Storm Eagle

A Storm Eagle used by the Salamanders.

The Storm Eagle Assault Gunship is the "middle brother" of Space Marine aerial transports, carrying twenty Marines as opposed to the Stormraven's twelve-plus-Dreadnought or the Thunderhawk's thirty. The Space Marines used loads of them during the Great Crusade, but the forge worlds that made them were destroyed during the Horus Heresy. This meant that the only Storm Eagles in use were those left over at the end of the Heresy, so you had to be from the First or Second Foundings to even have them and they were only seldom deployed, but those chapters who are friends of the Adeptus Mechanicus seem to be using theirs a lot more frequently, almost as if they're being made again...

Given how powerful all Space Marine aerial vehicles are, you'd think that they would make use of as many as they could by flying around empty ones modified for dropping bombs or holding more weapons/ammo to support their brothers on the ground. Or, hey, how about using the fuck-tons of chapter serfs to pilot air craft and drive tanks and shit so all the power armored super-soldiers can do what they do best. Kill shit with bolter and chainsword (admittedly that would likely drop them down to BS3). Please note that this is exactly what the Legiones (not misspelled, blame Games Workshop) Astartes did and they conquered a million worlds almost single-handedly in about two or three centuries (except on the vast majority of those worlds they never actually fought anything).

It's a Forge World product, created to beef up the Space Marines' section of Imperial Armour Aeronautica (as if the Marines didn't have enough toys already), and to give some non-Apocalypse aerial transport to those Chapters that aren't Blood Angels or Grey Knights (including Chaos Space Marines). It also sports a twin-linked Heavy Bolter, an array of Missile Launchers and, optionally, two twin-linked Lascannons or four krak missiles.

Clearly effective at killing any enemy vehicles present at a drop-zone and saturating the surrounding area with missiles and heavy bolt shells before deploying its Marines.

Its appearance should always be accompanied by an epic guitar riff.

Darkwing Pattern

Darkwing Duck ahoy!

A rare and precious variant utilised exclusively by the Raven Guard Legion during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy eras of the 30th and early 31st Millennia. This variant Storm Eagle pattern was fitted with a range of highly prized and barely understood systems, from its rad-shrouded armour to its quantum field repellors. These additional systems required a higher degree of maintenance and some interior space was sacrificed to make room for them, meaning the vessel had a slightly reduced troop-carrying capacity. Given that the Darkwing pattern was often utilised to insert small units of elite warriors such as the Mor Deythan deep into enemy-held territory, this was no great loss. Each Chapter within the XIX Legion maintained a stock of these highly-prized gunships. It is not known if the Raven Guard still utilises this rare pattern of Storm Eagle in the late 41st Millennium.

Nighthawk Pattern

The Nighthawk Pattern is a specialised variant of the Storm Eagle that was developed at the dawn of the 31st Millennium by the illustrious Sabik Wayland, an Iron Father of the Iron Hands Legion. The Nighthawk Pattern was equipped with a multi-spectrum camouflage field which greatly increased the vessel's stealth capacities. The Nighthawk Pattern was also noted to be far more agile than the average Storm Eagle and was equipped with decoy launchers able to confuse incoming missiles. The Nighthawk Pattern was still undergoing tests at the time time of the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, its construction plans having not been sanctioned by the Mechanicum for mass-production. In fact, the only Nighthawk Pattern known to have effectively flown was Wayland's own personal gunship which undoubtedly proved its efficiency on the many covert missions led by Wayland and the valiant crew of the Strike Cruiser Sisypheum. If and to what extent the Nighthawk Pattern was indeed commissioned for regular duty remains unclear.

Roc Pattern

The Roc Pattern is unique to the Minotaurs Chapter; a variant of the the standard pattern Storm Eagle is the Roc Pattern Storm Eagle, which is intended to serve as a dedicated tank-destroyer. Although outwardly indistinguishable from the standard pattern of the aircraft, the Roc Pattern Storm Eagle forgoes a proportion of its transport capacity for added specialized anti-armour munitions and on-board fuel reserves for its attitudinal thrusters to enhance its ability to carry out ground attacks. It loses six seats to hold additional fuel and ammunition as mentioned before. Beyond the original Storm Eagle's loadout, the Roc Pattern comes with lascannons standard and replaces the Heavy 2 5" blast missile launcher with a Heavy 4 twin-linked krak launcher It also gets a BS boost for attacking ground targets.

Fire Raptor

Note the twin rape gun in the nose.

Suddenly Forge World guys realized that people run Storm Eagles empty more often than not, being more interested in using them as a fire platform than as an extremely risky transport (because S10 AP2 autohit for every passenger if it explodes in midair sucks), so they cut out the transport capacity, armed it with a twin Avenger bolt cannon (aka "fuck marine gun") instead of nose twin HB, and replaced the missile pods with two sidegunner sponsons with 2 twin-linked HBs each, and named it the Fire Raptor. This thing is a flying rape machine against any infantry lighter than terminators.

Rules are out, and they're hectic. It has the 'Independent Turret Fire' special rule, which basically means "Shoot these weapons at anything in range, and they don't count towards the total number of weapons it can fire". It also has the 'Relic of the Armoury' rule - this means you can only take ONE of ANY type of Relic vehicle in your army, unless you have a Keeper of the Relics as a HQ choice (or compulsory HQ in secondary detachments). What's a Keeper of the Relics, you ask? They are:

• Space Marines: Master of the Forge (which no longer exists RAW, just use a Techmarine, which is the same RAI thing until you see an update, Forge World encourages this)
• Dark Angels: Interrogator-Chaplain
• Blood Angels: Reclusiarch
• Space Wolves: Rune Priest with Saga of the Beastslayer (which now only exists as a Warlord Trait, emails from FW suggest just ignoring that part and house-ruling a basic Rune Priest)
• Chaos: Abaddon, Warpsmith or a Sorcerer rolling on Malefic Daemonology

You have one of these, you can take as many of these flying rape machines as you want (within reason).

Blood Angels also get a unique weapon - the Revelation-class Warhead Battery. Unlike every other Blood Angels weapon ever, this has an STR and AP value of -. Why? Because it's Heavy 4, Barrage, Large Blast, Blind, One Use and Descent Beacon. Which raises another point - what's a Descent Beacon? More Deep Striking goodness - "After the Revelation warhead battery attack has been fully resolved, the controlling player may place a beacon marker at the center point of any one of the Large Blast markers placed as part of the weapon’s attack. This marker remains in place until the end of the Blood Angels player’s next turn, and any friendly unit with the Descent of Angels special rule that deploys using the Deep Strike rules within 6" of the marker will not scatter."

Oh, and you can swap the two quad heavy bolters (S5/AP4/Heavy6/Twin-Linked) with two twin-linked Autocannons, or a double Reaper autocannon (S7/AP4/Heavy4/Twinlinked), in case you don't worship that rotting corpse on th*BLAM* HERESY! Anyway, the side sponson weapon still benefit from the Independent Turret Fire rule.

In 8th Edition, the Fire Raptor has become even more of a flying machine of moving death than it has in previous editions. It becomes nearly as tough as a lander raider at T7, 16 wounds and a save of +3 but with a few more perks, namely the Hard to Hit and Airborne. One adds a -1 to hit against this model and the other make it so that only units with the key word <Fly> can charge it but it can't charge itself. Not only that, your two hellstrike missiles are no longer single use, so enjoy that 72" range or switch them out for two twin-las cannons. While very expensive at a whopping +400 points, its usually worth it to see orks and nids cry.