40k: Iron Warrior Tanks

Continuing the Iron Warriors preparation before the Sakar Campaign battles begin, I've been looking through my Iron Warrior tank collection.

It took a while to go through the various boxes, cases and hideholes to find them but I have my Iron Warrior tanks together for the first time. The years of tournaments, campaigns and large scale battles during the early 2000's racked up a decent number and now I shall reap the benefit.

Yet, time has not been kind and many of these tanks are battered and bruised. Broken spikes, loose parts or missing gargoyles – they all need some TLC.

As I mentioned previously, I had a limited number of Chaos marines so Rhino transports were never a real desire, other than as mobile terrain pieces. There were two that I took regularly to tournaments and true to form they are the twins in the Rhino collection – almost carbon copies of each other to look at. However, my first Iron Warrior Rhino was used as a Command Rhino, hence the extra time spent on the painting and the addition of a dozer blade. The tell-tale of its origin though is that it has no extra armour – an essential for tournament play back then – hence it never saw any tournament time.

The darlings of my IW tournament armies were without doubt my Predators. I could squeeze four into a list and for years they formed a very solid and intimidating backbone. The ones used almost exclusively were the Twin-Lascannon/Heavy Bolter sponson variety – of which I own four. This allowed them to deal with vehicles as well as troops and, given they were always on the move, not being able to shoot all your weapons every turn wasn't an issue.

Nowadays however, an Autocannon turret with the Heavy Bolter sponsons might be a better solution, as would the Twin-Lascannon turret with Lascannon sponsons.

I also have a Vindicator who, whilst not used much in tournaments, proves to be a solid choice in 'fun' games. It had a bit of customisation done at the time – it was a Forgeworld conversion kit as GW only did metal parts at the time which resulted in a very unbalanced model.

A prerequisite for Iron Warrior armies for many a tournament was the humble Basilisk. These were the days when IW and Orks could make use of such heavy weapons and I build a custom version especially. However, it didn't take long for GW to retract that option and now the tank resides here somewhat redundant.

The daddy of the collection though has to be my resin Forgeworld Baneblade. It has never has been a legal option for an Iron Warrior army but it was bought and converted to face Imperial walkers and Eldar flyers (in the days when only Forgeworld made such things and they were rarely seen on the battlefield) in massive fun campaign days – before the Apocalypse rules were invented. It was put together and painted in some haste but was always fun to roll onto the field of play.

It has been battered over the last decade in storage though and will need a lot of attention to bring it around. It has a serious amount of firepower and would be a worthy opponent for the likes of Bull's Ork Stompas. With a 4000pt game on the horizon it seems the perfect time for the Baneblade to make its return… or I could buy something new and plastic. The only 'legal' Lord of War choice available to Iron Warriors is the Chaos Lord of Skulls, which would be a ridiculous choice for this heavy hitting army. I could always build and convert one of the new Imperial Knights, turn it to the dark side – an exciting option but additional time and money would be an issue.

So there we have the mech side of my Iron Warriors. More soon…