Terminator Armour

Tactical Dreadnought Armour, more commonly known as Terminator Armour, was developed for close-quarters melee fighting, where staying power was more important than maneuverability. The technology was originally developed during Mankind's Dark Age of Technology to enable the maintenance crews of spacecraft to operate in hard vacuum or in other adverse atmospheric conditions. It was re-designed during the Great Crusade to replace Power Armour, but was relegated to its current role due to a lack of maneuverability. Very few suits of Terminator Armour were ever manufactured by the Adeptus Mechanicus and the secrets of the technology's design have now been lost. As a result, every suit of Terminator Armour is treated as an irreplaceable, precious relic by the Space Marine Chapters that own them.

It is manufactured from a ceramite plasteel alloy as an exoskeleton with servo-assisted interfaces that integrate with a user's own neurological and muscular systems to enhance movement. It is the heaviest combat armour in any Imperial arsenal, is able to withstand tremendous punishment, and serves as a solid heavy-weapons platform in open-field combat. The elite Veteran 1st Company of most Space Marine Chapters uses Terminator Armour extensively, and only those Astartes who earn the Crux Terminatus, a special badge of honour said to contain a fragment of the Power Armour worn by the Emperor of Mankind when he defeated Horus at the end of the Battle of Terra, are permitted to wear it.

Less frequently, high-ranking members of the Inquisition have been known to wear Terminator Armour. Notably, members of the Ordo Malleus can be seen wearing them. However, due to not being able to neurologically interface with the armour as Space Marines do because they lack the genetically-engineered implant below the skin known as the Black Carapace, Inquisitors generally find the armour to be much more cumbersome than a Space Marine would as a result.

Tactical Usage
Almost all Space Marine Chapters maintain some suits of Terminator Armour and usually train some Veteran Astartes in their use, despite their rarity. Terminator Armour is worn in very specific circumstances, such as when the close corridors of a hive city or Space Hulk need to be cleared. Astartes wearing normal Power Armour would not be ideal in such a role; instead they would form a cordon around the Terminators while they carried out the search-and-destroy mission. In the present time, the 41st Millennium, Terminator Armour has become so rare that its use is reserved for those times when it will provide the maximal tactical benefit. Terminators are best used during starship boarding actions where the cramped conditons and tight starship corridors maximise a Terminator's firepower while downplaying his lack of maneuverability since a flanking attack is highly unlikely. Terminator Armour is also deployed into combat on standard battlefields when their heavy weapons can be used for long-range strikes or they can use teleporter technology to suddenly appear amidst a vast group of enemies where their near-invulnerability to damage can transform them into true force multipliers with little risk of their own loss.

Technology Development History
Terminator Armour was first developed during the time of the Great Crusade in the 31st Millennium by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars. The design emerged from a hybrid of standard Astartes Power Armour, the cybernetic shell of a Dreadnought and the armoured hostile environment suits long worn by Terran engineers who worked in difficult environments like debris-plagued orbital space and the radioactive engine cores of interstellar spacecraft. Terminator Armour was initially intended to maximise the firepower and protection for Astartes forced to undertake missions in extremely confined spaces like the corridors of a hive city or during a boarding action on a Space Hulk where Dreadnoughts and armoured vehicles could not operate because they were too large to fit. Several designs of Terminator Armour evolved in parallel from the Forge Worlds of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Armouries of the Space Marine Legions. Massively armoured, sealed against any hostile environmental conditions and incorporating their own heavy ranged or close combat armament, Terminator Armour designs soon proved their capabilities. Like Power Armour, the suits were equipped with fibre-bundle synthetic muscles and imposed few movement restrictions upon the wearer, despite their immense weight. In the 41st Millennium there is no such thing as a "new" suit of Terminator Armour. If an additional suit is required, it is cobbled together from refurbished parts salvaged from the remains of Terminators killed in action. Indeed, as time marches onward the knowledge of how to fabricate some of the more complex pieces of Terminator Armour has become only a desperate hope in the minds of the Tech-priests of the Mechanicus, whose knowledge base of science and technology has been slowly decaying for the last 10,000 standard years.

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