You’re here to hear about the Valdor Tank Hunter. It’s a nice tank for the Solar Auxilia, a variation of the trusty Malcador tank.
The Bits and Design
For the uninitiated, a tank destroyer is a mainline fighting vehicle that focuses on hunting tanks with a big bloody gun (self-propelled anti-tank gun) fixed on the front without a turret. The Valdor takes the Malcador chassis and adds a Neutron Beam Laser, a very big laser weapon. The Malcador is named after the Imperial Regent, so the Valdor is named after the leader of the Custodian Guard, Constantin Valdor.
This is not just a one sprue variation of the standard Malcador Dracosan kit. Within are six sprues:
- The standard Solar Auxilia vehicle upgrade sprue with sponsons, tank crew, flare shields and a chunky dozer blade.
- The standard Solar Auxilia sponson sprue, which you only need half of.
- The double-size common garden Malcador/Dracosan sides sprue
- The common garden Malcador/Dracosan tanks and bottom
- A new sprue shared with the Malcador Infernus, containing the middle of the tank with the chassis for the big gun and a single sponson.
- A new sprue containing the star of the show, the Neutron Beam Laser, and all it’s lovely pipes.
I love the uncanny valley of history for this tank. One of the quirks of the Valdor, and why it’s specifically not a Malcador variant, is the single sponson on the right hand side. On the left hand side is the wiring and tubing that feeds the big laser. Thus it has only a single weapon on the other idea.
I don’t think you do this in ‘real life’. Tank destroyers don’t tend to bother with sponsons to begin with, plus sponsons didn’t really exist by WW2, but doing one on just one side is down right weird.
There’s even more to dig into with the design of this vehicle. All the Solar Auxilia tanks draw on inspirations from WW1, WW2 and inter-war fighting vehicles, particularly the heavy welding, rivets and weird shapes, but they almost always do something entirely and completely non-historical. The Malcador has a weird front facing half-turret casemate thing you’d never put on a real tank. For the amount of moving parts and vulnerable engineering this would take, the correct thing is the simply make a full turret rather than one that just does 90 degrees. Evie talks about it in their review. After much thinking, it looks most like an emplacement on a naval vessel.
The non-historical element here is actually the fact this vehicle is heavily asymmetrical. I’ve never seen a real world tank destroyer of this size that has the anti-tank gun so far to one side. The excuse is probably that there’s no recoil on a weapon that shoots neutrons(?). There are vehicles such as the Czech-built Jagdpanzer 38, also known as the Hetzer, but they’re much lighter and more mobile than our Valdor.
The absurdly sized anti-tank gun takes up half the space between the tracks. It’s also a long vehicle, all the Malcador/Dracosan variants are, and its absurd length only combined with the massive gun, oversized cabling, and the loose single right hand side sponson makes this long boi look like such an ungainly, lopsided thing. I kind of love it.
The Build
What a joy these new era tanks are. The diagrams are clear, the instructions make sense and everything fits together like a glove. There’s some real juicy contact points, and GW have gotten very good at making parts integrate without visible glue or seam lines,
I built it in about 3-4 hours while writing this article, using a pair of hobby clips, some plastic glue and an oversized metal nail file.
Reviewing the instructions and contact points, I decided to glue part E2 to the centre of the tank later on (around 3M) instead of the right hand side during 2C as the instructions suggest. It glued onto the middle a little bit nicer, and allowed me to massage the visible join with some sprue glue and a sanding stick once I had put everything together.
I really can’t overstate how much of a joy this thing gives me. The Beam Laser is a full 6 inches long and half of the tank is spent loading and cooling it. I have no idea where the crew are sitting. It may be the perfect warhammer tank.
I armed the vehicle with the lascannon sponson (it’s an anti-tank vehicle after all) and a flare shield for the extra front armour. I left the tank commander hiding inside the vehicle and ignored any pintle mounts since I tend to forget about them when I play.
The Paintjob
This is the thirteenth tank in my Old One Hundred regiment, the 13th Oeste Albion “Smogborn”, but the first dedicated tank destroyer for the Dragoons.
I started with a black Montana Gold spray and did most of the painting with big sponges and impatience. I cycled up through Vallejo German Grey, Citadel Skavenblight Dinge and Citadel Mechanicus Standard Grey and Citadel Dawnstone for the armour, and mostly used Citadel Iron Warrior, Citadel Leadbelcher and Vallejo Aluminium on treads and metal details. I inherited Evie’s Malcador after they reviewed it last year, and copied its green and red squadron markings, applied with masking tape and more sponges. I got silly with washes, mainly using black and grey inks and watered down craft paints, since I lament using the amount of Nuln Oil or Agrax Earthshade it took to weather my first six Leman Russes. I worked out any tide marks with a mixture of wet brushes and damp cloth, then sponged on more earth tones for mud near the tracks and ground, and paint chips using similar silver mixes to above.
Auxilia tanks have a lot of rivets and details and I tend to ignore them. You could go around pinwashing and highlighting every bolt, nut, frame and welding line, but I’d went a little mad trying this on my Tank Commander.
Finally, I grabbed a brush not designed for painting doorframes to pick out the cables, glass windows and glowy bits with Citadel Warpstone Green and Moot Green. My partner, @molomoot on socials, got excited at the prospect of doing some OSL and it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, I let them work their magic. Sadly, there wasn’t anywhere big enough on the tank for them to do freehand.
Valdor leads the Custodians, so I’ve decided this tank is Meridian III. I imagine the other squads are Guardian, Solarite, Merdian and Adrathic, each containing three tanks. Meridian III is thus HANDS CUT THE CLOUDS. I wrote this clumsily on the side of the tank next to the sponson. I hated it at first but now love how childlike it looks.
The Rules
Mortals get it rough in the Horus Heresy. The Valdor comes in at a baseline of 250pt, and once you’ve purchased a single lascannon and a flare shield it costs an eye-watering 290pt.
The Neutron Beam Laser is a good gun in principal. With 2 shots, S10 AP1 and Ordnance 2, it has a good shot of popping a vehicle that it hits. If it doesn’t, Shock Pulse will force an opposing vehicle to Snap Shoot next turn. Concussive 3 is a rule that rarely shows up that much, but it’s nice to have for edge cases. The disadvantages of the gun is that it’s centre-lined, has the annoyance of Gets Hot and the short range of 36”. This is a mortal tank, so we’re looking at BS3 and there isn’t a twin-linked in sight, or a co-axial autocannon.
Sadly, the merits of the Valdor end there. There are a few damning comparisons to other units even within the Auxilia list.
The Vanquisher Cannon Leman Russ has a co-axial Autocannon to make the anti-tank gun hit better and comes in at half the price. 150pts extra is a lot to pay for AP1 and an extra pip of strength on the main gun. A rapier laser destroyer has effectively the same gun as a Valdor, but trading a pip of strength and Shock Pulse for twin-linked. You’re dealing with a meaningfully less survivable chassis, but you can afford nearly 5 times as many shots that are more likely to hit for the same price.
The very very sad comparison, and the nail in the coffin really, is the Legion equivalent vehicle: the Vindicator with Magna Laser Destroyer. This tank is vaguely equivalent in terms of survivability, but the gun has 3 shots, is twin-linked with BS4 and costs only 140pts.
Even worse is the Sicaran Venator, which has the exact same gun with three sponsons instead of 1 and BS4 and comes in 100pts cheaper. That’s a very expensive flare shield. Why can it buy 2 lascannons for less than the Valdor can buy one?
I love playing mortals in Horus Heresy but I do hate some of the rules for playing mortals in Horus Heresy.
That said, when I ran him in a game earlier this week, he successfully blew up a Land Raider! Succesfully avoided new model curse.
Conclusion
Buy the Valdor Tank Destroyer. It’s a proper weird-little-guy of a tank and I love him. Please never run him on the table. Don’t hurt my poor long son.
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