Swordfish

The Swordfish gunship is a Tau vehicle that is a relatively new addition to the Fire Caste’s armed forces, it’s design is based on the familiar chassis of the Hammerhead and Devilfish. Its defining feature is, without a doubt, the huge twin-linked Railgun primary weapon system mounted on its turret, which makes it extremely effective at taking out enemy armour at great range. Indeed, it was for this explicit role that the vehicle was originally built to fulfil, after the sometimes painful experiences with Imperial armour and heavy armour during the Damocles Gulf Crusade. The Swordfish was not designed as a for the Hammerhead gunship, but instead as an addition to the Tau vehicle arsenal that could take on exceptionally well armoured super-heavy targets. However, the Swordfish vehicle design isn’t fully developed yet and the vehicle does suffer from some minor problems as a consequence, especially during long-term campaigns, as it requires an extensive amount of maintenance and repair/refit with spare parts after each engagement. However, its impressive fighting capabilities make up for this drawback.

Armament
As standard, a Swordfish is armed with:
 * Turret-mounted Twin-linked Railguns - Railguns are linear accelerators that use superconductive electrodes to fire projectiles at hyper-velocity speeds. The vast kinetic energy generated by the round on impact often has devastating effects, and is effective against heavily armoured vehicles even at long range. A Swordfish’s Railguns can also fire submunition rounds that consist of a sophisticated bundle of smaller projectiles which can provide suppressive area fire against soft targets such as enemy infantry.
 * Twin-linked Missile Pods – A Missile Pod is a simple and effective delivery system for multiple high strength missiles at long range.
 * Nose-mounted Burst Cannon - Burst Cannons provide rapid-firing suppressive anti-infantry fire, acting as a self-defence weapon that can also be used to complement the fire of supporting squads.

Optional Weapons

 * 'Seeker Missile''' – Swordfish gunships can also optionally have up to two Seeker Missiles in addition to their primary and secondary armaments. Each Seeker Missile is most effective when fired and guided by Marker Lights.