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One of my friends wants to use Razorbacks/Land Raider Crusaders in a Pre-Heresy campaign. Did they exist?
Everyone else is convinced he is wrong, but he wants to justify it with this passage from the Black Templars codex:

"Faced with such formidable defenses, it was not until the discovery of ancient techno-arcana in the long-forgotten depths of a captured hive that the tide of the battle was to turn.
Amidst the tattered scrolls and flickering holo-schematics, Marine Artificer Simagus discovered the means to develop one of the most feared battle tanks in the Imperium, the Land Raider Crusader."
BT Codex Page 43

Is he right? I ask to just legitimately check who is right, on the offchance we are all incorrect.

The Black Templars were formed after the Horus Heresy (when the Imperial Fists divided their legion). Therefore, since it seems that the Black Templars were the ones that discovered the schematics for the Land Raider Crusader, it must've been post Heresy.

The various land raider variants are typically post heresy, as is the razorback. Its theoretically why Chaos marines can't get them. You could always say that the BT just re-found what had been lost before the heresy, but I don't think it's quite correct.

Oh god flinty - don't fuel his fire! We are trying to adhere to the fluff as close as possible.

Crystal Geyser wrote:One of my friends wants to use Razorbacks/Land Raider Crusaders in a Pre-Heresy campaign.

Must be him:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/455905.page#4408586
Right?

As said in the other thread:

The Land Raider is a pre-imperial design ( Land Raider / Index Astartes 3 ), a few thousand years before the imperium was founded.
The techno-archeologist arkhan land ( GW's way to justify "land" as part of the name of 'land' raiders and 'land' speeders ) searched the librarium omnis at Mars for STC and found the bits to build Land Raider ( the usual phobos pattern ). The estimated first date of Land Raiders in imperial service is the start of the great crusade.

However, the LRC is a altered Mk3 Land Raider. Not a Mk1 or Mk2. Its a design used in the Jerulas crusade ( M39 ) and the bit he's not providing in the quote in your post is : the design was sanctioned by the mechanicum in M39.
Now M39 is just around the corner in M41, isn't it?

The BT codex ( and C: Armageddon too ) placed the LRC as a "new" design based on found scraps of data. So basically the LRC is a LR chassis with a config not used in the imperium before. It is possible the STC provided tons of different configs for the LR
chassis but only a few of them were found and maybe some of the data in bad shape , so the time neccessary to sanction a build would mean the variants are few but will increase someday. Still a claim to use anything beyond the pattern available from start in the era of the great crusade cannot be justified by the existance of the Land Raider itself ( pre-imperium ) as the LR was "new" back in these days and even handed to imperial army, so the variant in question would be available to the traitors too and we don't see them sporting LRC or Razorbacks..

Aside from the LRC, the Razorback is certainly post-heresy. CSM entry for it is about of fluff proof as you need.

Yeah 1hadhq. That's him.