6 Things You Need to Know About the New Ork Kill Rig/Hunta Rig

Happy weekend, Dear Reader. We’re a week out from the release of perhaps the most anticipated unit in the recent Codex: Orks – The Kill Rig. Games Workshop was kind enough to send us a preview copy of the model (thanks!) and while it’ll be another week or two before Rockfish can paint one up for a How to Paint Everything article, we thought we’d write something about it anyways since it’s going up for pre-order today. Whenever we do these there’s a certain pressure to just do an unboxing but frankly those are pretty pretty boring and we think we can do better than just telling you what’s in the box. So while yes, we will cover what the box contents are here – spoiler: It’s a Kill Rig – we’ll also be addressing some of your burning questions about the model, both from a hobby perspective and a play perspective.

So without further ado, here are the 6 things you need to know about the new Kill Rig.

 

Before We Get Started Bonus: Look at These Sprues

Before we dive in, if all you’re here for is a good look at what’s on the sprues, here they are. We’re going to spend the next 5 points talking about how to actually build and paint and play with the thing ad what you can do with these sprues, but here are the photos you’ll need for reference.

The Kill Rig box contents. That’s a 170mm oval base – same size as an Imperial Knight.

Sprue #2, with more gubbinz

The third sprue, only half the size, with all the Orks on it

Alright, now let’s cover the good stuff.

 

1. It’s a large model

A size comparison of a marine against the big squig that pulls the rig

OK this may seem like a no-brainer but it’s important to note how big the model is. It comes on three sprues, and comes packaged with a 170mm oval base, the same size base as an Imperial Knight. Even then, the assembled model overhangs the length of the base by more than 2 inches on the front and back, making the whole thing about 9 inches in length from horn to rear. It’s also got some height to it as well, standing about 5″ off the ground at its highest point, with most of that height in the rear where the Wurrboy sits.

 

2. The kit can also be used to build the Hunta Rig – and It’s surprisingly modular

The assembly for the Kill Rig, which has modular slots for the gun and pulpit mounts

If you’re not into winning games the easy way, you can also use the contents of this kit to build the Hunta rig. This is really simple – you just take off/don’t assemble the Wurrboy’s pulpit and instead move the two guns back, freeing up the platform at the front of the rig to be open for transport. Though full credit to Games Workshop – they’ve designed a model here that is extremely modular. The Wurrboy pulpit and both of the model’s guns slot into circular mounts that can be placed – without glue – into specific spots on the mode, and the forward guns can be mounted in several different spots. When you want to switch things up, you just pull these out and rotate the guns back. If you’re worried about rubbing the paint off, magnetizing this bad boy will be trivially easy.

Look, we’re not going to lie to you: Right now there’s almost no reason whatsoever to take the Hunta Rig in a competitive game. It’s bad, and the Kill Rig is so good the only question you’ll have is “do I need two or three in my army?” But regardless, this is just a fantastic design decision, and is exactly the kind of thing that I’d love to see on future GW models. If you think I’m being effusive with my praise here well, it’s intentional – I think this is great and I want to encourage GW to do it more often. This will be even better if they ever make the Hunta Rig useful enough to play in competitive games. As-is, it’s a really great design decision that rewards players who want flexibility and is great for more casual players who want options with their models.

 

3. If you build the Hunta Rig, you get the Wurrboy

The Wurrboy and his base

The kit comes with an extra 32mm base, which is the base you’ll mount the Wurrboy on if you decide to build the Hunta Rig. The one aspect of the kit that isn’t modular is the Wurrboy, surprisingly – the pulpit he sits in doesn’t hold his base – he’s supposed to be glued into the pulpit. That’s not ideal if you want to be able to use him on or off the model, but not a big deal if you don’t need to field a Wurrboy on foot when you’re running a Hunta Rig. If you are planning to do that however, this is where you’ll want to drop a couple magnets in his feet (and accordingly on the 32mm base and pulpit floor), so you can easily move him from one to hte other. He’s not going to sit stably enough without them.

 

4. Rockfish’s Thoughts on Painting the Kill Rig

I’m not planning to actually paint this one – it’s going to Rockfish, one of our most prolific mini painters on the site. If you haven’t seen his Orks, check out the Army Showcase for them here. We’ll be having him write about them in a future How to Paint article. In the meantime, I asked him for his thoughts on painting this.

Rockfish: Since I am completely mad I do even huge models like this after they’ve been completely assembled, but you can often get away with this on ork models by priming or airbrushing the full model in your main metallic base coat then washing and drybrush that. This also saves a huge amount of time as the majority of the model will end up as some variety of metal, and as a bonus even if you miss a spot later on it will blend in with the rest of the model. You can make that intial coat go even further by using contrast colours like Gore-Grunta and Snakebite to add copper and brass without additional base coats or washes.

Remember that while the model is huge and immensely complex, the things that won’t be handled by starting with the initial metallic colours are surprisingly few distinct components. It’s some armour panels, the riders, the squig, and some details bits like bone, which is not nearly as monumental a task to consider!

I would also suggest painting the orks and squig last, because then you can go wild with rust and dirt without obscuring the time spent on nice flesh tones and cloth.

 

5. Two Kill Rigs is probably the correct number in competitive play

The Art of War crew have affectionately (read: Sarcastically) dubbed this new unit “the Skill Rig,” and for good reason – it’s got an incredible datasheet for its cost. For some additional insight here, I asked former ITC Champion Richard Siegler for his thoughts on the unit.

Siegler: The Kill Rig is absurdly durable and has an amazing toolkit for its points. It’s a Psyker, has access to both indirect fire and auto-hitting lascannons (i.e. S9, AP-3 D6 damage), access to the Groundshaker Shells Stratagem (1 CP to halve the Move characteristic of a unit hit by a ‘eavy lobba and give it -2 to Advance and charge rolls), plus it’s great in melee combat, can gain pluses to hit and wound, and on top of all that, it doesn’t degrade that harshly as it takes damage. Competitive armies generally want two of them. Taking a pair gives you just enough beef on the front lines move blocking and holding down center objectives or protecting non-Blood Axe buggies from being tagged. Our team was considering converting them for the upcoming LVO Team Tournament – they were absolutely dominant in our five playtest games against some of our best lists.

TheChirurgeon: Great point. Taking two instead of three also helps lists avoid giving up max points for the Abhor the Witch Secondary objective if there are other psykers in the army, and likewise helps you avoid giving up full points for Bring it Down or Assassination, depending on how you build.

 

6. Be aggressive with your Kill Rigs and build around them

We also talked to Goonhammer resident Orks competitor Shane Watts about his thoughts on adding the Kill Rig to his Ork lists.

Shane: The Kill Rig is a great all around unit, and as Mr. Siegler said it has something to add in every phase. I have come to find that it poses a big threat in melee, and the fact that it can transport 10 beast snagga boyz, means that advancing it into your opponent is just awesome. Since the Wurrtower (Ork Psychic Lascannon) is both Assault and automatically hits its targets, you can advance and shoot it without worrying. If it gets stuck in it can do a ton of damage and still can be dropping Beast Snagga Boyz out.

I think you’ll get your best results if you build around it, bringing other units that opponents want to shoot with anti tank guns. I am running two of them, alongside Trukks with more beast snagga boyz, some squigbuggies, and Ghaz. All these things generally are where an opponent wants to shoot anti tank, so by overloading it, it makes it harder for it to be dealt with.

Additionally, since the Kill Rig is a CHARACTER, it does benefit from the Waaagh! advance and charge benefit, and when you combine that with the vehicle Stratagem Ramming Speed, you have an average threat range of 26″. It’s pretty bonkers having a vehicle with 14 attacks and angry orks inside yeet across the board, toss out some mortals via psychic powers, lascannon something, and then crash into melee. And as an added bonus: if you have 15 points lying around, you can give one Squig-hide Tyres, for +1″ movement and +2″ to advance.

However I will say that since this is still an Ork unit, don’t expect it to be unkillable. Yes, the Kill Rig is T8 3+/6++ with 16 wounds, but if a wild robot chicken (Rob: Ironstrider Ballistari) with a laser looks at it funny, there’s a good chance it’ll die all the same. You can afford to be aggressive with them, but play it too risky with them or you’ll find out pretty quickly that nothing is invincible in the current 9th edition meta.

 

That wraps up our look at the Kill Rig. Hopefully you found this a little more helpful than the usual unboxing article/video/whatever, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on it – drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com to let us know what you think.