Rogal Dorn Battle Tank

This page is for the Imperial Guard heavy tank. If you are looking for the page about the Galaxy's most stubborn man, please see Rogal Dorn.

The Rogal Dorn Battle Tank in all its Dornish glory

"Imagine naming a main tank after a Primarch – but not the one who masterminded the defence of the Imperium in its darkest hour. The time has come to correct this grievous error."

– Warhammer Community

"Mine's bigger."

– The VIIth Legion's Liege finally winning for a change...

"But mine doesn't have a fucking hole in it."

– The VIth Legion's Liege clapping back using model design idiocy.

The Churchill T-14 M6 Heavy Tank M26 Pershing Flintstones Tank Rogal Dorn Battle Tank is a new Imperial Guard AFV, revealed as part of their big 2022 refresh. More akin to a Heavy Tank than an MBT, it is a chonkier and shootier big brother of the old reliable Leman Russ and seems to be a non-Forge World alternative to the Macharius Heavy Tank as a second-generation Baneblade. Its in-universe provenance is as yet unknown.

It's unfortunately undermined by having one of the greatest model fails in recent memory, due to the entire undercarriage being MIA. It's been memed that this in-universe is because one of the usual suspects stole all the undercarriages, among other mockeries of Geedubs' (alleged) cost-cutting.

Or maybe the exposed hole was because this was originally the Fulgrim Battle Tank? *BLAM* HERESY!

Overview

Like its namesake it seems to specialize in siege work, both breaking and anchoring defensive lines with its wide variety of guns. Its main turret can carry either two Battle Cannons or an Oppressor Cannon, an anti-armour gun that can supposedly one-shot anything up to and including a Chaos Knight. It can also carry a hull-mounted Castigator Gatling Cannon or Pulveriser Cannon, a baby version of the Demolisher cannon, along with the usual array of extra weapons: hull-mounted Heavy Stubbers or Meltaguns, sponson-mounted Heavy Bolters or Multi-Meltas, and last of all a pintle-mounted Heavy Stubber in case you feel like reenacting the last twenty minutes of Fury with Your Dudes. Some of them have side sponsons, some don't. The previews of its datasheet reveal that it's got a little more Toughness and four more Wounds than the Leman Russ, all the better for keeping it going in a firefight.

It's larger than a Leman Russ but smaller than a Baneblade, so we're in Malcador Heavy Tank territory. Probably meant to be used as a budget Lord of War.

Inspiration

The Rogal Dorn is a direct copy of the T14, with tracks and other bits from the Churchill and ARL-44 to make it more 40k. The design of its turret is inspired by the Pershing, while its upper glacis also takes cues from the experimental AC-IV Sentinel, down to the position of the hull gun. Even the twin cannons of the battle cannon loadout is lifted from the Sentinel, though in the Sentinel's case they just wanted to make sure the chassis could handle the stress of high-caliber ammunition. It also looks more like a proper tank in scale than the Russ. The Leman Russ has always had a notably tiny turret (just compare the size of the commander's hatch to the overall size of the turret), whereas this thing looks like you could have an actual crew in there.

Fun history, the unfortunate turret gunner that has to stand on a platform behind the turret to man the heavy stubber probably comes from the factory-mounting of the M2 Browning machine gun on an M4 Sherman forcing its gunner to stand on top of the tank behind its turret. In this case, it was due to an pre-war concept (which was shared by the British, because it came from how WW1 tanks had been used) in that infantry would advance behind the tanks, using them as a big mobile wall of cover. Unsurprisingly, there was a worry about the tank needing to avoid running over the friendly infantry, so it was assumed that the leader of the squad/platoon would ride on the back of the tank, still covered by the turret and able to talk to the tank commander via the cupola. In the case of the US, they felt they'd take advantage of this assumption by bolting a Browning to the turret for the infantry guy to play with if he wanted to.

Unsurprisingly, in armies like the US where they quickly began shitting out half-tracks to transport accompanying infantry, this tactic wasn't used as much as expected and the Browning mounts were converted for AA use. Ironically it would be the Soviets of all people who used this tactic the most, because their lack of proper capitalist industry and/or communist ingenuity in avoiding unneeded production of equipment meant they usually had accompanying infantry ride into battle on the tanks and dismount before reaching the enemy to follow behind them. Still, they found it was usually smarter for the leader of the infantry component to stay on foot and simply communicate with the tank crew via a phone mounted on the back of the tank.

Regardless (and likely entirely unintentionally) this tactic is actually pretty fluffy for the Guard and they're even depicted in artwork as advancing behind their Russes Soviet-style. Extra points if you convert your Rogal Dorn so the guy on the Stubber is the same uniform as your squad Sergeants (or, if you've upgraded it Vaunted Praetorian, you could even model him as an Officer).

Model Shenanigans AKA How to Clown a New Badass Tank in One Easy Step

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

GW being money-grubbing scumbags strikes again!

It is the year of our God-Emperor 2023 and GeeDubs seems to be going ass-backwards when it comes to model quality. The first released Imperial Guard box set for 9th Edition was a hotly anticipated release, until people got their hands on it and their attitudes went from excitement to absolute neckbeard horror when they started building their shiny new Rogal Dorn tanks. You see, for some reason, the sprues that make up the Rogal Dorn had basically almost everything present ... until the folks who bought it realised something was missing when they started putting the model together.

What was missing exactly? Well, turns out that the tank named after the guy known for his fortifications just so happens to be missing its entire goddamn undercarriage. Many IG players who bought the box set were left scratching their heads. "Surely I must have missed a sprue somewhere?" some wondered in perplexity. But after hours of searching, reality started to set in for them. GeeDubs didn't even bother to give the tank an undercarriage in the first place. This means that every Rogal Dorn tank is now stuck with this absolutely hideous hole at the bottom of the tank, making the vehicle feel incomplete and making IG players rage with the force of a thousand suns.

Just to give you some context. Imagine paying $90 USD (that's about 72 British pounds) for a new model that doesn't even have a fucking bottom. Questions immediately spread like wildfire. "Why did GW remove the undercarriage!?", "Did GW forget about the undercarriage?", "Surely it must have been a production issue and the undercarriage went missing?", "Nay, this is intentional, GW just wants to cut plastic cost and not use an undercarriage model!". Whatever the case, /tg/ has already made a metric shit-tonne of memes over this predicament ranging from the Imperium having regressed to using Flintstones-level of propulsion, to the tank being immune to anti-tank mines to jokes on modellers 'filling in Rogal Dorn's hole'.

All memes aside, it's likely the design team at GW (the idiots who brought us the Desolation Squad and the Skorpius, which has the same problem but nobody complained about it then because it wasn't the Imperial Guard) wanted to put more weapons and stowage on the sprues, and thought removing a part of the tank nobody would see to make room was a good idea, forgetting that they're dealing with the 40K community

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  Peter Turbo smirks once again at Dorn's impotency.

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  YABBA DABBA DOO!

• Even Angron has found a use for this tank.

  Even Angron has found a use for this tank.

• File:I43emmm76uda1.jpg
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  Believe us. This is what GeeDubs will do one month later.

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  A Discworld nod...nice.

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  Times have really hit the Imperium hard ever since the Great Rift.

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  Now in model form!

Gallery

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  Armed with standard loadout.

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  Armed with big FUCK OFF Oppressor Cannon.

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  Top of the tank.

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  Comparison to a Leman Russ and the Baneblade. And a Guardsman for scale.