There have been many timeless Warhammer kits over the years – but few have as many service studs as the not-so-humble Land Raider.
This glorious lump of plastic was first released 25 years ago, gracing tabletops for almost as long as it has been in use in the grim darkness of the far future. Such a milestone is worth celebrating, so we’ve prepared a retrospective fit for Arkhan Land himself.
Rogue Trader and Epic
The current Land Raider made its glorious debut in Issue 245 of White Dwarf in May 2000 – but as with most of Warhammer, this isn’t where it starts. There’s an earlier version that dates back to the dawn of Warhammer 40,000 as a setting.
The Land Raider was first mentioned in the Rogue Trader rulebook – the very first edition of Warhammer 40,000 in 1987 – though the original was scratch-built by Dave Andrews, using pen tops for track links. A year later, it would be one of the first plastic kits ever released, coming in a box of two. It wasn’t an exclusively Space Marine tank in those days – it was also in use by the Imperial Guard, the Squats, and even looted by Orks and Eldar Harlequins.*
Sporting a pair of twin-linked lascannons and twin-linked heavy bolters on a pintle, this magnificent machine dominated the battlefield. The kit was far ahead of its time, and it’s now an incredibly rare collectors’ piece – and even rarer on sprue (which was cream coloured for some reason).
Its lore was fleshed out in 1990, in an article in White Dwarf 129, which (we think!) is the first mention of Arkhan Land, the Tech-Priest who rediscovered the STC.
After the original kit went off sale, the Space Marines had to go to battle without their premier tank for more than a few years – at Warhammer 40,000 scale, at least. Land Raiders were still available in the epic-scale games Space Marine and Titan Legions, while in 1997 the world would get a glimpse of a radical redesign. A sleek new Land Raider** made an appearance in the launch box for Epic 40,000… but it wasn’t joined at the larger scale until the next real-world millennium.
The Land Raider MkIII
By the year 2000, the battlefields of the 41st Millennium were crying out for a murderous parallelogram on tracks – it was the middle of third edition, and things were kicking up several notches as battles got faster, louder and larger.
The new Land Raider landed in a furore of lascannon fire and machine spirit turbulence – and more than 20 pages of coverage in White Dwarf, including a picture of Arkhan Land himself.
Billed as a mobile Space Marine fortress, it was the largest plastic kit ever produced at the time – at least a third larger than its ancestor, retaining all the familiar elements but reimagining them for a new era. The lascannons were now twinned horizontally rather than vertically, while the heavy bolters came with proper heft. The smoke grenade launchers retained their classic three-tube silhouette, but many more details were pioneered, including interior doors, lockers and control panels you could glimpse thanks to the functional opening doors. Every 13th track has an Imperial Aquila on it; 12 for the High Lords of Terra and a 13th to stamp the Emperor’s dominion on the ground below.
This was actually the Land Raider MkIII as it had subtle changes from its epic incarnation. The rear armour was removed from the sponsons to allow for more mobility on the lascannon, for instance, alongside other small changes.
The variants
The arrival of the new Land Raider opened the floodgates for variants, which came thick and fast over the years, first with metal upgrade sets. The Land Raider Crusader (originally exclusive to the Black Templars) switches out the lascannons for three banks of paired storm bolters on either side – four guns won’t cut the mustard in the face of 12 – while the Redeemer mounts flamestorm cannons for close-range mayhem.
The Land Raider Excelsior is rarer, more commonly known as the Command Land Raider, which is on sale at Warhammer World and a select few other Warhammer stores around the world.
Forge World also got in on the act with a range of resin upgrade kits for more obscure patterns, including the likes of the Helios, the Achilles, and the Prometheus. You could even customise your Land Raider with Chapter-appropriate resin doors.
There are plenty of other canonical variants – which even had official rules in various publications – though they can only be built through kitbashing. As you can see, the stock chassis has two sponson mounts on each side, and most of these variants would add a second sponson per side for additional (if impractical) firepower…
The Horus Heresy
There are yet more Land Raiders still available. The original style of chassis made a daring return in resin in 2013, updated with modern sculpting techniques yet deliberately harking back to the earliest days of the setting. Dubbed the Land Raider Proteus,*** it fleshed out the lore of the original, and it still graces battlefields in the Horus Heresy setting – albeit re-redesigned in plastic.
There is also the Spartan Assault Tank, which combines the silhouette of the original with the length of the MkIIb, adding a special hatch at the front to help disgorge your cargo of irate Terminators right where they need to be. Now available in plastic, it too is based on a very old design, a 1989 kitbash that appeared in White Dwarf 119.
Is it a Land Raider? No, but it certainly looks like one, as do its variants, the Typhon Heavy Siege Tank and the Cerberus Heavy Tank Destroyer. Clearly, the Dark Age technician who invented the original model knew they were onto something… In a reversal of the MkIIb Land Raider’s journey from epic scale to the Warhammer 40,000 MkIII, the Spartan has also been shrunk down to modern epic scale for Legions Imperialis, as has the Land Raider Proteus.
We love the Land Raider, and we’d love to see your Land Raiders. Do you have one you bought way back in the year 2000? Do you have a heavily kitbashed Chaos Land Raider? Do you own an unusual variant? Do you have an original? Share them with us on Instagram and Facebook – we genuinely can’t wait to see ’em.
* As they were then known…
** Subsequently dubbed the MkIIb.
*** At this point, the regular chassis also received a name: the Land Raider Phobos.
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