Ravenwing

Speed kills.

The Ravenwing is the name used by Dark Angels and their successor chapters for their Second Company. While the Second Companies of Codex Astartes-compliant chapters are "Battle Companies" nominally consisting of six Tactical Squads, two Assault Squads and two Devastator Squads, instead the Ravenwing specializes in using bikes, Land Speeders and aircraft.

Way back in the darkness of 3e, the Dark Angels' traditional battle companies could include "normal" bikes of their own just like every other chapter (as an alternative way of deploying assault marines) though it seemed that as time went on, every single biker and land speeder pilot in the chapter and all of its successors got promoted into the Ravenwing (or equivalent) and by 6e the Dark Angels lost count of how many members the second company actually has in it (assumed to be more than 100) but that's what you get when you steal a chapters worth of bikes and cram them into one company.

In terms of skill; Ravenwing compete with White Scars for the best bikers in the Imperium. Whilst the White Scars probably win out as an entire chapter dedicated to mounted combat rather than just one company and have better tabletop rules representing the average bike-riding individual. However, the Ravenwing's elite Black Knights are just superior in every way and have plasma-wielding bikes, rending pick-axes and stolen Grey Knight rad or stasis grenade launchers, and their leader: Sammael has an endless supply of the "last" jetbike in the Imperium, kitted out with a plasma cannon.

Ravenwing Attack (Bikes and Land Speeders as one unit) and Support Squads (up to five speeders rather than the traditional three) may be seconded to a detachment of Dark Angels, or they may deploy as an army in their own right. On the tabletop, this is represented by Sammael's (Master of the Ravenwing) ability to take Ravenwing Attack Squads as Troops as well as Fast Attack.

Ravenwing also have access to pimped out Land Speeder variants not seen anywhere else: The (shitty) Land Speeder Vengeance which has a Large Blast plasma array and a tendency to glance itself to death, and the ever useful Darkshroud which has bits of Caliban modded onto it which blanket friendlies with darkness (hence the name).

Also rather than being techmarines in traditional chapters, all the pilots of the Dark Angels aircraft are members of the Ravenwing too. Unfortunately the supposed benefits of doing this are dubiously represented on the tabletop, since both of the Dark Angels aircraft are inferior to codex aircraft and the distinction between Ravenwing fighter aces vs Techmarine pilots are only detailed in the Crusade of Fire supplement which many people may not own. Giving them different (arguably inferior) abilities and kamikaze maneuvers.

By contrast; in the Deathwatch (RPG), dedicated ravenwing pilots are at a slight advantage over nearly all other chapters pilots (including White Scars) with the ability to use evasive action more freely than others.

The Ravenwing, like the Deathwing, is tasked with hunting the Fallen Angels, though the Ravenwing know far less about their targets; as far as they know, the Fallen are simply heretics who happen to bear a grudge against the Dark Angels, and enjoy spreading lies about the Chapter's history. When the Inner Circle expects to encounter lots of Fallen, they may deploy the Ravenwing and Deathwing together: the Ravenwing chase down the heretics, and then use their locator beacons to call down the Terminators.

Gallery

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  Hell is coming at you fast!

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  The last jetbike in the imperium... if it weren't a different pattern from Heresy-era Imperial jetbikes and it didn't appear thousands of years after the Horus Heresy...