Great Crusade Great Crusade arms & armaments

[WrathOfTheLion]

I view it more like the refinement of weapons during a war's progression. For example, replacing milled components with cast or stamped components, removing unneeded parts and other simplifications. While this is done, the equipment still does what it needs to do, but by the end, it's more crude, may lose some nice-to-have features, but also significantly easier to manufacture.

Edited January 17 by WrathOfTheLion

[Xenith]

On 1/14/2026 at 10:12 PM, calgar101 said:

That is a great analogy with the Tiger tank. Thank you for that Xenith. It would be interesting to see what weapons the Dark Angels had, and still have. 

 

The Excindio automata is a great source for that, as well as inductii - namely phosphex, rad and volkite, and probably stuff the admech has also, so we're looking at conversion/inversion weapons, graviton, particle shredders, electro guns, disintegrators, the custodes aranthite disintegrators etc.  We know the Luna Wolves ravaged the Moon pre-crusade, so they probably had some pretty gnarly stuff also, before the space marine arsenal was standardised. 

[calgar101]

@WrathOfTheLion Yeah I'd definitely agree on that, streamlining the manufacturing processes, some drop in quality but nothing alarming and production increases making up for that. 

@Xenith I need to read the Black Book that has the Dark Angels in it. 

[Pacific81]

Its possible to tie yourself in knots with the often contradictory background but a lot of this just comes down to the practicalities of how the miniatures themselves were produced. 

In 1st edition Orks had bolters and rhinos because initially that was the only plastic kit available. WHFB and 40k used to share miniatures. The Horus Heresy exists because they only had one infantry sprue produced for 6mm, and they needed a lore justification for blue on blue warfare.

Even to this day, the new Saturnine book has descriptions of every Legion using the armour mark, even the ones that don't make very much sense, because they don't want people with existing miniatures not being able to buy them (which is absolutely fair enough).

 

The context of this is that while I am trying to stick to an era, all of this lore is from someone's imagination, so while there are a few red lines (Inductii in a Crusade-era army* etc) I won't treat this as something like WW2 gaming, where there are distinct unit options at different eras of the war and across campaigns.

 

*even then, you could justify this as something like a trainee unit, after a campaign where massive casualties had been sustained, such as in the Rangdan genocides.