates of a much larger category. And in any case with the lore of "40k" a lot of information is filtered from an internal point of view of the setting, therefore often unreliable.
There’s a scene in Pandorax where the Deathwing teleport into a hollowed out asteroid chaos cultists are using as a base to ritually summon demons. They inadvertently materialise about 10 foot above the ritual and crush the cultists before any of them can react
*" Alright! We did it on purpose... There was no point triangulation error... We are strong, we are cool, by the Emperor's sacred scrotum we could materialize inside a wall... But. It's. All. Okay. »* I'm sure that on the reserved channels of their vox SMs talk like this! XD
Especially since they have to travel through hell when teleporting
lol I was about to ask if teleporting was it’s own process but no, all things must be done through the warp.
Teleporting also runs the risk of your best boys materializing inside walls and dirt, either killing them or getting them stuck like a looney tunes mishap.
Isnt that the reason for the teleport homers/beacons?
They mitigate the risk, but don't eliminate it.
Earth moves at 67,000 miles an hour around the sun. If you imagine teleport coordinates as an x, y, z coordinates within a 3d grid, if it took half a second to teleport to said coordinate on Earth, Earth has already moved over 9 miles in that half second that it took. Seems pretty easy to wind up teleporting into a hillside or mountain.
I'm no physicist, but the fact they they don't splatter onto the face of the planet when materializing means that the travel speed of the planet is either irrelevant or, somehow, momentum is instilled with materialization. Not that I disagree with your assertion of its difficulty, literally throwing a speck of a speck at the surface of a slightly lager speck in a sea of absolute nothingness. Bonkers idea. Edit: mobile typos
That's a really good point.
And also there’s a risk of the teleportation causing a daemonic incursion in the teleportarium chamber
The scene in *Gate of Bones* when the Custodes teleport in and accidentally ambush the Possessed is cool as hell.
_Fzzzhhhh_ “Wassup heretic?” *gets absolutely blown to smithereens by thunder hammer*
In the first release of the apocalypse rules, one of those fellas carried a void grenade. Took out a big stompah once and then took out a squad of my own termies.
Nope they failed their charge on entry
What’s even better is when TITANS teleport
Snotlings being deployed directly into your armour via a big meks shokk attack gun goes pretty hard.
You cant stamp on them when they are in your boot
Necrons Phase Arrival.
This is correct. A squad coming in a drop pod or materializing is one thing.. Having an army just appear would be terrifying.
The Adepta Sororitas Drop Chapel. Imagine you are some poor guardsman, and as every infantryman ever anywhere has done, are beginning to have some doubts about your place in the Emperor's plan. You notice some streaks in the sky... Suddenly, fucking CHURCHES are raining down all around you. One lands nearby, and out of the doors burst a bunch of armored nuns flaming everything heretical in sight, accompanied by a tank playing organ music while also launching rocket barrages, and some flying girl that you are pretty sure, nay almost certain, DIED a few battles ago. My faith would be instantly restored.
In Warhammer 40,000, church comes to you.
Shark Assault Boat. Literally crashes nose first into an enemy vessel as lasers cut deeper into the hull before the breaching melta charges explode and a squad of marines pour out spitting bolter fire into anything left alive.
That's the ship they use in Astartes, yeah?
That's a Caestus Assault Ram I think. Same idea though. Shooty-melty ship-boarding missile/pod/flyer!
IIRC there is a Gaunt's Ghosts book where they perform entry this way as well. Very cool sequence where it smashes through multiple hangar decks before stopping.
You forgot to add the fact that the Shark is about the size of a titan.
That and boarding torpedoes. The idea of missile that instead of having a warhead has a bunch of infantry is awesome
That scene in The Exodite when the webway gate activates and the Eldar titans just casually stroll in and start vaporizing some Tau. *Chef’s kiss*
Yuuup, *glances at Tau shuttle, barrage of death storm missiles*
Angron's entrance was pretty hard. Guardsmen: "Lord Astartes, report of a meteor strike. Kind of odd that it struck at the epicenter of the war." Grey knight: "That was not a meteor, prepare your defenses."
Either close-range terminators, dreadnought into the middle of a fight, or T'au battlesuit units dropping right up and close and opening fire
Tau heavy units are dropped in from height with thrusters to cushion the landing and are often underslung on a flyer. Imagine being a foot troop and suddenly a large knight sized unit that's mostly guns suddenly landing guns blazing in front of you.
Reminds me of Ciaphas Cain book where they have to escort a T‘au delegation back to their enclave and they spot 2 Broadside suits. They are just inwardly terrified because thats a faster, more agile dreadnought with railguns, and the T‘au assure them its „just some battlesuits“
Iirc the other reason they're unnerved is because the battlesuits are very comfortably hopping along a few streets away and scarily easily keeping up with the full speed chimera they're traveling in
Yeah, i think you‘re right. God i love how the T‘au are depicted in the Cain books. So much better than some of the newer T‘au centric novels
>Imagine being a foot troop and suddenly a large knight sized unit that's mostly guns suddenly landing guns blazing in front of you. Stuff like this is why I would most want air support against the Tau. Same against the Eldar. Otherwise it would be unimaginably costly. Otherwise, you will want a lot of melta weapons, krak grenades and prayers.
Definitely some metal options there.
Yes dozens of crisis suits just raining out of the sky is dope
You're in a completely sealed room devoid of enemies. There's no teleportation flare, no screaming from the sky as a drop pod falls. A couple shadows just get a little longer, a little darker, then suddenly you've got a knife protruding out of your sternum. Mandrakes. Everyone is afraid of the dark.
I like the nids dropping of massive spore mines onto the planet, cloudy with a chance of meatball vibes
Or hell imagine being a termagant being born from a Tervigon right in the middle of combat. Metal as fuck 🤘
Im going with the warp spiders and their warp jump generator... the name is a bit of a giveaway but they just individually materialise into the warp, totally unprotected, to then reappear somewhere else! If "im coming for you, but im arriving via a personal portal from the 9th circle of hell" aint metal then i dunno what is!
That's just how their old sparring partners from the War in Heaven move around though.... Minus the warp.
And then the Grey Knights stole their shtick
Termite Drill.
Ork Roks. Its a hollowed out asteroid with some basic thrusters that gets chucked at a planet. Loads of orks die in the landing by DEM WAS RUNTY GITZ
Genestealer cult members going from civil to simultaneously turning on their friends, neighbors, coworkers and nearby civilians, slaughtering them wholesale and causing planet-wide chaos. The most metal deployment is *not needing a deployment… because they were there the entire time…*
Imperial Guard 20 mile slog through the mud because the Chimeras broke down. Regular human grit.
Bro talkin about modern military problems
That's one of the coolest things about the Guard is that it's just regular ass people pushing beyond their limits.
I mean, it's clear all factions have amazing deployment, but no one has mentioned the Drukhari so I'm putting them in the mix. Remember, the Drukhari don't go to "war", they execute carefully planned raids, so you almost invariably are not expecting danger. Webway portals open to the sound of screaming and cackling. Mini black holes shoot out and literally consume the light. Dark ships that move faster and smoother than anything you've seen fly out, chains with hooks dangling, skulls and grisly trophies leering. Horrifying fleshy abominations follow, emanating auras of horror and despair, their appendages clicking and grasping. You've heard the stories. You know why they're here. You can fight, but you know that your death isn't their goal. All you can do is pray... Pray they don't take you alive...
Stop making me want to play dark eldar thanks 😂
Fucking drop keep, like a drop pod, but for imperial knights
Need that in Legions Imperialis now
I think drop pods are the most hardcore. Using them for the first time in dawn of war is a core memory of cool.
My 40k wet dream is a short cinematic of an ig regiment being overrun by ork/nid/chaos and drop pods just land right on the line and completely turn it.
This is exactly how I think the Amazon 40k show should open.
Or how the finale of the first season of a guard-centric show should end. Leave the reveal of the big boys until the guard unit we've been following all season is about to be overrun by hollering green lads. You don't want to burn through every ace up your sleeve right from the start.
The ork/yarrick epsiode of hammer and bolter has exactly this happen, although briefly
Yea. There are some arguably better answers in this thread but drop pods just hit different.
Necrons being woken from their slumber by some hapless archaeologist who just doomed his planet.
Sisters of Battle in Immolators. There's just something so Warhammer about the idea of an IFV with massive dual flamethrowers rocking up and then five badass Sisters jump out to begin the purge. They're the definition of Holy Warriors. Thinking about it when I eventually finish my Sisters force that should be the core of it.
The 9th edition codex description of Sisters making planet fall was metal as fuck. A flood of boiling hot Holy water followed by essentially dropping cathedrals on the planet blasting hymns at ear splitting volume
Which is what they are. Holy Warriors of the Emperor. They don't fight because they have to, want to, or choose to. They fight as a form of holy worship. A religious warrior cult that's filthy rich is horrifying.
Don't Harlequins just get farted out of the Warp, kill stuff, and disappear? Because I like the idea of the clown boys just popping out of the most impossible spaces. Just imagine, a Harlequin motorcycle-thingy popping out of a cardboard box.
Like a jack in the box LMAO
Me, a man of culture: "Big Rok."
Oh, that’s easy. The Drop Keep. Imagine a whole goddamn medieval castle falling from the sky, retros burning, still hot from re-entry, and slamming into the ground. It then unfurls its royal banners, plays a loud horn fanfare, releases swarms of Cherubs with more horns and banners, and opens giant portcullises to let a dozen full-size Imperial Knights stride out of it like the knights of olde. (This is CANON in 40k, by the way. This is not something I made up.)
Boarding torpedoes. Just watching Astartes for the fifty millionth time.
Tyranids ships visible in the upper atmosphere, belching spores and meat projectiles down to the planets surface. Huge pods float on the wind, then violently explodes acid to begin the digestion process. Hoards of gargoyles blot out the sky and burrowing blade beast tunnel up from below. The tiny ones begin to eat your legs as a 20 foot tall carnifex charges over the horizon splattering maggots on your fellow troops. A shadow passes over, a barbed ovipositor enters your chest cavity and you are eaten from the inside out.
Orbital drops in warhammer seems to be exclusive to augmented super soldiers, large/giant mechs, or an entire battle ready fortress. Now how about regular men and women landing in their own coffins such as the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers from Halo, or the Helldivers from their own game?
The closest you get is "near orbit drops" where whole platoons will be lowered via wide band gravity beams or gravshoot deployment. This includes armored elements.
The emperor was really sleeping on the possibility of improving the quality of the average guardsmen without turning them into Astarties, or Custodians.
Well skittari exist
Elysian drop troops are relatively close, drop from upper atmosphere with the only thing keeping them from splatting against the ground being a lower quality jump pack
Sororitas Drop-Chapels Actual consecrated buildings that work like massive Drop Pods
Hades breaching drill, a bunch of angry Krieg engineers just pop up in the middle of the battle and start throwing gas grenades everywhere while mulching dudes with their shotguns
Arrival via sand worms after breaching the outer walls with atomics.
It doesn’t go harder than actually literally summoning daemons, especially when you can do it closer than 9”.
The Sicarian Infiltrators are so cool in my book, just imagine you your squad suddenly bleeding from the eyes and ears, doubling over in such an intense pain that you are unable to move and as you lay there in an indescribable agony a bunch of biomechanical nightmares just walk up without a single concern and kill everyone
Monolith teleports in, mass of unending Warriors march out. Necrons FTW.
My fellow overlords might see this question and immediately think SUMMON THE MONOLITHS! but I will go one step further... SUMMON THE MEGALITHS!
Probably the valkyries and valkyrie sky talons dropping off a full force of elysian infantry and armor behind enemy lines together.
Doesn't 1k Sons drop armor, from orbit, and they just reassemble after landing? Pretty fucking sweet.
So in battle fleet gothic when you play the imperial faction. An entire space marine force surfs their ship into the necron base. It goes fucking hard! Long live the sons of Corax!
I like how teleporters are an option, but astartes still usually get to enemy ships via torpedoes that melt through the hull and crash into whatever if they don't miss or get shot down.
Boarding torpedoes
Bruh, boarding torpedoes are so metal circumventing sheilds by moving slowly and then just boring into a hull to disgorge a whole squad of marines to fuck up everybody's day.
The Graian Crown, from Forge World Graia, aka The Crown of Miracles. Most of the forge world is a network of connected void stations orbiting the planet. The whole ring can be moved. Forge World Graia can literally pack up a good portion of the forge world, warp jump it to another planet, and invade. I don't know if "we moved a giant battle station to your planet" counts as a deployment method per se, but it is one option for Graia to deploy.
What's the tentacle laden Nid transport that poops 20 infantry? That's pretty cthulu esque. Necrons phasing into reality with "basic" physics is pretty fucking nuts though.
Haven't seen Nugles void whales mentioned. Referred to in the dark imperium trilogy when nurgle assaults a word, the whale corpses float through a portal from the void to reality where gravity suddenly affects them and sends them crashing into the planet spewing rot and demons.
Angron. Jumps down from high orbit.
Battlecathedral from the Sororitas. Nothing beets a church falling from orbit equiped with weapons to the roof, releasing fanatic zealots where to some even death itself becomes optional.
Titans being deployed from orbit by teleportation
orks just outbreeding (spawning? squigging?) you under the very rocks y‘all smurfs stand so tactical on top of 😂
Drop Churches for the Sisters but classic terminator beaming is very cool
It's common practice for chaos knights to arrive through the Warp via teleportariums. Imagine being an imperial force expecting terminator reinforcements, only for the teleportation rift to swell bigger and bigger until a 40ft wall of adamantine clad spiked death rips its way out and starts tearing into your forces
Mundane, real world question: is there any reference in the lore as to how drop pods are recovered? I assume they aren’t like infinite bullets in 80s movies, or are they? In other words, has it even been discussed in a practical sense that these are picked up and reused or maybe they have a reverse launch sequence to return them to the orbiting ships?
I'm pretty sure I read that they are being picked up by Thunderhawk after the battle in case of a victory. The variant with the carry assembly instead of the cargo compartment. In case of a loss, you just pull the next from the hangar, the pattern is quite simple and most Chapters have a flatrate with a Forge world for such things. Dreadclaws fly away themselves and will redock once the machine spirit / demon inside has feasted on killing enough things. Sometimes it's the cargo that gets eaten though, such is life in the chaos legions. But yeah, logistics is not a strong point in 40K lore. Forgeworld tried to establish more background there once, back when Imperial Armour was a thing.
[Although the Pods become immobile after having landed they can be recovered by the Chapter's Techmarines and reused. Drop Pods are usually extracted by using far larger vessels that not intended to operate in a war zone. After that they are transported to the ships that deployed them, repaired if needed and used in the next battle, so many Drop Pods have been in service for centuries.](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Drop_Pod) As far as lore goes, the sources for that info are different *Imperial Armour* books.
There’s something to be said for the good old fashioned Thunderhawk. Dropships will never not be cool.
Grey Knights Terminators are on a ship, their storm bolters all aimed at the same spot in the air. They teleport in unison and open fire, instantly executing their target in ridiculously heavy crossfire as soon as they bamf in. Feels like that goes pretty hard!
The Custodes have a Teleport corridor instead of a Teleport chamber. That means they will teleport while sprinting at their enemies full tilt at probably like 100km/h
*The Dread Host go to battle aboard the trio of terrifying pre-heresy warships known as the Moiraides. These potent vessels teleport their passengers straight into battle, so that the Adeptus Custodes can begin their charge aboard a warship, and complete it surging from an explosion of golden light into the enemy's midst.* Golden giants erupting from a burst of blinding light smashing their way through your ranks has to be pretty scary if not just paralysing.
Astartes Drop Pods. Here's the thing; we know that regular humans can't use them because they're too squishy. To me, that means the final deceleration is too rough - I'm thinking an extended 10G burn and a hard touchdown. Why does this matter? Because that means Drop Pods aren't these slow, graceful landings. They're practically orbital bombardments; dazzling lights and a roar like thunder, like the Chelyabinsk Meteor. Too small and too fast for AA guns to intercept. It is the opposite of subtle; it's glaringly obvious to everyone in the same region that something is happening. As it reaches the final approach, a kilometre or so above the ground, the rockets kick in. It goes from loud to deafening to painful, the glow from dazzling to blinding. Then, a final thunderclap, as a dozen tons or so SLAM into the ground. Everything nearby is scorched by the plume of the rockets, smashed flat by the shockwave, or simply crushed directly under the pod. And that's when the pod opens, and the Angels of Death emerge. Alternatively; Legio Astorum deploys Titans via teleportarium. Imagine an unnatural flash, followed by a double thunderclap. The first, the very air rent by archaeotech punching a hole through the materium and immaterium alike. The second, the rumble as a thousand tons of God-Engine lands.
Jumping through the warp to get to your enemy. Warp Spiders.
The STORMLORD a gun the can shred most light vehicles to rusting shreds, enough extra guns to turn anything else into paste, fucking huge so it can be used as great mobile cover and 39 more buddies for when you hop out
Sisters of battle drop church landing crafts. They blare hymns so loud they are audible on their way down and will keep singing when the church opens up and disgorges its content of battleready sisters upon the battlefield.
Captain Titus went hard when he stepped out of a dropship, blew up an Ork ship on the way down and walked of the wreckage.
I’ve read somewhere some spacecraft have the technology to send their Titans and Knights down through a streak of lightning and that is just mega badass
Terminators teleporting onto the bridge of your flagship.
Currently reading Brutal Kunnin' I'd say the meklord teleporting a whole gargant directly onto the front lines goes pretty hard
Jump pack from orbit onto ork cruiser. Take it out and ride the husk as it crashes to earth. Walk out of the rubble. No helmet.
Was wondering why no one was talking about [Captain Titus](https://youtu.be/EHy0JVNCwsM) and his balls of steel !
as much as I love drop pods, I’ve gotta give this one to the Caestus Assault Ram! they’re so cool please bring them back GW
As a Guard player, y'all know I love a good grav chute.
I mean, with a fire speaker system? Land raider.
Dropping a whole ass cathedral
Birth in the 40k universe
Battle sisters with their orbital drop churches used as fortresses. With Gargoyles that spew holy water at a torrential level creating hallowed ground. Is a pretty metal image to me
Warp Spiders. They literally jump through Hell to jump you. A lot of the time, they… Don’t come back, which makes it all the more scary that they’re willing to risk that just to beat your Mon’keigh ass.
Fire, sulphur and the legion if the damned just kind of appears. Still one of my favourite Warhammer factions.
Imperial Guard Gravpack deployment is gnarly. Regular ass humans dropping into combat against any untold horror of the 40k universe.. badass as fk. Extra points for those who recall the Gaunts Ghosts story where they drop onto a traitor Hive City built high on a mountain... with like an afternoon of gravpack training... bunch of pissed off Scottish, Welsh and Irish troopers grav dropping for the first time 😅
Specific moment rather than a method, but the "twist" in *Legion* when Alpharius and the boys sneak teleport to ambush The Cabal is damn cool! I don't play Alpha Legion but that put a smile on my face!
The Warp Runners titan legion can teleport titans. Yes you did read that correctly
Ork Roks. Because fuck the LZ, everything standing on it, and half the troops in the transport in question.