Siege Breakers rejoice, plastic reinforcements have arrived! Today we’re looking at the new rapier kits released for Horus Heresy, courtesy of Games Workshop sending the team preview copies.
The Kits
To keep the number of sprues per box down due to their different loadouts, rapier batteries are available as two different SKUs:
- Rapier Laser Destroyers and Quad Launcher Battery
- Rapier Quad Heavy Bolters and Graviton Cannon Battery
Each variant comes with two rapiers, with two of each weapon and four legion gunners. It is possible to swap around the guns once assembled if a little care is taken during the build, we’ll share our approach in a moment..
While the main stars of this kit are the weapon platforms, let’s not overlook the gunners. Donned in a vague late heresy armor mark, there is a wealth of interesting bits on the sprue here to for variety in your gunners or for conversions – we would not be surprised to find some of these finding their way into some Masters of Signals, Techmarines or Praevians in the future.
A particular shoutout goes out to the holstered bolter, which I fully intended to use and kept as a separate subassembly, but instead forgot about until much later. It’s nice to have the optional details to make the models more realistic.
realSnice: This is one of the most interesting kits for bits I’ve seen in quite some time. I cannot wait to have a bunch of these extra pieces floating around in my bitz box. The old resin Rapiers were 40mm wide, 50mm long (excluding gun), 13mm high. The new ones are also 40mm wide, 57mm long (excluding gun), and 27mm high. Notably these come with a 60mm base where the prior ones were baseless.
meltabombed: I am absolutely in love with the bits on this kit! The holstered bolters are a huge addition to the Heresy bits box and will go great with any support officer, “at ease” poses, or “marines doing stuff other than shooting” poses for your Heresy armies. The servo skull/cyber familiar bit is a welcome addition as well, and if you want to customize your crew with Legion specific helmets, this kit will leave you with a ton of tech marine style helmets left over.
The Build/Magnetization
As with most modern kits, these went together very smoothly with no egregious visible mould lines, nor were there any particular joins which were troublesome as the guns came together. Having recently built some Mechanicum kits, I was grateful for the straight forward build.
Let’s cut to the chase and share the thing which most people wanted to know when they clicked on this article – can I swap or magnetise the guns? Yes, although you do need to commit to this during assembly.
The laser and grav weapons are long, and not compatible with the ammunition case which the bolter and quad launchers both use. You have a few options here:
- Make the ammo box removable
- Assemble all platforms without the ammo box
- Consider you’ll likely pick up a couple of these kits and use a variety of both.
I went with the third option here, as the first was too much of a faff and the other didn’t look quite right – although it is still perfectly serviceable. Given I’m a paypig and will probably run these in sets of three, it’s inevitable that I’m going to pick up some more.
Onto the main affair – swapping the guns. In the picture below you can see what the mounts look like stock, before I removed the peg on the chassis and trimmed the corresponding part of the gun which inserts into the chassis. It’s important to dry fit the two halves of the chassis together and make sure that you have trimmed enough off the gun to ensure you have removed just enough to move the gun in and out of it’s mount.
Once this is done, we can insert some magnets to keep them in place. I opted for 3mm and 5mm magnets – I’ve intentionally put in different polarities on the bigger guns and smaller guns (which I may regret later but which made sense at the time somehow)
realSnice: I basically followed the exact same process but less gracefully. Scraping away the entire ring for the laser and grav variant. Mine are rough but after doing it now I’ll be more careful. I’ve never been one to magnetize much of my stuff so this was a very rust skill for me. I also opted for “option 3” building two rapiers to support heavy bolters and quad launchers and will ultimately have 3 of each set.
meltabombed: I forewent the magnetization for my single rapier as I felt like the laser destroyer was the option I was going to take for my Thousand Sons more often than not. That said, I kind of wish I had magged it to allow for swapping with the grav gun; I have a feeling the utility those will bring to a force in the next edition will be too much temptation for me to pass up. Oh well, guess I’ll just have to buy some more boxes.
The gunners went together very well, much like any of their fellow modern plastic marines. Each set comes with two kneeling and two standing gunners, with a variety of consoles and binoculars to keep their hands busy.
realSnice: I will reiterate my earlier point and say that I absolutely love this Mk-OSHA armor and when I get a new set I’m going to mix and mash the bits with some of the eventual MK2’s that are on the way to keep some of these bodies lying around my bitz box for other purposes.
meltabombed: New Heresy hobby challenge; build s Siegebreaker with as many screens as possible! The marines in this kit went together like a dream, and I’m a big fan of the “heavy” style Mk6 these guys are in. The gimbal control panel bit for the “gunner” is especially nice in my opinion.
Given how busy some parts of the Heresy community is with posting hot takes at the moment, it’s only fitting they get representation via a marine posting when they should be at work.
Painting / Subassemblies
When it came time for painting, I opted for several subassemblies to keep things easy to blast with the airbrush, avoiding doing any masking or awkwardly having to paint the underside of guns fixed in place.
For a long time I’ve been flirting with the idea of painting up some Salamanders, which the reveal of the Saturnine box cemented in place. As rapier batteries didn’t feel super complementary to my agile White Scars army, these were perfect to serve as test models.
Not for the first time, I was inspired by Medder’s Miniatures painting approach. While I did modify a few things for what I had on hand, I’m mostly happy with the result. As I was finishing the gunners I applied a (what I thought was) very thin purple wash to pinwash/give contrast, which instead darkened things down a bit more than I was expecting. I hear that normal people do only one model as a test model rather than eight in one go. 🤔
realSnice: This was the first unit (beyond a tester) for my up and coming Blood Angels force (expect a dedicated series of articles later on). I followed the same sub assemblies as Soggy for the rapiers, which is another reason to magnetize the weapons as you can’t build the Rapiers without having the guns inside the carriage. I did stick with gluing my shoulder pads and heads but that was due to how I’m painting infantry in this army, if I was going for a different shoulder pad color, I would do the same. In my upcoming article I’ll have a space dedicated to my paint scheme to keep an eye out for that. As a teaser, enjoy my photos below.
meltabombed: The only real “subassembly” I did on this kit was to leave the treads off until I was done painting the main chassis, just to avoid having to dig my brush around underneath them and risk getting black or silver paint on my nice clean candy red paint. Otherwise, painting was straight forward as one of the first few models for this new army for the new edition. The big flat panels on the Rapier itself lent themselves well to decals and streaking, chipping, and weathering. It was all the fun of painting a tank at 1/4 the size.
Final Thoughts
realSnice: This kit is lovely. I find Rapiers to be one of the most fun Marine units out there and the flexibility from magnetizing these kits really provide a player flexibility to handle a range of opponents, easily filling in gaps that the rest of a list may lack. The kits are easy, and two in a box for presumably a price that is a significant decrease from what the resin equivalents used to be, I can’t think of a single reason why one would wish for the models that it replaced. While it would be nice to have all four options in a single box, the cost savings alone make this really a nonissue and frankly, the box is full. I look forward to the amazing conversions that these kits will create and a variety of paint schemes on the easy to paint platform. 10/10, no additional notes from me.
meltabombed: I am new to the rapier hype train, having never run them in Heresy before. However, with the ease and utility of this kit (especially getting multiple set to allow for all the options), I can definitely see myself getting more and filling out a couple batteries worth for each weapon. With the new force org chart we got to see recently, they seem like they can easily fit into any army for a free Logistical Benefit Prime slot. The flexibility of the weapons options for this unit means that you can fill any role in your force, be it anti-armor, more dakka, or to add some utility with the grav cannon and suppressive potential of the quad mortar (especially if that juicy phosphex will still be an option!) I have been made a fan of the Rapier carriage, and I think they are a great new kit to help usher in the new age of plastic Heresy!
Soggy: I’ve got nothing to add to the above; it’s a great kit and it’s always good to have plastic kits for what really are staple units in some armies. I see myself picking up more in the future.
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