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I was setting out my tau army last night for cataloging and a strange thought hit me.

Why, of all the suits, do the XV25 Stealth suits not have an option to use Rail rifles (or ion guns) - the same ones that pathfinders are toting about? They seem like they'd be perfect weapons for the lil' ninja buggers.

It also got me wondering why the XV8 suits don't have access to those guns either. I mean, we have Broadsides with the Heavy rail rifles, but why don't the XV8 suits use the smaller rail rifles?

If it's just a "no models, no rules" situation, I wouldn't imagine it'd be too difficult to make a "suit upgrade sprue" that could have these and a few other options on it. I'd certainly be more interested in it than a Darkstrider miniature...

Yeah, I'd love the option to see more ion rifles and rail rifles. Especially in infantry units like Strike Teams and Breacher Teams.

Even sniper drones use to have rail rifles and it'd be awesome if they could again.

As for suits, no idea on why it was never an option. After 5th edition my assumption would be no model no rules. That's been GW's rule of thumb for like the last 10 years.

Headcanon: rail rifles are long-range, low rate-of-fire weapons that can't correct the course of the projectile after being fired the way missiles can. Stealth and crisis suits both generally want to be moving around at a decent speed, so the rail rifle could conceivably just be really hard to utilize on such a platform.

Basically, it's really hard to 360 no scope while simultaneously bobbing through the air with a jetpack. Even if you have crazy crisis commander levels of skill.

That might make sense for the XV8's, but the XV25s have (or used to have) some sort of stealth projector that basically made them invisible. They should be able to stand still and shoot those, then hop to a new location and repeat.

Also, at least in 8th Rail rifles are "rapid fire 1", not heavy so they're not exactly low ROF.

Because the models haven't been updated in, what, fifteen years? (Stealthsuits, not Crisis suits.)