<warning> We're going to hit 88mph here - escape while you can
</warning> For those of you too young to remember the wild heady days and battles of the Great Crusade and subsequent Heresy in Epic (read 1st edition AT and SM) there were a plethora of rhino variants out there. A few were refactored into core units you are familiar with such as the old Rhino Bison getting cooked into the Razorback we all know and love (IIRC).
Recently I came into possession of a huge lot of 2E plastic Land Raiders and Mk1 Rhinos. For shits and giggles decided to bake a few into the LR spartan variant just to have a little old skool flavor in my BA (some of which actually goes back to items I painted in the 90's). Looking around for inspiration I stumbled across this thread (viewtopic.php?p=322950#p322950) and note Legion 4's typically bad ass conversions (cheers, mate!). Now spartans I can see being used without stat changes - they're just great relics and in the EA world would be smoothed out to equivalence with the existing stats for LRs.
However right along side this post was his Rhino Sabre conversions. In all frankness, I had completely forgotten about them until now (I still have fond memories of WD 120). Stats were published for using them in Epic scale and life was grand. However no models were ever produced for them and over the decades (man I'm old
![:{[]](./images/smilies/headbang.gif "Headbang")
) they've fallen to the way side. All this being said, it would be great for non-tourny games to dust off a few of these old school relics and update the stats for them to EA. note: personally I'd see them working best in scenarios but I digress...My take on a Sabre was that as a dedicated tank hunter it's not dissimilar to the role the Leman Russ Vanquisher plays for IG. In addition the way the Rhino chassis would take to handling it would probably be something along the lines of the Vindicator. Putting them together I could see some stats along the lines of:
Rhino Sabre
Armoured Vehicle; Save 4+; Speed 25cm; CC6+; FF5+
Vanquisher 75cm AP4+/AT2+
Bolters (15cm) small arms
Sabres are an incredibly rare site on the battlefield harkening back to the days of the Great Crusade. No more than a single upgrade may be taken ONCE in an army (0-3 Sabre Tank Hunters).
Now I am fine if we want to rename the weapon itself to "blah blah blah tank hunter cannon yada yada yada". In the original stats it was an autocannon which many people would immediately turn to look at the pred destructor. However I will point out that way back when the abilities of autocannons were very anti armour capable (remember this is long before the whole Pred Anihilator / Destructor split). The fluff states this was a dedicated and very capable tank hunter so I think this stands to be a reasonable stats.
The real question would be given the above what would a good cost recommendation be? My initial thoughts would be around a vindicator cost considering the balance with the notes limiting # units. I may be smoking crack here and of course there's always the need for play testing but we've got to start somewhere...
let the rules lawyering commence!
