Shadowhawk

The Shadowhawk is a rare variant of the Thunderhawk Gunship that was used solely by the Raven Guard Legion during the latter days of the Great Crusade and during the Horus Heresy. The Shadowhawk was developed as a stealth variant of the Thunderhawk, sporting all manner of technologies that made it invisible to all but the most sensitive of Augurs.

History
By the time the Corvus Corax took command of his Legion, the Great Crusade was over a century old. Corax was quick to impose the style of war he had perfected in the dungeons of Lycaeus over that which had come to define the XIXth Legion, melding stealth and guile with vigilance and swiftness. During the restructuring of the Legion, they commissioned several innovations from the forges of Mars, all of them cunningly wrought to further its mastery in the arts of stealth and speed. It was during this time that the Thunderhawk Gunship was entering more widespread use amongst the Legions, replacing the aging Stormbird series of dropships. The Raven Guard secured for themselves the Shadowhawk variant, along with the Whispercutter, an open air-frame flyer constructed about a gravitic impellor and capable of dropping ten Legionaries into a war zone in utter silence and with practically no chance of detection. Such technology was created not by the Martian Mechanicum nor any of their Forge Worlds, but by those master artificers of Kiavahr who formerly served the tech guilds. Utilising strands of machine canon unknown to the mainstream of the Mechanicum, the Kiavahran guild artificers created all manner of systems at the behest of the Raven Guard and in time the Legion's Techmarines were inducted into these mysteries, although it has been speculated that the Kiavahrans might have been declared outcast by the jealous lords of Mars, were it not for the patronage of so august a body as the Legiones Astartes and the Primarch Corax.

Notable Campaigns

 * The Compliance of Indra-sûl (ca. 990.M30) - The Raven Guard Legion used Shadowhawks and Darkwings to infiltrate the massive glittering spire of silver that reached from the ground to the void above the planet. There they liberated the planet's remaining enslaved population from the vile xenos Khrave, towering monstrosities that had gorged on centuries of captive bounty, impossibly strong and wielding foul Warp-glamours.