Saturnine might be named for the Terminator and Dreadnought armour contained within the box, but there’s no shortage of other esoteric technology represented in the set. By our real-world standards, bolters are pretty far out and plasma bombards are unimaginable… but disintegrators are the strangest guns of all.
The box contains no less than 43 disintegrator weapons: from the compact disintegration pistol a Legionary Veteran can carry in one hand all the way up to the massive twin heavy disintegrator borne by the mighty Saturnine Dreadnought. Each has its place, and each is horrifically dangerous on the battlefield.
Birth of a legend
The first time we ever saw a distintegrator weapon was back in 1986, at the birth of the Warhammer 40,000 universe as we know it. It was in the hands of the very first Space Marine miniature, given the code LE 02. As the first Space Marine miniature, little enough was known about him back then – and soon enough his iconic weapon all but faded into memory.
That was until 2016, when the Warhammer studio remade that classic LE 02 model in plastic, faithfully reinventing him along with his iconic weapon. It even got a weapon profile for the 41st Millennium – which currently has Legends rules.
A character appears in the Siege of Terra novels who is relevant to this tale. Named Leetu, he is a formidable Space Marine of mysterious origins. He even refers to himself as a prototype. Here’s how his weapon is described:
“Leetu had a gun in his hands. It was long-barrelled, ribbed, and wound with pipes and wires that gleamed with the work of technology that Oll had not seen since wars that were now long past.”
But what do they do?
And that brings us up to now – and the spectacular Saturnine release, with which you can equip two full squads of Legionary Veterans, six Saturnine Terminators and a Dreadnought with these relics of a bygone era.
We know relatively little about disintegrators – it's an ancient Terran technology that survived the horrors of Old Night, and it seems to have played some part in the Unification Wars and the Great Crusade that followed. The weapons fire bolts of radiant energy, the power of which unmakes the target at a molecular level. The result is an explosive tearing-apart of flesh and armour – even the Space Marine Legions are vulnerable.
We’ve grabbed two frames from the epic Saturnine cinematic trailer that show the destructive fury of these murderous guns.
Why did their use die out in the wake of the Horus Heresy? Like so many things lost in the sundering of the Imperial dream, we don’t know. Yet. Perhaps that will be explored in the future, or perhaps it's just another mystery underlying the grim darkness of the far future.
