OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Expand on Shadow Knight forces.
Image Credit: Here.
Role: Heavy fire support.
Links: Eldorai, Eldorai Exodus from Kaeshana, Casus Belli.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Unit Name: Void Breakers.
Affiliation: Shadow Knights.
Classification: Mechanised infantry.
Equipment:
Vehicles:
Armour:
Sidearms:
- Cylix Bolt Pistol
- SP-3
- Verpine Shattergun
- Flechette Pistol
- A280 CFE Blaster
- Sonic Disruptor
- Explosive Blaster Pistol
- Subrepeating Blaster
Misc:
- MM9
- Wrist Bolter.
- Misc. equipment such as lifeform scanners, spare parts, repair tools and medkits,
- Neural band.
- Whisper jetpack.
- Grenades
- Eldorai Spirit Gem (can be directly plugged into a walker)
Description: The Void Breakers are a unit of mechanised infantry in the service of the Shadow Knights, a group of Eldorai renegades and dissidents formed in response to the destruction of Kaeshana and the Great Exodus. They are a small, but well-trained unit whose members make use of Mag'ladroth walkers. Their vehicles are designed to provide heavy fire support during boarding actions, urban warfare and similar engagements. This makes them an ideal support unit for infantry. The Shadow Knights have scarce resources and have to steal most of their equipment. Their troops tend to rely on speed and surprise rather than numbers and heavy firepower. The Void Breakers complement their usual approach by providing a heavy punch.
Their walkers are Firemane designs. The human-led megacorporation has equipped the armed forces of the Eldorai Matriarchy. Most of the Shadow Knights are career rebels or deserters from the Eldorai army. Quite a few of them have fought Firemane troops in the past. This does not stop them from appropriating their gear though. After all, a lot of the equipment the Eldorai used to use before Kaeshana was opened up to the galaxy is antiquated.
The Void Breakers are administrated by the Court of War. This is one of the bodies the Shadow Knights have set up to organise, police and regulate the various professions and spheres of society. The Court of War is responsible for soldiers, pilots, naval personnel and so on. Ultimately they answer to Strategos Yseult Faerin, the general-in-chief of the Shadow Knights, who has been responsible for reorganising the Shadow Knight military.
Most of the members of the Void Breakers are Eldorai. While the elves tend to be less physically strong than humans, they have impressive dexterity and hand-eye coordination. This makes them excellent vehicle pilots and thus helps with commanding their walkers. However, they have also recruited Qadiri, who make incredible pilots. Service guarantees citizenship in Shadow Knights' heavily militarised, nomadic society, and membership in the Void Breakers is quite prestigious.
Most of the Void Breakers are normal organics. However, a select few of them are, strictly speaking, not really alive anymore. These are veteran Shadow Knights who suffered near-fatal injuries, but who were able to return to service by undergoing a special treatment. Their consciousness has been transferred into spirit gems. These gems utilise entechment technology to preseve mortally wounded heroes. Unlike conventional entechment, the spirits inside are not tormented. Instead they exist in a grey area between life and death.
Walkers are modified to house these gems, allowing the fallen Void Breakers to continue serving even in death, merging their organic skills machine tirelessness. The gems tend to be plugged directly into the walker. This maximises their ability to interface with the vehicle and become one with, but obviously leaves them very vulnerable if the walker is crippled, as they cannot move without help. It also means that the vehicle cannot be piloted by a normal pilot.
Their living comrades regard them with respect, but also find them unnerving. Their state of being is not natural, but it is one of the many sacrifices the Shadows have made in the name of survival. Usually the pilots trapped in spirit gems are volunteers who have signed an agreement stipulating their willingness to serve in death. But on rare occasions the Shadows decide to volunteer someone. These tend to be people whose skills are judged too important to lose, or criminals who can repay their debt to society this way.
COMBAT INFORMATION:
Unit Size: Small
Unit Availability: Rare
Unit Experience: Elite.
Combat Function: The Void Breakers are Shadow Knight soldiers who make use of Mag'ladroth walkers. These walkers are designed to provide heavy fire support during boarding actions, urban warfare and similar engagements. They are heavily armoured and advanced weapons systems such as heavy bolters, shattercannons and flamethrowers can be mounted on them. Such weapons make the Void Breakers very potent against large clusters of enemy infantry, light vehicles and hostile Force-users. Both the heavy and the light variant of the Mag'ladroth are utilised.
Death charging them to hack off their legs is less efficient than with other designs because the legs are comparatively small and the Graphite mesh has limited lightsabre resistance. However, light vehicles such as speeders could run rings around them. They can dish out plenty of punishment and are hard to kill, but enough firepower takes them down. They are obviously vulnerable to aerial bombardment and artillery strikes. The same applies to the cannon of a tank. The light variant is a quicker vehicle but its armor is more vulnerable so it can be damanged by light and medium vehicles, and it's easier to take down by personal anti-armor weapons. Heavy variants are slower but pretty much only vulnerable to advanced anti-armor weapons and heavy vehicles. At the same time, anti-armour missile are an efficient to make the walker keel over by targeting its legs.
Notable weaknesses of their walkers include being extremely slow and thus at a disadvantage against faster craft, the large amount of recoil generated by certain weapons such as heavy bolters, meaning a walker cannot fire swiftly on the move. The Void Breakers are utilised primarily to help Shadow Knight soldiers board warships, clear out enemy trenches and in urban warfare situations. They can also be useful as sentries. The light variant of their walkers, being only 3m in height, is perfect for boarding operations, but depending on the targeted vessel even the 5m tall heavy variant can be useful for space insertions.
Moving in conjunction with infantry, they can provide direct fire support. Outside of their niche the Void Breakers are at a big disadvantage. The Void Breakers wear decent armour and carry sidearms, blades and rifles for personal protection, but lack heavy weapons outside of their crafts. Thus they will require protection and reinforcements fast if their walkers are compromised. Their personal body armour only offers protection against glancing blows from lightsabres, but not full-on impacts. Thus the Void Breakers should not be deployed in a vacuum, but as part of a combined arms force. On the ground it would be smart to screen them with more lightly armoured, faster vehicles suh as armed airspeeders.
Strengths:
- Mag'ladroth walkers are powerful infantry support platforms. Well-armoured and can be equipped with potent heavy weapons such as heavy bolters, shattercannons and shatterbolters.
- Very useful for boarding actions and urban warfare.
- Walkers are very slow and thus easily outmanoeuvred by faster craft.
- Despite their armour and firepower, they are at a disadvantage against tanks and the like.
Historical Information:
One of the downsides of being a nomad fleet run by a rebel junta is significant scarcity of resources. Sure, it is quite thrilling to be unbound by the dictates of interstellar and planetary governments. Likewise, it is liberating to finally put one's ideology into action. Assuming one is able to agree on one and is not torn apart by internal strife, that is, for being a rebellious rebel is always easier than being a builder. However, the lack of planetary domains also means that one does not have the revenue basis of an actual government.
This is an issue that the Shadow Knights have had to deal with. For a paramilitary survivalist movement their forces are quite strong and they put a lot of effort into training them, though their internal politics can get in the way due to them being a rather diverse coalition of Eldorai renegades. However, most of their ground forces are infantry and light vehicles. They lack the means to go toe-to-toe with the armies of major powers and so their military operations are focused on raids, lightning strikes and boarding operations. The fact that the Eldorai races have a high proportion of Force-Sensitives has allowed them to use preternatural powers as a force multiplier to a degree, especially due to the Eldorai's affinity for elemental abilities.
Nonetheless, they have realised the necessity of utilising some heavier hardware. The Void Breakers are one attempt to provide this. These soldiers utilise the old but still deadly and serviceable Mag'ladroth walker. Strictly speaking, this design has more in common with a large personal exoskeleton than a conventional walker. It was designed by Firemane Industries and the Guild of Hammers. Its name is a direct homage to the so-called 'Machine God' Siobhan Kerrigan and HK-36 fought during the final battle against the Bando Gora on Gehenna. The first walkers left the factory not long before the Netherworld Event sent the Galaxy spiralling into chaos.
Some of the walkers were sold by Firemane to the Eldorai royal army. Aside from deploying them against pirates and raiders, the royalists also used them for policing duties in problematic provinces. A few saw action during the Troubles in Santaissa. The months leading up to the exodus from Kaeshana were a chaotic period. As the Eldorai learned that their homeworld was doomed, law and order collapsed. People did anything to fleet the doomed planet. Others rose up in rebellion, believing that if the Eldorai purified themselves the Goddess Ashira would intercede and stop the asteroid from destroying the planet.
In the end, the asteroid impacted, though most Eldorai were evacuated by Firemane prior to the impact. Those that remained cursed those who had gotten away and faced a harsh struggle for survival. The Shadow Knights were formed to protect them. The Shadow Knights were able to get their hands on some Firemane surplus gear during these chaotic days, seizing an Eldorai royalist cache.
This included a bunch of the walkers. Indeed, an abandoned base that had manufactured them became the site of a heated battle between Shadow Knights and a rival warlord. Archon Naesala Faethyra, the elected leader of the Shadow Knights, formed the Void Breakers to help her protect the surviving Eldorai communities against warlords and raiders. They performed redoubtable service against these foes. The Void Breakers saw action during the Kaeshana Rebellion, when they supported Firemane and Galactic Alliance forces in the assault on the First Order-controlled ruins of the Citadel of Dawn. However, by then attrition and a limited ability to repair damaged walkers had whittled down their numbers.
After the Shadow Knights evacuated from Kaeshana in the aftermath of the First Order occupation, the unit was reorganised. Yseult Faerin, who as Strategos was the renegades' new general-in-chief, took an interest in them, putting the experiences she had gained as a general officer in the Republic army to good use. As the Shadow Knights and their followers had become a spacefaring people, a greater emphasis was placed on their use as a support force during boarding actions. Due to their slowness, they would not be used as scout vehicles, though they could provide fire support for patrols.
In these capacities the Void Breakers performed well, battling pirates and Kraal raiders. When the Conspiracy of Equals, a radical left-wing insurgency, tried to topple the Citizens' Council, the Void Breakers aided the Exemplars in boarding their command ship and putting an end to the uprising. More walkers were acquired after the Eldorai launched their vast colonisation fleet from Tygara to find new worlds to settle on. A good number of the vehicles went 'missing' during transit. Some of the walkers stolen by the rebels later vanished into the hands of opportunistic corsairs or rogue Shadows. This vexed the rebels, but they were still left with enough to walkers to equip their frces. The Void Breakers also saw action against Archangel, a machine cult that had become a serious threat to the Shadow Knights and the Eldorai exiles.
The Void Breakers started out as a purely Eldorai unit. However, more recently an increasing number of Qadiri joined them. The Eldorai's Tygaran 'cousins' displayed a surprising eagerness to learn and make good vehicle pilots. As with any Shadow Knight military unit, service guaranteed citizenship. Pensions were paid to the families of those who had performed the ultimate sacrifice for the motherland or suffered significant injuries in the line of duty.
