The centrepiece of the upcoming Saturnine boxed set is the imposing Saturnine Dreadnought, a towering engine of destruction protected by layers of overlapping armour and bristling with seriously potent guns. Today, we take a look at the lore behind these ironclad behemoths, and how they fit into the armies of the Space Marine Legions.
As with Saturnine Terminator armour, the Saturnine Dreadnought chassis has its origins in the tech-enclaves of Saturn and made its debut in the early years of the Great Crusade. Where other Dreadnought models were developed entirely separately to power armour or even Terminator armour, this is not true of the Saturnine pattern. It’s evident from the technology interwoven through both that the mysterious tech-enclaves had a hand in both.
The Saturnine Siege Dreadnoughts were further developed by the Primarch Vulkan and then naively gifted to all the Space Marine Legions.
The Dreadnought suit features the same enlarged shoulder armour to house shield generators. It also requires that the pilot in the sarcophagus have the same mental gifts – sometimes described as a disciplined mind. The same rumours persist, however, that each possessed some latent or suppressed psychic abilities to enable them to fully access the armour's capabilities.
By way of armament, the Saturnine Dreadnought carries some of the largest and most lethal weapons available to the Legiones Astartes. Many of these weapons are themselves quite rare, or even dangerous – their use on the Saturnine Dreadnought made possible by its advanced power supply, and made (marginally) safer by the Saturnine’s own thermal deflection shielding.
Saturnine Dreadnoughts are commonly equipped with heavy plasma bombards. These indirect-weapons can pummel enemy formations from a safe position, and have proved effective against even massed Legion infantry formations.
Disintegration cannons are one of the larger incarnations of the already rare disintegrator technology. These twin-barreled-weapons were capable of busting a tank, or obliterating enemy walkers.
Some Saturnine Dreadnoughts were equipped with devastating graviton pulverisors. Though capable of hitting with enough gravitic force to crack tank armour, this weapon’s most useful function was suppression – it could effectively immobilise enemy formations as they advance, leaving them easy prey for supporting Legion squads.
Rarer still were inversion beamers, a variant on the conversion beam technology found on some other Legion vehicles. These weapons were notoriously difficult to construct, maintain and use, and required huge power supplies to function. More lethal at closer range, they were able to delete entire units of even Terminator-clad warriors in a single concentrated salvo.
These primary weapon mounts were combined with point-defence weapons, such as photonic incinerators or concussive resonators – all quite potent in their own right, making the Saturnine Dreadnought a terrifying prospect to engage in a short-ranged firefight.
Despite their rarity, there were still a number of famed Saturnine Dreadnoughts. Such was the power of these war machines and the skill of their pilots that they nonetheless carved their names into legend.
Seperoth, The Mountain of Fire, took its name in the wake of the Isstvan V massacre – erasing the legacy of its pilot and beginning a new legacy as it sought to avenge the shattering of the XVIIIth Legion.
The Thousand Sons Legion had no shortage of psychically sensitive warriors within its ranks. Ahkenoptek the Ruinmaker was one such pilot of a Saturnine Dreadnought. His impact in battle was said to be the equal of 50 other Legionaries.
It is ironic that the IVth Legion, having played such a brutal part in the slaughter of Vulkan’s sons, guarded their stocks of Saturnine wargear so jealously. As the Heresy broke out, Perturabo permitted their full deployment, including the Dreadnought armour ‘Avatar of Scorn’, piloted by Gulgorath.
Add a Saturnine Dreadnought to your own Space Marine Legion with the upcoming Saturnine boxed set. Sign up to the Warhammer newsletter for news on this, and all Horus Heresy releases.
