Crew: 5 (1 commander, 1 comms operator, 1 gunners, 1 tech adept, 1 driver)
Known Patterns/Subvarrients: I-II (A-B)
Armament:
Main Armament: 2 120mm Autoloading MAC 'Accelerator Cannons' (25 rounds for each), Dark-Light Stealth Generator
Secondary Armament: Co Axial Mars-Pattern Autocannon (500-1000 rounds), Co Axial Heavy Stuber (1000-3000 rounds), 2 Hunter-Killer AT-Missile Launchers (8 missiles onboard)
Mobility:
Max Speed: 50 km/h
Traverse: 360 degrees (Main turret) and 6 degrees (hull turret)
Elevation: -10 to 30 degrees
Powerplant: MR600 V20 "Vermillion Inferior" Multi-Fuel engine
Dimensions:
Weight: 201 Tonnes
Height: 5 metres
Width: 6.4 metres
Length: 13.5 metres
Ground clearance: 1.2 metres
Armour:
Superstructure: 100/100/100mm Faramite Composite
Hull: 100/100/100mm Faramite Composite
Gun Mantlet: 50mm Adamantium Plate
Turret: 150/150/150mm Faramite Composite
Lore: Of all the Imperium's Super Heavies, the Shadowblade is the most rare and unusual of all. An inconceivably ancient design that stretches back to the Dark Age of Technology and the War of Iron, the Shadowblade was a warrior of a war mostly forgotten by humanity. A war that nearly ended humanity, and forced mankind to forever abandon the pursuits of science and return to a more dogmatic and traditionalist mindset to find solace from the horrors they created.
The War of Iron was the apocalyptic war that ended the Dark Age of Technology. Where humanities AI servants known as the Men of Iron turned on their creators and triggered an apocalyptic genocide across the entirety of the old empire, resulting in the complete destruction of the vast majority of humanities colonies in very short order. The tattered and scattered remnants of humanity fought a desperate war for survival against the machine legions that once served them, the machines feilding weapons that rendered most of humanities conventional protection feutile thanks to thier de-constructing nano-machine swarms and goliath sized fusion-beam-wielding war constructs.
The early years, following the Great Culling that marked the start of the War of Iron, were characterised by short and brutally one-sided battles where humanities armoured regiments and infantry formations were executed en masse by the varied AI constructs created by humanity in the Dark Age. Without networked weapon systems or AI of their own, humanity was forced to revert to more simple methods of war that proved worthless against the AI legions. Realising very quickly that any conventional and more primitive forms of warfare were mostly pointless, the leaders of humanity of the day eventually found a winning solution in land warfare: the Shadowblade.
The first Super Heavy tank produced by humanity since the times of Old Terra, which weighed just over 200 tons, the original design has two auto-loading cannons mounted in an unmanned turret. The cannons fired Transuranic Flechette rounds at a monsterous fast rate of fire of 20 rounds per minute, an extremely powerful burst of raw firepower capable of incapacitating even the largest war constructs, and disable swarms of lesser machines with residual radiation. The tank was also equipped with a Heavy Autocannon and Heavy Stubber in the turret to provide more protection against the swarms of nano-machines, and AT missiles for dealing with the smaller war constructs of the Men of Iron. But the reason why the tank was so large and heavy was because of its single most important component: the Dark-Light Stealth Generator. Stealth tanks were not unusual in the old empire, but the countermeasures and detection abilities of the Men of Iron rendered conventional forms of stealth useless. As such, the Dark Light generator features a totally unique form of stealth, of a kind never tried before or since.
The Dark Light Generator works like a miniature warp engine, complete with gellar field generator and the ability to open entrances to the warp, but instead fitted to a tank rather than a space-borne warship. This allows the tank to periodically leave this plane of existence, to reappear elsewhere the commander whenever the commander wishes. To allow for navigation, the tank also had a unique form of real-space mapping apparatus, that showed them where they were in relation to their position in the warp when the commander chose to 'dive', and where 'resurfacing' would place them. This effectively meant the tank would haunt any AI presence on a planet, bypassing all countermeasures to appear amongst their geometrically perfect factories and data centres to destroy vital production centres and Men of Gold, that controlled the horde of machines, as well as constantly harassing and eventually destroying any aggressive action made on the remaining human cities. This tank, produced in its millions, eventually lead to the defeat of the AI menace on land, which could never find a counter to the illogical new weapon that decapitated their ability to fight their creator effectively. The War of Iron completely changed in its course after the failed attempt by the machines to take Earth. Humanities rebuilt military mercilessly chased down and exterminated the last of the Men of Iron, destroying them utterly, but not before any remnant of the Old Empire was forever lost to massive warp storms and humanity descended into an age of anarchy and societal collapse known as the Age of Strife. An age only ended with the emergence of the Emperor and founding of the Imperium of Man.
With the rapid expansion of the Imperium during the Great Crusade, many of the old Shadowblades were recovered, found abandoned in ancient military bases or on long forgotten battlefields. They were a curiosity to the Mechanicum, which was able to salvage thousands of them for use in the Imperial Army as specialist support vehicles, where they became a fond favorite for their ability to become impervious to detection or enemy fire on the commander's whim and obliterate anything the troops may be struggling to destroy.
Although, with the advent of the Horus Heresy and the emergence of Chaos as a major threat in the warp, a unique limitation was discovered in the tank. The power of chaos seemed to be able to slowly shrink the gellar field around the Shadowblade while it was in the warp; causing the tanks walls to whisper maddening things to the crew, shadows to appear and move independent of any people or objects, and psychosis often manifested in crews assigned to Shadowblades after long 'dives' into the warp. The most extreme example was when the Volkite Generdier Shadowblade submerged for 6 minutes without pause, by which point the tank's crew started to become paranoid and unresponsive to hales over the vox. After another minute the vox feeds were filled with screaming and clawing of flesh as the crew presumably either went completely insane and killed each other or had a daemonic incursion, the Shadowblade was then permanently lost to the warp.
This horrific limitation, together with its incredible rarity, make the Shadowblade an exceptionally rare tank to see on the battlefield. Most of the surviving examples are locked away in the vaults of Mars, where they are remembered for past service but retired from active service. However, a handful still see use even now in some parts of the Imperium, although typically with strict rules on how long the tank is permitted to submerge, and with warnings not to abuse the Dark Light Generator unless it is absolutely necessary.