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Rending reailgun shots useless is suspecious to me though, given that they cause pain to warhound titans from long ranges and chew void shields.

According to the Farsight enclaves codex, under Massacre At Ghoul Gorge, it mentioned a fight against a large ork walker that is described as a "Drill-Titan" with a forcefield that shrugged of hits from the heavy rail rifles of Farsights broadside teams.

Railgun=/=heavy rail rifles. we were talking about hammerheads here, not broadsides.

 BoomWolf wrote:
Railguns solve hordes as well with submmunitions.

And pulse fire is practically putting bolters to shame on it, and tau got that in droves. and even hammerhead mounted when you really, REALLY want to kill hordes (there is a LBBC hammerhead varient from taros, it was discontinued due to wasting the platform as was the plasma that was replaced by ion, melta that was not on par with railguns and missile pods variant that was replaced by skyrays.)

New generation pulse submmunition XV9s and HBC riptides would made it a joke really to eliminate hordes, as would HYMP broadsides.

You're going to need more than a swarm of generic ork boys to take down a tau line, even in taros and especially after. they have gotten good at mowing hordes of expendables, as it seems to be the main tactic of their three major enemies (IoM, nids and orks)

Also, more bodies than bullets fail when half the enemy armory does not need bullets.

In smaller engagements, I absolutely agree. Submunitions and missilesides are excellent at thinning hordes to manageable size. Pulse rifles can definitely do some damage, but in a mobile battle they're no good because by the time the enemy is in range they'll overrun the position before you can evacuate. The scenario that I'm picturing here is "Taros campaign, but with orks," and I don't know if the Tau could handle that without Tiger Sharks. Trying to thin the horde means exposing yourself to the gargant's long-range bombardment, and the horde is expansive enough that they can't get the Gargant in firing range without undertaking a suicide mission.

As for the effect of Ork force fields, they vary widely in strength and mechanism, so it's hard to say. Going by tabletop rules, the KFF blocks half of incoming fire, so massed fire from multiple Hammerheads could punch through. I see this as representing the field only being able to block a certain amount of fire at once, so synchronized volleys could overload it. The power fields that protect Ork super-heavies function like void shields but without the ability to regenerate, so those could be worn down gradually.

Tigersharks ARE from taros. so there is little reason to thing "like taros but without tigersharks".

Honestly, tau build new guns to face the enemy. and the faced orks several times. they got the guns ready. they had them for a while now, and they could also build more. as for range issues, you underestimate how outrange tau can get with pulse guns, and just how absurdly fast are the deployments and disengages a fluff devilfish pulls off. the devilfish might suck at the game rules, but fluff wise its almost competing with dark eldar skimmers when it comes to deploying and disengaging. its an APC that can take off and fly out, or jump from a nearby mountain and glide towards the battlefield. giant engines and anti-grav platforms get things done.

The point is that ork supers are usually not more scary than warhounds, and warhounds get blown up by hammerheads. longstrike did a one-shot headshot at it. (that's what got him the title)

if the devilfish were fluff-accurate it would probably have a "re-embark" rule, say on a 4+ the unit that disembarked that turn gets right back in.
Not sure how that would affect the balance of the game though, and i think dfish are pretty good atm.

The long and short of it is that the rising-star nature of the Tau is enabling them to quickly become professionals at mechanized warfare- even more so than the Eldar, because the Eldar can only boast superiority in each individual niche something of theirs fits into. Which even though the Tau are not specifically "my thing", I find it to be an interesting aspect of the Tau that they can do excel at something in the 40K universe without resorting to "throwing more bodies into the breach".

Some of the fan-made material for Epic Armageddon makes the Tau look really fun to play at that game's economy of scale.

While on the subject, are the tau more likely to use missles or railguns against a target like a stompa ?