Chapter 455: The Rogal Dorn Tank
The troops poured off the shuttles in a wave, armed personnel and tanks pushing forward to form a defensive perimeter.
The tech-priests then rolled down in heavy recovery trucks, beginning the work of hauling in vehicle wrecks.
Kian moved through the field of wreckage at a leisurely pace, ignoring the Ork tanks outright, nothing but scrap, and ignoring human tanks that had cooked off entirely in a full ammo detonation.
He came across one Leman Russ, its turret struck by a shell, a gaping hole punched into the side.
He climbed up, popped the hatch, and looked inside. The crew compartment was a mess of shredded remains.
Whoever had taken the direct hit had been reduced to a fine mist of blood, evenly coating every surface inside the crew compartment.
The rest of the crew were more intact, killed instead by shrapnel and spalling rivets that had ricocheted through the hull.
Kian reached into the wreck and, working through the mangled remains, pulled the dog tags off each of them.
He climbed back out, five dog tags in hand, shook the bits of flesh off them, and waved over a tech-priest working nearby.
"My lord?" The tech-priest bowed low.
Kian pointed at the tank. "Everyone in there got killed by spalling rivets and shrapnel. If this thing had proper anti-spall lining, none of these men would've had to die. Don't you people have that kind of technology?"
Kian had been something of an armchair military enthusiast, back in his old life. He knew perfectly well that even when a shell didn't penetrate, the impact and blast could still shear off metal fragments inside the hull and kill the crew outright.
The fix wasn't complicated either, just a layer of Kevlar-equivalent lining bolted to the interior hull.
And here humanity was, still building riveted tanks, an absurdly outdated armour construction to begin with, and skipping anti-spall lining on top of it.
The tech-priest explained:
"My lord, our tank designs do include anti-spall lining as an option, but it's generally deemed unnecessary.
Fitting a layer of lining to improve crew survival consumes resources that could instead go toward producing additional tanks."
Kian clicked his tongue. Classic Warhammer universe logic: human lives were just another resource, one that could be sacrificed for efficiency.
Kian said, "Every tank under my command gets anti-spall lining installed. Understood?"
The tech-priest nodded. "My lord, your will be done."
Kian then called Rudolphson over and handed him the dog tags.
"Have the men quietly collect these off the wrecks as they go. Find a way to get them to Major Noa without making a fuss."
Rudolphson understood immediately. For the Astra Militarum, same as the PDF, a body without dog tags wasn't recorded as killed in action, only missing.
If a soldier had family back in the hive, their confirmed death would at least mean a small stipend for the family, a few tins of nutrient paste, vitamin tablets, water purification kits.
Without dog tags, even that small mercy was lost.
Kian wandered on across the battlefield afterward, tech-priests working busily in every direction.
They clustered in groups of a dozen or so around individual wrecks, assessing salvage value.
Some tanks, struck by armour-piercing rounds, were relatively intact and could be hauled off whole.
Others, hit by high-explosive shells, weren't so lucky, blown apart entirely or with the turret or hull too damaged to save, forced to be stripped down for parts on the spot.
Some tanks yielded a usable turret with the hull discarded. Others were only good for a few salvageable tires.
Each tech-priest worked like a mobile factory in his own right, the laser cutters mounted on their mechanical arms slicing effortlessly through armour plate to extract whatever equipment still had value.
Kian approached one particularly unusual tank, an anti-air unit.
Its hull was a modified Chimera chassis, topped with a large turret housing four massive flak cannon barrels, two mounted on each side.
A Hydra flak tank, the most widely fielded self-propelled anti-air unit in the Astra Militarum's arsenal, fitted with an internal cogitator array paired with its four Hydra autocannons for efficient anti-air coverage.
This particular Hydra had been badly wrecked, its Chimera hull torn wide open, exposing the internal structure completely.
It looked like an Ork walker had gotten in close and pried it open like a tin can with its mechanical claws.
The hull was ruined, but the important parts, the turret and the cogitator array, were still intact. Haul those back and bolt them onto a cheap replacement Chimera chassis, and the unit could be brought back to life.
He had a tech-priest set to work cutting the turret free and moved on to the next wreck.
As he walked, he suddenly spotted a massive tank. A genuinely enormous tank.
This thing dwarfed a Leman Russ by a considerable margin, and its hull bristled with more than ten separate weapon mounts.
The ground around this massive tank was carpeted with the bodies of Ork power-armoured infantry, suggesting it had killed a triple-digit count of Ork infantry before finally going down.
Kian circled the tank once and spotted a blast crater along one side, the side armour caved in deep from what looked like a high-yield explosive charge.
A tech-priest happened to be passing by just then, and gave Kian a rundown:
"My lord, this is a Rogal Dorn heavy tank.
The turret carries twin-linked 125mm cannons. On the turret sides are two five-tube smoke launchers, and mounted atop the turret is a commander's Lumberer-pattern heavy stubber.
At the front of the hull is a 150mm mortar, used to lob high-explosive rounds against fortifications and infantry clusters, along with two hull-mounted Lumberer stubbers.
Mounted on either side of the hull are sponson-mounted meltaguns, effective against infantry attempting to close in from the flanks.
The vehicle weighs 165 tonnes, has a top speed of 55 kilometers per hour, and comes equipped with an NBC filtration system, a magnetic clamping system, and a full crew complement of fifteen."
Kian was genuinely impressed. This thing had triple-digit impact scars covering its entire hull, and its armour thickness was probably measured in meters, not millimeters.
If it hadn't been for Ork infantry closing in and hitting it with a heavy-yield charge, this thing probably wouldn't have gone down that easily at all.
If he could get his hands on four or five of these things, paired with his Knights and power-armoured infantry, he'd be practically unstoppable.
Kian gave the order immediately: "Priority salvage, find every one of these you can and haul them out."
The tech-priests received the order and began scouring the battlefield for more Rogal Dorns.
They eventually located three more, four total, exactly enough to fill one Devourer shuttle for transport.
Kian kept combing the battlefield, hoping to find more heavy armour worth taking. Then, without warning, a cannon shot rang out ahead, followed by the crack of heavy stubber fire.
"My lord!! Ork tank ambush, west side, twelve Ork tanks!!"
A soldier's voice came screaming through the comm. Kian turned west and saw muzzle flashes lighting up the horizon, his private troops already exchanging fire with the Orks.
He sprinted straight for a specially modified Leman Russ, dropped into the cockpit, and pulled a neural cable, plugging it into the interface port at the back of his neck.
That's right, this was a fully neural-operated tank.
A standard Leman Russ needed a five-man crew to operate. But Kian's had been heavily modified.
The NBC and life-support systems had been stripped out entirely, and the freed-up space had gone to an auto-loader, a cogitator array, a full neural operating system, and extra weapons and armour.
With this neural-operated tank, Kian could pilot the whole thing solo, essentially living out his own personal round of War Thunder.
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