Placing Torrent Templates

[Disciple of Fulgrim]

7th Edition may clear this up, or make it obsolete, but in case it doesn't I was wondering how exactly people have been handling the placement of torrent templates?

 

The torrent special rule reads simply enough, but also leads to the following questions: 

 

1. Does the firer of a torrent weapon have to have LOS to the narrow and/or wide end of the template?

 

2. Do intervening friendly models block placement of the template, even if the template does not actually cover any friendly models?  (Or in other words, can torrent weapons fire over friendly units?) 

 

Given the exact wording of the special rule, and the fact special rules are intended to bend or break main game rules, the answers to the above questions seem (to me at least) to be "no," "no" and "no" respectively.  (While also keeping in mind that at least one model in the firing unit must have LOS to at least one model in the target unit, and that wounds can only be allocated to targets visible to at least one model in the firing unit.)

 

We had a bit of a debate about this the other night, and trying to compare torrent weapons to other weapons types or real world hardware was rather fruitless.  The torrent special rule clearly differentiates those types of weapons from regular template weapons, at least when it comes to actually placing the template, and there's actually no requirement for the firer of a regular template weapon to have LOS to where the wide end of his template is placed.  And if some real world flame tanks seem to have been able to arc their flame jets vertically as well as horizontally, who's to say that a 40K version of this weapon couldn't as well?  (Thus enabling the narrow end to be placed out of LOS, and also for torrent weapons to fire over friendly units.)

 

Any thoughts on this - is there something else in the rules we missed, or are torrent weapons indeed pretty flexible (at least according to RAW) when it comes to the placing of their template?

 

P.S. A search of this forum did turn up one thread discussing whether or not torrent weapons could hit the upper floors of a ruin - this question isn't about something like that, but simply how torrent templates should be placed on flat ground.   

[Dam13n]

1 - No to both, he only has to have line of sight to at least one model in the target unit.  The placement of the template is placed to cover as many models in the target unit as possible.  (see Templates, page 52)

 

2 - Friendly models will block placement of the template, but do not affect the intervening distance granted by the torrent rule.  So you can fire over/through friendly models/units, but the template cannot touch them.

 

Of course, this could change in 6 days time...

[Disciple of Fulgrim]

Great, thanks for the confirmation!