The engineers of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds are famed for their flying machines, and the most cunning of these is the Gyrocopter, upon which is mounted the fearsome Gyrocopter Steam Gun. Rather than shot or shell, this ingenious weapon vents a scalding jet of pressurised steam, drawn directly from the machine's labouring boiler and directed downward upon the packed ranks of the enemy below.
There is no armour that can turn aside a cloud of superheated vapour. As the Gyrocopter buzzes low over the battlefield, its steam gun hisses and roars, engulfing whole regiments in a searing fog that boils flesh and chokes the lungs. Massed infantry, so often the strength of the enemy, become their greatest weakness against such a weapon, for the tightly packed ranks that make them formidable in the charge leave them nowhere to flee the scalding cloud.
The dwarf pilots who fly these machines are a breed apart, part warrior and part engineer, forever tinkering with the temperamental mechanisms that keep them aloft. They swoop and harry from above, using the steam gun to break enemy formations and clear the way for the dour infantry advancing below. To the greenskins and northmen who so often war upon the holds, the drone of a Gyrocopter's rotor is a hated sound, for it heralds a rain of scalding death against which their courage and numbers count for nothing.
The armoury continues
