Torture-class Cruiser

The Dark Eldar Torture-class Cruiser is the larger of the two primary types of spacecraft used by Dark Eldar fleets. Despite all looking generally the same, Torture-class Cruisers show a wide variety of armaments, including weapons batteries, torpedo tubes, Phantom Lances, Impaler Assault Modules, and launch bays for Attack craft. Many are also equipped with Mimic Engines, and all are protected by Shadowfields and as much speed and maneuverability as Escort-sized spacecraft.

Outwardly, the Torture class shares many characteristics with the Eldar Shadow- and Eclipse-class Cruisers, leading to many cases of mistaken identity, up to and including the Fleet Insturum of Alien Studies classifying them as variants of each other. Some accounts do indeed seem to indicate that Torture-class starships are some sort of amalgam of these Eldar ship classes, while other reports reveal characteristics so divergent in both configuration and armament that it only becomes more difficult to properly classify these vessels. Accounts of Eldar and/or Dark Eldar vessels attacking one another adds even more confusion.

Whatever the case may be, both Eldar and Dark Eldar use these apparent similarities to their advantage, and at least thirty attacks previously attributed to Eldar craft are thought to have been committed by Dark Eldar vessels. One notable such instance came in the form of an attack on monitoring station Adecca, where three hundred technicians were captured and then hurled from Attack craft over the planet Bladen in an unsuccessful attempt to invite retribution upon the wrong party.

All these similarities are only skin-deep, however. Unlike their Eldar cousins, the Dark Eldar care little for practicality or aesthetics in their ship design. Instead, the Dark Eldar create ships to be as horrifying and destructive as possible, designed purely for sating their perverse lust for brutality. Ships often bear corridor upon corridor of torture chambers and "arboretums" filled not with trees, but with bloody rows of still-living impaled victims whose life is slowly sucked out by the void.