Orca

Your units will love you if you can afford this baby. Your opponents will too.

The Orca is a Tau orbital dropship. It is entirely built for transport, and meant to operate in low-intensity combat zones; it has almost twice the cargo capacity of the comparably-sized Thunderhawk, but its only weaponry is an underslung turret and a few missiles for last-resort self-defense or clearing a landing zone. Imperial Armour Volume Three mentioned "unconfirmed reports" of more heavily-armed variants, though no models or rules for these have appeared yet.

• Length: 21.45m
• Crew: 5 crew, including 3 pilots and 2 operators
• Transport: 24 Fire Warriors, 6 Crisis Battlesuits and 8 Gun Drones
• Weight: 25 tonnes
• Max recorded speed: 2100kph

Overview

A standard transport load of an Orca dropship is twenty four Fire Warriors (sitting in rows on either side of the passenger cabin), six Crisis Battlesuits (lined up in a crouching posture in the center of the passenger cabin attached to a ceiling rail to deploy them) and eight Gun Drones (attached to racks in the ceiling over the Fire Warrior's heads). That is almost half a Hunter Cadre right there, and represents a good way of getting a small infiltration force behind the enemy's lines and extracting them again.

While the Manta has a far greater carrying capacity and is faaaar more heavily armed and armored than an Orca (it's more heavily armed than most things in 40k, actually), the Mantas are more valuable and more limited in number. Thus the Orca is meant to fill in a smaller strategic gap of Tau deployment: it functions better for "flying quiet" to do stealthy insertions, or to muster quickly to swiftly redeploy Tau forces to react to enemy advances. Further, three Orcas offer a great deal more flexibility in deployment than a single Manta does.

The Orca debuted in the Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior videogame(although arguably it first appears as part of an image in the 3rd edition Codex, though never identified), and Forge World gave it a physical model and rules in Imperial Armour Volume Three, only to discontinue production of it in 2014.

Crunch

Interior of the flying tube sock.

Minor note, it is sad the model was discontinued because it looks amazing. Anyway, the way the embarking works in this edition means that anyone with any number of brain cells is going to realize you have half of your fucking army in an easy source for Mortal Wounds, and will proceed to spam all available weapons fire at it. The . piss-poor 4+ save and 13 Wounds will do you no good against mass firepower, particularly accurate massed firepower. It's 3+ and 28 wounds as of 9th edition legends rules, though still debatable if it's worth the 300 points. Just Deep Strike for crying out loud, don't use this! It's a cool little model, but until its rules are updated it's literally not worth taking.

Battlefleet Gothic

When creating Tau ships for Battlefleet Gothic, Games Workshop must have run out of aquatic names, because they gave the Tau an escort gunship called the "Orca" as well. These Tau Merchant Escorts are too small to mount a proper gravitic drive, so they get towed along in the faster-than-light "bubble" of larger capital ships. Despite this, they are full of weapons that will cause big blue explosions on whatever they hit.

Vessels of the Tau Kor'Vattra and its Auxillaries.
Spaceships
	Space Station	Tau Space Station
	Battleships	Battleship (Tau Merchant - Or'Es El'Eleath Stronghold - Warsphere)
	Cruisers	Light Cruiser (Tau Merchant - Tau Protector) Cruiser (Tau Merchant - Tau Protector - Bastion)
	Escorts	Escort (Tau Merchant - Tau Protector - Nicassar Dhow)
	Logistics	Il'Emaar
	Dropships	Orca
Landships
	Titans	KX139 Ta'Unar Supremacy Armour
Airships
	Flying Fortress	Tiger Shark
	Aerospace Vessels	Manta