Thursday, June 3, 2010

Design Feature - The Sawfish by Patrick Stannard

While parsing the ATT forum  I came across a design thread by Patrick Stannard, aka LordDirk. This guy has great vision when it comes to Tau designs. He is a professional animator and illustrator and you can see more of his work on his blogs, kiltedanimator.blogspot.com, mydadthegiant.blogspot.com, or simply patrickstannard.com.

Here is one if his latest.


Design:  The Sawfish acts as a medium between the Devilfish Troop Carrier and the Piranha support craft. Able to carry six firewarriors, armed with two gun drones, and boasting dual vehicle mounted sheild generators, the Sawfish turns normally static fire warriors into small mobile firing squads. Without the sheild it has medium armor and has one pilot, the firewarriors attach to the sides and are exposed, spare for the massive sheilding. Firewarriors can fire from the sides and count as firing from an open top vehicle.

Experimental note: Additionally, firewarriors dismounted but within 2" of the Sawfish gain the sheilds 4+ invulnerable save.

Inspiration: After viewing a Tau player contest multiple objectives with highly mobile Tau squads of six mounted in Devilfish, I discovered that small squads of pulse rifles can be very nasty if moved around correctly, and that the static element of the squads seemed to be the most detramental aspect of their performance. Devilfish, most notably the warfish, can be costly and large, so I sketched up a design to minimize the size and cost while adding mobility and support to vulnerable firewarrior squads.

Now if GW would produce something like this I would definately buy it. This seems like the perfect vehicle for pathfinder teams. Small, fast and designed with speed and small size in mind. It is a step above the Tetra in size but not as massive as a Devilfish. All it needs is a few rule tweaks to really set it appart.

Great work Patrick!!! I look forward to seeing more of your works.

3 comments:

  1. Definitely sounds cool. I was thinking of something similar to this, except that it would be slower and grant the warriors inside Relentless. Faster is probably a better idea, though, and one that the Tau could definitely use!

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  2. That is an awesome design. If not a GW pick up, I see a great idea for FW, although its on the small scale for their grander ideas, I see some small things pop up from time to time.

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  3. That looks interesting but I would say trade in the Shields for Speed. On such a small vehicle it's a bit hard to justify stuffing a powerful shield generator in as well.

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