Home › Units › Genestealer Cults › Goliath Rockgrinders
1 / 4 · Click to enlargeLore & origins
Across a thousand industrial worlds, hive under-levels and asteroid quarries of the Imperium, no civilian workhorse is more respected than the STC-pattern Goliath Truck. Originally engineered during the Dark Age of Technology to carry Imperial officials and corporate factotums safely through toxic crypt complexes and unstable mining tunnels, its folded layers of chemically treated permasteel and raiseable airtight duraglass vision slits can shrug off acid storms, rad-chamber leaks, rockfalls and furnace-spark hurricanes. Because columns of grimy Goliaths rumbling between shifts attract no suspicion whatsoever — and any cult wyrm-glyphs stencilled on their hulls are brushed off by Enforcers as harmless miners' graffiti — every Genestealer Cult hoards and modifies as many of the vehicles as it can steal or requisition.
While the open-topped Goliath Truck ferries twelve Neophyte Hybrids through the tunnels, its most common and feared heavy variant is the Goliath Rockgrinder. Built to survive subterranean dam bursts and bore straight through solid mineral seams, the Rockgrinder sacrifices half its troop bay to mount a monstrous front-mounted Drilldozer Blade and heavy industrial excavation ordnance.
When the Magus or Patriarch broadcasts the psychic call to uprising through the Broodmind, the Rockgrinder's hybrid crew drop all pretence of labour and gun their engines straight at the nearest Imperial barricade, turning a humble mining rig into an unstoppable armoured battering ram. Few sights break the morale of a planetary garrison faster than a phalanx of screaming Rockgrinders ploughing through a fortified bunker line in a storm of sparks, promethium flame and pulverized bone.
Appearance & wargear
Compact, slab-sided and riding on massive all-terrain industrial tyres, the Goliath Rockgrinder is clad in battered, hazard-striped permasteel plating hung with stowed demo-charges, mining chains and stencilled cult icons. Across its entire prow spans the terrifying Drilldozer Blade — a massive, piston-braced snowplough of spinning circular rock-saws, rotary grinders and crushing teeth designed to chew through granite — while its reinforced top turret mounts a pintle Heavy Stubber alongside a Heavy Mining Laser, a earth-shaking Heavy Seismic Cannon or a multi-nozzled Clearance Incinerator.
Weapons & Vehicles
The repurposed industrial deep-core lasers and diamond-tipped rock saws of the Genestealer Cults, turning Imperial mining tools into ta…
A volatile liquid-promethium projector that floods bunkers, trenches and xenos swarms in clinging, self-oxidising gouts of cleansing ch…
A belt-fed 1.0-calibre automatic support cannon known to Imperial troops as the "Backbreaker," scything down massed infantry and light …
The brutal motorised tooth-bladed sword carried by Space Marines, Imperial Guard officers and Chaos renegades, chewing through armour a…
Explore all 48 entries in the Weapons & Vehicles armoury.
Battlefield role & tactics
In an insurrectionist assault, the Goliath Rockgrinder serves as a heavy shock-transport and line-breaker carrying an assault brood of six cultists — often Aberrants or Acolyte Hybrids — in its armoured belly. Laying down a curtain of burning promethium from its Clearance Incinerator or punching through tanks with its Heavy Mining Laser as it accelerates, the driver rams the Rockgrinder straight through Aegis Defence Lines and ferrocrete redoubts, its whining Drilldozer Blade reducing whole infantry squads to crimson paste before the rear hatches fly open and the embarked cultists pour out into the breach.
Notable battles & users
- Uprisings of Ghosar Quintus and Hive Tertium — Columns of requisitioned Goliath Trucks and Rockgrinders used to stockpile munitions in peacetime and smash Enforcer barricades on the Day of Ascension.
- Standard Goliath Truck Variant — The twelve-man armoured personnel carrier armed with a Heavy Stubber and twin Autocannons from which the Rockgrinder is adapted.
- Subterranean Siege Breakers — Rockgrinders deployed by the Rusted Claw and Four-Armed Emperor cults to bore straight through sealed Imperial bunker doors.
Related
Characters (1)
Deathleaper · Terror of Leviathan
