Thousand Sons, of Armor Marks & Mixing

[Vhalyar]

Hi!

I initially wanted to wait until the Thousand Sons had some kind of official representation before jumping into 30k, but... I want to start painting now!

So I have two questions concerning usage of armor among the Thousand Sons.

1) What would be the most common marks in the legion?
I would imagine most of them using Mk3, followed by Mk4 and 2 in equal measure. Not sure how Mk5 would fall into this.

2) Would the Thousand Sons mix & match armor marks within units?
They basically avoided most of the conflict, so the need to use whatever armor they could get their hands on was greatly lessened on top of not being a large legion, so I would think they would not have done it much?

Cheers!

[Noserenda]

As one of the legions not in Horus' inner circle I imagine a larger proportion on Mk2/3 and Local makes (The Egyptian stuff :D ) with a limited selection of Mk4 probably more likely to be issued to Psychics due to Legion Bias.

"Mk5" i can see them using post Prospero, they arrived at the planet of the Sorcerors without supplies and no doubt in dire need of some armour repair, though id imagine what we recognise as Chaos Warping sets in pretty much immediately lots of repairs would be improvised or scavenged from dead/flesh changed brothers. Prior to that probably not :)   

[Kol Saresk]

One thing to note about Mk 5: It is literally any unofficial or ad hoc design that was not made official by the time the Heresy erupted. The Praetor pattern armor? Mk 5. The Egyptian headgear? Possibly Mk 5. So Mk 5 is a rather broad and general area of armor patterns as it literally can be anything.

[Brother Kirus]

On most artwork it looks like TS wear slightly modified MkIV. I would imagine that Mk VI would be most commonly used followed by MkIII.      

[depthcharge12]

I think mkII looks good on them

[Vhalyar]

Cheers for the replies! I have plenty of bits to make artificer armour and important characters, but now I have a better idea of how to build the bulk of the troops.

 

For the most part, would you imagine units were of mixed armor on pre fall of Prospero?

[Excessus]

Before the fall of Prospero, they should have "pure" marks of Mk II and III, with a little Mk IV sprinkled in there amongst them for the officers and such. The mix and match was introduced on Istvaan V as a stop-gap solution to the extremely heavy attrition of armour and gear and continues later in the heresy. On prospero there should be no such mixes of marks.

[Inquisitor Kravin]

Firstly I think that the TS would be averse to mix and match - proper order was very important to them with their ritualistic customs.

Secondly, remember in A Thousand Sons Ahriman prefers the term Reaper Cannon to the more modern designation "Autocannon" because it is more numerologically auspicious. I think that this would apply to a lot of their preferences. They might for example favour MkIII because 3 is the square root of 9 and 9 is their favourite number even before they learn that it is Tzeentch's Sacred Number - e.g. the 9 companies.

[daveNYC]

Maybe.  Thing is, it's the name that has power.  Mk III isn't the name of the armor version, Iron is the name.  Corvus, Heresy, Thunder, these are what carry the power and are what the 1k Sons would key in on if they were going to armor up based on numerologogy.

 

Unfortunately I ran all the armor marks' names through the world's cheesiest numerology calculator online, nothing really works out with some serious '9' type loving (Thunder totals to 36, 4 x 9, but that's weak).  Maximus does have seven letters and totals to 28 (4 x 7), so the Death Guard might be digging that.

 

They're a small enough legion that had a home planet with a relatively high tech level.  You could spin that to give them anything in enough quantity to outfit near everyone.  Flip side is that they're not very popular, so you could stick them with a mix and match of whatever is available.

 

Personally I think they'd lean more towards IV.  It's not that rare, the Sons aren't that stuck on the protective advantages that III offers, and they spent a lot of time hanging on Prospero, not getting shot at, so they wouldn't be losing equipment and having to make due.

[Vhalyar]

Thanks for the replies, very helpful in figuring out what to order :)

 

So between my own tastes and what would theoretically make sense, I'll build my first two blocks of tacticals in pure Mk3 and Mk4 with added greenstuff doodads.

[Lord Commander Scrymgeour]

"(Thunder totals to 36, 4 x 9, but that's weak)"  It's pretty strong actually, 3+6 is also nine, so if the sum of the two letters is 9, and also divisible by nine, and thus also by 3 it seems pretty auspicious