Emperor Battle Titan

In days gone by, an Imperator stomps around firing its deadly trouser cannon.

The Emperor Battle Titan is the second largest land based weapon the Imperium of Man, or any faction even, can field (the first is a triple tie between the Capitol Imperialis super heavy tracked vehicle, the Leviathan super heavy mobile command center and the Ordinatus super heavy mobile ordinance weapons platform with its countless flavours). Comparable to an Imperial Cathedral on legs, depending on what sources you take from it stands between approximately 43-100 metres (130-330 feet) tall (including the cathedral spires), and is quite simply the most devastating vehicle ever seen on the many battlefields of the galaxy. It is seen as a physical manifestation of the Emperor's will, and just like the Imperium itself, once they are fully deployed, they are relentless, unyielding, and unstoppable. It is similar in size to a Starhawk bomber (the bomber is probably not as wide, though), which is a long-range void bomber utilised in squadrons for ship-to-ship combat, typical capital ships that carry these vessels can deploy upwards of 2 dozen of these in addition to support weapons, which should tell you just how ridiculously huge both space combat and the land based Imperator are.

Overview

The Warmonger class Titan

Captained by only the most battle-hardened and elite of Princeps, its interior is large enough for it to serve as a mobile headquarters, with room for dozens of operators and serfs; it can also transport around a hundred Imperial Guardsmen or dozens of Space Marines in its lower legs for either close defense or to assault a shattered fortress.

The Emperor Battle Titan comes in two models: the standard 'Imperator' is an all-round assault and support vehicle, whereas the 'Warmonger' specializes in long-range fire support. The Imperator is commonly seen leading Titan assaults, while the Warmonger rains artillery on the foe with its city leveling firepower.

Their only difference is in weaponry; the Imperator have shorter ranged weapons, while the Warmonger is armed with long-range artillery and missile platforms. A third Emperor with an aircraft carrier deck on its back was planned and showcased as part of the buildup to the release of Titan Legions, but sadly Titan Legions was an overcomplicated trainwreck of a system and the planned line of super-Titan variants was canned as soon as people stupid enough to buy a box containing more counters than Battle for Armageddon realized this.

Chaos Emperor Titan

The Dies Irae. The Ghazghkull of Chaos Emperor Titans. The one-man wrecking ball of Rape.

Most of the Traitor Emperor Titans have mercifully been destroyed, but the small handful that remain are as deadly as their Imperial counterparts, if not more so. Most of them have been possessed by Greater Daemons, making them essentially supersized Daemon Engines which have transformed these great war engines into towering leviathans of Warp-corrupted steel and Adamantium, a true incarnation of the power of Chaos in the material realm.

While they are rare, they are still in prime condition and is able to wreck an entire army on itself single handidly. They possess similar weaponry than their loyalist counterparts but with a few extra quirks. One of which is the ability to shoot Daemons like an Angry Marine Titan, possessing several unique Chaos exclusive weaponry and lastly being possessed by the aforementioned Greater Daemon, making it tougher, almost immortal and even harder to kill.

There were several well known Chaos Emperor Titans during the Horus Heresy such as the following....

• Abominatus "Despoiler of Worlds": Abominatus is one of the most terrifying of all the servants of the Blood God. Abominatus is the hellish union of an Imperator-class Titan and a Greater Daemon of Khorne. When it walks the ground shakes beneath its steel shod feet and the enemies of the Blood God quail in fear. Abominatus carries a veritable arsenal of weapons built onto its body. Its main armament, the Hellstorm Cannon and Plasma Annihilator, along with its main battery function in an identical fashion to its Imperial counterpart. However the weapons on its main fighting platform are quite different. This Chaos-possessed Titan also has a Scorpion Cannon, a lethal multi-barrelled weapon used for close assaults and is normally mounted on Daemon Engines of Khorne. It possesses Manglers, huge battle claws which can sweep aside battle tanks and flay enemy Titans to twisted metal. As Abominatus is part daemon and part machine, this makes it particularly resistant to psychic attack as well.
• Augmenautus Rex: The Chaos Imperator-class Titan Augmenautus Rex fought against the Legio Invicta and the Legio Tempestus forces defending the Forge World of Orestes in 779.M41. It vaporized the Legio Tempestus Warlord-class Titan Orestes Magnificat with a single shot. The Princeps of the Legio Invicta Warlord-class Titan Sicarian Faero, Vancent Kung, linked his MIU (Mind Impulse Unit) with those of Titans from three battlegroups to take down the Augmenautus Rex with an assault coordinated by a single mind. Such a measure, although forbidden, was required as the Imperator-class Titan's Void Shields were so potent that they would have withstood a more dispersed assault. It is said that after the Augmenautus Rex had fallen disabled, it took another ten minutes of sustained fire to destroy it (Why the Imperium didn't asked their Navy to do a controlled orbital bombardment on a large target is a mystery).
• Bubonis: As its name implies, Bubonis is the Daemonic Plague Titan of Nurgle, which was a special class of Chaos Imperator-class Titan that was fused with a Greater Daemon of Nurgle. Must be a real bitch to take down given the already obscene toughness of Nurgle combined with the ridiculous defense of a Emperor Titan.
• Dies Irae: The most infamous of these monster war machines was the Imperator-class Emperor Titan Dies Irae (literally "Day of Wrath" in High Gothic) which stormed the battlements of the Imperial Palace during the Battle of Terra and had been assigned to to the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet, the Warmaster Horus' own fleet, throughout the Great Crusade. It was eventually destroyed 10,000 standard years later in the 41st Millennium, during an Iron Warriors campaign against the Imperial world of Hydra Cordatus, where the Dies Irae engaged in battle with an entire demi-legion of twelve Imperial Titans, destroying almost all of them before finally being stopped by the Warlord-class Titan Honoris Causa.
• Skylok: A really unusual Chaos Emperor Titan. The Skylok is a Winged Titan of Tzeentch, which was a unique Chaos Imperator-class Titan, that was created through its fusion with a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch. As you can imagine, seeing a flying 50+ meter tall walking cathedral of Tzeentch is not only Awesome but terrifying as well.

Origins

If you wanted to actually use an Imperator back in the day you just had to figure out what the hell any of this meant.

The Imperator was one of the two showcase Titans for the Epic expansion Titan Legions, which aimed to take the system back to its Adeptus Titanicus roots of having small numbers of really expensive models battle it out rather than large numbers of dirt-cheap plastic infantry and tanks. Coming in the heyday of the Second Edition "moar rules = bettar" design philosophy, the Imperator came in a box with roughly half a dead forest's worth of cards, counters and rules and featured an insidiously complicated double-sided datacard for the player to perpetrate accountancy on every turn with plasma tokens and garrison troops and a whole load of other shit that made firing a Conversion Beamer in Second Edition seem simple by comparison.

As usual for Titans, the Imperator was roughly 1/700 scale in a system that was largely around 1/350, meaning that it would be hard for even a single Epic-scale Terminator to fit inside the model's head. Since most 40K-scale Imperators are based on scaling up the Epic model without realizing it's half the size it should be, they tend to replicate this. Needless to say, the price was correctly scaled to the Imperator's size in the fluff.

Some neckbeards have tried to kitbash a true 1/48 Imperator titan, and found that at 6'10"/2.1m tall, it would just be easier to make a titan costume and stand on the table.

Size comparison of various titans.

Above assumes you consider Imperator titans on the higher end of the fluff massive scale, the kind of which you see in things like Dawn of War where humans are mere ants crawling around over the top of it. Games Workshop back in the original incarnation of Apocalypse did a 4000 point datasheet for the Imperator Titan which included a scale comparison with a Warhound and a guardsman, where if you built it, it would be almost three feet tall, so on the smaller end.

The size differences given in the fluff are often to do with varying levels of artistic license, as in the older Titan comic books a normal Warlord Titan was absolutely MASSIVE (despite actually saying it stood over 100 feet tall), but when depicted in the Space Marine video game and running around on a slightly smaller Warlord Titan's shoulders it certainly never gave that impression at all. Though that might have been done to make the game actually run without turning your computer into a ball of chaos daemon hellfire that eats your face with burning teeth before setting your entire city ablaze. Also, different authors can't make up their minds as to how tall Titans really are, with one Imperator Class Titan (the Dies Irae) being described as both 43 meters tall and 140 meters tall in different novels.

Weaponry

While the classic Epic Imperator had completely fixed armament with no options at all, more recent rules for the Imperator/Warmonger Titan allow it to be armed with a choice of 2 arm weapons and 6 carapace weapons.

Possible arm mounted weapons are the Plasma Annihilator, Hellstorm Cannon, Vengeance Cannon and the Doomstrike Missile Launcher

Possible carapace weapons are the Laser Blaster, Plasma Destructor, Inferno Gun, Vulcan Mega-Bolter, Gatling Blaster, Melta Cannon, Quake Cannon, Volcano Cannon, Apocalypse Missile launcher and the Vortex Missile.

Gallery

• 

  Finally found the damned rules!

• 

  Rough size scale of the Emperor Titan next to the Imperial Navy. The small smudge on the left is the Emperor Titan. All of a sudden, the Titan crew suddenly felt like it ain't the biggest kid on the block.