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This idea arose in a different thread and I happened to like the idea, let's see what you guys think...

The idea is just what the title says; a variation of the Valkyrie Assault Transport for Imperial Guard that can be taken as a Dedicated Transport outside of the FOC.

First to justify it being just a transport, it must be a stripped down version: I'd say give it only the Multi-Laser and Searchlight, no Hellstrike Missiles or Extra Armor to begin with. As far as upgrades go perhaps allow the purchase of Multiple Rocket Pods OR Heavy Bolter Sponsons, but only one of them and not both. Possibly Hellfury Missiles? Seems like that would be fluffy for something meant to airdrop troopers in the thick of the enemy. Take note these are meant to represent stripping it down to make it lighter as well as to make it cheaper for use specifically as a general transport; do you think the Guard would generally allow anyone but Stormtroopers or the most hardened of Elysians to ride around in fully armed and expensive gunships just to get into the fight?

Second, the availability; who should it be available to?

I vote that it should be available for Stormtroopers, CCS, PCS, and Veterans with a specific (possibly homebrew) Doctrine. Points cost for these I would assume to be somewhere around 75-85 points? More expensive than a Chimera but not as expensive as the standard Valkyrie.

Third: Basic rules. It would act as a normal Valkyrie except it wouldn't take up slots on the Force Org Chart, and in addition it would follow all flier rules EXCEPT that it could be placed on the board in deployment and act as if it had the Scouts rule to make a standard scout movement. This way it's possible to have an entirely air-borne army and have it represented realistically.

Here's where it may get a bit screwy to some of you, as if it wasn't already!

What if you allowed a variant to be used as a dedicated transport for vehicles? One with absolutely no weapons except the multilaser and no other wargear as well as no transport capacity for the fact that it's carrying a vehicle.

Makes sense to me to have it carry Sentinels, of the Scout and Armoured varieties as well as perhaps Hellhound variants, and possibly single Russes or Artillery pieces. With this it would follow the exact same rules as above although perhaps it's only allowed to Hover instead of Zooming? Seems a bit much to have a flyer, especially a rather "light" one such as the Valkyrie, zooming with tanks though I could see them carrying them into place rapidly and dropping them off. Heck it's been done before in reality with various jeeps, tanks, and other weapons and vehicles. I could see some air cav regiments (Elysians are straight up said to do so) bringing in their vehicles into the thick of the action with Valkyries.

Vehicles being carried would also be unable to take any actions until the turn after they disembark, at which point they may act as normal. Vehicles in squadrons must take a single Valkyrie transport for every model in the squadron. Points about 80 or 90 or so?

I don't know if this is even a good idea or not but I thought it was an intriguing idea so here it is! I think it'd be cool to see some wicked Elysian all-air lists that don't even have to have boots on the ground until they start dropping. That's what air-cav and airborne is supposed to be all about, isn't it?

There's already a stripped-down basic transport for IG, all you need to do is make it a dedicated transport for everyone that can take a Chimera instead of just a command squad:




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 Yipyioh wrote:
What if you allowed a variant to be used as a dedicated transport for vehicles? One with absolutely no weapons except the multilaser and no other wargear as well as no transport capacity for the fact that it's carrying a vehicle.

I think it'd be cool to see some wicked Elysian all-air lists that don't even have to have boots on the ground until they start dropping.

I'm mostly meaning this for those who don't have access to Forgeworld stuff or those who don't generally play with it. I understand not only from your signature but from the myraid posts I've seen from you in discussions that you fully support Forgeworld but simply put not everyone uses it and for those who have a few Valk's and want to use them easily as a transport I just thought this was interesting. Just another idea, why I put it in proposed rules.


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Good to know I apparently hit all the bases though I just thought with how variable practically every other vehicle chassis is in the IG 'dex that some people would enjoy seeing some basic tweaks to give another Valk variant.

 Yipyioh wrote:
I understand not only from your signature but from the myraid posts I've seen from you in discussions that you fully support Forgeworld but simply put not everyone uses it and for those who have a few Valk's and want to use them easily as a transport I just thought this was interesting.

I think you're going to discover that the intersection between "not willing to play with FW rules" and "willing to let you invent your own units" is pretty much nonexistent. So if FW rules aren't available then what's the point of this thread?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Yipyioh wrote:
I understand not only from your signature but from the myraid posts I've seen from you in discussions that you fully support Forgeworld but simply put not everyone uses it and for those who have a few Valk's and want to use them easily as a transport I just thought this was interesting.

I think you're going to discover that the intersection between "not willing to play with FW rules" and "willing to let you invent your own units" is pretty much nonexistent. So if FW rules aren't available then what's the point of this thread?

If he has people willing to let you play units you make up in friendly games, but he doesn't have access to Forgeworld models.

Buttons wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Yipyioh wrote:
I understand not only from your signature but from the myraid posts I've seen from you in discussions that you fully support Forgeworld but simply put not everyone uses it and for those who have a few Valk's and want to use them easily as a transport I just thought this was interesting.

I think you're going to discover that the intersection between "not willing to play with FW rules" and "willing to let you invent your own units" is pretty much nonexistent. So if FW rules aren't available then what's the point of this thread?

If he has people willing to let you play units you make up in friendly games, but he doesn't have access to Forgeworld models.

Exactly what I mean. It may not be a huge call for it but for people who may already have a bunch of Valk's and don't want to (or legitimately can't) shell out a couple hundred to outfit their army with what amounts to a Valk used as a transport and the books to go with it.


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So back to main topic... Even if I'm the only person who would ever consider using these rules because everyone else has Forgeworld products up the arse... Anybody have some ideas for this proposed ruleset?

 Yipyioh wrote:
Exactly what I mean. It may not be a huge call for it but for people who may already have a bunch of Valk's and don't want to (or legitimately can't) shell out a couple hundred to outfit their army with what amounts to a Valk used as a transport and the books to go with it.

So you use the Valkyrie model as a proxy for the FW rules, just like you'll be using a standard Valkyrie model as a proxy for these rules and not converting it to haul around a Chimera.

I've been writing a Stormtrooper Regiment list as part of my attempted redesign of the Inquisition; I dropped Valkyries to AV 11-11-10 and put them in as Dedicated Transports, but this project is new enough that I haven't had a chance to do much playtesting. I've also added an Airborne Assault army special rule that works like Deathwing Assault in that all your planes come in at the start of turn one or turn two (you pick secretly before deployment).

I don't think it even needs to be that drastic-- Any unit of 10 stormtroopers can take a Valkyrie as a Designated Transport. It can be one of their 'special operations' things.

That and then I would probably delete the transport capacity from a Vendetta entirely. Off topic, but it would make sense to me.

The vendetta is an up-gunned valkyrie, so taking away its transport makes no sense. Reducing it maybe, ala razorback style, but not removing it entirely.

Unless you were going to rreplace it with a bomb bay or something.

Anyway, Elysians only pay E0 points a squad and sacrifiice thei infantry squad heavy weapons to ride around in valks, and even if you don't. Have access to forge world models, if you play 40k you can afford Taros SE to field elysian rules with your standard GW models and the 1:52 scale jeeps you picked up from modelzone with the money you savved on chiimeras and leman russes.

Elysians have the Combat Drop rule, which let's you bring up to half your valkyries, sky talons, sentry guns and drop sentinels (so potentially half your army since everything else can either take a valk or a sky talon as a dedicated transport) out of reserve on the first turn.

Please excuse my typing, I'm on my phone.

The siliest thing about the Vendetta is that it can have more guns than the vulture despite ostensibly being from the same family of vehicles.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
The vendetta is an up-gunned valkyrie, so taking away its transport makes no sense. Reducing it maybe, ala razorback style, but not removing it entirely.

I'm looking at it like the land raiders. The reason the land raider Phobos has only about half the capacity of the Crusader is because of the extra capacitors for lascannons. And it has 33% fewer lascannons than the vendetta, which obviously is an aircraft and not a heavy tank, so I would imagine it is more limited by weight and balance than a massive land yacht like the raider. Same thing with the razorback- but really again, this is an aircraft, and it has a buttload of lascannons, so I would imagine basically the entire inside is filled up with capacitors and generators for them.

From a balance perspective I don't think too many people would be sad about the vendetta loosing the transport capacity. Aside from maybe a SWS or something I don't think a lot of people bring them for the transport capability anyway.

Which is why I said it would be fine to reduce it, but not take it out completely.

They must use some other form of power for the lascannons in any case, because they have to be lightweight enough for the thing to fly. I expect they just power them directly off the Vendetta's turbines. If you think about how much thrust they must generate to be able to lift an ungainly monster like that full of troops and their gear vertically off the ground even a few inches, I imagine that firing lascannons is easy during level flight.

The accessory gearbox on a turbine is already taxed to the max just providing essential services to an aircraft. That's why on planes that use jammers (a very high energy requirement) you see they have little windmill pylons- those things are actually using the CAS of the jet to power the jammers, believe it or not. You can't make enough juice to power the jammer just of the AGB-- or at least not since like, Vietnam.

With lascannons we are talking about a HUGE amount of energy. Adding one twin linked lascannon to a rhino lowers transport capacity by 4. So by adding three we are reducing it by twelve...

See what I mean? Even on a land vehicle you would run out of space, and the thing still has to fly!

 Silverthorne wrote:
Same thing with the razorback- but really again, this is an aircraft, and it has a buttload of lascannons, so I would imagine basically the entire inside is filled up with capacitors and generators for them.

You imagine wrong. The model very clearly has the lascannons and battery packs entirely mounted on external hardpoints with nothing in the transport section.


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 Silverthorne wrote:
From a balance perspective I don't think too many people would be sad about the vendetta loosing the transport capacity.

Except all of us who use our Vendettas to transport veteran squads.

I've never used a vendetta. I think they are far to powerfull having alll the guns & the same cargo capacity. At most it shoyld carry 5 guys but ideally id argue 4 none, the caego hold replaced by capacitors & generators 4 the 6 lascannon.

Ideally the vendetta should have actually been a Vulture varient.

DaHedd wrote:
At most it shoyld carry 5 guys but ideally id argue 4 none, the caego hold replaced by capacitors & generators 4 the 6 lascannon.

As I've said countless times before, this does not match the model. The lascannons use external battery packs, and the transport space is completely untouched.

Ideally the vendetta should have actually been a Vulture varient.

It should have just been the Vulture, but I guess GW wanted to sell more of the new Valkyrie kit. But now it's far too late to change that decision.

*ignore this, someone had allready mentiond it*

You can argue about external power packs etc but ive never liked it, never used one. It just smacks of cheese & power gaming.

As abusive as the vendetta is, and as much as I think it needs an armor nerf, points increase and FoC slot change (I'd make it AV11, 150pts, Heavy Support) the weapons are externally mounted pretty much entirely, nothing about them is internal.

While I personally don't think it *needs* a transport value, removing it on the basis of lascannon power cells or what not doesn't fit.