Having recently played in an apocalipse game of Warhammer 40K and only having three railguns in a Tau army of just under 3000 points I decided something had to be done. I have plenty of crisis suits but only two Broadsides for backup so considering that all my regular suits were magnetised anyway what if I built some railguns so they could do double duty?
After some searching around the net for ideas I came across a post on Advanced Tau Tactica in which the author had used Cable ties for the beams of the weapons, noting that many of the other ideas involved components I didn't have access to I decided to give it a go.
As you can see from the picture above I have already created two pairs of guns for suits and something somewhat more substantial for my Skyray, the large guns in the background are a pair of twin linked plasma guns also built to be used on the same mounting but lets start with the suit railguns.
Being all out of fusion blasters, and any Tau battlesuit weapons for that matter, I ended up using Space Marine tank Auto Cannons as the rear of the new guns, partly as I had a number which would maintain a visual style but mostly because I liked the look of the ammo feed, though I new in the end it would probably have to be removed so the gun would mount both on the arms and shoulders of the weapons. The size of the host wepons was also useful as it allowed for the ties to sit next to each other leaving a small gap creating that traditional railgun feel.
After searching with no luck through my bits box for components that would look good as the front end of thee weapons I settled on just using card and carefully wrapping it around the ties, a coating of superglue is then applied to turn the card into something approximating plasticard. The next stage will be to add more metal plates to the 3 guns I haven't finished yet to allow the magnets to attract them, this first one has metal on two sides allowing for both horizontal and vertical positioning as suspected though the feed had to go which was a bit of a shame.
On the tank front, having rescued a rather dilapidated Skyray I took the opportunity to add magnets to where the missile racks would normally attach. the whole turret mount is also removable and can be attached to both this tank and one other that have both had their top hatches removed and replaced by a modified drone that the turret can attach to. The missle racks and railgun have then had metal added, the plasma guns will probably need magnets sunk into them as they are a little heavier.
Of course the best part about magnets is you can swap things about a bit, though admittedly this particular load out may be a little impractical for most combat situations. It also means the Hazard suits I featured a while ago can use any of these weapons, they would make cool looking Broadsides though the base size is an issue.
