Nephilim Jetfighter

The Nephilim Jetfighter is a comparatively recent addition to the arsenal of the Dark Angels, first taking wing in the closing centuries of the forty-first millennium. Its distinctive engines are the fruit of a Standard Template Construct fragment recovered during a hunt for a suspected Fallen known as Baelor the Imposter, run to ground in the Nephilim Sector from which the aircraft takes its name. The recovered pattern, honoured as the Lionheart Engine, was married to older and well-proven fighter designs, and though the tech-priests reworked much of the craft, they left many of its ancestral features untouched so as not to rouse the ire of its machine-spirit.

In battle the Nephilim serves as an atmospheric interceptor, its purpose to seize command of the air and hold it. Ranging above the fray, it hunts enemy flyers and drives them from the sky, keeping the heavens clear so that the Chapter's warriors on the ground need never fear death falling upon them from above. Its guns and blacksword missiles are equally suited to shredding aircraft and to strafing the foe below.

By long tradition the pilots of the Nephilim are drawn from the oversized squadrons of the Ravenwing, riders whose mastery of high-speed manoeuvre in the mobile war translates naturally to the fury of aerial combat. Accustomed to the breakneck pace of the hunt, they wheel and dive through the clouds with the same predatory instinct that guides their brethren across the battlefields below.