Classichammer

Welcome everyone to this, my long-awaited return to 40k. It has certainly been a long time coming.

A long time ago, in a toy store far, far away, a 6 year old boy (at least I think I was 6 at the time, my memory gets quite fuzzy around that era, I might have been 5, but I'm pretty sure it was one of those two ages. Certainly no older than 6) happened upon a big shelf display of strange boxes. Upon them were pictures and artwork of all kinds of futuristic sci-fi vehicles and soldiers. The boy loved science fiction (and still does), so his attention was instantly captured. He examined some of the boxes, and was fascinated by the bizarre designs of their contents. He also noticed that they all shared a common name on the top - some particularly brutal and violent sounding name like Bloodconqueror or Battlegore or Warhammer 40,000 or something - and immediately wanted to know more about them. But he was informed by his parents that they were toys for older kids, and not meant for the likes of him, so he left the store without ever uncovering the truth behind them. That was the last the boy ever saw of those strange science fiction things, and the boxes with their weird science fiction armies faded from memory...

... until a few years later. This time the child, now 8, had dived into the world of computer games, and was browsing a shelf of them in a store just opposite where the toy store had been. One game in particular stuck out to him, and he picked up a copy for a closer look. It was called Fire Warrior, and it's cover artwork depicted a high-tech soldier sitting on a pile of skulls in an apocalyptic landscape. He was immediately enthralled with the artwork, particularly the cool looking helmet that the character was wearing with its glowing central eyepiece, and for a long time it was the number 1 thing on his mind. He thought about how awesome an entire army of soldiers like that one would be. A short while later, a schoolyard discussion ended up on this thing called Warhammer 40,000, which quickly started a discussion about who was picking what faction (not to collect though, but rather to play as at lunchtime - we were just kids in relatively limited income families, and this was in the days before everyone just sat around browsing the internet in their free time). Someone suggested Tau as a fit for the child, and after a puzzled response said "Fire Warriors" and the child immediately remembered the amazing artwork he had seen.

And ever since then the Tau have been my number 1 40k army.

I've always loved the Tau, especially in their first incarnation during the tail end of 3rd edition. They were my first army not just for 40k, but for any tabletop game, and to this day are still probably my favourite. Since I started I ended up amassing a sizeable force of them, painted to varying degrees of success as I worked on them to the best of my child level abilities, from around 2002ish to 2010ish. There work slowed to a crawl and then a halt as I shifted resources and energy away from army development in favour of an ambitious space program. For years afterwards my poor Tau army languished, with only a token effort towards modernisation in preparation for a couple of games with a guy living nearby that I discovered was also into 40k.

But that's all about to change. With the bulk of my space fleet now finished, I am embarking upon a truly massive rearmament program for the ground forces. When the dust settles, I aim for nothing less than a place worthy of a 40k rulebook showcase. Like the Tau themselves, I tend to think big.

But first, we're going to go back in time, back to when it all began, back across years and decades and social trends, back to the glorious bygone age of the early 2000s, and to this guy.





A metal XV15 Stealthsuit Shas'vre (plus his faithful gun drone) - and the first Warhammer 40,000 model I ever owned and painted, when I was 8 years old.

This wasn't the first tabletop model I owned and painted. I had been collecting Lord of The Rings models in the form of the old Lord of The Rings Battle Strategy Game magazine series by DeAgsostini, (what a fantastic stroke of brilliance that was), but those were only ever meant to be a stepping-stone to 40k, something to practice on until I got to the models I was really after.

Thus, I consider this to be the official start of my journey into 40k and tabletop games. He came from my first ever trip to a GW store, which in those days was conveniently located just downstairs from my optometrist at the time. I had been doing some research beforehand (read: spending hours on the GW and Forgeworld webpages ogling all the gorgeous Tau models displayed on there and ravenously devouring every scrap of information about the Tau I could find on there), so I already had a good idea of what my first model was going to be, the one GW kit (not Forgeworld) that had so far captured my admiration and imagination more than any other - a Hammerhead Gunship. Extrapolating from Forgeworld (which I did not know at the time was a separate subsidiary of GW and not usually stocked in stores), back when Forgeworld still listed normal GW kits on its website, I initially assumed that the Hammerhead would be a relatively small model no larger than a Rhino, and with a cost of around $25. You can perhaps then imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was in fact a massive $72 beast of a kit, which put it squarely in birthday and Christmas gift territory. This disappointed me somewhat, especially when my plan B - a Broadside Battlesuit - also proved to be out of financial reach at $55, but that was quickly forgotten as I started my first introductory game of 40k, commanding 6 Firewarriors against 3 Chaos Space Marines. It was a quick victory as I ended up shooting one or two to death and then beating the remainder in close combat with zero casualties sustained (I still have lingering suspicions that the staff member opposing me might have fudged the results somewhat to get me more enthusiastic about it), and then ended up walking out of the store with the models posted above after being allowed to get "One little thing" from the shelf of blister packs. My primitive childhood reasoning for choosing them was simple - I loved the Firewarriors (remember the Fire Warrior artwork that first got me interested in the Tau), so naturally when I saw a Firewarrior with a Gatling gun I picked him. I was wild with excitement when I got home and actually read the label on the blister pack to find that I was in fact now the proud owner of a Tau Stealthsuit - a Firewarrior with a Gatling gun, a jetpack, a robot sidekick AND he can turn invisible? Hell Yes! Even now I'm still very fond of Stealth Teams.

In addition to the Stealthsuit, I also went home with a Citadel Paint set, which went on to serve me well for over a decade - in fact I still use some of the paints from it to this very day. The Stealthsuit went through several changes in colour scheme over the years. You can see the colour scheme he was originally painted with on the gun drone, and it was a crude attempt to recreate the Fire Warrior cover artwork that was so compelling - my child logic was that I wanted an army of troops just like the one on the Fire Warrior cover, and that one was wearing yellow armour, and I had a pot of Sunburst Yellow from the paint set, so naturally I should paint my new models yellow, with some red optics. I then spent the next two nights lavishing Sunburst yellow on the two models until I was satisfied with the coverage. The end result can be best described as a pair of mostly yellow blobs, but I was still very happy with the results. This continued to be how the Stealthsuit looked until one day after school I suddenly thought to myself "You know what would look really cool? A gold Tau army! Think about it, an entire army of high-tech Tau in solid gold! Gold is cool and high-tech, and lots of cool ancient cultures had gold everywhere, and they looked cool, so I should make my Tau GOLD!"

It never occurred to me at the time that this would have resulted in my army all looking like C-3PO, so I rushed home and immediately painted all the Tau models I had at the time (3 of them) in a full coat of Shining Gold over a Mithril Silver base. I eventually converted most of them back to what would become the colour scheme I settled on, but this guy remained gold for a bit longer before I finally decided to get serious and painted him in the crude attempt to recreate the GW studio stealthsuits that you see today.

The Drone was lost down the back of the desk I did my hobby work on back then, and so was spared the many colour scheme revisions I made. I no longer remember whether the orangeish-tanish splotches were an attempt to paint over the yellow areas with Vomit Brown, or if I just put so much Sunburst Yellow on it that it ended up looking that way. There was originally a second pulse carbine on it, but that has since been lost to time along with the flying stand that I foolishly decided to glue it onto. Working without any kind of assembly instructions, I was confused about which way to stick the antenna on - I had faint memories of seeing it pointing backwards on the back of a Firewarrior box, but then seeing the artwork on page 60 of the Tau codex (which included a gun drone with the jetpack exhaust facing forwards and the antenna away from it) threw me off, causing me to end up gluing the antenna on the wrong way. You will be glad to know that I did not make the same mistake again.

At some point in the past the other antenna on the Stealthsuit's jetpack broke off. I think I might still have it somewhere, but never attempted to glue it back on again.

Now, let's come back to the present and see what 13-14 years of experience and progress (like learning to actually layer colours) can do.









This is the first of my revamped Tau army, a Firewarrior test model. The colour scheme I am going with is the same one I attempted to recreate when I first started a Tau army - the classic T'au desert camouflage scheme. This project is to be a homage to and celebration of the old Tau army I first fell in love with as much as it is a renovation and modernisation.

Thus, the process I used was almost exactly the same one described in Codex: Tau, substituting in newer colours for those no longer available. I had originally planned to follow the process as described to the letter, but eventually found out (as I had already discovered when building my Wood Elves) that even the older GW painting instructions are a lot like the cooking recipes my grandmother used to share - an accurate general set of instructions, but they don't tell you everything you need to know, missing out one or two key details that are on the 'Evy Metal examples. To compensate I added an extra stage of highlights - Ungor Flesh for the armour and Steel Legion Drab for the undersuit, and applied the same process used for the Battlesuit mechanical areas on the darker areas of the gun and backpack. The other final details were relatively straightforward, and this is one of the very few models I've ever painted that I'm genuinely happy with - I still have trouble believing that the highlights and jewelling on the helmet were done by my own hands.

All in all, I'd say I've come a long way since the days when yellow blobs roamed the earth. Now to see what I can do with a full army...

Quite the glow-up!

Is there a sort of summary-type picture of your Tau collection in one place? These deep dives into two or three individual figures and the storied history of Kakapo, M are well and good, but I'd like more of the 'hammer context - where these figures sit in terms of what you actually own and (presumably intend at some point to) play with.

(I say "picture" and not "writeup" because, based on these posts alone, you'd produce a full-sized autobiography with a novella's worth of background if I asked for a writeup, and while I would read it, 'tis a lot of time and effort to write.)

Is there a sort of summary-type picture of your Tau collection in one place? These deep dives into two or three individual figures and the storied history of Kakapo, M are well and good, but I'd like more of the 'hammer context - where these figures sit in terms of what you actually own and (presumably intend at some point to) play with.

(I say "picture" and not "writeup" because, based on these posts alone, you'd produce a full-sized autobiography with a novella's worth of background if I asked for a writeup, and while I would read it, 'tis a lot of time and effort to write.)

Please, please, autobiographies are for individual lives, not prestigious military institutions like my Tabletop armies are. It would be a multi-volume collection of full-sized history texts, with several novel's worth of annotated background. And footnotes.

There are some photos of the army at different points of growth, but if an image of the entire collection in one place exists then I have yet to find it. Full photoshoots can be expected in the not-too-distant future, starting.... soon.

In the meantime, I can also provide a list of the entire force as it stood at the end of its front-line capacity, and during the only three times it was ever deployed in anger.

Kakapo's Tau Army Mk. I (circa 2011, Codex: Tau Empire)

HQ

Commander: Shas'O with Airbursting Fragmentation Projector, Cyclic Ion Blaster, Command And Control Node, Iridium Armour and Stimulant Injector

Elites

Stealth Team: Shas'Vre with Fusion Blaster, Targeting array and Hard-Wired Target Lock, Shas'Ui with Fusion Blaster, Drone controller and 2 Marker Drones, 4 Shas'Ui with Burst Cannon and Targeting array, Bonded

Fireknife Crisis Team: Shas'Vre and 2 Shas'Ui with Plasma Rifle, Missile Pod and Multi Tracker, Bonded

Troops

Fire Warrior Team: Shas'Ui with Markerlight, Pulse Rifle and Photon Grenades, 4 Shas'la with Pulse Carbines and Photon Grenades, 7 Shas'la with Pulse Rifles and Photon Grenades, Bonded. Mounted in;

Devilfish with Disruption Pod, Multi-tracker, Sensor Spines, Flechette Discharger and Targeting Array

Fire Warrior Team: Shas'Ui with Pulse Carbine and Photon Grenades, 2 Shas'la with Pulse Carbines and Photon Grenades, 9 Shas'la with Pulse Rifles and Photn Grenades, Bonded

Fast Attack

Gun Drone Squadron: 8 Gun Drones

Pathfinder Team: Shas'Ui and 5 Shas'La with Markerlight, Pulse Carbine and Photon Grenades, 2 Shas'La with Rail Rifles, Target Locks and Photon Grenades, Bonded. Mounted in;

Devilfish with Disruption pod, Multi-Tracker, Sensor Spines, Flechette Discharger and Targeting Array

Piranha Squadron: Piranha with Fusion Blaster, Targeting Array, Disruption Pod, Sensor Spines, Multi-tracker, Flechette Discharger and 2 Seeker Missiles

Heavy Support

Hammerhead Gunship with Railgun, Smart Missile System, Sensor Spines, Multi-tracker, Blacksun Filter, Flechette Discharger, Disruption Pod and Target Lock

Skyray Missile Defence Gunship with Smart Missile System, Targeting Array, Sensor Spines, Multi-tracker, Disruption Pod, Blacksun Filter and Flechette Discharger

Broadside Team: Shas'Vre with Advanced Stabilisation System, Hard-wired Drone Controller and 2 Shield Drones, 2 Shas'Ui with Advanced Stabilisation Systems, Bonded

This army came up to a total of 2224 points, which I know because I happen to still have the hard copy of the first ever army list I ever made, used for all three of the games the old army took part in. All three were nominally around 2300 points I think but were very much 'empty your figure collection on the table' affairs and the actual game size was largely a formality.

In addition to this was a Second Strategic Echelon of about 28 Kroot and an Ethereal, which could also be mobilised if necessary. By the 2010s however both of these elements had been largely sidelined, as Kakapo High Command - convinced of the aesthetic power of flotillas of grav-tanks - pivoted towards the visual coherence of an all-Tau army as the best way towards victory, and growing influence from the online Tau community of the time advised strongly towards mobile elements as the way forward leaving no room for a foot-bound Ethereal unable to fit in a Devilfish alongside a full unit of Fire Warriors.

The planned immediate expansion for 2012 - 2015 would have entailed an extra Devilfish to mechanise all the infantry teams, another four Piranhas to bring the 'squadron' up to full strength, a new Crisis Team and Seeker Missiles for everyone. These plans never came to fruition however, as the Defence Cabinet opted instead to shift attention towards the newly minted Aerospace Forces and later Fantasy armies, leaving the Tau ground element's expansion program to fall victim to budget cuts and be shelved indefinitely in 2012. Later administrations opted for the ground-up modernisation program that is still ongoing.

You may note that the selection of wargear is both eclectic and more modest than my later projects. This is because at the time I was very committed to making the army as WYSIWYG as possible, and a lot of the wargear options I would have liked to have were not featured on the models and adding them was beyond my modelling capabilities of the time. It is only more recently that I have started to become an enthusiastic adopter of Invisible Rules addons, spurred first by Warhammer Fantasy adventures where serveral magic items just felt more natural to not be prominently displayed (visibly modeling a magic ring or small necklace amulet at Warhammer Scale just seemed odd to me in the same way that modelling an integrated circuit hard-wired system that was supposed to be entirely contained within a helmet anyway did), and then by a desperate need to make up points imbalances against far more established 40k armies.

The other noteworthy thing is a distinct lack of thematic identity, as the key backstory beats and dramatis personae for the Tau army did not really fully crystalise until 2013, leaving this collection with little more than a vague nebulous concept at its heart. Even the Shas'O's name didn't take shape until I learnt that there is an actual legitimate way to translate 'Kakapo' into Tau'sia.

I do not use the word "autobiography" lightly, comrade "talks about children's television or late-aughts goth-metal for seven paragraphs in a post ostensibly about his toy soldier collection."

(I'm not suggesting you should stop, mind, but these posts are as much if not more about you than the army. The art does not separate from the artist with you, that's the point I'm making here.)

Thank you for that context. It's always good to know, to my mind, how much actual playing of games informs and feeds into the overthinking and romanticising of game pieces that is the remit of the Hobby Blogger. I also have no idea how I'd go about modelling an integrated circuit hard-wired system in 28mm scale, to be fair - it's not as if you're playing Tyranids and have a sprue where all the biomorphs are modelled as discrete little blobules you can stick on your figures!

I find it especially interesting that you pivoted hard into backstory while the army was off the table, and that when you were playing, you were in the same sort of nebulous never-never of backstory elements that I spend my entire tabletop career occupying. Elements are only firmed up after the fact for me.

I do not use the word "autobiography" lightly, comrade "talks about children's television or late-aughts goth-metal for seven paragraphs in a post ostensibly about his toy soldier collection."

(I'm not suggesting you should stop, mind, but these posts are as much if not more about you than the army. The art does not separate from the artist with you, that's the point I'm making here.)

That is probably because all of these toy soldier armies are very close expressions of myself, Using Tabletop models as a form of self-expressive art as I do. It has become apparent to me for some time that my top two game factions in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 produce a fairly comprehensive cross-section of my personality when taken together.

The interplay between the tabletop army and the psychology behind the player choosing it is also a subject that could perhaps do with more study and reflection beyond the tired old 'History Nerds like Imperial Guard' style stereotypes.

I also have no idea how I'd go about modelling an integrated circuit hard-wired system in 28mm scale, to be fair - it's not as if you're playing Tyranids and have a sprue where all the biomorphs are modelled as discrete little blobules you can stick on your figures!

Tyranids are a particularly interesting example here because they were, to the best of my knowledge, the last 40k army released before the Tau, with Cityfight being the only 40k codex book coming between the two. The change from 'every biomorph is modelled as a discrete blobule to stick on the figure' (itself an evolution of the earlier 'every wargear has a distinct metal figure waving it around') to a game faction where all the armoury wargear was so discrete and abstract that even the GW studio gave up trying to model it and just let players use invisible wargear items (with the trade-off that most models were only allowed a choice of one of them), is striking.

But I digress. My point here is that there is a symbiosis between 'Modeling an integrated circuit hard-wired system that's supposed to be a computer chip inside the model's helmet is an exercise in tedium that just isn't worth the hassle' and 'Modeling a talisman that's supposed to be a magic ring or gem to scale on a little 28mm figure is an exercise in tedium that just isn't worth the hassle' in my tabletop journey.

I find it especially interesting that you pivoted hard into backstory while the army was off the table, and that when you were playing, you were in the same sort of nebulous never-never of backstory elements that I spend my entire tabletop career occupying. Elements are only firmed up after the fact for me.

I think part of it is that more time spent not playing actual games means more time to sit down and think about the tabletop armies themselves. For some this means endless obsessing over mathematical minutae - points efficiency, probability of wounding and so on. For me, it means endless dwelling over narrative minutae, no doubt because I am by nature an English/Lit nerd rather than a Math nerd so language and storytelling come far more naturally to me than numbers do.

Of course, it also means more time spent on painting models, like the first ever infantry troops for the army(s).

I've startied with Fire Warriors for a number of reasons - they're one of my three favourite Tau models of all time to start with, and they'll be a major component of the finished force. Most importantly though, I always start a tabletop army with some basic infantry units - because you can bomb it, you can strafe it, you can cover it with poison, you can turn it into smouldering glass, you can consume it with eldritch extra-dimensional energies, but you don't own it unless your infantry is on it and the other side's isn't.


First, let's take another walk down memory lane.







This is the first Fire Warrior team I ever owned; I think I must have been 9 years old when I got them. I still remember having endless fun putting them together over an afternoon. At the time I was still digesting the shiny new 4th edition 40k rulebook (which still remains my favourite 40k BRB) that I had gotten for Christmas the previous year, and I had recently started exploring the Dark Millennium hobby section in more detail. Something that had particularly caught my eye while going through it was the sections on Kill Team (real Kill Team, with one player using a Kill Team and the other controlling Brute Squads and more references to action movie tropes than you could shake a machine gun at. Ahh those were the days) and Raid scenarios with sentries. In particular, I was fascinated and immensely inspired by the various conversions of infantry models showcased in the sections, and quickly decided to take a recurring passage from the Kill Team section to heart and make every model in my new Fire Warrior team unique. Some were actually given specialised roles, while most were simply just normal troopers, but I gave each one a distinct personality even if it was only in my imagination. Much of them are now sadly lost to time, but I still remember a few of the more specialised roles.

You may notice that there are two Fire Warriors in the team with white markings. The story behind this is that when I had finished assembling the team, I then stopped to decide which one of them should be the team leader, using the only relevant and worthwhile metric there is to a 9-year-old - which one of them looked the coolest! I had of course been naturally building up one in particular with an eye towards being the team leader, but when it came time to decide I was torn between that one and the one immediately next to it, who had ended up with an awesome action pose that I have never quite been able to replicate, much to my frustration. In the end I decided to settle the matter by simply painting both of them with white leadership markings, making my first candidate the Shas'Ui team leader and the alternative choice the team's second in command, a tradition that has carried over to all of my Fire Warrior teams ever since.

This Fire Warrior team also marks one of my earliest experiments with basing models. I had already read through the instructions in the 3rd edition Tau codex on how the studio Tau models were based (which I've been following for this new Tau army), but at the time it seemed rather complicated, and required paints I didn't have, so instead I simply went through the more basic method suggested by the Lord of The Rings Strategy Battle Game magazines I had also been getting a steady supply of, got a bag of flock (back when GW still sold bags of modelling flock) and began to apply it to the bases of my Tau models. Since it was already green, I saw no reason why it would not yield a passable version of the typical grassy field basing scheme commonly found. The end result was less than spectacular - my child motor skills and perception abilities proved insufficient for the task at hand, and the flock ended up being applied very chaotically. Ultimately, I deemed it such a disaster that I avoided basing models at all until four years ago when I started my Wood Elf army (and used the simple innovation of finishing bases separate to the models to avoid getting any basing materials on feet and shins).

At the time I was (and still am, all things considered) awfully proud of this Fire Warrior team. Now let's see how their successors stack up.










Fire Warrior Team Kais (as if it was going to be called anything else given my love of the old Fire Warrior computer game) is my first new Fire Warrior team in over a decade, though it is also a homage to the previously documented one and contains several throwbacks to it. Like the first team before it, I've taken the idea of personalising and special roles to heart and made the unit a sort of 'Kill Team lite', including several specialised members. Some, like the tech specialist and honour guide, have been carried on from the first team, while others, such as the demolitions expert and medic, are entirely new. Almost no component swaps or kitbashing was used to make the team - I am keeping conversion work in the army down to a minimum, because A) I already think the models look fantastic as they are and don't really feel the need to modify them too much, B) I'm looking at focusing more on getting the most out of the model kits themselves and pushing them to their limits rather than introducing lots of outside elements and C) it will make the major conversions I actually do really stand out that much more.

Thus, the only component used in this unit from another kit was the Shas'Ui's markerlight, taken from the new Pathfinder kit. I think most of all, more than anything, my favourite part about the 2013 6th edition Tau releases was the introduction of a readily available separate markerlight bit, and I have obtained an entire box of Pathfinders purely to harvest for markerlights for my team leaders (though other bits on it will be coming in handy also). It is a testament to the flexibility of the old Fire Warrior kit that I was able to make all of the specialists that I wanted (5 in total) using only the parts contained within it. Plus a little greenstuff and a piece of sprue frame (and the ubiquitous florist's wire for the Shas'Ui's stylish data-cables).

The team also carries on the tradition of a Team Second painted with a white helmet and shoulder guard panel, now with an in-universe justification as a deceptive countermeasure against enemy snipers. It also allows me to split the team and field it as two units of 6 Firewarriors with minimal fuss if I so wish (I can also conveniently make both teams Bonded by simply including the honour guide in with the Second's group). Her pose is a direct reference to the first team's Second, though not an exact copy (mostly because I wanted that set of legs for another use), with the other major change being a worn helmet, as I am moving to the old 3rd edition GW studio Tau army's pattern of only one bare head per Firewarrior team. Even then all of the infantry models will have a helmet somewhere on them, as what I've read suggests that going into an active warzone without some kind of head protection is widely regarded as a bad move.

Painting wise it's nothing that hasn't been already shown on the test models, with the exception of the white panels on the Shas'Ui and his second. I experimented with them after the thought suddenly occurred to me that the erroneous colour choices listed in the 3rd edition codex's painting instructions might have been a typing/publication error (as they say, never attribute malice to what could simply be incompetence) and they really meant Bleached Bone instead of Vomit Brown. Thus, I tried a 3:1 mix of Skull White and Bleached Bone (that's White Scar and Ushabti Bone for you youngsters reading this) for the main white colour and was tickled with the results, which were much closer to the white on the studio models. The only question left after this breakthrough was how to highlight it, for which I used a 3:1 mix of White Scar and Screaming Skull followed by a final highlight of White Scar. The Shas'Ui also has a simplified pattern of team-markings on his helmet and shoulder guard, indicating his team is a 'tactical' Fire Warrior Team armed with a mixture of pulse rifles and pulse carbines.

This update was delayed for a long long time as painting the team ran dangerously behind schedule. I had originally intended to get it finished before the start of the month and was confident I would by using a production line painting method. The last army I worked on was a Wood Elf one for Warhammer Fantasy, where an overall production line was impractical on the plastic Glade Guard that formed the core of the army - units in Warhammer Fantasy are tightly ranked, and thus all the models in them must fit side-by-side, and since I was also working in sub-assemblies for maximum access during painting this meant I had to go through an entire unit one model at a time to make sure they all fit together when fully assembled (I tried keeping unpainted ones together with blu-tack at first, but that proved to be of little help as they kept falling apart or leaning over), and thus production line painting was only used for metal units. Since 40k units act in loose formation, this was not necessary, simplifying things considerably, however going through the entire unit in a gigantic production line quickly proved exhausting, and after two weeks I finally gave up and started working through it two models at a time. The end result has left me almost a month behind my initial planned schedule, and I fear the delays have meant that I will now never end up playing a full game of 40k at a GW store (unless they relax their policies on using older rules editions for games in there), as I will not use the coming 8th edition rules - I have already heard enough about them to know that they are not what I am looking for for 40k gaming.

Still, all in all it is a fine start to my Tau rearmament program. Next, they need some backup...

It has become apparent to me for some time that my top two game factions in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 produce a fairly comprehensive cross-section of my personality when taken together.

The interplay between the tabletop army and the psychology behind the player choosing it is also a subject that could perhaps do with more study and reflection beyond the tired old 'History Nerds like Imperial Guard' style stereotypes.

I mean: same, and yes. To know oneself is never a bad thing, and leads you to want to know others. I'm a simple soul, aligned almost wholly with "deathsetics", and any attempt to escape that coding ultimately leads me to regret - but that doesn't tell you why I'm like this, or why it started when I was too young for "just a recovering goth" to make any sense.

I think part of it is that more time spent not playing actual games means more time to sit down and think about the tabletop armies themselves. For some this means endless obsessing over mathematical minutae - points efficiency, probability of wounding and so on. For me, it means endless dwelling over narrative minutae, no doubt because I am by nature an English/Lit nerd rather than a Math nerd so language and storytelling come far more naturally to me than numbers do.

Definitely. It's the light side of the "bitter non-gamer" phenomenon, where people who don't get to play enough channel their frustration into complaining about every damn thing under the sun instead of theorising in a way that's productive and helpful to others. I used to help people list-jam even when I hadn't seen a table in years - it was only the coming of eighth edition that invalidated my residual knowledge and drove me into first retrogaming, and now my cautious, circumstance- driven reappraisal of the Modern.

Speaking of which: your reposted materia on the topic of Fire Warriors discusses the upcoming eighth edition, partying like it's 2017. Has the rise of Crusade, as a concept, given you cause to reconsider the contemporary game? This isn't evangelism: it's a genuine question.

Also, are you building towards a commander or ethereal designated K-42? I have seen those base numbers, and now I have questions.

I mean: same, and yes. To know oneself is never a bad thing, and leads you to want to know others. I'm a simple soul, aligned almost wholly with "deathsetics", and any attempt to escape that coding ultimately leads me to regret - but that doesn't tell you why I'm like this, or why it started when I was too young for "just a recovering goth" to make any sense.

Lack of deathsetics (and paint-60-models-just-to-get-started-itis) would explain the lack of any serious Tyranid interest, which is something I had started to wonder about since they seem to have a lot in common with Warhammer Undead playstyles assuming everyone stays in Synapse coverage and keeping a conservatively played Synapse Creature alive can't be too much harder than keeping a conservatively played Heirophant alive.

Speaking of which: your reposted materia on the topic of Fire Warriors discusses the upcoming eighth edition, partying like it's 2017. Has the rise of Crusade, as a concept, given you cause to reconsider the contemporary game? This isn't evangelism: it's a genuine question.

Crusade (and the concessions to large skimmers I'm told are in the 9e Tau book for that matter) was ultimately a case of too little too late for me. While I can appreciate the effort of showing tournament types Another Way, it just doesn't offer enough to offset my general distaste for the post-7th 40k game engine. It doesn't help that as a Battlefleet Gothic player first it also has to live up to the Battlefleet Gothic campaign rules, which are a tough act to follow.

That said I did ultimately end up giving the late-2017 modern a try, being roped into all of about 3 games of 8th edition and a few games of its close cousin 2018 Kill Team by some friends and joining in as a gesture of goodwill. While I had a mostly good time it was almost entirely due to socialising with friends rather than the game itself, which I largely found as wanting as I expected, not least because it committed the mortal sin of making my basic troop units un-fun to play with. From what I gather they're not particularly exciting in 9e either, with all the Tau discourse recommending other things over them more times than not (and "Just run X instead" is not a valid option here because I want to have fun with these little toy space men, not some other ones I have to go out and buy just to have a good time). And I'll be cold in the ground before I run these ones in the units of 10 I'm told the 9e Tau book mandated them to be.

This was in very stark contrast to the 3 games of 3rd edition I've gotten in with this army so far, where I had a whale of a time and the difference in play experience was night and day, with everything just clicking together and making sense in a way that the post-7th rules just never really did for me.

Also, are you building towards a commander or ethereal designated K-42? I have seen those base numbers, and now I have questions.

K-42 is already taken as a designator for my Tau fleet (and the metal Kor'vattra part in particular, the small Forgeworld squadron is officially V-47). It started out when I needed to actually settle on a name for the fleet itself in a hurry for the purposes of an online RP thing that happened in 2013, and as I was frantically brainstorming ideas I remembered the K-## naming convention for Soviet submarines, which seemed naval enough for a Battlefleet Gothic project and dovetailed with my standard online handle far too well for me not to run with it. It helped that naming fleets with a simple utilitarian alpha-numeric code felt very Tau-esque.

Then I built a lore around that where Tau fleets are named along a standardised alpha-numeric pattern of K/V-##, with K denoting a fleet of mostly Kor'vattra style ships and V denoting a fleet of mostly Kor'O'Vesh style ships, and the first number denoting Sept of origin - 4 is for T'au due to nebulous quirks of the in-universe history behind the system that I never really felt the need to fully iron out (beyond that it was invented by a different Sept that picked the number 1 for themselves and gave T'au 4), much like what the second number is supposed to be for. Even I have limits for the level of world-building I want to do.

The 42 motif appears in this project in other ways, in particular the "42nd T'au Guards Cadre" name for the army. There is a commander with the Tau version of Kakapo in his name coming very soon, however.

But a commander won't get very far without an army to command, and that means plenty of troops. Which in turn mans a second troops choice, in this case my second Fire Warrior team.

I cannot stress just how much I love Fire Warriors, and never want to see them change. For even longer than tabletop hobby, one of my favourite past-times has been Real Time Strategy computer games, and amongst them there is a special place in my heart for the Command and Conquer games (well, maybe not so much the more recent ones...), which were the first I ever played and remain some of my favourites to this day. A couple of years ago it occurred to me that this is an important part of my fondness for Fire Warriors, as I can recognise their purpose instantly from those games - Fire Warriors are the light infantry/rifle infantry/minigunners of the Tau, the basic soldier costing around $90-120 to make, and armed with a machine gun that's best against other infantry troops. They might be looked down upon, you might scoff at them, but when there's enough of them around, they can chew through anything the enemy throws at them, and no matter what your plan is, whether you're conquering the entire map with the full tech tree or playing an infiltration mission where you have just a few guys and an engineer, they will always serve you well.

It's because of this that it always makes me sad when I see comments about wanting them to have stuff like organic special weapons.

Anyway, continuing the series on the proud and illustrious history of my armies, here is the second Fire Warrior team of my first army.



While the first Fire Warrior team was from a Fire Warrior box, this one was included as part of the original 3rd edition Tau Battleforce, which I received as a Christmas present one year if memory serves. The 3rd edition Tau Battleforce was fantastic, and to this day is still the best one GW ever produced in my eyes. Not only did it provide you with a fully functioning army straight out of the box (and a fairly well-rounded one at that), it also provided you with something else that no other Tau army deal ever included - a set of Jungle Trees. I found the inclusion hilarious when I first looked at the back of the box in a GW store, giggling over the idea of this impressive list of formidable troops and weaponry followed by "And a set of Jungle Trees" which seemed like a classic case of Arson, Murder and Jaywalking humour, but to this day I still think it was a stroke of brilliance; not only would a new player buying the Battleforce get the nucleus of their new army, they would also get their first terrain piece. This alone is why I still consider the 3rd edition Battleforce boxes superior to all their equivalents released since.

As I already mentioned in the last post, my early experiments with basing ended up something of a disaster in my eyes, so I swore off basing models for a long time. This team comes from that period, and thus are glued straight onto unadorned bases. I thought I had included specialists in this team as well, but it seems that I either gave them totally new ones that I have since forgotten, or never applied the practice entirely this time around. Either way they still all retained their own individual personalities and characteristics, though many have been lost to the ages. It also represents a step up in painting, as I now started to experiment with actually painting the scanner displays and Tau Empire badges instead of simply leaving them black.

Together with the earlier team, this formed the core of my original Tau army, and served me well for many years. Now let's meet their successors.







Firewarrior team Lar represents the first painted Tau 40k models that I actually bought with my own money. The earlier Firewarriors that I've shown were all free of charge, as I won them as prizes in several giveaway raffles. There were several other units that I also won in this way, and these Free Men or 'Freebies' will be forming an elite core of my new Tau army. Thus, this new team represents the first mainline regular unit of the army, having come from a 6th edition Tau Empire Battleforce (which, though certainly a good deal, is still a pale shadow of what came before). Like Firewarrior team Kais, Firewarrior team Lar includes a full compliment of mission specialists, with the additional inclusion of a Designated Marksman (in Firewarrior team Kais the team's Scout is also the Designated Marksman, performing both roles). Again, conversion work was kept to a minimum, with the only real modifications (as opposed to just creative posing and assembly or crude greenstuff sculpting) being the inclusion of a markerlight and data-cables on the Shas'Ui and a spare helmet clipped to the Scout's backpack, created using the tried and tested method created by Sebastian Stuart and showcased both online and in White Dwarf #313 - incidentally the first White Dwarf magazine I ever owned, in case I never mentioned it before - with the only modification being to use a razor saw to remove the bulk of the head piece.

For the Shas'Ui I had originally planned to finally recreate the cool action pose I first created with the first team's Second so many years ago, after having finally cracked the secret behind it (a twist in the waist was the missing ingredient I had overlooked), but partway through assembling her I had a change of heart and instead decided to create an entirely new pose for her, which I suppose was only fitting given that this is a new army. It was an easy enough thing to do, with the only real change being to flip which way the pulse carbine was pointing. I find the end result just as impressive looking, and even cooler for being reminiscent of the Pathfinder artwork on pg. 2 of Codex: Tau which acted as some inspiration for it. The pose of original second team's Shas'Ui was recreated for Firewarrior team Lar's Team Second, positioning the two paired arms seperately. I think it ended up like that by accident in the original team (I remember I was trying to go for a generic action pose), but I decided to deliberately copy it this round after liking how it looked, with the arm positioning suggesting that he's reloading.

These two troop units are solid start to the army, but to command all the rules of 40k I would need to branch out into some different unit types. I also need some fast maneuver elements and something for scouting and reconnaissance...

I did briefly play Tyranids, as it happens, towards the tail end of fifth edition. I needed an army for a school club, and two Battle Force sets slammed together into a tidy 1000 points with a bit of kitbashing. I think the list was something like a Tyranid Prime, two Hive Guard (made from the Venom Cannon arms on Warrior bodies tilted right forward and down into scuttle posture), three deathspitter-toting Warriors, a big unit of Ymgarl Genestealers and the usual swarm of disposables around them. Beating Sir's Tyranids never quite took off as the challenge I'd wanted it to, partly because I left that job after six months and partly because I really didn't enjoy painting the army.

I can understand a fundamental distaste for the contemporary core, as well. It reminds me of second edition, and that should be understood as something of a backhanded compliment, as a lot of the present game's features are things we left behind with the transition to third, for damn good reasons. I'm currently teaching and learning ninth with a colleague's husband, who I know will not bite on Crusade as he has enough beef with the amount of rules he has to wrangle already - but he's an old hand at Bolt Action and I'm wondering if, at some point, it might be worth introducing him to third edition and seeing how he reacts to that. Certainly a lot of his sticking points with the present system - save modifiers, army-wide rules you can't detect from the board state, and the S/T calculation to wound - will fade away. I think he'd like Grimdark Future even more though, as the whole "to wound" roll seems superfluous to him, and that's the real issue here; 40K has a lot of legacy rules that are there because it wouldn't be 40K without them, rather than because they really serve an absolutely one hundred per cent vital purpose.

Do not engage me on the "troop tax" mentality. I, who own multiple units of bog-standard Chaos Legionaries with boltguns and special weapons, am not at home to armies without at least two Troops choices in them, and ideally Troops who do something a little more than occupy a point to make a number go up. Especially not when Fire Warriors, in that capacity, should be laying down fire with their pulse rifles, or charging in to occupy points with their pulse carbines, and doing all that to the Chaos Cultists and Legionaries coming at them from the other direction. A good hearty troop skirmish is where it's at, brother.

The "mission specialist" angle is interesting. I... sort of blundered into that, with my core Legionary squad, who are also my designated Kill Team; the heavily bionic'd and plasma'd ten-man originals of my army. I didn't think about who was doing what as hard as you have, it was more a "mother of invention" situation because the figures were in such a state, but we've ended up in a similar place from different directions.

I can understand a fundamental distaste for the contemporary core, as well. It reminds me of second edition, and that should be understood as something of a backhanded compliment, as a lot of the present game's features are things we left behind with the transition to third, for damn good reasons. I'm currently teaching and learning ninth with a colleague's husband, who I know will not bite on Crusade as he has enough beef with the amount of rules he has to wrangle already - but he's an old hand at Bolt Action and I'm wondering if, at some point, it might be worth introducing him to third edition and seeing how he reacts to that. Certainly a lot of his sticking points with the present system - save modifiers, army-wide rules you can't detect from the board state, and the S/T calculation to wound - will fade away. I think he'd like Grimdark Future even more though, as the whole "to wound" roll seems superfluous to him, and that's the real issue here; 40K has a lot of legacy rules that are there because it wouldn't be 40K without them, rather than because they really serve an absolutely one hundred per cent vital purpose.

I don't think the Second Edition parallels are a coincidence. GW for the last decade or so has been working very hard to appease the grumpy 2nd edition dinosaurs that roamed the forums during the 2010s and constantly complained about how much more sense everything made in 1993. It's visible in the references to 1990shammer aesthetics that have crept into models like the Rhino, and it's visible in moves like introducing an homage to the Squats, so it makes sense it would bleed into the 40k game mechanics too.

I never really followed 2nd edition too closely, partially because my number 1 40k army isn't a thing at all in it and my number 2 40k army is only partially exists in it, and partially because the overly-zealous 80shammer and 90shammer evangelists I kept running into in the 2010s erroded what little good faith I had towards it to begin with, but I have to say I haven't been entirely impressed with what little of it I've seen. My impression of it is that it's a rule set that feels like it needs to do everything itself around here, holding the players' hands through game events that I'd really rather just fill in the blanks of myself afterwards if it's all the same (I don't really need or want the game itself to tell me what happens to the jetbike after its rider is shot off, my imagination can handle that on its own).

Really if you take every piece of waxing lyrical about Rogue Trader or 2nd edition that's ever been written up by the 80shammer and 90shammer revivalists, that's pretty much how I feel about... well really it's how I feel about 2004hammer but I only feel about 1% less about 3rd edition so it's a distinction without a difference there. Point is, I'm a natural dyed-in-the-wool 2000shammer man, and it fits me like a speedo.

Do not engage me on the "troop tax" mentality. I, who own multiple units of bog-standard Chaos Legionaries with boltguns and special weapons, am not at home to armies without at least two Troops choices in them, and ideally Troops who do something a little more than occupy a point to make a number go up. Especially not when Fire Warriors, in that capacity, should be laying down fire with their pulse rifles, or charging in to occupy points with their pulse carbines, and doing all that to the Chaos Cultists and Legionaries coming at them from the other direction. A good hearty troop skirmish is where it's at, brother.

Hear hear. This is also why I like the 4th edition base rules a little more than 3rd edition 40k, because the more relaxed rapid-fire rules there makes good hearty troop skirmishes a lot more dynamic and decisive (and Target Priority makes them more tactical, because now those Fire Warriors will need think fast and have a good fast-witted Shas'Ui if they want to target those Chaos Space Marines coming up behind in support of the Cultists).

(And don't get me started on occupying points to make numbers go up as a win mechanic. Just because something works in Dawn Of War doesn't mean it should be translated to the tabletop game)

The "mission specialist" angle is interesting. I... sort of blundered into that, with my core Legionary squad, who are also my designated Kill Team; the heavily bionic'd and plasma'd ten-man originals of my army. I didn't think about who was doing what as hard as you have, it was more a "mother of invention" situation because the figures were in such a state, but we've ended up in a similar place from different directions.

Convergent Evolution is a many-splendored thing. I am also pleased to have hashed out the concept about 4-6 years before NuGW applied it to the Tau with their boxed set. I actually have a motley collection of hand-me-down figures that is earmarked for becoming a full dedicated Kill Team in the near future, which is likely to be a closer story to that Legionary Squad.

But there are two sides to Kill Team. It needs a large force of Brute squads as well. I don't yet have nearly enough Gun Drones for even the smallest and simplest of Kill Team games yet, but I do have one batch of them for a highly mobile manoeuvre element and some basic reconnaissance and scouting capability to the cadre.

First off, as is tradition, here are the original drones from my first Tau army.







These guys came together organically overtime. GW has, to my knowledge, never released a full set of gun drones - instead they're usually included with other Tau model kits, which is something I always thought was really neat (I've also always loved the other 'freebie' units that GW did like this, the 3rd edition Tyranid Rippers and Necron Scarabs). Thus, this unit built up over time as I accumulated them in pairs from other Tau kits. Most came from the 3rd edition Tau Battleforce I got, while a couple of others came with a Firewarrior box.

The two with bonding knife decals on them were intended to be optional additions to a Crisis team. At the time I insisted on having a select few drones dedicated to being an independent squadron, and wargear drones dedicated to, well, being wargear additions to units, with no crossover of the two. This left me concerned that I could end up mixing the two by mistake (no real problem from a practical point of view, but as I said I was somewhat OCD about this at the time). Thus, I came up with the solution of marking out the Battlesuit wargear drones by putting bonding knife transfer decals on them in order to tie them into the Battlesuit teams better.

One interesting thing to note about the drones is that almost no glue was used in their construction. I quickly found out with my first models (see April's post 'Start A Revolution' for more details) that almost all of the gun drone parts fit together just fine without needing adhesive, and so I refused to glue down any of the joints in order to allow maximum range of movement on the models - this means that their guns can rotate and elevate as much as the model's design will allow them. It does mean that their guns can fall off from time to time, but I consider the extra movement range and simplicity of construction to be more than worth it. Thus, the only component glued on the model is the antenna, stuck to the drone body with polystyrene cement. Speaking of which, astute readers will note that all of the drones have their antennas on the left side. I saw the antenna attached to both of the little dimples on the drone on the original GW studio examples but seemed to notice slightly more stuck to the left one, so I standardised on left-hand antennas early on - though it seems many others did not.

These aren't actually all the drones from my first Tau army. The ones that came with vehicles have not been pictured (they'll be presented with their parent vehicles when the time comes), and there are a further two that I pressed into service as makeshift Shield Drone proxies, hastily converting them to the role by putting them on the stand without their pulse carbine turrets. They were only ever meant to be a temporary stopgap until I could put together some real Shield Drones but ended up soldiering on in that capacity until this rearmament program started. It should however give you an idea on what the drones in that army looked like.

Now then, here are their new replacements.












These gun drones are to be the first of many, and came as a set from one of the Tau giveaway bundles I won at the local GW store. Conveniently this batch contains enough to make a full gun drone squadron for use in games. I have since discarded my old doctrine of dedicated gun drone units, which was fiddly and would waste precious transfer decals, and have instead adopted a more modern system where all gun drones become part of a collective 'drone pool' from which I can allocate gun drones to independent squadrons or unit upgrades as needed. Thus, the gun drones will be the only unit in the army (and indeed in any of my modern tabletop armies so far) to not be named. This also conveniently eliminates the need to fiddle around with writing a name down on the tiny rim of the flying stand.

I'm still somewhat torn on the flying stands. I still really love the look of the bare flying stand bases on their own, without anything done to them - the clear base and stem combination is easily the best way I've seen to model something that's floating in the air (certainly much better looking than the ugly tacky methods of perching the model on a long extended detail or scenic base that are common on NuGW models). However, I received more recommendations to base the flying bases, and it does still look good, while hiding any scratches or smudges. I suppose I can always commandeer some clear flying bases from the older drones if I want.

Aside from that, there isn't that much special about the drones. Once again, most of their parts are dry-fitted, giving them full range of rotation, but aside from that the main difference is their much snazzier paint scheme.

I'm a big fan of the "paint the base, leave the stem" approach to those horrid brittle transparent stalks - OK, look, I agree that the increasingly inane and overblown "hero rocks" are a terrible design trend, but I built and painted and, crucially had to transport ten metal Fell Bats on those... things, and I will die mad about it.

These Drones are perhaps the clearest illustration yet of how far you've come as a painter. It's difficult for me to read Tau models, and unless the painter has absolutely stuffed them there is generally a low bar for them to clear before I think "that's fine." But there's a blobbiness to those early ones, which contrasts with the crisp perfectionism of the rearmament-era miniatures. I suppose what I'm saying is good job - it's a simple studio scheme and as such doesn't always register to the eye, but this time you got me.

I also have to admit that I would mark the drones that went on the vehicle kits, or associated with battlesuits. It would bother me to mix them up.

GW for the last decade or so has been working very hard to appease the grumpy 2nd edition dinosaurs that roamed the forums during the 2010s and constantly complained about how much more sense everything made in 1993.

It probably doesn't help that more than a few of those grumpy dinosaurs are on the development teams now. I know some of the chaps who've been elevated from the circuit and discourse to join the Studio in some capacity, and they're a little older than me, i.e. firmly of the second edition era. It's no accident that Blood Bowl and Necromunda have flourished to the extent they have in recent years: the demand is coming from inside, as well as outside, the company.

My impression of it is that it's a rule set that feels like it needs to do everything itself around here, holding the players' hands through game events that I'd really rather just fill in the blanks of myself afterwards if it's all the same (I don't really need or want the game itself to tell me what happens to the jetbike after its rider is shot off, my imagination can handle that on its own).

That is a very good description of it: a strong "what does not occur in system is not true" philosophy that leads to oversimulation. See also: clouds of smoke, plasma, warpspace/realspace overlap, psychic detritus, ravenous squigs and pestilent ooze being plopped down all over the place, carpeting the table in markers and cruft.

This is also why I like the 4th edition base rules a little more than 3rd edition 40k, because the more relaxed rapid-fire rules there makes good hearty troop skirmishes a lot more dynamic and decisive (and Target Priority makes them more tactical, because now those Fire Warriors will need think fast and have a good fast-witted Shas'Ui if they want to target those Chaos Space Marines coming up behind in support of the Cultists).

The concept of a "scoring unit" also goes a long way to encourage things here, in that armies will likely have enough Troops to engage in Troop on Troop violence.

(And don't get me started on occupying points to make numbers go up as a win mechanic. Just because something works in Dawn Of War doesn't mean it should be translated to the tabletop game)

It's my turn to give the hearty hear hear, because good grief Dawn of War has a lot to answer for. I wouldn't mind objective markers if they were keyed to terrain pieces (coughCityfightcough) but when they're just points that you put down based largely on proximity to each other and the table edge, or a precise series of measurements pertinent to the deployment zone, nudged slightly to negotiate advantage or disadvantage as to scores from the first turn roll - this is pure-game nonsense, as insane as any pursuit of any of Ron Edwards' (a pox on his name) three pillars to the detriment of the others, and as bad as the goggle-eyed simulation-huffing of the blighted Second. There's an awful lot of video game silliness bubbling through the current edition of 40K if I'm honest; the aura ability is one of those concepts that works fine when you have a CPU and GPU calculating and presenting the aura in real time but is more fuss and bother when you have to continually measure it on an actual table.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't afraid every time I moved my metal Warhawk Riders.

These Drones are perhaps the clearest illustration yet of how far you've come as a painter. It's difficult for me to read Tau models, and unless the painter has absolutely stuffed them there is generally a low bar for them to clear before I think "that's fine." But there's a blobbiness to those early ones, which contrasts with the crisp perfectionism of the rearmament-era miniatures. I suppose what I'm saying is good job - it's a simple studio scheme and as such doesn't always register to the eye, but this time you got me.

I also have to admit that I would mark the drones that went on the vehicle kits, or associated with battlesuits. It would bother me to mix them up.

Thanks! I have since reversed my policy on the drones somewhat, in that now the drones attached to vehicles and the upcomming command team are getting marked out after all (it helps that advances in Freehanding and precision detailing technology have rendered the need for decal transfers unnecessary here). The other drones are still all being made equal though, not least because they need to be able to band together into lots of 3-drone Brute Squads for Kill Team games.

It probably doesn't help that more than a few of those grumpy dinosaurs are on the development teams now. I know some of the chaps who've been elevated from the circuit and discourse to join the Studio in some capacity, and they're a little older than me, i.e. firmly of the second edition era. It's no accident that Blood Bowl and Necromunda have flourished to the extent they have in recent years: the demand is coming from inside, as well as outside, the company.

This explains a lot. If I didn't know any better I'd almost suspect it was a factor in the decision to make a game using the 1980s pedigree Adeptus Titanicus property over touching the very post-2nd edition Battlefleet Gothic brand. But that's probably just paranoia talking.

It's my turn to give the hearty hear hear, because good grief Dawn of War has a lot to answer for. I wouldn't mind objective markers if they were keyed to terrain pieces (coughCityfightcough) but when they're just points that you put down based largely on proximity to each other and the table edge, or a precise series of measurements pertinent to the deployment zone, nudged slightly to negotiate advantage or disadvantage as to scores from the first turn roll - this is pure-game nonsense, as insane as any pursuit of any of Ron Edwards' (a pox on his name) three pillars to the detriment of the others, and as bad as the goggle-eyed simulation-huffing of the blighted Second. There's an awful lot of video game silliness bubbling through the current edition of 40K if I'm honest; the aura ability is one of those concepts that works fine when you have a CPU and GPU calculating and presenting the aura in real time but is more fuss and bother when you have to continually measure it on an actual table.

What really gets me about them is that there's just not really any effort to integrate them into the game's context. They make a number go up in Dawn of War because they're an abstraction of how well an army's doing and how robust its logistics backbone is (which the Tabletop game just doesn't really need to track anywhere outside of campaigns and list building), and you use the number that goes up to buy more stuff to use.

Similarly, I like objective markers in the 4th edition Secure And Control mission, where they model valuable stuff that's scattered across the area of operations and your goal is to grab it by having your units on it and the other side's units not by the end of the game. I like them even more in the Rescue mission, where they just highlight potential hiding spots for the important McGuffin you're here for, and as soon as you've found and positively ID'd that they go away.

In both those cases they actually connect to the context of the events the game is trying to model. The 9e scoring system... I mean it can be used for that, there's at least one youtube battle report that does just that, but it's certainly not the path of least resistance, it's something where the players have to work against the current of the rules to achieve, rather than with.

Of course, what I also like is Imperial Armour-grade lore pieces, and I like them even more when they're cleaned up with the benefit of hindsight to be a little less 6th editioney. Those of you averse to world-building exercises may wish to avert your eyes and apply safety goggles at this point...

HUNTER CADRE DA'ANUK - THE 42ND T'AU GUARDS CADRE
Tactical Fire Warrior Teams

"I still remember when I first encountered him. I was just a Shas'la then, posted as a guard for one of the conclave chambers on T'au. At the time there was a discussion going on about future military development, and I will never forget what he said that day. He said, "You can't fight a war without warriors."
And he was right. Sooner or later, you will have to send someone into the fighting to achieve your goals."

- Shas'Nel'T'au Kass'Ko'Vash, on his encounter with Shas'O'T'au Kais'Ka'Eoro'Da'Anuk

The origin of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre's 'Tactical' Fire Warrior teams can be found in the Fire Warrior infantry teams that formed the core of Da'Anuk's original hunter cadre. Forming the bulk of Da'Anuk's forces and outfitted with the best equipment that could be procured for them, these troops were instrumental in the Tau commander's first victories. They performed the bulk of the night-time raids that earned Da'Anuk his title on the moon of Hoki and proved themselves to be formidable adversaries to the Adeptus Astartes in Da'Anuk's early campaigns against the Ultramarines.

By the time of the First ATT Orbital Incursion attrition had left Da'Anuk's forces spent, and the Fire Warrior teams were one of the few units to remain fully capable during this period, with a combat readiness level considerably higher than the grav-tanks and vastly higher than the battlesuits in the cadre. During the First ATT Orbital Incursion the Fire Warriors took the brunt of the fighting that Da'Anuk's cadre was involved in, especially when the combat moved into the corridors, rooms and hallways of the orbital where heavier equipment could not follow.

Following the First ATT Orbital Incursion and the Da'Anuk's cadre being awarded Guards status, the Fire Warrior teams were rebuilt, their combat losses filled with recruits drawn from the survivors of the ATT internal security forces who had fought alongside the 42nd T'au Guards. Since then, the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre has recruited from the cream of T'au's Fire Caste, maintaining the standard requirement common to all Guards Cadres that prospective recruits must have a minimum of 1 Tau'Cyr's worth of combat experience before they can be accepted. New warriors are then put through the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre's comprehensive training program covering all of the special skills and equipment operation they will need when serving in the 42nd T'au Guards.

The modern iteration of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre's Fire Warrior Teams were proven for the first time in the trial by fire of Doran'Cha, where Da'Anuk's investments payed off considerably. Mounted in Devilfish transports equipped with rappelling lines, the Tactical teams moved from rooftop to rooftop during the battle for Doran'Cha's capital city, laying down sustained pulse fire into oncoming Tyranid swarms from their high vantage point and then swiftly redeploying to another building top when they were threatened with being overrun. Working in concert with other mobile elements, the Tactical Fire Warrior teams were able to whittle away the Tyranid numbers decisively with these tactics.

All Fire Warriors serving in the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre are equipped with combat armour incorporating the latest model of the advanced Lar'Shi infantry combat system, providing a full range of tactical information including voice, video and text communication from the integrated Cadre network, an interactive map featuring geographical and topographical data of the surrounding warzone, basic translation algorithms for dealing with alien lifeforms, objective information and waypoints and data-links to other cadre elements, as well as the standard features of Fire Warrior combat armour. A Fire Warrior can access most of the Lar'Shi features from the tactical computer built into their gauntlet, or from the display in their helmet, which also incorporates thermographic and UV sensors, passive radio detection systems in addition to the full range of features common to the standard Fire Warrior helmet.

The primary weapons of choice for the Fire Warriors of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre remain the PX-16 pulse rifle and PX-16-1V pulse carbine, both tried, tested and combat-proven designs. Both weapons make use of the same technology common to all pulse weaponry, using an electromagnetic induction field to propel a particle that breaks down into a plasma pulse as it leaves the barrel. The pulse weapons in use with the 42nd T'au Guards cadre are fed with advanced K-type munition particles, each one only a few molecules large, allowing over a million of them to be stored in the removable magazine cylinders that are a standard fit for both weapon types. The tiny K-type particle reacts on contact with the atmosphere, triggering a chain reaction that converts atmospheric gases into high-energy plasma, creating a pulse burst far in excess of the particle's initial size. It is this chain reaction that produces the distinctive blue crescent shaped muzzle flash of a pulse weapon.

The PX-16 pulse rifle possesses a near-perfect blend of range, accuracy, firepower, reliability and ease of maintenance and supply. Its stopping power and penetration characteristics are directly comparable to Imperial bolt weaponry, but with superior range and ammunition capacity, and with fewer moving parts the PX-16 is considerably more reliable. Fire Warriors in the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre are trained to favour the fully automatic setting on the PX-16, trusting in excellent trigger discipline to prevent ammunition wastage. This requires intensive training but provides maximum flexibility on the battlefield by allowing a Fire Warrior to change firing rates more quickly - to increase their weight of fire, the warrior needs only to squeeze harder on the trigger.

As well as the anti-grav stabilisers and recoil compensators integrated into most Tau weaponry, the PX-16 pulse rifles used by the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre are fitted with the latest model of advanced optical sights, including thermographic and UV modes (useful as a backup in case the Fire Warrior's helmet sensors are damaged), built-in ballistic computer and full systems integration with the Lar'Shi infantry combat system. The sight unit uses a wireless connection to network with the Fire Warrior helmet, where it interfaces seamlessly with the helmet display. The sight view is incorporated directly into the HUD field of view and moves fluidly in real-time with the sight's movements. A Fire Warrior can aim the weapon just as he would without a helmet or use the sight alongside the helmet's sensors for enhanced binocular vision. The sight feed can also be used to see around corners.

The 42nd T'au Guards Cadre is one of a select few Tau formations currently supplied with enhanced power cells. These power cells make use of the latest advancements in tri-lithium fusion technology to provide three times the energy capacity of a standard pulse weapon power cell with no increase in weight or size. Where a standard power cell provides enough energy for 50 shots, a tri-lithium fusion power cell can provide energy for 150 shots. Fire Warriors in the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre commonly take advantage of this by firing three-shot bursts where single shots would normally be used but are also able to go for three times longer between reloads when conserving ammunition and can lay down massive amounts of automatic fire if the situation calls for it.

In addition to the warriors armed with PX-16 pulse rifles, the Tactical Fire Warrior teams of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre include a small section of between three and four warriors each armed with a PX-16-1V pulse carbine. The PX-16-1V makes use of the same advanced sights, anti-grav stabilisers/recoil compensators and tri-lithium fusion power cells used on the PX-16. Its reduced barrel length means the PX-16-1V has a shorter range, but in return is much lighter and more manoeuvrable, making it ideal for short-range firefights in close quarters. Like other pulse carbine models, the PX-16-1V features an underslung photon grenade launcher. The grenade launcher on the PX-16-1V is a break-action variant, firing photon grenades from a small magazine at the rear that holds three photon grenades and can be reloaded, the bottom section swinging away on the rail-like frame that connects the grenade launcher to the pulse carbine. the launcher is fully integrated with the weapon and synchronised to fire a photon grenade automatically with each pull of the trigger. When combined with the plasma pulse fire of the carbine itself, the resulting barrage is more than capable of pinning most enemies in place. The PX-16-1V model also features an automatic fire setting, an improvement over previous pulse carbine versions that were limited to semi-automatic fire only, though Fire Warriors in the 42nd T'au Guards are still trained to favour the semi-automatic setting in contrast with their rifle-armed comrades.

It is the addition of this carbine section that distinguishes the Tactical teams from the other Fire Warrior teams found in the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre, and what gives them their great flexibility. In defence, the carbine armed Fire Warriors can provide close-in protection for their teammates, pinning down nearby enemies and covering the team's flanks. On the offence, they provide an effective manoeuvre and point element able to lead the team in attacks on enemy positions and room-to-room combat. Like all Fire Warrior teams in the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre, Tactical teams are trained to be able to split up and operate as smaller units of six Tau, and when operating in this fashion it is common for the carbine section to be split between the two groups to afford each one its own point element.

In the early days of his command Da'Anuk established in his Fire Warrior teams the system of Mission Specialists, Fire Warriors with additional training and equipment for specialised roles. Originally each team had only three such Mission Specialists; a technical or technology specialist, an honour guide and a 'Mont'yr'B'Ka' (translated to Gothic as 'Veteran Scout Marksman'). The addition of these Mission Specialists proved to greatly enhance the combat effectiveness of the Fire Warrior teams and was an important factor in the success of their nighttime attacks in the campaign on Hoki. In the years following the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre's reconstitution, Da'Anuk added more Mission Specialists to his Fire Warrior teams. Following the First ATT Orbital Incursion, team corpsmen were included, and proved invaluable in the gruesome battles on Doran'Cha. In the aftermath of the Second ATT Orbital Incursion Da'Anuk drew on experience learned and added demolitions experts to every Fire Warrior team, which have likewise proved their worth since. The role of Mont'yr'B'Ka has been further split into two specialist roles, a team scout and a designated marksman, although some Fire Warrior Teams still have one warrior perform both roles, often when the team scout proves to also be the best shot in the team.

One notable tradition amongst the Fire Warrior teams of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre is that of the Team Second. The Second will often be one of the most experienced or capable warriors after the Shas'Ui team leader, and functions as both their second in command and a bodyguard. To this end the Second wears the same full-colour helmet and coloured shoulder guard as the Shas'Ui as both a sign of authority and to confuse enemy snipers. The Second's armour also includes the same Sept markings as found on the Shas'Ui painted in adaptive 'smart paint' that can be turned transparent or opaque with the application of a small electric currant. This allows the Shas'Ui and Team Second to effectively 'switch markings' as the situation dictates to further confound enemy marksmen. The Second will be a capable leader and tactician in their own right however, more than able to lead a small six-Tau element if necessary and can fit into the role of team leader seamlessly should the worst happen to the Shas'Ui.

From the twisting labyrinth of the ATT Orbital to the hellish nightmare of Doran'Cha to their latest conquests against the Gue'la Imperium in the 3rd Sphere of Expansion, the Fire Warriors of the 42nd T'au Guards Cadre have delivered victory for the Tau Empire time and again.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of nerds, I shall fear no infodump. I am one with the Word, and the Word is with me.
-- "What It's Like To Live In Viriconium," probably.

I wish I had something to say about this Forge World style "historicals in space" greeble-talk. I am definitely more Mel than Vorthos: rules that represent fiction on the tabletop make brain go brrr, big scads of fiction describing minutiae about the tabletop units make brain smooth as polished teak. 's cool that you do it though. Find your joy, and all that.

What really gets me about them is that there's just not really any effort to integrate them into the game's context. They make a number go up in Dawn of War because they're an abstraction of how well an army's doing and how robust its logistics backbone is (which the Tabletop game just doesn't really need to track anywhere outside of campaigns and list building), and you use the number that goes up to buy more stuff to use.

Similarly, I like objective markers in the 4th edition Secure And Control mission, where they model valuable stuff that's scattered across the area of operations and your goal is to grab it by having your units on it and the other side's units not by the end of the game. I like them even more in the Rescue mission, where they just highlight potential hiding spots for the important McGuffin you're here for, and as soon as you've found and positively ID'd that they go away.

In both those cases they actually connect to the context of the events the game is trying to model. The 9e scoring system... I mean it can be used for that, there's at least one youtube battle report that does just that, but it's certainly not the path of least resistance, it's something where the players have to work against the current of the rules to achieve, rather than with.

To be fair here, the ninth edition does do more interesting and worthwhile things with its objective markers in Crusade scenarios (I want to play Sabotage soon, where the markers are actually removed from play once the attacker makes contact with them). And an attempt has been made, through the Action based secondary objectives, to make "stand on objective and do a thing that has mechanical impact on the play" a concept. The problem is really with the bland scoring of the Primary system and, of course, with using circular "zone markers" rather than terrain features for this sort of thing in the first place.

I wish I had something to say about this Forge World style "historicals in space" greeble-talk. I am definitely more Mel than Vorthos: rules that represent fiction on the tabletop make brain go brrr, big scads of fiction describing minutiae about the tabletop units make brain smooth as polished teak. 's cool that you do it though. Find your joy, and all that.

It's OK, the greeble-talk is specifically aimed towards the sort of hobbyist that likes greeble talk, trawls Lexicannum exhaustively and whose brain goes brr with the knowledge that their dudes aren't just running around with any old space gun, but a Mod-7GU Type 9 space gun with a superhelical power core and Reydon accelerator drive (what makes a superhelical power core better than a regular one? The hell if I know, but it sure sounds like something I'd want on my side). It's also aimed at forever GMs in need of material to mine for their 40k RPGs, and people who enjoy rooting out easter eggs and posting them on TVtropes shoutout pages. All three are key demographics this thread is trying to reach in addition to gothic English supervillains.

I am starting to wonder about switching over to Games Workshop style in-universe report framed greeble-talk, but I'm not entirely convinced it would be any more digestible.

In any case you will probably like the coming Kakapo Approved feature more, just as soon as I can decide on what concept to post first.

You will also probably prefer a deep dive into my first battlesuit models in almost a decade.

This is a groundbreaking milestone, and the latest in a long and often turbulent history. For you see, I have a dark secret. Beneath all my many layers and masks and acts upon here, at the very heart of my psyche is a hidden canker, a deep-buried heresy so heinous as to be incomprehensibly anathema to other Tau enthusiasts, a blasphemy ruthlessly suppressed and uttered only in hushed whispers. You see...

... I've never really been all that fond of Tau battlesuits.

If you've been following this blog from the start, you'll know that I'm a rare breed in that I was never drawn to the Tau for their battlesuits. It was always the grav-tanks and Fire Warriors that attracted me the most, and even to this day I consider battlesuits in much the same way that many might view the drone units - an important and interesting component of the Tau army and model range, but a secondary one, a side-show to the grav-tanks and Fire Warriors that are the real main event. The exception to this of course is the Stealthsuits, which are close enough to the Fire Warriors that I have always considered them to be separate to the XV-8 family, a kind of 'honorary infantry' if you will.

The Crisis battlesuits were always hit the worst by this. As I mentioned in the first post about my big Tau 40k reboot, one of the first Tau models I had my eye on was a Broadside battlesuit, which I could always appreciate because of their proportions - something about those massive shoulder-mounted guns always seemed to balance them out wonderfully in my eyes. The Crisis Suits, with their comparatively dinky weapons always seemed somewhat lesser to me in comparison. This was only further compounded by the nature of the weapons the models were armed with and my age at the time - the broadsides were very clearly carrying some kind of missile launcher, very easy to both identify and understand for an 8 year old boy with an acute fascination with all things modern military and science fiction, and while a railgun was far less comprehensible at the time, a pair of gigantic intimidating looking cannons was certainly not. The Crisis Suits, on the other hand... well my 8 year old brain just couldn't wrap itself around what a fusion blaster or plasma rifle was supposed to do (it took my 9-10 year old brain to start making progress on that one).

This all added up to seriously stunt my battlesuit forces, until I eventually made a decision to eschew them entirely. I have always had a massive rebellious non-conformist streak, so naturally after a few years of being constantly bombarded by GW's marketing on how much I as a Tau player should love battlesuits, and exposed to how many other Tau players loved them, I decided that I would not include a single XV-8 based battlesuit in my entire Tau army. The Crisis suits I had already obtained would be kept for completeness, but from that day forward whenever my Tau were to do battle they would fight using only infantry, grav-tanks, drones and stealthsuits. "Pfft, who needs battlesuits!" I thought, "I've got pulse guns for dealing with infantry, and railguns and seeker missiles for dealing with tanks. What more could I possibly have use for?"

It was around early 2010ish when that all began to change. After looking again at Crisis Suits, and having begun to get a better grasp of some of the nuances of the Warhammer 40,000 rules (not least among them being the rules for equipping Crisis Teams themselves, something that had always been far too byzantine for my primitive child brain to grasp), I began to wonder if we had perhaps gotten off on the wrong foot. This was shortly followed by a growing realisation of the importance of assault weapons in Warhammer 40,000. Then the two came together when after reading more closely through the original Tau Designers' Notes by Andy Chambers I had a sudden Eureka moment and realised that the purpose of Crisis battlesuits was to act as mobile assault weapon carriers for the Fire Warriors.

And perhaps the most profound factor in this change of thinking was that about a year or two earlier I had discovered this strange and wonderful website all about my favourite 40k faction called Advanced Tau Tactica, and had been steadily digesting the wealth of tactics articles hosted on there ever since.

However, this growing revolution in military affairs ultimately failed to materialise any practical changes, as the nascent modernisation of my Tau army was cut short in the tail end of 2010 when all my hobby efforts were redirected towards building my Tau fleet for Battlefleet Gothic, and later a Wood Elf army in Warhammer.

Nonetheless, theoretical consideration and planning continued, in anticipation for a renewed modernisation of the ground forces at some undetermined point in the future, and was only accelerated in 2013 when I was sucked into the buzz surrounding the Tau releases of the time. The profusion of utility afforded to Crisis battlesuits in the 6th edition codex accelerated the development of my battlesuit doctrine considerably, and quickly cemented an important niche for Crisis teams as the key source of essential assault weapons in my future Tau army, with the mobility to get to where they were needed in order to deal with targets that the Fire Warriors could not - just as the original designers of the Tau intended!

Which at last brings us to today, with the first brand-new Crisis Team of my rebooted Tau army. But first, as is tradition, let's step back a way to see where this all began. My first ever XV-8 Crisis battlesuit was this guy.




It also has the distinction of being the second Warhammer 40,000 model I ever owned, and the first ever plastic Warhammer 40,000 model I ever owned (not counting drones). I got him during a visit to the same local GW store where I gained my faithful metal Stealthsuit Shas'vre, where I was able to play my second ever game of Warhammer 40,000 - an intro game arbitrated by a staff member that saw me trying to rescue an Ethereal from a small force of Space Marines commanded by a family friend we were out shopping with at the time. Unfortunately I fared worse than in my first glorious triumph, and was unable to stop the Space Marines from carrying off the captive Aun - in no small part because of some poor reserve rolls for the Devilfish-mounted reinforcements I was promised which I had made a crucial part of my plan. But this was also my second game ever; tactical mistakes were inevitable.

But I digress. After the game I was once again allowed to take home 'one small thing', this time on a slightly bigger budget that would afford a small boxed model rather than a blister pack. I still wanted that Broadside battlesuit, with its awesome looking shoulder mounted guns and arm mounted missile launchers, but it was still deemed too expensive, so I settled on the only other small Tau box there was - an XV-8 Crisis battlesuit kit (and with the fantastic box artwork found on the 3rd edition kits too no less). It was either that or this other weird looking battlesuit carrying a sword called 'Rebel Commander Farsight' or something, but I decided to go with the box that had the cool artwork on it.

Now, it's important to note here that at the time I was 8 years old, and I had not yet read either the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook or the Tau codex. This is important, because they were both major factors in colouring my perception of the Crisis battlesuit kit when I got home and started inspecting it more closely. Being 8 years old, I had never encountered multi-part model kits before, save for a Chinese-made sci-fi robot toy that fired balls when assembled (in theory), which had been put together by one of my parents without my observation. The closest experience I had thus far had been the plastic model sprues in the Lord of The Rings Battle Games In Middle Earth part-book magazines, but they were almost entirely single-part models with a few push-fit arms and shields.

You can perhaps imagine, then, my total bewilderment when I encountered the Crisis battlesuit sprue for the first time. I had assumed that the Crisis battlesuit would be something like one of the action figures I had played with for years, or perhaps at most something like the Lord of The Rings plastics, with a simple push-fit assembly. The Gun Drone that came with my Stealthsuit seemed to reinforce this idea, being mostly push-fit itself. At first the Crisis battlesuit with its snug-fitting chest piece and many ball joints seemed to meet these expectations, but it soon became apparent that this was misleading - the ball joints at the hip and on the head were deceptively loose, and were quickly found to be impossible to hold in place without glue. The arms and ankles were left unglued for a while, but in time they too were fastened in place with adhesive. I had thought I had stuck the aerials on the helmet, but archaeological analysis suggests that these were left off - presumably my 8-year-old self decided to leave them dry-fitted and they fell off, never to be seen again.

The other point of confusion, which plagued me for years, was the weapon fits. Since my funding was limited, I had prioritised getting models over books and so had yet to read the Tau codex, and consequently I had not the faintest idea what the various bits of wargear included in the kit were supposed to do. My information about the Tau and the setting had thus far come from the GW website, but the Tau unit guide they had up on there at the time contained only vague mentions of "an array of deadly weaponry that can meet almost any threat and neutralise it" in regards to what Crisis battlesuits actually did or how they fought (it should be noted that this descriptive line did not help their reputation in my eyes - as an 8 year old I didn't want to neutralise threats, I wanted to kill, destroy and annihilate them!).

In the absence of any information, I gravitated towards the burst cannon, missile launcher, flamer and shield generator as my first picks for equipment - I had seen the name 'burst cannon' used in several places on the GW and Forgeworld webpages in regards to the Gatling guns featured on Tau units, and as an 8-year old boy interested in science fiction and military hardware I was already fairly familiar with what Gatling guns and missile launchers could do, and it did not take much brainpower to deduce that the funny looking gun with a pilot light on the end and what looked like a fuel tank on top of it was a flamethrower of some kind, likewise that the device which looked like a shield was some sort of energy-shield generator. The other pieces, especially the poor maligned target lock ("Why would I want to put a tiny little extra head on this battlesuit instead of another gun?"), were largely maligned, except for the plasma rifle, which I adopted as a 'cool sci-fi energy weapon' option for the Crisis Suit (because as a keen enthusiast of science fiction computer games I knew you always had to include an energy weapon of some kind along with all the guns and rockets).

At first all of these options were simply push-fit into the various hard-point slots on the battlesuit model, so that I would be able to swap them out between battles. The pieces seemed to fit well enough without glue, and I still wanted maximum variety and flexibility with my battlesuit. Eventually though as I came to favour the above choices over others they were glued in place, resulting in the loadout you see today.

Being the second Warhammer 40,000 unit I ever owned, this Crisis battlesuit shares much of the same history as the metal XV15 Stealthsuit who directly preceded him, and went through much of the same changes in colour scheme, many of which can still be seen on the model in places. At first it was painted in a massively thick coating of sunburst yellow - much like the Stealthsuit, I wanted my Tau to have yellow armour just like the box artwork for Firewarrior that had first drawn me to Warhammer 40,000 in the first place. The exception of course was the mechanical areas, which were left black to mimic the dark gunmetal areas on the GW studio battlesuits.

Then when I had my ill-fated idea to have an army of gold-plated Tau it was hastily repainted with a coat of Mithril Silver followed by a coat of Shining Gold. You can still see how this colour scheme looked on the burst cannon amongst other areas. After a short while I realised I had made a mistake and repainted all of my non-Stealthsuit Tau units at the time (both of them) to the sandy desert camouflage scheme from the GW studio army, starting with a thin (by my standards at the time) coat of Vermin brown and later adding a white helmet. I no longer remember if the white helmet came when I finally got my hands on Bleached Bone paint, or if the off-white cream colour is simply the result of Skull White over Vermin and Vomit browns in sufficient quantities.

The other feature of interest is the Jerry Can glued to the base. While I quickly abandoned conventional basing in my childhood years, I still liked to add objects to my models' bases when possible. This came from seeing the Space Marine my friend at the time brought over one day when I was 8, just before I got into Warhammer 40,000 for the first time. The Space Marine model had a spare bolter glued to its base, and I thought it looked so cool I tried to emulate it myself with other objects. For a while my Stealthsuit had a spare shield drone antenna glued to its base (back when I thought they were rifles and not aerials), and later I decided to mark out my sole Crisis battlesuit by sticking down the Jerry Can piece from the Battlefield Accessories kit I had got some time earlier (which it must be said is a fantastic set of terrain and easily one of my two favourite GW terrain products alongside the Jungle Trees).

Being the only Crisis battlesuit meant that for some time this guy was also the de facto commander of my Tau army for some years, before I finally got an Ethereal in to relieve him of his command duties. He then served as a Monat for a short while before being retired in place of these guys.







This was the trio of Crisis battlesuits that came with the Tau battleforce I got for Christmas when I was about 10, if memory serves. By this time I actually HAD read the Tau codex (and would get a copy of the brand new 4th edition core rulebook to read through not long afterwards), but this did little to enlighten me on the subtleties of equipping Crisis Teams and ultimately ended up raising more questions than it answered in that area. However, I had also read the new interactive flash guide on battlesuit weapons and support systems that was now on the GW website (and can still be found through the Wayback Machine archive), which was vastly more helpful for my primitive childhood brain. This was very strongly reflected in the choice of weapons loadout I gave them - you will immediately note an abundance of plasma rifles, now in vogue because the interactive flash guide suggested they were the best Crisis battlesuit weapon. Of course, like any good military my army had plenty of institutional inertia within it and so there was at least one battlesuit loaded down with burst cannons and missile pods at the insistence of the Old Guard generals, because you never know when you might need a Gatling gun and a missile launcher.

The other thing you probably noticed immediately is that this Crisis Team was originally built with four weapons or support systems equipping each battlesuit rather than three. The reason for this is very simple - there are four hardpoint slots on the Crisis battlesuit model, so my 8-9 year old self decided it was only logical that they carry four weapons. I also admired - and still do - the symmetry of having two items on the shoulders and two on the arms (another reason why I always liked the Broadside battlesuits with their twin-linked weapons more). Even after reading through the codex I still thought it made sense to stick four guns and/or wargear items on them because of that - my response to seeing the rules in the codex was "What? Three? That can't be right, it doesn't make sense. They have four slots on the models! Why would they say they you can only take three items when there are four slots on the models?"

To this day I still cannot help but wonder if once upon a time taking four weapons/wargear items was a feature on the Mk.I-IV Crisis battlesuits that never made it past playtesting to the codex and was never mentioned by Andy Chambers in the Designers' Notes for whatever reason.

It took me years to realise that the fourth hardpoint slot was really just there to give you some options for visual variety. By that point I had also begun to start giving some serious thought into tactical roles for Crisis Teams instead of just piling on whatever guns or wargear I thought looked cool. I had also started digesting more tactics articles on the internet (not least among them the ATT Academy articles, as mentioned earlier). At this time the classic Fireknife team configuration was in vogue, and so I constantly heard about how the Fireknife was the best Crisis team layout for general combat, especially against Space Marines. So in early 2010 when I was faced with the prospect of my first game of Warhammer 40,000 outside of a GW store against a Space Marine army I immediately concluded I needed to get some Fireknives up and running.

The trouble was that my funding was still limited, so rather than take resources away from the Broadside battlesuit production that was going on at the time I made the decision to modify my existing Crisis battlesuits to a Fireknife loadout. This was done by the crude and brutal method of simply cutting off their existing weapons and replacing them with plasma rifles, missile pods and multi-trackers, using those already featured on the models where appropriate. Using the Swiss Army Knife I had recently gotten as a Christmas gift to cut through the plastic joins, the process was long and extremely bloody (I went for a few weeks in High School with at least one band-aid on almost all of my fingers), but eventually I succeeded in getting the extraneous weapons off, then blue-tacked the Fireknife wargear in their place as seen in the other image.

That was how the Crisis Team was equipped for the three games that turned out to be the only time they were ever used in anger. They performed reasonably well, though did nothing particularly spectacular. The plan originally was to glue the Fireknife weapons on permanently and paint them, but I ultimately never got around to it as I put more and more hobby time into Battlefleet Gothic, then Warhammer. So it was that instead they quietly languished in one of my more out of the way storage spaces, silently guarding a collection of bitz piles and boxes while falling into a dire state of disrepair (in actual fact the damage was a result of the rigours of combat - the Crisis suit with the shield generator had its feet break off at the ankles during one game, while the one on the flying stand had its arm broken off in a related accident. They were temporarily repaired with copious amounts of blue-tack at the time, but then left in that state after the pivot towards other game systems). With their front-line duty now fulfilled however, I saw it fit to repair them fully in honour of their faithful service, and then decided to fully restore them to their historical wargear loadouts.

Of course, even at the time sticking down new weapons and painting them was only ever seen as a temporary stopgap until completely new Crisis battlesuits could be procured, as by this point they had begun to grow on me considerably. It was always planned that replacement battlesuits would inevitably arrive, and fitted with a wider selection of weaponry to handle a wider array of mission types, likely at some time in the near future. The arrival date for these new Crisis suits was pushed further and further back as Battlefleet Gothic and Warhammer became the dominant tabletop games of my hobby, meaning that it was not until 7 years later that things finally started to shift from the purely theoretical.

But now the new Crisis suits are finally here. At long last, I can proudly present a whole new generation of XV-8 Crisis battlesuits, a total ground-up revamp that takes my battlesuit corps to the next level.








After everything I've said about them, it should be noted that even when my fondness for battlesuits was at its lowest point I still thought the models looked phenomenal, just not as much as the Devilfish, Hammerheads and Fire Warriors that I did not think were getting their fair share of the limelight. I still think that these are by far the best Crisis battlesuit models GW has ever produced, and vastly prefer them to the 2017 versions released some years ago. Because of this I made sure to build up a healthy stockpile of the older kits as I was acquiring my new Tau army, alongside a healthy stockpile of the older Fire Warrior kits I love so much (the fact that both kits were included in the Tau battleforce box alongside what were effectively free Piranhas and Stealthsuit sprues was very convenient), enough to make all of the Crisis Teams I had originally planned on.

I take enormous pride from the fact that there is not a single model sculpt newer than 2013 in my entire Tau army (both planned and painted!).

Of course, that does not mean that the Crisis battlesuits were left completely untouched - they have had a whole host of modifications applied to them under the hood. The first and perhaps most important feature is the ankle joints, which have been reinforced with metal pins to prevent breakages. But more dramatic still is that these are the first Crisis battlesuits that I have magnetised.

Magnetising Crisis battlesuit hardpoints is a practice that I had been familiar with for a very long time - ever since first reading about it in the spotlight article on Sebastian Stuart's Tau army featured in the first issue of White Dwarf I ever owned - but had always dismissed as being impractical in the past. I was unaware of any magnet suppliers in my local area, and lacked the tools with which to install them on models. This began to chance in 2013 as I first gained some reasonable spending money for the first time and began to expand my collection of hobby tools as I began to get more and more invested in conversion work, but I still lacked a viable source of magnets until around 2017 or so when I finally performed a google search and found a convenient magnet supplier located within public transport distance, which then turned out to have very affordable 1mm magnets.

The next challenge was working out how to install the magnets. Most battlesuit magnetisation I've seen has simply glued the magnets into holes drilled into the model's surface, but that approach was quickly deemed unacceptable - I really loved these older models and wanted to preserve as much of their aesthetic design as possible including every last detail I could save. At the same time, I also wanted to preserve the mounting plugs on the battlesuit weapons and support systems, because I've actually always really loved those details and the really nice utilitarian look they bring to the components.

The solution I came up with was to not install magnets at all in the weapons and wargear pieces. Instead I drilled out the inside of the mounting plugs and inserted lengths of magnetic wire into them, before sealing them in with greenstuff. Then I installed magnets in the hardpoint slots on the battlesuits themselves. This setup preserves virtually all of the aesthetic details of the models, allows any weapon or support system to be placed on any battlesuit hardpoint, and conveniently halves the number of magnets needed to fully magnetise the entire unit.

The magnets themselves are small 1mm x 2mm square magnets. My original plan was to simply drill out the bottom 'floor' of the hardpoint slots and slot the magnets in place, but they proved to be just a touch too big to fit. This wasn't a problem for the shoulder hardpoints, since it was a fairly simple matter to drill out the floor of the slot while the jetpack pieces were separate, then slide the magnets in before gluing the two jetpack pieces together. The arm hardpoints were considerably more challenging and ultimately required me to completely excavate the hardpoint slots before reconstructing them over the embedded magnets with greenstuff.

The result is a Crisis Team that can be equipped with any of the weapons and support systems available, as seen below in the classic 'war machine with its entire arsenal of payload options splayed out in front of it' picture.





Although they are pictured above in what is anticipated to be their default loadout, a team configuration of my own invention. I have always been a huge proponent of versatility and multi-role capability in my units, since that way no matter what the enemy brings and no matter what the battlefield situation is they will always be able to do something useful. This philosophy mixed with my realisation that Crisis Teams are the only source of several key assault weapons in the entire Tau army to produce a flexible multi-role loadout that provides my army with all three of the core essential assault weapons - melta weapons in the form of fusion blasters, plasma weapons in the form of plasma rifles, and flamers for template weapon support. In the process it also produces a team that can deal with almost any threat on the table and handle any mission I throw at them.

The core loadout was originally conceived during the 6th edition codex (another factor in wanting as many different assault weapons on the same team as possible, because at the time there was a very real possibility that I would only have enough Elites slots for one Crisis Team at most), where it was imagined that the organic hard-wired multi-trackers Crisis battlesuits have in the 6th edition rules would allow them to choose the best two weapons for the situation and thus still yield an enormous amount of firepower. I was somewhat concerned that it may not be viable in 3.5 and 4th edition play, until I remembered that 3 assault weapons is actually the normal amount of an elite unit and adopted the approach of "If 3 assault weapons is good enough for the Imperial Guard, Chaos Space Marines and Orks then it's good enough for me."

The painting was an entirely different matter to their construction, and was the reason this post was so long in coming. If my Custodian was the painting equivalent of Trench Warfare, and the ATT Orbital was the painting equivalent of Urban Combat, then this unit was the painting equivalent of Afghanistan. All those sharp corners (prone to paint chipping or sliding at the slightest provocation), many many panel lines to highlight, hard to access areas and my obsessive perfectionism made for a lethal combination that kept me trapped in a nightmarish quagmire for over two years and a quarter. It got so bad that I actually gave up - stripping the paintwork I had done with Simple Green and starting over from scratch (I actually ended up doing this twice). Even after I started getting paint results I was content with I still had to contend with the tedious process of carefully working over the waterslide decals with layer upon layer of Micro-Sol until they finally looked nice enough, and the additional challenge of painting up the entire supply of weapons and wargear. There was also another altogether more insidious complication, for in the journey into the Heart of Darkness in the centre of my soul that painting these things became, I also came to a sudden dark epiphany:

I really don't like painting battlesuits.

It's not that I don't like the models, or the concept of the unit or the lore or anything like that - like I say I never really hated any of those parts about them to begin with, and they've only grown on me over time. No, rather I discovered that I find painting battlesuits a chore in much the same way that many appear to find painting Fire Warrior units. It seems that where others hold distaste for painting their Fire Warriors and treat themselves by painting battlesuits, I am destined to hold distaste for painting battlesuits and treat myself by painting infantry units (or possibly vehicles, depending on how that turns out...).

Speaking of waterslide decals, this also marks the first time I have used any in my new Tau army, and indeed the first time I have touched them at all in over a decade (literally in fact - the decals used were from my old Tau army, which I was sure to restore with a coat of Microscale Liquid Decal Film before using). It is also the first time I have ever created and used custom decals of my own devising in the form of the warning markings near the jetpack exhausts, which I painted freehand onto a sheet of Testors decal paper procured from a local scale model hobby store. The only freehand markings painted directly on the battlesuits themselves were the ID numbers on the shoulders and the red unit markings on the Shas'Vre.

The paint scheme of course is as close as possible to the colour scheme of the original GW studio Tau army scheme, with the sole exception being the helmet colouring. Back in 2010 when I was first starting to seriously explore the idea of battlesuit units in the army I came up with the bright idea of colour coding my battlesuit teams based on intended mission role. The idea stuck fast, not least because it would give me a chance to play around with some different colours while still keeping the overall army scheme intact. The practice has been applied to all my battlesuits since then, including these ones. Gold Team here is to be one of my general purpose combat units, with no particular specialisation in mind and thus they have no special helmet colour, just the base maroon markings that will be common to all my new armoured units (incidentally also their first appearance in the army). The 'Gold' designation is simply a close approximation to the main colour and sounds a lot more impressive than 'Sandy Coloured Ochre Team'.

That said, there is by a somewhat uncanny coincidence a very poetic Full Circle with this paint scheme, as it is ultimately the direct application of the very first ever colour scheme I wanted to paint a battlesuit in. Long ago when I was getting into the Tau and Warhammer 40,000 for the first time I was enthralled by the cool desert camouflage the 'Evy Metal studio Tau were painted in (in no small part because it was what the Firewarrior artwork was based on), but I was somewhat baffled by the odd-looking 'bald' white headpieces that the battlesuits had been painted in, which did not really look quite right to me at the time. I instead wanted to paint mine in the same desert camouflage scheme, but with ochre coloured headpieces which would fit much better visually in my eyes. This resulted in a very interesting exchange between me the schoolyard chum who had also gotten into 40k alongside me, when one day I brought up my desire to paint the heads of my battlesuits Vomit Brown in the middle of my excited talk about my new Crisis battlesuit.

"What! No, you can't do that! You have to paint it how it is on the box!"

"The Games Workshop staff person said I could paint them however I wanted."

"But not when there's an 'Evy Metal on the back of the box, then you have to paint it that way!"

"Not if I don't want to."

"Yes you do! That would be like me painting my Space Marines red!"

"But there are red Space Marines. I've seen them myself."

"Look, trust me, I'm trying to help you here. Do you know what's going to happen if you paint it Vomit Brown, and bring it into a Games Workshop store? They'll all go 'Eeeww, did someone vomit on your battlesuit?'!"

Needless to say I felt thoroughly vindicated upon reading all the passages in the rulebooks and codexes about how you should paint your army in whatever colours you like. And before you judge that schoolyard colleague too harshly, do remember that he too was only 8 years old or so at the time and just as new to the tabletop hobby as I was. And the colour guides on the back of the model boxes did hold a lot of sway over us at the time, to the point where even I eventually caved to their guidelines and painted my battlesuit heads white, as you can see in the pictures earlier.

After all that, I like to think I've done my 8 year old self proud with these Crisis battlesuits. But now my forces have grown so large that they now stretch the current command structure to the limits of its capacity. If I am to proceed any further I will need to significantly expand the leadership and command and control of my new Tau army.

Perhaps I can find more use for that battlesuit hangar...

--XV8-Battlesuit-status: active--

--Ident passcode accepted. Welcome back, Shas'O Da'Anuk--

--Fusion reactor: online--

--Auxiliary systems: online--

--Sensors: online--

--Communications: online--

--Jetpack and maneuvering jets: online--

--Command and control systems: online. Synching with main command data network--

--Weapon - plasma rifle - input received. Status: online--

--Weapon - fusion blaster - input received. Status: online--

--Weapon - missile pod - input received. Status: online--

--Running final systems check. All systems online and functioning optimally. Tau'va--

Here he is, Shas'O'T'au Kais'ka'Eoro'Da'Anuk, Commander Kakapo (or Commander Nightwing if anyone from the Imperium is asking) himself, in the flesh.


For much of my time with 40k my Tau army did not really have a commander as such. Partially this was due to the HQ section being by a fair margin the least crowded and interesting part of the Tau army. In an army of giant hover tanks bristling with laser-guided cruise missiles and electromagnetic death cannons, power-armoured commandos with invisibility devices and tooled-up infantry troops with badass-looking helmets, it can be hard to get excited over.. a Crisis Suit with a better stat-line and the extraterrestrial love-child of Gandalf and Jacinda Ardern. Don't get me wrong here, the love-child of Gandalf and Jacinda Ardern is a really cool concept that I am 100% down for, but it just lacks a certain visceral cinematic oomph that the giant hover tanks and invisibility commandos possess in abundance.


But mostly it was because for a very long time I just did not get the HQ section in Warhammer 40,000 on a fundamental level. Before getting into Tabletop games my main experience with strategy battles was from RTS computer games, especially Starcraft and especially the various games in the Command & Conquer franchise, all of which put me the commander as a faceless amorphous god-like presence directing the battle from an omniscient vantage point far far away from the actual fighting. Whenever games like Starcraft handed me a special unique character unit, I would invariably leave them safely tucked into an out-of-the-way corner of my impregnable stronghold surrounded by a sea of defensive weapon emplacements while the actual combat was carried out entirely by wave after wave of regular troops.


Given that tabletop wargames like Warhammer 40,000 appeared to be equivalent to analogue RTS video games to my 8 year old self, the logical conclusion I came to was that when playing this new 40k thing I would continue to be an invisible god-like presence commanding my little metal minions from somewhere else far far away from the battlefield on the tabletop. After all, it's a sci-fi game set in the future. The future has technology. In a world with long-range real time communications technology, why would you ever put the army's commander in harm's way when they can direct everything from a nice safe reinforced underground bunker thousands of kilometres away from the dangerous fighting?


Before you comment with a lecture on how real-life military command and control structures work and how the kinds of high-end commanders directing everything from a reinforced underground bunker thousands of kilometres away from the battlefield are at a higher tier of the chain of command than what most 40k HQ units are actually modeling, remember that I was 8 years old at the time. Present Day Adult Me understands the difference between a Colonel directing a battalion on the ground and a Field Marshal directing a Front from a command centre where they can see the big picture across the entire theatre. 8-year-old Me Raised On C&C did not, and it honestly would have gone straight over my head if you had tried explaining it to me.


Anyway, the upshot of this is that for a very long time I just could not fully understand the point of the HQ section in 40k armies, outside of Tyranids where it made perfect sense for the Hive Tyrant as a big final boss Hive Queen monster, and as a hypothetical place for lone special forces operatives with a gun that killed infantry instantly but did nothing to vehicles and hand-placed bombs that blew up buildings instantly (Command & Conquer background remember). And named Hero units that sit in the corner while the rest of the army fights because I lose the level if they die. The idea that they actually represented me as a player character in the universe was a completely alien concept.


This meant that for some years my Tau army just did not have an HQ unit of any kind at all. When I finally did add one it was mostly because the game rules forced me to, and I went with an Ethereal because by this point my No Battlesuits policy had become a thing. That was how it was until around 2009 or so, when I noticed that the army rules in Codex: Tau Empire also forced me to take a Crisis Suit Commander. That finally drove me to go out and procure this guy:




This was the first Shas'O to lead the army, and was the first HQ unit that I ever put real serious effort into. Having purchased him in 2009 he came as part of the shiny new Crisis Suit Commander box, which also included a blister of shiny new metal Special Issue gubbins and variant heads. The alternate head pieces never really caught on with me, for various reasons (one was too big and the other was too knobbly), but the Special Issue gear was another matter entirely. I had loved the look of the awesome metal Special Issue guns from the moment I first saw them advertised in White Dwarf, and the Special Issue support systems weren't too far behind them. So they were immediately glued into place without hesitation. There was also an element of convenience at work here - I still hadn't fully comprehended the subtleties of Battlesuit equipment combinations yet, so just loading the Commander down with all of the Special Issue guns and support systems he could carry was an excellent eliminator of choice that let me side-step the whole question of how to outfit my new Battlesuit; just pick the shiny wild fun experimental guns and call it a day.


The only real question that remained was which fancy metal support system to go with, and I opted for the Command And Control Node largely because it was the only one that made sense to me. The tactics of Reserves were still too arcane for my primitive teenage brain to really grasp, and I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about a device that just sent information off the table, but an advanced AI-assisted transmission system that efficiently beamed my orders into a nice simple Leadership boost for everyone within 12" was much easier to comprehend. By the time I noticed that the Command And Control Node only affected Target Priority Tests which are not a thing in the 5th edition rules I was following at the time, it was already glued on and I did not really care too much. In the end it was a moot point anyway since there never ended up being anyone within 12" of the Commander in any of the three games I managed to play with the older army. But it was an AI-assisted communications system, and that's always going to be a handy thing for a commander to have regardless of what some stupid rulebook says.


I was once asked if I ever ran a Super Prototype battlesuit with every single Special Issue wargear option piled onto the one model, but the website where it was asked burned down, so I never got to answer them in time there. But to answer the question, no I never did, but I did come close. For all the games this guy was used he was loaded down with as many extra Special Issue wargear items as I could get away with not modeling. Irridium armour was the first addon thrown in, because hey awesome a 2+ armour save like the Terminators get and the different hue of sandy ochre could comfortably pass as a new formula of armour plates (it helped that my 2+ save native Broadsides also had the same colour), but I also ended up throwing in a Stimulant Injector too because a medical healing juice dispenser seemed like the sort of small discrete thing that could easily be tucked into the interior compartment of a battlesuit without leaving any sign on the outside, and the Feel No Pain rule was nice to have too. Everything else either ate up a support system hardpoint - and I was all out of those - or required some extensive converting and/or kitbashing that I did not feel confident about, and at the time I was cautious around invisible wargear items.







Aside from the weapons loadout, the first thing you might have noticed was the pose. When I was putting the model together I had the wild idea to model him literally walking off his base, a concept that I immediately thought was awesome and wild and meta and hadn't been done before and it was everything my brain had ever wanted to think about.


Now, this was about a year or two before we covered the concept of a centre of gravity in school, so at no point did it ever occur to me what sort of effect putting the bulk of the model away from the base would have on the model's balance and ability to stand upright. After all, this thing was mostly plastic, and plastic is really light right? How bad could it possibly be? Again, the fact that the model had two very heavy metal guns shifted even further forward never registered once with me. What did register was that it looked so cool and meta that the model was literally stepping off its base and straight into battle. It was almost like something out of Toy Story!


The result is evident from the pictures, and the model is incapable of standing upright on its own. There was a tactical rock - not a plastic one or anything, a real actual rock that I found outside - that was applied to the base as a counterweight and mostly solved the problem, but it was never permanently glued on and I have no idea where it went.







The other noteworthy thing about this model is that it is the first model I've documented on here that belongs to the White Period of my Tau army. In 2006 I went home from one of the local GW stores with my first ever White Dwarf magazine, Issue #313(AU) covering the release of the Dwarf army book for 6th edition Warhammer. But what it also featured was a showcase of Australian model hobbyist Sebastian Stuart's legendary Tau army, and that very quickly became the biggest influence on my own Tau project.


A lot of Sebastian's modeling techniques and conversions were beyond my means and hobby skills at the time, but one innovation that I readily adopted was the white undercoat. Sebastian's main Tau army (he has two) uses a colour scheme based off the GW Studio Tau army, and features a sandy ochre tone as its primary colour. Unlike the GW Studio Tau army, Sebastian's Tau were painted with a white undercoat rather than a black one, and the smooth even tone on the models impressed me so much that I immediately adopted a white undercoat for all my future Tau models.


At the time I was very pleased with the results, which produced a sandy ochre colour that was much less orange and much more sandy looking, which is what I wanted at the time, though doubtless the application of brand new Tausept Ochre Citadel Foundation paint helped there. It quickly became my new standard, which persisted all the way until 2011 when I started shifting back to black undercoats for my Battlefleet Gothic ships because it was easier to just drybrush white over black than it was to wash black over white and then drybrush white over that. After that I learnt how shading and highlighting colours actually worked, and went back to black undercoats for everything for organic shading so I could avoid using washes. This left my white undercoats in a similar place to swing-wings on aircraft - an ingenious solution to the engineering challenges of the time that worked well, but was ultimately left behind once simpler technological alternatives caught up.


Of course what did carry on was my scheme of colour-coded battlesuit accents. I came up with the concept of colour-coding my battlesuit teams based on battlefield role not long before I got this model, and it represents the first application of the scheme. Aside from some Broadsides that arrived shortly after this guy did, it was also the only application of the scheme until new Battlesuits started going into production in 2020.


This Commander served me well during the brushfire wars of 2010 that represent the only 3 games when my old Tau army was ever deployed in anger, and was still in command in 2013 when the identity of my Tau army finally began to take shape from participating in online forum RP threads, which gave the backstory process a much needed shot in the arm by forcing me to actually think about what kind of character the Commander I was RPing was. The RP threads in turn combined with the limited tabletop history I had (with some embellishments) and some personal life details to form the nucleus of Da'Anuk's identity as a Shas'O with a solid decent if unspectacular performance record relegated to backwater postings along with his cadre after a particularly gruesome defeat, only to end up in the right place at the right time to serve with distinction in a key victory that put him and his forces back on the map just as the 3rd Sphere kicked off, getting his cadre rebuilt with Guards status and sent into a new wave of expansion and adventure that continues to the present.


It is that era that is reflected in this new model.









There are a lot of changes that have been done for this new incarnation of Da'Anuk. Perhaps the most immediately obvious one is that he now has some friends. In the past I never really bothered with Bodyguard teams, partially because of my generally cold attitude towards battlesuits on principle but also because for a long time I was very strongly influenced by online tactica articles about 40k. Now, the thing about online tactica articles for all tabletop wargames is that apart from a few exceptions the vast overwhelming majority of them are written by sour prudes who hate fun, which in the case of the ones for Tau in 40k meant that Bodyguard teams were usually dismissed as not worth it because of their points cost. But at the time I did not know that the tactica articles I was reading were written by fun-hating sour prudes, and points costs were something I never paid any attention to even when they were being talked about, so I tragically assumed that Bodyguard teams should be avoided because they were just not useful or interesting.


This changed after 2013 or so when I began to grow more aware of just how much the online Warhammer community is systemically populated by Roald Dahl Children's Book Authority Figures, and how much those RDCBAFs colour and influence the content of a lot of online tacticas, and consequently began to filter them out and start thinking more about the stuff I wanted to take rather than what the internet wanted me to take. This lead me to radically reevaluate the value of a Bodyguard team, because two badass right-hand warriors watching out for danger as personal guards is awesome, and by this point I was starting to get a little envious of the colourful diverse command squads everyone else got to take for their HQ commanders and a Command Team of a Shas'O, some bodyguards and a couple of drones felt like a nice equivalent.


So when the time came I gleefully put together a pair of bodyguards that would accompany my shiny new commander in the vast bulk of games going forward. Ko'Ta'Kir is the senior of the two, being Da'Anuk's right hand XO and the team leader of the bodyguard detail. It was only just last year that I actually noticed the "One bodyguard may be upgraded to a bodyguard team leader for +15 points" part of the unit entry that I can recall with Mandela Effect precision was never actually written, but I went ahead with painting one up as the team leader and XO anyway, complete with a set of green ID stripes to make it harder for marksmen to single out the real commander, and to let her act on the table as an independent Shas'el if necessary. She is also a Freebie, being built from a lone XV8 sprue I got as part of a giffle prize one year, making her an unofficial leader of the Free Company element of the army. O'ran'Nars, the other bodyguard, is just a regular Crisis Suit box I purchased the hard way, but he was also to my knowledge one of the last single Crisis Suit boxes sold.







The bodyguards are shown in their planned default loadout (though like the other Crisis Suits their hardpoints are magnetised), first devised around 2014. The original plan for the weapons load was as a foil to Da'Anuk's suite of Special Issue gear. While the commander ran around with all the fancy experimental guns, his bodyguards would sport a grounded sensible package of proven reliable weaponry to take down any threats to their charge. That meant fusion blasters for knocking out tanks (and big gribblies), plasma rifles for frying power armour, and missile pods because that was the other most practical and reliable 'gun' available, and Da'Anuk's airbursting fragmentation launcher was deemed enough for dealing with swarms of light infantry so flamers were unnecessary (I was also feeling a little insecure about the level of medium range firepower at my disposal).


Then I pivoted completely towards using Codex: Tau almost exclusively, and needed to come up with an alternative loadout for the commander that did not make use of stuff invented for Codex: Tau Empire. Thinking about it, the Shas'O has Ballistic Skill 5, which is very good. That meant I needed to make the most of it, which in turn meant:


- I definitely wanted a missile pod. That BS 5 is just too good not to use for long-distance shooting.


- I also definitely wanted a fusion blaster. That BS 5 is just too good not to use for reliably knocking out big targets.


- But what about close-range shooting at infantry? That BS 5 is just too good not to use for reliably hitting with an AP2 plasma rifle to pick off Space Marines.


So it was decided. For games using Codex: Tau my Commander would sport a missile pod, a fusion blaster and a plasma ri- wait a minute...


As well as accidentally replicating the same weapons load as the bodyguards I also looked through Imperial Armour Volume 3 and noticed that I had also accidentally replicated the exact same weapons load used by Crisis Teams in Epic. And that was all the sign I needed to run with it.







As well as a pair of bodyguards, Da'Anuk has also picked up a pair of shiny new Shield Drones, which represent the first fully metal components to appear in the army with their gloriously pointy shield generators and supersized aerials. The one on the right, 042, is also technically one of the first 40k models I ever owned, being built with the metal Shield Drone parts that came with the Stealthsuit Shas'Vre I got on my first ever GW visit when I was 8 (mated here to a stray giffle prize drone chassis). Like the commander they're assigned to, they feature advanced green optics instead of the standard red optics used by the rank and file, a feature to mark them out as specifically part of this unit along with their green ID sept markings. "You remember when I said I was going to make all this army's drones one communal pool? Aye Laihd!"







Da'Anuk himself has also had a few modeling upgrades. The posing problem has been fixed, using the simple workaroud of switching from 'model walking off the base' to 'model walking onto the base', which is only slightly less cool and meta while being much more stable. The arms have also been pointed upwards to keep the model's centre of gravity as central as possible when heavy weapon components are fitted - it occurred to me that keeping them pointed downward would have probably kept the centre of gravity central and closer to the base, but I also wanted a bit more of a break from the older pose and the upwards arms look more dynamic and less simian.


His Crisis Suit is also different to the rest of those in the army thus far, because it is a different make - where all the other battlesuits so far have been 2006 resculpts, this one was a 2001 original sculpt. Having decided I wanted as authentic a 3rd edition model as I could get for the Shas'O, I looked around and was fortunate enough to find a 2001 era Crisis Suit box going on eBay for a reasonable price (by eBay standards at least). The box turned out to be rather squashed, but the models within it were in great shape, and I was amazed to discover just how much of a glow-up the 2001 sculpt is over the later versions. Compared to the 2006 version, there are a few areas that are more detailed - most notably the ankles, which are less defined on the 2006 version in return for also being less fragile - and crucially the 2001 sculpt features much higher casting quality, with more seamless joins between parts and none of the 'pits' of sunken plastic that appear around the neck and jetpack hardpoints on the 2006 models and are notoriously irritating to fill in with greenstuff.


But most dramatic of all is that he now has a choice of battlesuit head. Ever since I first got into the Tau I have always loved and admired the more symmetrical head antennae that the Farsight model has, even when I never really got that into Farsight the character, and for many years I longed to have a commander model with the same aerials, but without the Farsight Enclave logos, because for many years I was never fully comfortable with the asymmetry of the regular Crisis Suit head aerials. A couple of years ago I received a box of (mostly) Tau bitz as a reward for helping my friend out with a school fair stall they were running, and among the bitz contained were a set of metal Farsight model pieces including the two head aerials and the shield generator - only the Dawn Blade arm was missing. There was also a spare 2001 vintage Crisis Suit head. Since there was not enough pieces to make a complete Farsight model using a spare battlesuit kit, I decided it was a good chance to realise my childhood dream of a Tau commander with (almost) symmetrical head aerials. The catch however was that by this time the regular asymmetric aerials had grown on me and I now actually liked them a lot too, especially their mounting hubs that were more discrete than the giant earmuff-like disks the Farsight aerials sprouted from. So in classic Kakapo fashion I of course deadlocked on the decision and painted both head variants up, leaving them pinned to plug into the battlesuit body as I see fit. The Enclave logos were paved over with greenstuff and PVA glue in the process to produce a more Empire loyal look.


Speaking of pins, unlike all the other Crisis Suits Da'Anuk's hardpoints are pinned rather than magnetised. This is so that they can accommodate the weight of big heavy metal components like these.









While I am largely committed to using Codex: Tau in games wherever humanly possible, I ended up with a few metal special issue guns in a bitz bundle I received a few years back so two of them got painted up along with some special issue support systems, at the insistence of the Old Guard generals who argued that you never quite know when you might be in need of an AI-guided cluster bomb launcher or a quick-firing particle beam and demanded that the new commander model retain full special issue wargear compatibility before they agreed to lobby for funding for it. There is also a considerable chance I may end up putting them to use in the occasional game of late 4th edition 40k, because I am aware of at least one friend who is almost as passionate about the 4th edition Tyranid codex as I am about the 3rd edition Tau one, and since I have very few serious reservations about later 4th edition I am perfectly happy to oblige any taste for games with the 4th edition Tyranid book by pairing it against its natural 4th edition Tau adversary.


This also meant that the Positional Relay I got with the first commander also finally received a coat of paint, because now I am Smort enough to know how 40k Reserves work and why it is valuable to always be able to have the Reserve you want most available on a 2+. But I also painted up a spare Command And Control Node too (again, the Old Guard generals demanded it), allowing me to completely replicate the old commander loadout if I wish.








Even the base has had an overhaul. From the start of this revamp I knew I wanted a nice chunk of opposing wreckage on the base, and the bitz bags I had won at GW holiday events left me 3 choices. The first was the frontal plate of a Blood Angels Dreadnought - this was very tempting, but in the end I decided to save it for later use as an objective. The second was half a Carnifex head, which very nearly ended up going on the base because Tyranids do feature quite prominently in the army's backstory where their first major victory after being rebuilt was against Tyranids in a big cityfight, but I ultimately opted against it because it was from the newer Ballfex design and I like my Tyranids to be of the more menacing 3rd edition 2001 flavour. The final option was what I believe is the face plate from an Ork walker - now this had potential! The haphazard nature of Ork stuff means that parts from later models can often pass for 2000s items without too much trouble, Orks also feature prominently in this army's backstory (not least through the Wurrshuv's Revenge campaign from Advanced Tau Tactica) and most imporantly of all my main two prospective opponents for 3rd edition 40k games both have Ork armies. Conveniently, they also both have Ork armies that feature a lot of yellow, so deciding on a colour scheme for the debris was easy too, so I dutifully painted it up in dark metal and bright yellow and then attacked it with brown, grey and black drybrushes to create a scorched burn effect that I am utterly delighted with.


All in all, this leaves me in a very exciting place. The most exciting part is that I no longer have to paint any more Battlesuits! Not for a long, long, long time at least. There will be more in the future, but the infernal things are such a massive drain on my time and joy that they have now plummeted straight to the bottom of my painting que, past even horses. This is unlikely to make painting them any less of a chore, but it will ensure that I at least have a bunch of interesting stuff to play games with in the mean time.


And on that note, it also leaves me with not just my first 1000 points of new Tau army, but in fact my first 1100 points.

HQ

Shas'O'T'au Kais'Ka'Eoro'Da'Anuk: Shas'O in XV8 Crisis Battlesuit with plasma rifle, missile pod, fusion blaster, hard-wired multi-tracker, hard-wired blacksun filter, hard-wired drone controller and 2 Shield Drones - 162 pts

Green Team: 2 Shas'vre Bodyguards in XV8 Crisis Battlesuits with hard-wired target lock, plasma rifle, fusion blaster and missile pod, Bonded - 188 pts

Elites

Gold Team: Shas'vre in XV8 Crisis Battlesuit with hard-wired blacksun filter, plasma rifle, fusion blaster and missile pod, 2 Shas'ui in XV8 Crisis Battlesuits with flamer, plasma rifle and fusion blaster, Bonded - 223 pts

Troops

Fire Warrior Team Kais: Shas'ui with pulse rifle, markerlight, hard-wired multi-tracker, photon grenades and EMP grenades, 4 Shas'la with pulse carbines, photon grenades and EMP grenades, 7 Shas'la with pulse rifles, photon grenades and EMP grenades, Bonded - 205 pts

Fire Warrior Team Lar: Shas'ui with pulse carbine, markerlight, hard-wired multi-tracker, photon grenades and EMP grenades, 2 Shas'la with pulse carbines, photon grenades and EMP grenades, 9 Shas'la with pulse rifles, photon grenades and EMP grenades, Bonded - 205 pts

Fast Attack

Gun Drone Squadron: 8 Gun Drones - 96 pts

Provisions

Laura's Roadside Inn Breakfast Order: 15 Big Kiwi Breakfasts, 15 Vegan Hash Brown Feasts, 30 Tropical Delight Smoothies - 10 pts

Golden Bakery Special Order: 15 Sausage Rolls, 15 Vegetable Pies, 5 Red Powerade bottles, 5 Blue Powerade bottles, 5 Mango Green G-Force bottles, 20 1.5 Litre Pump water bottles - 4 pts

King Coral Takeaways Special Order: 2 $40 Fish and Chip specials with extra crabsticks and extra potato fritters, 1 $30 Fish and Chip special with extra crabsticks and extra potato fritters, 4 1.5 litre bottles of Vanilla Coke, 4 1.5 litre bottles of Coca-Cola, 5 1.5 litre bottles of L&P, 5 Lime Thick Boy Shakes, 5 Strawberry Thick Boy Shakes, 5 Vanilla Thick Boy Shakes - 6 pts

Lone Star Dairy Purchase: 30 Large Chocolate Fish, 5 Strawberry Coconut Shakes, 5 Lime Coconut Shakes, 5 Passionfruit Coconut Shakes - 1 pt

TOTAL: 1,079 pts

It is also conveniently exactly the full transport complement of a single Orca Dropship (except for the 2 Sheild Drones, but they can be strapped down where the Ethereal normally sits).




Having looked through the archived files of the very first photos I ever took as a kid (using the family's very first ever digital camera no less), tragically few group shots of the old army have survived to the present. I have very vivid memories of taking an earlier one, but this one here is the oldest group shot I can find.





According to the image tags, this picture was taken in early 2006, when I was 11, after I had been working on the Tau army for 4 years.


And now, here are their successors, 17 years later.





Now my army has a solid core of troops, first rate leadership, and wide range of units and weapons including infantry and jump infantry. With the main command and control structure in place it is time to start requisitioning some heavy equipment and get to grips with how the vehicle rules in 40k work...

We will ride into battle, and this shall be our steed...



For as long as I can remember, I have always been an enormous, raging, Jet-head.

It could be genetic - one of my grandfathers flew F4U fighter planes in the pacific during the Second World War, and I believe one of my uncles had a career in the air force. Or it could just be regular cishet boy interests at work.

Whatever the reason may be, out of all the various forms of machinery that made my brain go Brrrr, the ones that made it Brrrr hardest by far were the aerospace vehicles. Planes, zeppelins, helicopters, spacecraft - if it moved under its own power without touching the ground, chances are I was into it. Like a lot of cishet boys I went through a very long phase of daydreaming about flying fighter jets, and a real fully functioning SU-34 fighter bomber was very high up in my Top 10 Crazy Things To Splurge On If I Ever Became A Billionaire until a couple of years ago when I remembered how vulnerable my eardrums were to rapid pressure changes. And even now that same list still has a fully functioning Krokodil assault gunship in the top 5 since helicopters don't fly high enough to implode my eardrums.

And my heart always flutters a little when hearing the distinctive Whoooooorrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaash of a passing fighter jet.


Naturally this also meant a key fixture of my childhood was the Supermarionation series Thunderbirds, which was all about thrilling aviation adventures and where the futuristic aerospace vehicles featured were almost more the central characters than the actual characters themselves. I was right in the middle of the 1990s Thunderbirds revival and oh boy did it leave an impression on me.

So too of course did a whole lot of other science fiction shows featuring all kinds of spectacular flying machines.


It is little wonder then, that when I ended up discovering Warhammer 40,000 I was immediately sucked into the premiere Jet-head faction of 40k bar none. Between the Hammerhead and Devilfish hover tanks, the Barracuda and Tiger Shark aircraft and the Manta Missile Destroyer, the centrepiece and crown jewel of the Tau model range has always been their awe-inspiring vehicles.


And from the moment I first saw them showcased on the GW website, I knew I had to get me as many as possible.


Because of this the history of vehicles in my 40k projects goes back a long way, but today we'll be focusing on the history of my Devilfishes specifically. And that starts with my first one, affectionately known today as 'Old Ginger'.





Old Ginger was actually the second 40k vehicle I ever got - we'll get to the first one later. I no longer remember exactly how old I was when I got it, but historical evidence would place it as a present for either my 9th or 10th birthday, as I remember I had I Believe In A Thing Called Love by The Darkness stuck in my head that day so it can't have been earlier than 2003.

In any case, by the time I got around to painting her I had largely moved past my experimental painting stage and had settled back into a primitive facsimile of the T'au sept desert camouflage used by the GW studio army as a standard paint scheme. The major difference, as you may have spotted, being to paint the cockpit vision block green instead of red. My general vision for the scheme was 'just like the GW studio army, but with green windows on the tanks instead of red' for no other reason than that green is my favourite colour, so I wanted the red parts of the vehicles to be green instead. The panels could stay maroon, but the cockpit window had to be green, which was one of the two points of improvement I had for the GW studio scheme (the other being to ditch the bald white helmets on the team leaders). This is the ultimate origin to the green optics used on the commanders of the modernised Tau army.



Being an attempt to replicate the studio GW Tau scheme, Old Ginger was painted following the guide in Codex: Tau. Of course, being only 9 or 10 and not quite able to fully comprehend how layering and highlighting worked, the results were restricted by my own primitive painting skills, though by the standards of the time it was fairly impressive and I still have a bit of a soft spot for the old girl today.





Being the first transport model I ever had, this was also my first ever vehicle with an actual interior. As with the gun drones and crisis suit that were contemporaries, I tried to keep glued parts to a minimum and left the engines, top cupola, chin turret and of course the gun drones all unglued and fully articulated. The interior was again extremely crude, just being given a black undercoat and left at that. This was because by this time I had some experience with the Devilfish that was part of the store Tau collection at the local Games Workshop (which was also painted in T'au desert camouflage but naturally to much better accuracy than my own attempts), and that one just had a plain black interior. Since I had no real points of reference or bolts of inspiration, I decided that following suite was the best way to go.





Being the only Devilfish I owned for some years meant Old Ginger was quickly assigned to transport my nascent Pathfinder team, a role in which she served faithfully for 20 years - including the only two times she ever fired her burst cannon in anger - and due to the timetable and priorities set by the defence ministry is expected to continue serving in that role well into the 2030s at least, albeit strictly in second-line roles among reservist units, popular mobilisation units and border guards.



The task of transporting Fire Warrior teams was ultimately performed by my next transport, this one.



This Devilfish was painted when I was a teenager, it would have been around 2007. It belongs to the 2nd Generation of models from my first Tau army, in particular a family of vehicles that represented a massive step up in painting at the time. It may not look like much today, but back when I was around 13-14 just getting the colours in more or less the right places and having mostly distinct panel lines at all was a big achievement.



Also of note is my first serious attempts at jeweling on the cockpit vision block and the chin turret sensor. Of course at the time I still didn't quite get how layers worked in model painting, so it mostly just ended up being a flat coat of colour with a dot of white in the corner, because the white dot reflection was something that even at an early age I could recognise and fundamentally understand as a key part of the process.



The colour scheme itself also changed during this time period, because by this time I had gotten my first ever White Dwarf magazine, issue #313 (AU). This issue of course featured a major article on the legendary Tau army of Sebastian Stuart, and was a massive influence on me for many years. This Devilfish was an attempt to take some of my favourite features of Sebastian's colour scheme and mate them to the GW studio scheme so as to blend in with the rest of my models. Most notably the use of a white undercoat and Vermin Brown accent panels on the dorsal spine were both taken directly from Sebastian's colour scheme. On the other hand, the two-tone camouflage is gone here as by this stage I had given up on trying to recreate the iconic Crows' Feet pattern from the GW studio army.



Of course, Sebastian's Devilfish also featured several conversions, most notably fully articulated side doors...



.... so naturally I HAD to incorporate that improvement into my own transports!



The process was fairly straightforward in itself - all it really requires is drilling out the bottom hinge joint and sticking a pin through it to turn it from a purely decorative hinge into an actually functioning one. The biggest complication at the time was that I had none of the necessary tools for doing that, so the process was carried out by my father (who did have suitable tools) under my supervision.



This Devilfish also featured a much more elaborately decorated interior than the first, the better to show off through the now movable side doors. Again this largely followed the lead of Sebastian's transports, with the white interior being a knock-off of his bone cream interiors and some Fire Warrior accessories in imitation of the kit he had stowed inside. There were twists however, with a spare grenade pack on one of the seats substituting for the spare helmet in Seb's because the process of creating a loose Fire Warrior helmet involved sharp cutting tools and filing that was well beyond my resources and skills at the time, and a pulse carbine stowed in the gun rack instead of Seb's stowed pulse rifle because at this stage spare pulse rifle bits were in short supply for me but I had an abundance of spare loose pulse carbines.



The seats were my own original addition, painted in the same ochre as the hull to try and introduce some colour into what would otherwise be a very monochromatic interior, and topped with Vermin Brown leather upholstery for style and comfort.



Sebastian's conversion guide called for installing magnets in the side doors to keep them secured when closed, but magnetising models was largely an unknown science to me when I was 13 - 14 or so, and there were no known magnet suppliers near me at any rate, so instead I improvised and simply used wads of blue-tack to keep the doors closed, which in hindsight did not blend into the white threshold nearly as well as I thought it did at the time.



This machine too was around for the 2-3 games of 5th edition 40k that represent the only time thus far my original Tau were ever used in direct combat, assigned to one of my Fire Warrior teams where it displayed acceptable if not spectacular performance - I no longer remember if it ever did anything truly amazing in any of the games, but it certainly wasn't a complete waste of resources either.





Now, here's where the plot starts to thicken. At around the time of my Tau army's tabletop debut in 2010, I was working on a sister ship for this Devilfish, which would have completely mechanised my Tau. This model got as far as to have its interior painted and its exterior undercoated....




... and never went anywhere after that.




What happened was that I still wanted the side doors to be articulated, but I still lacked the tools and know-how necessary to pin them on my own, and I no longer wanted to bother my parents about it so I decided to just leave it until I could perform the conversion unassisted. That ended up taking about three years, and by the time I had my own pin vice capable of handling such precision drilling it was 2013 and my hobby focus was dominated by Battlefleet Gothic and Warhammer, leaving the 40k side of things to fall behind.



This model is entirely unique in that it represents the first and only use of a brand new technology - airbrushing. In 2008 GW released a Citadel brand airbrush modeled in the shape of a 40k hand flamer, and while I wasn't really fully able to appreciate the shout-out I was motivated to get one because the White Dwarf showcasing it happened to use a Tau tank hull as a demonstration model and emphasised how easy it made getting a smooth colour on Tau tanks. And since smooth coverage of the skimmer hulls is the holy grail of Tau painters, I was very intrigued.



The Citadel Airbrush I ended up getting however proved to be less reliable than advertised. I got through about two or three coats on the front of the model before its inner workings glued themselves shut forever and refused to work, and the whole experience ended up souring me on the whole concept of airbrushing to this day. Fortunately my skills at hand brushing models ended up maturing to a level that made it largely unnecessary.





While the model's exterior was left on hold until the side doors could be pinned, I did work on the interior in the meantime. By this time I had largely given up on trying to break up the monochrome white and settled for plain white seats - though still with the same Vermin Brown leather upholstery because I value my troops enough to make sure they get whatever small comforts I can give them. There was plans to add stowage too, but they never materialised before the whole project was mothballed.

On the other hand I did end up putting in some transfers to liven the interior up a little bit. Despite having been a Tau enthusiast for almost a decade by this point, I had very little understanding of the difference between Tau letters and numbers, so at the time I assumed the transfers I was putting on were slogans and information labels like the ones featured in the Tau ship areas in Firewarrior. It was not until much much later that I discovered I had in fact covered the interior rather nonsensically in registration ID numbers.





The sides of the hull were left unpainted on the outside in anticipation of the hinge brackets being drilled, but I did eventually get to painting the side doors under the reasoning that they were easy enough to manipulate while separate pieces that they could probably be painted and then drilled without too much difficulty.







And that was how the Devilfish was left for over a decade, languishing in a half-forgotten cache of models, bitz and various hobby supplies while I focused on Tau starships and Wood Elves. It was not until 2018 that I remembered it was there and, seeing a perfect opportunity to give my new rebooted Tau army a 'free' transport vehicle, I resolved to turn it into the first new vehicle for my new Tau with a deep, deep, deep modernisation program.

The refit work began last year after I had finished the command team for my rebooted Tau. I started by carefully stripping off the outer hull with Simple Green. Normally I am deeply uneasy about paint stripping, being loathe to erase a piece of history and someone else's hard work, but plain undercoat primers are an exception and this was my own painting at any rate, and trying to work with the very thick caked up undercoat my 14 year old self had applied seemed like a bridge too far.

That said I did determine that the interior was worth salvaging, so I avoided stripping that while carefully taking the paint off the outside by using a system of jury-rigged scaffolding to keep the Devilfish hull suspended above the pool of Simple Green, with just one surface dipping into the liquid at a time. This was largely ineffective at keeping the Simple Green out of the interior, as the troop compartment got flooded through the flight stand hole in the floor and the cupola hole in the roof multiple times, but it was successful at preserving the interior paint job, which was left relatively intact with no serious solvent damage. Though it does even now still have a sharp citric cleaning freshener smell inside...

With the white undercoat taken off, the upgrade work could begin, and this Devilfish, the missing link between my old Tau army and my new one, was REBORN.











I can only pray I have made Xzibit proud.

This new Devilfish was unsurprisingly painted up following the exact process outlined in Codex: Tau, with a level of fidelity that my 10 year old self could only dream of. In particular this is the first success I've had in implementing the iconic Crows' Feet camouflage pattern featured on the GW studio tau army's vehicles.

It wasn't easy of course. The size of the model meant that it was a massive slog to get painted, but crucially it was noticeably much less of a slog than those damned battlesuits. Much of this was due to this model being big and vehicular enough to attack with a tank brush for basecoating, and big and smooth enough to be attacked with a makeup blush brush for highlighting (another tip gleaned from Sebastian Stuart). This meant a lot of rapid progress for a lot of the larger open areas of the model that mostly bogged down around the clusters of greebles scattered over the model - the landing gear in particular were especially troublesome.

The chin turret was also a major headache due to the friction caused by having such a snug fit. Ideally this piece should really have been painted separately and rigged up to be detachable for both upkeep and to model Weapon Destroyed damage results, but 14 year old me was not that smart.

The largest problem by far however was clearcoating the beast. Some application of an improperly mixed varnish ended up causing huge swathes of the model's recesses to fog over with this disgusting crusty white residue, which then plagued me for many days as it just would not stay gone, returning paint touchup after paint touchup no matter what I tried. I thought I had solved the problem at last with many many touchups followed by a coat of pure varnish, but even now it seems to be starting to creep back in. It seems that this particular TX-6 is cursed to live an ignominious career as a tyrannical hangar queen.


But then that's just how the march of technology goes sometimes.




The rear of the machine shows off one of the many firsts for a 40k vehicle I've painted - a full set of engine glows. These were done using the same rough colour scheme as the engine glows on my Tau ships for Battlefleet Gothic, building up from red to yellow to orange to white in the centre of the thruster. The main difference was in a more detailed range of colour shades to fit the larger scale of Warhammer 40,000 models, as well as a white undercoat to compensate for the colours being drybrushed rather than simply layered.

The orange engine glows also mark the first decisive action in my WAR AGAINST BLUE GLOWS. They were fine in Firewarrior, and they were OK in District 9, but then after that every single goddamn sci fi movie has just made every glow and explosion electric blue and after 15 years of it I just can't take it anymore. ESPECIALLY with Tau since every last Tau player and artist seems to only ever give Tau stuff blue glows everywhere because of Dawn Of War, and it just feels so lazy and it looks so monotonous and I'm so so tired of seeing them everywhere.

So in my new Tau army there's not going to be a single blue glow. Anywhere. At all.

Starting with the engines on this Devilfish.



The other notable feature on the rear of the Devilfish are the rear-facing sensor clusters at the bottom, which have been painted up in multiple colours as a throwback to the rainbow lights on my older vehicles, with a little uniformity added in - the main lenses are red and green, which is a recurring colour motif throughout the army and taken directly from Codex: Tau and Firewarrior, while the smaller lenses are asymmetrically coloured to add a splash of visual spice.



The underside showcases what is perhaps the most dramatic new addition over the previous models, a massive increase in firepower from a set of magnetic hardpoints for a full payload of seeker missiles. It was always my plan to eventually equip all the Devilfish of my Tau army with the maximum number of seeker missiles they can carry. This is rooted in my longstanding doctrine of ensuring that every single unit in my armies is equipped with anti-tank capability as well as anti-personnel weaponry, to ensure they can defeat any threat they encounter. And also because as I've mentioned before I had a strict policy of no battlesuits so I needed something to cover the middle ground between pulse guns and railguns. More recently discovering the Soviet army practice of ensuring every single unit had some way of hurting tanks only vindicated this approach. Besides, it's just not a proper infantry combat vehicle without a good anti-tank missile launcher bolted on.

Much consideration was made to the placement of the seeker missiles, a question that my engineers have wrestled with for decades. At one point over-wing mounts on the top of the prow were considered. So too were a cupola mount, and sticking them on the engine mounts or on the top or underside of the engines themselves. In the end, I settled on a conventional under-wing configuration on the prow, which was simple and made plenty of sense from a design point of view. But this then raised the question of how to fit four seeker missiles under the prow of the Devilfish, which was not a lot of space to fit four big honking cruise missiles. My first plan was to take some inspiration from real life Raketnosets and opt for an interleaved stack of missiles clustered around the central keel in a similar manner to the TU-95K-22 missile carriage.



But then I discovered that the weapon stations on the tips of the prow wings were actually smaller than I first thought and it was possible to stick a big cruise missile right next to them without getting in the way of any gun drone docked there. This made the overlapping layout unnecessary, provided two missiles were kept right next to the central keel.

The missiles themselves are taken from the Skyray, because the Hammerhead kits these days come with a Skyray sprue, and since I plan to build more Hammerheads than Skyrays I have a surplus of Skyray seeker missiles, which is great because I need a lot of seeker missiles, and each Skyray sprue gives me six of them which is five more than the lone seeker missile on the Tau vehicle accessory sprue, and Forgeworld no longer sells booster packs of seeker missiles.

They have been slightly modified with the addition of missile pylons modeled on directly, which in the case of the central two is necessary to give them enough clearance over the central keel, and provides enough area for sticking down a pair of magnetic metal pins so they'll stick to the magnets embedded in the prow. There are also a number of magnetic hardpoints installed around the top of the hull so that the Devilfish can be fitted with specialised mission equipment in the future.

The other notable feature on the underside is the prominent anti-gravity arrays on the prow, picked out in gold as both a shoutout to my first vehicle model and to tie in with the gold anti-gravity gyros on the infantry and battlesuits.



Like her predecessor, this new Devilfish also features fully articulated side doors, this time secured with paired sets of magnets. The hinge installation did not go smoothly, as my wonky depth perception and spatial awareness meant the shafts drilled through the hinge pieces were not completely level, making the resulting axis of movement for the door awkward. In the end I had to destroy the hinge brackets in order to save them, with the remains being assimilated into the greenstuff fairings added to accommodate the pins.





The doors in turn open to a completely refurbished interior.



The interior itself is mostly the same configuration it was first painted in, just updated to my latest painting standards. The white areas were enhanced by using the same method I once used to improve my first ever Battlefleet Gothic spaceship, and involved something I have only ever used twice including here - ink washes. Like my first Explorer class starship, I applied a liberal wash of very watered down black paint to the whole of the passenger compartment, then went back over it with a drybrush of white. This also conveniently repaired the warping on the areas contaminated with Simple Green.

From there it was mostly a matter of touching up the buttons with jeweled versions of their original colours - which was not the easiest thing to do as I had to work around several sections of hull that had already been glued in place - as well as the vision blocks, which were painted to reflect the environment beyond them, in other words the inner sides of the vision blocks were painted blue to reflect the sky outside and the outer sides were painted red, marking a return to the red vision blocks used in the GW Studio army which I am happy to settle for, and is a reflection of the red combat lighting inside the Devilfish itself. Speaking of, several casting pits and divots in the ceiling of the passenger compartment were painted up as dome lights, coloured red because they've been switched over to combat lighting.

The upholstery on the seats was also enhanced with a drybrush of Skraag Brown over Doombull Brown for some extra hard-wearing, stylish and comfortable leather padding - though naturally synthetic this time to avoid needless animal cruelty.



The interior has also at last been equipped with some stowage, this time not one, not two, but three pulse guns for a complete full gun rack. Moving forward all future transports in the army will be required by regulation to have at least one fully stocked gun rack on board at all times, because I am smart enough not to make any of The Classic Three Mistakes. This also means I will be deploying units as large as possible and avoiding any suspiciously well-paying bounty contracts for a maverick lone-wolf space outlaw with surgically-enhanced night vision. Even if issued by a planet facing imminent invasion from Newcrons.

Not that the Tau Fire Caste is generally given to the business of bounty hunting in the first place anyway.

The combination of two pulse rifles and a pulse carbine also indicates this Devilfish as being assigned to transport one of my tactical Fire Warrior teams.



The new Devilfish also features for the first time a complete set of markings, faithfully applied precisely according to the guide in Codex: Tau and painstakingly copied from the GW studio models using photos from Codex: Tau and White Dwarf #262(US) as reference. Since many of the marking icons used did not exist on the GW Tau decal sheet I had to create my own decals using an inkjet printer. These ultimately proved ineffective on their own, as Microsoft Word's crude graphics editor could not scale down the Tau letters and graphics to a small enough size, and the final printed decals lacked pigment. Instead I ended up printing off a set of circular markings in the right size and using them as templates to freehand over with the desired graphics. The results are a little wonky, but honestly so are the freehand letters on the GW studio examples.

The crew's personal roundel was chosen to be the same design used on the main GW studio Devilfish, visible in the painting example on the back of the box and Codex: Tau as well as the battle photo on the back cover of the codex. The slogan next to the cockpit was taken from the GW Tau decal sheet and reads "Y'eldi Shi" meaning "Winged Victory" which seemed fitting enough. There were also plans for a second slogan around the edge of one of the side doors, but the curved slogans on the decal sheet proved unable to fit there.

Similarly after the number Lobba barrages my Fire Warriors have been subjected to I had also planned to freehand "PIN US NOW ASSHOLES!" in actual Tau'sia onto one of the side doors, but even after all my time spent painting tiny Elven runes onto banners my freehanding skills were not able to produce acceptably good looking painted letters to the right size.



The new Devilfish, Arrow 1, has already seen action and performed well in her tabletop debut. It is expected that she will see much more use this year.

In the meantime, I now have a modest army featuring a solid core of infantry, jump infantry, assault weapons, and now heavy weapons and vehicle support. It is time, at long last, to close out the beginning of my rebooted Tau army with the most awe-inspiring beautiful centrepiece model GW ever made in plastic...

Slowly but surely, it looks like your Tau is coming around. Looking good, and keep it up.