#t'au drones

[potpourrifandoms]

Behold! The first minis I’ve ever painted! I thought I’d start with some drones (stealth drones, I think?) as practice before I do anything else. I don’t know if they look good or not, as I don’t know a lot about miniature painting, but I love the little guys anyway. Their names are Droney and Maximiliano. :)

Also, because I love both the T’au Sept colours and drawing clothes, here’s some T’au fashion design because I couldn’t help myself. Sorry.

Some very fancy Ethereals

Water caste, my favourite :)

Some Earth caste friends

The Air caste are very tall and thin.

No Fire caste because I didn’t feel like drawing armour, and I still haven’t got any good ideas for what alien sci-fi parade/dress uniforms might look like. And also because they’re my least-favourite caste.

[katjapetersart]

A Calico Cadré Shas'la sharing a little break with their favorite drone. (Art for my friend's custom Warhammer faction.)

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

As T'au drones have perfect flight capabilities due to their anti-grav tech, I can't help but wonder...

Did they put wings on it so the Vespids would respect it more?

[hereticusmaximus]

And finally, the last two T'au drones!

With these done, I have now painted all the T'au models I currently have built, so for now I'm going to focus on getting reinforcements for my other armies!

[cobalt-owl]

So if you've been following me for a while you'll know that I've been wanting to make a warhammer 40k army but with Halo Covenant models as a proxy. I was originally wanting to make them a proxy of the T'au but I found issues with figuring out Drone tokens, base sizes (specifically for elites), and invuln saves for things like shield Jackals. Well I'm happy to announce that I finally found a faction due to a new release in rules including rules that allow Imperium factions to bring deathwatch space marines. And here is my choice in faction shown by the Combat Patrol.

I chose the Adeptus mechanicus as, while there are some issues (not restricted to but including struggling to pick if Skitarii Vanguard or Rangers should be the Jackals since they both have a 5+ invuln), they by far have the best array and arguably fitting themes around them. I have a full 1500 point list that involves a deathwatch squad of elites, skorpius disintigrators as wraiths, Kastelan Robots as hunters, etc. Also I apologize for the shit photoshop

[cursed-40k-thoughts]

Do you think a Votann would consider Tau drones as descendants of Stabby The Warrior Roomba?

Oh, for sure. The Votann see them as slightly stupid, but appreciably capable pets. Spiritual successors of Stabby. Funky little guys. They give them all nicknames, talk to them, pet them. The T'au are often quite bewildered by it all.

[lulzyrobot]

"It's dangerous to go into the Hive City alone.

Take this! It will help you on your mission!"

The tall, masked, and somewhat inhuman appearing individual with some quite eccentric headgear hands over a very confused looking T'au drone. It might not have functional guns but someone duct-taped fully functional chainswords to it instead.

[a-midnight-rest]

It may be of bad taste, but the testimonies of present day soldier in the Russo-ukrainian conflict does echo the images of fighting between the Imperial Guard and the T'au.

Experienced soldiers sent in unknown environement where their expertise is wasted. Rations not being sent because they are not expecting their soldiers to survive that long anyway. Unreliable soldiers because they are barely supervised conscripts. The harsh bullying, theft, and corruption in the ranks. And, of course, the money promised to the family in case of death being never paid because they are not dead, they are "missing".

And those people are fighting armies of drones, their movements are being spied on so mich any new material is being bombared, and there are systems helping soldiers to commit desertion.

Real people are dying and I'm thinking about a game. But I can't help it.

[blizz4rd1203]

just had an Ork kitbash idea

the house from Up but instead of balloons its very various T'au drones and instead of a house its either 1) a very large cannon or 2) part of a titan/knight

Play it as a blitza-bomma

[ask-mortarion-the-death-lord]

Gue'vesa Head Cannons I guess

Didn't think I'd have much in the way of thoughts on the taus human auxiliaries but here we are.

Since ai is a touchy subject for humans, most human governors when having to explain drones to their human subjects handwave it as drones just having machine spirits of a different nature. Thus to the confusion of the t'au, humans on campaign will insist on all manner of odd rituals carried over from the imperium. These range from harmless such as ritualizing maintenance procedures or proper safety protocols to the bizarre such as lighting incense candles on a hammerheads control module before going into battle to ensure operation protocols are executed with maximum efficiency. Funnily though these do seem to have some effect if only psychologically, and tau forces who have operated extensively with gue'vesa tend to pick up these little rituals or even invent their own based on old tau spiritual practices. Much to the annoyance of the ethereal council.

mechanicus turncoats to the tau empire have extensive interest in the taus nescient ai technology, usually turning to the tau for the opportunity to more extensively research into that field at all. Thus with the assistance of tau earth caste engineers, tau hereteks have been known to field larger forces of robots then the mechanicus can usually muster thanks to access to tau drone technology and manufacturing infrastructure letting them 'bridge the gap' so to speak.

on that same note, skitarii and their like. As the range of xenos species the tau encounter as allies are quite varied, the mechanicus and its cyborg body horror madhouse aren't actually that odd of a thing to deal with on the whole. and well they're happy to offer more standard mechanical or drone replacements for things like servitors, skitarii are in the odd position of often being willing warriors servants hacked to bits in their machine gods name. Thus the tau mostly dont interfere with them outside of technological assistance and a, futile, attempt at standardization of skitarii augmentations to help ease potential burdens on tau logistics. skitarii in the tau empire for their part enjoy cleaner lifestyles as it were thanks to tau technology emphasizing a more harmonious relation to nature compared to imperial technology, and a greater degree of intellectual independence on the individual level thanks to drone ai technology and the ethical encouragement/requirements most tau septs will insist on before dealing with tau hereteks.

tau hereteks, or guetak'vesa as they are referred to as [machine human helper] by the tau as stated mostly turned to the tau empire out of interest in the tau ai technology, ai long having been a contentious topic of heretek interest and the relative stability the tau ai so far presents is an attractive prospect for ai 'hobbyists' interested in expanding their knowledge without selling their souls to space satan. Xenobiologists and xeno tech freaks in general on the wrong end of imperial law find refuge in the tau empire an attractive prospect for the variety of xenos species available to study within. On the whole most guetaks that make it to the empire are only really useful for keeping everything running on former imperial planets the actual depth of their knowledge often only expanding so far on anything human, and their 'expertise in xeno and experimental tech' often being rudimentary or completely backwards compared to any jobbing earth caste worker. The truly talented of the guetaks usually run their own little fiefdoms of forgeworlds repurposed to the tau empires use and their own personal havens of experimentation and tech heresy. with detachments of tau earth caste and fire warriors as liaisons, assistants on tau technology, and bodyguards with the understanding that any useful discoveries the guetak do make need to be shared with the tau empire proper. Sitting firmly in the middle of the chaff and the talented, guetak with useful expertise or qualifications/understandings of imperial tech usually get contracted into projects on imperial tech analysis and can expect steady and profitable work from the empire, it not being unheard of for guetak of notable qualities to guest lecture at tau earth caste universities.

as the tau are generally speaking religiously tolerant, some institutions of the imperial cult survive in tau space but without what degree of centralization exists in imperial space proper of the cult, and generally given the inherent contradiction of the imperial cult serving xenos masters, most imperial cult institutions have either fully shifted into local cult practices and ownership or otherwise collapsed and been replaced with old planetary traditions or newly established cults of the personality or esoteric kind. On the whole though gue'vesa still consider the god emperor their figure of worship even if they dont directly live in the empire he founded, worship of the god emperor so entrenched in imperial society as to be near impossible to remove on the whole. A number of gue'vesa have taken to worshipping a new 'greater good' cult of their own devising, and well the ethereal council appreciate the dedication, the religious zeal as to which gue'vesa take to worship has been noted as 'very concerning'.

well no space marine chapter or adeptus sororitas order have defected to the tau empire, their technology is collected and analyzed whenever possible. some inqusitors have defected to the tau empire however, though so far efforts to turn high ranking inqusitors to the tau have been less fruitful then hoped for. Rogue traders on the other hand are one of the simpler targets to flip for the tau empire.

imperial armour like the leman russ or heaven forbid the baneblade are produced in the tau empire for gue'vesa use using both old imperial manufacturing structures and tau developed replicas for gue'vesa specific use, though they are mostly only produced for reserve gue'vesa use or gue'vesa only forces. Some effort has been gone into developing imperial armour and tau tech armour hybrids however, one notorious example being a lemen russ that had been juryrigged with a devilfish hover system instead of tracks. most of those efforts havent gone anywhere, most effort instead being put towards understanding unique imperial technology that the tau dont have or understand less and could benefit their cause such as warp drives, gellar fields, gravity guns and what have you.

[totallyaspy]

I just finished my first few models for my T'au army. First five Breachers and a Guardian Drone. This is the first time I have used my air brush primary to make sure the purple came out evenly. I am really happy with how it turned out and think the other colors pop. My plan with the army is to have a secondary color to denote either rank or what they job is. Red being for close quarters combative and green for being for support unit. I plan for heavy support to be black, scout for light blue, commanders to be gold, sergeants to be silver, and elite to be yellow.

[askrobouteguilliman40k]

A felinid rogue trader approaches, p'oh. "A t'au? It's been a while since I saw some of your kind before."

She blinks. "I'm sorry, but how did you get in this deck? There are restricted." She says, balancing some data pads as a drone buzzes around her.

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.

[hereticusmaximus]

First WIP pics of T'au Pathfinder team!

I felt like quickly painting some figures for my T'au army, so I picked these guys, since they've been waiting for their turn quite long already 😄 I'm going to paint all the drones separately, so for now only painting the actual warriors.

[hooliganpaints]

So I've had some time to decomp from my games today, and after having about 3 hours of reacting Extremely Normally to my friends (read: growing increasingly more incandescent as I really read through all the other indexes), I think I realized finally why I don't like t'au specifically in 10th:

They are so boring

My GOD. Sitting at the tourney watching everyone play was INCREDIBLE. Jimmy Space Marine is over there deleting two things every turn with Oath. Gerry Gray Knights is rapidly flickering across the battlefield. Eric Eldar is bending fate to their will. Wally World Eaters is playing Yahtzee! with himself.

Tau? My cool army trait is essentially "you effectively have a 3+ ballistics and ignore cover".

The datasheets are Worse. Everyone has super cool guns with several abilities that do fun things. Tau basically just have sustained hits 1/2 from their detachment, with a handful of guns having twin linked (...yay...) or devastating wounds (mostly isolated to guns with one or two shots, so Cool When It Happens but not at all reliable).

Is that to say "I think tau are bad"? No, not at all. I think they're incredibly CONSISTENT. I think clever people are going to be able to know exactly what they can do and reliably achieve that, because you can game the margin of error so well.

But at the end of the day, I wanna do cool stuff too. Bleh.

What would I do to fix it? Tau have one unit that interacts with For The Greater Good in a cool way: when stealth suits are Observers, they give their guided unit reroll 1 to wound.

It would be so cool if more units, especially support units like ghostkeels, devilfish, Tactical drones, firesight teams, etc. gave buffs when observing, or if some units got more buffs when being guided. Things like "give this unit precision" or "lethal hits" or "critical wounds on a 5+ instead of a 6".

Balanced? Not really, but no first pass is. But it would be really evocative of the flavor tau are supposed to have as a combined arms faction in a way the current army rule only glancingly touches on.

[zicdragon]

Me posting to dumblr again weeeheee

Art featuring my OCs; A.J a t'au guy from the earth caste and his drone companion named Blinker.

This was mostly done just to brush up my composition and perspective/angle skills, so I have not planned much in terms of rendering. Speaking of which, I have to remind myself that not every piece I put out has to be fully rendered and over the top.

The only hardest parts of this was his braided hair and digitigrade legs lol.