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Yoyoyo wrote:
If you want a model can destroy Land Raiders and Knights with any kind of reliability, the Lynx and Gauss Pylon are your points baseline. Not 125pts, not 170pts, it's actually 400+pts. At this point you're talking about a different unit entirely, and it's a LoW and not a HS choice. Example :

Tau Carcharodon. Hammerhead chassis/options, Heavy Railgun Battery (Str D AP1 110", Primary Weapon, Ordnance 4), 420pts.

If just want minor buffs in your own games and your opponents are ok with it, run Ordnance as a houserule, unlimited Longstrikes, allow squadrons, or design your own custom vehicles exactly as chrisrawr mentioned. Why not? A lot of good suggestions have already come up in this thread.

If you're interested in discussing global balance and the desired endstate for gameplay, you need to look at the entire picture, not just complain your railgun is too ineffective. Should running a mounted Ork army = auto lose against Tau? That's not good design.

To have a more productive discussion, it would be good to reflect which of these three separate discussions we are currently having. All three at once is going to result in a lot of circular arguments.

Good points all around.

Maybe the real solution, and you can call me crazy, but, is that Tau should move towards being the shooting grey knights equivalent.

They have a small empire
They do everything tactically - they don't suicide their troops or even have hordes to draw from.
They are highly advanced technologically and continue to advance

So in saying that perhaps they should get more expensive but more resilient and generally have fewer models on the table.
So that playing against tau means you drown them in volumn fire and get up the table fast for close combat because they'll cut you down with high power shooting at range with a relatively small force.

Wait... is this or isn't this partially true?

Naaris wrote:
They are highly advanced technologically

This is a common misconception, but the Tau is not advanced technologically. They have effective technology, but they are faaar away from the level you would call "advanced" by 40k standards. In fact, the Orks of all people could show them new tricks (see: the Repulsor Impact Field that is based on Ork Traktor tech - or at least partially, because the Tau couldn't reverse engineer it properly).

Martel732 wrote:
"If you want a model can destroy Land Raiders and Knights with any kind of reliability, the Lynx and Gauss Pylon are your points baseline. Not 125pts, not 170pts, it's actually 400+pts"

Ridiculous, imo.

IMO theres nothing worse than playing a game where your tough centerpiece gets one shot from safe distance before you even get to move it. gotta be honest games like this I'd really like to throw my LR directly into my opponents face or at least stomp on it a little. OFC I don't do this and try to brush it off and laugh and have fun but seriously - A hammer head even without buffs is very dangerous for a raider already. LR start in marker light range regularly - so LR is getting auto hit and no cover most likely. The reason it's dangerous is AP 1. Half the results of a pen are disastrous for a tank with ap1. So at 125 I think it's just fine. Give it ordinance for a 20 point increase and I think you'd see them all over the place.

" A hammer head even without buffs is very dangerous for a raider already"

Not really. (2/3)*(1/3)*(1/3) is a 7.4% chance to take out the land raider. That's pitiful. If you want to throw in immobilization, it goes up to a whopping 11.1% chance. I would never take this unit. Ever.

With markerlights, it goes up to 13.9%. That's still terrible. The problem is that S10 only pens AV 14 33.3% of the time. That just drags down the chances of anything meaningful happening too much.

Martel732 wrote:


It's too great of a disparity in this case.

I understand where you're coming from but is the disparity any worse than in the case of the protective capabilities of terminator armour, for example? I'm all for tweaking rules where it's clear they need it, but I think any power increase has to be subtle.

 thegreatchimp wrote:

Martel732 wrote:


It's too great of a disparity in this case.

I understand where you're coming from but is the disparity any worse than in the case of the protective capabilities of terminator armour, for example? I'm all for tweaking rules where it's clear they need it, but I think any power increase has to be subtle.

GW has blown subtle power increases out of the water. That ship has sailed. See: Wraiths.

So, buff Railguns, because Wraiths.

Nice logic.

I'd like a buff to the railgun and heavy rail rifle for no other reason than they are cool and I would like to see them more often than ion cannons and high-yield missile pods, neither of which are even slightly interesting to look at. HYMPs at least have the very awesome mental image of a massive number of missiles, but that's pure imagination. On a static miniature, they look a bit silly. This is especially shameful after the update to the Broadside; the current model posing with rail "rifle" is one of the reasons I started collecting Tau when I did.

Martel732 wrote:
" A hammer head even without buffs is very dangerous for a raider already"

Not really. (2/3)*(1/3)*(1/3) is a 7.4% chance to take out the land raider. That's pitiful. If you want to throw in immobilization, it goes up to a whopping 11.1% chance. I would never take this unit. Ever.

With markerlights, it goes up to 13.9%. That's still terrible. The problem is that S10 only pens AV 14 33.3% of the time. That just drags down the chances of anything meaningful happening too much.

Considering the LR has 18.78% chance to immobilze or destroy a Hammerhead at twice the cost and half the range. Without MLs two Railheads have just under 21% chance to do the same. A 1/5 chance to invalidate the same number of points on the other side is pretty fair for one round of shooting.

The real problem for anti armor weapons in general is that aside from HP loss there is no real loss of effectiveness when you hit the other 4/5 of the time. Vehicles are a little too all or nothing now.

LR fills a completely different role than the HH. Closest Tau comparison is the Orca, which is 400 points and a superheavy.

Alcibiades wrote:

I guess we could play "cavemen vs. Wehrmacht," where one side gets rocks and the other gets tanks but that would not be enjoyable

I constantly play something like this with footslogging orkses vs IG

 chrisrawr wrote:
LR fills a completely different role than the HH. Closest Tau comparison is the Orca, which is 400 points and a superheavy.

Oh I realize they serve very different functions, in fact the LR I was referring to is rarely taken as well. It really served as a point for point comparison. Two railheads are more offensively point efficient than a LR. They will be more likely to beat the shootiest LR variant in a vacuum.

And that one in five games 2 railheads make a LR useless first turn. Better than 1 in 3 by the second turn and over half the time by turn 3. Hell only about 1 in 6 games does the LR survive past turn 5.

Hell adding the Longstrike upgrade alone more than doubles the chance to immobilized or explode a LR in one turn. From 11.11% to 23.14%.

I'd argue that the ability for railguns to straight up destroy something is fine, but that the real problem is that most of the rest of the time it does nothing of consequence. If I were to make changes I'd make so pens automatically afflict crew shaken and 1-4 would be crew stunned. That way every pen counts, but doesn't always destroy.

The LR is taken less commonly because the underlying game rules make taking more, cheaper things better than less, more-expensive things. This is because the game is heavily disposed toward alpha-strike and less toward action/reaction; there is nothing for a landraider to DO in a game. It has no real meaningful purpose, and making it *better* without absurd points increases makes it blatantly overpowered.

If we were to balance Railheads against LR in a vacuum I would give the LR 6 HP and AV16, ignores extra to-pen dice, and let him have a 3+ armour save and a 3+ save against haywire. All this for 500 points, taken only as dedicated transport for Elites. Now only a few select S10 weapons can meaningfully hurt it and it can put out S9 twinlinked lascannons and drop terminators off exactly where they need to be all day like it's supposed to.

Then I would implement the Rail rule where Rail gets autopen but loses points for rolling less than the AV; a shot can only then explode said LR on a roll of 5 followed by a 6, or a 6 followed by a 5+, at 200 points.

Tautastic wrote:
First of all I like the models of the rail weapons. It is huge, “looks” powerful, and “should” only ever need one shot to take down anything. Unfortunately even a lowly rhino will take multiple shot to consistently destroy it. So with that I want is to make a special rule for rail weapons, “Rail”.

With all the scarcasm I can muster.. lets apply this 'look' to other 40k things. Yes I know we dug these graves before...not an attack but Ironic humor.

SM and and those of common Ilk use propelled powered ammo. Let’s make them S7 cause the should be able to penetrate most vehicles cause they are … powered ammo.
Terminator Armor was built to withstand Plasma cores so all plasma and melta weapons have no effect. And powered ( see below )
SM’s and as above train constantly and live for 100’s of years .. they train constantly including assaulting things. They should be able to assault out of anything… bathrooms , Rhino’s , flyers. Anything you can fit a marine into. Remember ’only built for war. So they spend their Friday nights practicing.. how about assault practice.?
Some Chaos’s Marines are 10,000 years old. They should also be able to assault out of anything even their opponents own vehicles.
Power armor is Powered. So everyone wearing it gets +2 S, runs 2d6 further and can power cell phones and tablets just by touching them.
Eldar wave serpents shields are a ‘wave’ so when fired draw a line from the 45 deg arc out to the end of the table and everything in its arc is hit. And stunned and unhappy.
Orks are large. In fact they get larger the more they fight. In size and bulk they should be able to out muscle most other races. So to apply this new logic.. they should all be S6, S7 for Nob’s and S8 for the bosses. And because they get bigger they should be able to carry Battle cannons.
Necrons are machines.. so no poisoning, fear, pinning, morale or anything involving and emotional test. Metal is harder than flesh so all Necrons should be T6. Be immune to blinding and night fighting rules and be total by ignored by Nids.
Nid should have no FOC. Since they are reactive to the threats , the Nid player should field whatever he needs to beat his opponent (after his opponent deploy) in whatever quanity and repeats every turn as reserves.
IG is dependent on the Imperial Navy. Large capital ships with big guns. Or large battery’s miles away. IG player should be able to fire 2d6 orbital bombardments every turn. Every turn the IG player has a comm. Guy anywhere on the board the scatter each round is reduced by 4 inches.
And lastly .. every inf gun can shoot the length of the table.. cause Damn that’s unrealistic.

Anyway back to all the rule balancing/ math and codex comparing. Thanks for playing

Sarcasm aside, increasing the overall strength of most basic troops and creating a wider disparity between "heavy" and "infantry" weapons would be something nice, but is not the context of this thread.

Martel732 wrote:
Maybe, but it's how modern armor works and the railhead is the most modern armor-like unit in the game. The kill rate for the M1A2 Abrams is super high.

... versus less sophisticated tanks. Amongst the lessons that can be learnt from history, weapons and armour (at least of equivalent technological level) tend to be in something of an equilibrium.
In friendly fire incidents, or even occasions where they have deliberately tried to destroy Abrams tanks that have thrown tracks (to stop the enemy forces recovering and repairing them), the Abrams is highly resistant to its own weapons.
The same applies to other tanks with Chobham armour - for example, only one Challenger 2 has been destroyed in the field, in a friendly fire incident where a HESH round hit the open top hatch and started a fire that detonated the on-board munitions.

In these circumstances, the M829/M256A1 combination isn't actually that impressive - large missiles like the AGM-114 Hellfire are considerably more effective against high end tank armour.

And the Land Raider is definitely in the realm of "high end tank armour" - at least, if we take what it's supposed to do, rather than the rather paltry "equivalent to 300mm of conventional steel armour" description that appears somewhere in the older background (which wouldn't stop RPG warheads developed in the 70s, let alone any of the things they're supposed to survive in the fluff).

However, the railgun is actually very hard to predict, because if it's a true hypervelocity weapon (that is, that the impact is higher than the speed of sound in the target, probably 6,000 m/s or so), then you're into a completely different realm to the much more trivial velocities of the M829 penetrator. Normally, you have concerns about how strong or hard the materials used in your armour are, but at hypervelocity, the impacts are so fast that the forces cannot propagate (much like you cannot hear a supersonic plane until it's gone past). In a figurative sense, the armour is penetrated before it even knows it's been hit.

At this point it's all about how your armour is configured. There's a concept called Whipple shields which are used extensively on space craft (which have to deal with hyper-velocity micrometeors on a regular basis), not entirely different from spaced armour in its approach - basically, one initial layer that smashes the projectile apart (because, in impacts of these speeds, the penetrator is also immediately annihilated... so no penetrating several targets with one railgun shot, sorry), and reduces its coherency so that even though it's still hitting the second layer of armour very fast, it's not doing it all in one place. (And sectional density is a massive concern in penetrating armour).

So, basically, it depends how Land Raider armour is structured internally. Although there's no one "perfect" configuration - what's good versus hypervelocity penetrators would be adversely affected against high mass, low(er) velocity penetrators or certain types of explosive attack (so something like the large and heavy Hellfire previously mentioned would have a field day).

However, that's a level of detail far beyond the WH40K rules, and is entirely the ballisticist in me rambling at length.

 MarcoSkoll wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Maybe, but it's how modern armor works and the railhead is the most modern armor-like unit in the game. The kill rate for the M1A2 Abrams is super high.

... versus less sophisticated tanks. Amongst the lessons that can be learnt from history, weapons and armour (at least of equivalent technological level) tend to be in something of an equilibrium.
In friendly fire incidents, or even occasions where they have deliberately tried to destroy Abrams tanks that have thrown tracks (to stop the enemy forces recovering and repairing them), the Abrams is highly resistant to its own weapons.
The same applies to other tanks with Chobham armour - for example, only one Challenger 2 has been destroyed in the field, in a friendly fire incident where a HESH round hit the open top hatch and started a fire that detonated the on-board munitions.

In these circumstances, the M829/M256A1 combination isn't actually that impressive - large missiles like the AGM-114 Hellfire are considerably more effective against high end tank armour.

And the Land Raider is definitely in the realm of "high end tank armour" - at least, if we take what it's supposed to do, rather than the rather paltry "equivalent to 300mm of conventional steel armour" description that appears somewhere in the older background (which wouldn't stop RPG warheads developed in the 70s, let alone any of the things they're supposed to survive in the fluff).

However, the railgun is actually very hard to predict, because if it's a true hypervelocity weapon (that is, that the impact is higher than the speed of sound in the target, probably 6,000 m/s or so), then you're into a completely different realm to the much more trivial velocities of the M829 penetrator. Normally, you have concerns about how strong or hard the materials used in your armour are, but at hypervelocity, the impacts are so fast that the forces cannot propagate (much like you cannot hear a supersonic plane until it's gone past). In a figurative sense, the armour is penetrated before it even knows it's been hit.

At this point it's all about how your armour is configured. There's a concept called Whipple shields which are used extensively on space craft (which have to deal with hyper-velocity micrometeors on a regular basis), not entirely different from spaced armour in its approach - basically, one initial layer that smashes the projectile apart (because, in impacts of these speeds, the penetrator is also immediately annihilated... so no penetrating several targets with one railgun shot, sorry), and reduces its coherency so that even though it's still hitting the second layer of armour very fast, it's not doing it all in one place. (And sectional density is a massive concern in penetrating armour).

So, basically, it depends how Land Raider armour is structured internally. Although there's no one "perfect" configuration - what's good versus hypervelocity penetrators would be adversely affected against high mass, low(er) velocity penetrators or certain types of explosive attack (so something like the large and heavy Hellfire previously mentioned would have a field day).

However, that's a level of detail far beyond the WH40K rules, and is entirely the ballisticist in me rambling at length.

What's the kill rate, theoretical or empirical, of the Abrams against other modern armor?

That's hard to know, particularly without defining what counts as "modern" armour.

There's a wide range of different armour technologies (with the passive elements ranging from fairly basic steel or aluminium up to full-blown composites, and reactive elements such as explosive applique that are designed to disrupt incoming projectiles) and while it's common for militaries to spread around a bit of "hey, look how awesome our latest tank armour is" for publicity, unsurprisingly they tend to not reveal what will penetrate it and many of the important details are classified. Most reports of what will defeat the armour on an Abrams come from the public media reporting from war zones. It's not even public for many modern tanks what type of armour they use - it's likely that the composite MBT armour of many NATO forces is derived from Chobham armour, but only the Abrams and Challenger 1 & 2 are publicly acknowledged as so.

It also depends on what the Abrams is firing. The M829 APFSDS round will go through heavier armour than the M830 HEAT (particularly as the composites many MBTs use are often more effective against HEAT than KE), but there are circumstances where the M829 has completely over-penetrated lighter vehicles (such as armoured personnel carriers) and left them functioning - if a bit breezier than before.

 Solar_lion wrote:

With all the scarcasm I can muster.. lets apply this 'look' to other 40k things.

You're spot on with that post. While there are things that need balancing in the rules, "realism" is too much to aspire to in 40k.