There has been some debate over whether or not the XV104 gets a railgun, or just the ion weapon. This has been fueled by claims that there are three distinct weapons depicted, the 'super burst cannon', the ion weapon and the disputed 'railcannon'. Unfortunately, I'm afraid close inspection of the images shows that two of these weapons are, in fact, the same thing.
Behind the jump, since it would otherwise warp the page.
Showing posts with label rumours. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rumours. Show all posts
3.19.2013
1.17.2013
It's a Bird! It's a Plane! Wait, Yes, It Is a Plane!
According to the good people over at Faeit 212, next month's White Dwarf will see the release of a new wave of flyers. The wave consists of kits for the Tyranid Harpy and the Dark Eldar Voidraven bomber, as well as all new flyers for Eldar and Tau Empire. Obviously, one of these is of significantly more interest to me than the others, so let's take a look at what's rumoured.
First, the placement is nice; Tau don't have a lot competing for the Fast Attack spot. If this thing had gone into Heavy Support it would have forced some pretty serious tradeoffs, particularly given its loadout. The AV is good, not great but notably better than the Barracuda, and BS4 standard is the least one should expect. The lack of hover might be problematic, but it hasn't stopped any non-Marine flyers from being dangerous, so it's not a huge problem. The hull looks promising, though of course without a points cost or knowledge of the types of options available (primarily, can it buy a disruption pod?) it's impossible to say whether this will be a good kit or not.
Unfortunately, even without a points cost, one thing is obvious; this flyer is going to have very little to offer as a flyer-hunter. For codexes without flakk missiles (read, all of them but Chaos Marines and Dark Angels) the best answer to a flyer is another flyer. Yes, there's the quad gun and the Icarus lascannon on the Aegis, but those are single guns, with limited arcs and rates of fire, vulnerable to being destroyed by enemy forces before any flyers turn up. If you really need to deal with another army's flyers, you need one of your own. And whatever this thing ends up getting called, it's not going to do the job.
Heavy 6 is nice, but at the end of the day a S5 gun is too weak. Relying on glances to deal with most of the flyers in the game is not a solid option. Worse, this leaves it incapable of threatening the two most common flyers, the Imperial Guard Valkyrie/Vendetta and the Blood Angels/Grey Knights Stormraven. It's S8 option would work better, but of course you can't fire blasts at flyers. Which leaves it with its missiles, and at S6 the odds are actually even worse for dealing with AV12 than trying to take on AV11 with the main gun; at least that's Heavy 6, while these are presumably one-shot weapons, like every other missile in the game. Worse, every other flyer in the game has better weaponry than this thing, even those like the Dark Eldar with tissue paper AV10 flyers. This means that not only will Tau flyers struggle to deal with their counterparts, but those flyers that easily shrug off S5 will be more than happy to come back at it with S7, or 8, or even 9.
Like I said, without a points cost it's impossible to say whether this thing will be useful or not. At 50 points, it could fill a valuable ground-attack role; with a flyer's speed it's not hard to get into rear armour arcs, where S5 Heavy 6 can really ruin someone's day. But anything more than about seventy-five points is simply not going to be cost-effective for what this thing can do, given how expensive Tau units are relative to their utility already. The Piranha is overcosted at that level, and at least it gets a melta gun.
So. Here's hoping either this flyer is cheap-as-free, or that the guns are a lot better than what's been reported!
Tau receive a flyer and data sheet for it. Fast attack choice. Armor 11 all around. Non tau pilot. Looks like a manta ray flying backwards. Bs 4 super sonic. S6 ap4 missiles. Off center gun heavy 6 str 5 ap 4 twin linked or single small blast Str 8 ap 2.
That's not a bad look, actually.
First, the placement is nice; Tau don't have a lot competing for the Fast Attack spot. If this thing had gone into Heavy Support it would have forced some pretty serious tradeoffs, particularly given its loadout. The AV is good, not great but notably better than the Barracuda, and BS4 standard is the least one should expect. The lack of hover might be problematic, but it hasn't stopped any non-Marine flyers from being dangerous, so it's not a huge problem. The hull looks promising, though of course without a points cost or knowledge of the types of options available (primarily, can it buy a disruption pod?) it's impossible to say whether this will be a good kit or not.
Unfortunately, even without a points cost, one thing is obvious; this flyer is going to have very little to offer as a flyer-hunter. For codexes without flakk missiles (read, all of them but Chaos Marines and Dark Angels) the best answer to a flyer is another flyer. Yes, there's the quad gun and the Icarus lascannon on the Aegis, but those are single guns, with limited arcs and rates of fire, vulnerable to being destroyed by enemy forces before any flyers turn up. If you really need to deal with another army's flyers, you need one of your own. And whatever this thing ends up getting called, it's not going to do the job.
Heavy 6 is nice, but at the end of the day a S5 gun is too weak. Relying on glances to deal with most of the flyers in the game is not a solid option. Worse, this leaves it incapable of threatening the two most common flyers, the Imperial Guard Valkyrie/Vendetta and the Blood Angels/Grey Knights Stormraven. It's S8 option would work better, but of course you can't fire blasts at flyers. Which leaves it with its missiles, and at S6 the odds are actually even worse for dealing with AV12 than trying to take on AV11 with the main gun; at least that's Heavy 6, while these are presumably one-shot weapons, like every other missile in the game. Worse, every other flyer in the game has better weaponry than this thing, even those like the Dark Eldar with tissue paper AV10 flyers. This means that not only will Tau flyers struggle to deal with their counterparts, but those flyers that easily shrug off S5 will be more than happy to come back at it with S7, or 8, or even 9.
Like I said, without a points cost it's impossible to say whether this thing will be useful or not. At 50 points, it could fill a valuable ground-attack role; with a flyer's speed it's not hard to get into rear armour arcs, where S5 Heavy 6 can really ruin someone's day. But anything more than about seventy-five points is simply not going to be cost-effective for what this thing can do, given how expensive Tau units are relative to their utility already. The Piranha is overcosted at that level, and at least it gets a melta gun.
So. Here's hoping either this flyer is cheap-as-free, or that the guns are a lot better than what's been reported!
1.18.2012
A Sign of What's To Come?
Games Workshop updated their 40K FAQs a little while ago, and unusually for them they pretty much did a sweep across the board. Most everything, from the rulebook to the codices, got at least a few new points put in there to clear up little questionable odds and sods.
The exceptions? Tau Empire, and Black Templar.
Here's hoping this means that the rumours really are true; that those two codices are the next up on the updating block, and that they'll be making their appearances sooner rather than later. After all, it's not as though there aren't still a few questions about the Tau Empire codex, or even questions about the answers from the last round of questions about the Tau Empire codex. And if you're already doing everyone else, you'd think they'd throw those two groups in as well. Unless they knew it wasn't necessary; unless they knew, for instance, there'd be a whole new set of questions needing answers soon enough, so why bother putting something together now when they'll just have to do it all again in two or three or four months?
Fingers cross, my shas'os and 'els out there. Fingers crossed...
The exceptions? Tau Empire, and Black Templar.
Here's hoping this means that the rumours really are true; that those two codices are the next up on the updating block, and that they'll be making their appearances sooner rather than later. After all, it's not as though there aren't still a few questions about the Tau Empire codex, or even questions about the answers from the last round of questions about the Tau Empire codex. And if you're already doing everyone else, you'd think they'd throw those two groups in as well. Unless they knew it wasn't necessary; unless they knew, for instance, there'd be a whole new set of questions needing answers soon enough, so why bother putting something together now when they'll just have to do it all again in two or three or four months?
Fingers cross, my shas'os and 'els out there. Fingers crossed...
11.16.2011
Will It Be Unironically Full of Lens Flare, This Time?
So David Yates, the director of the last four Harry Potter movies, is working with the BBC on a big-screen Doctor Who adventure. The kicker? It won't have a damn thing to do with the Doctor, any of the versions of the Doctor, who's made the series so successful that the notoriously cheap BBC is willing to shell out enough for a major motion picture. According toYates,
"It needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena. [...] "Russell T. Davies and then Steven Moffat have done their own transformations, which were fantastic, but we have to put that aside and start from scratch."
I can't tell you how tired I am of this song and dance. Time and again, a genre property will get popular enough that the movie studios will take notice, and what happens? As a reward for it cultivating a successful brand, that brand is stripped to the bone and a whole host of random new elements are included. In the best case scenario, we can end up with something like the Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter movies, something that's strange and not quite right, but still enjoyable. More often, it seems, we get Dragonball Evolution, or the Resident Evil series, or Michael Bay's Transformers, or Roland Emmerich's Godzilla, or the upcoming live-action Akira film. No matter how closely the BBC is working with Yates and whoever else on this project, it's hard to see this as anything but a prelude to a story that is Doctor Who in name only, trading on the name but desperately trying to distance itself from everything that's made it so popular in order to appeal to the sort of people who wouldn't know Doctor Who from Doctor House.
Not that that's all bad...
And honestly, a reboot? I just can't look at this as anything but J. J. Abrams' Star Trek all over again, a needlessly complicated and unsatisfying re-write of the established mythology, failing to either tell an interesting new story or take the fans back into the pleasantly familiar universe. Star Trek was particularly brutal about this, wiping out an entire universe (sort of) in order to free Star Trek up to do 'new' and 'different' and 'interesting' things that, apparently, they couldn't do otherwise. And the new, interesting, different story they want to tell for Star Trek 2? Something with Khan Noonien Singh. You can't make this stuff up.
So what does a reboot mean for Doctor Who? Well, the script isn't done yet; Yates isn't even talking about having this thing ready before a few years from now, and hasn't even settled on a writer yet. But it's hard not to worry, and worry with some cause, that this is going to be some sort of elsewords-Doctor, unconnected with anything from the show, and one that uses the reboot excuse to change his character. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Doctor having a romance with his Companion, or firing a gun (repeatedly), or even having a space battle with the TARDIS. You don't reboot a series, after all, if you intend to play the pre-existing characters and themes straight. We saw this in Abrams' Star Trek, with Kirk's thoughtless bro-ishness turned up to 11, and Scotty as a work-shirking chucklehead, and the Spock/Uhura romance. So why would we expect something different from a Doctor Who that 'puts aside' everything people actually like about the series so they can 'start from scratch'?
Like this but, y'know, moreso...
Sigh. I used to wish that the movies would do something new, or different, or interesting. Now I just wish they'd stop redoing old, familiar stories so damn badly.
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