Rail Rifle

The rail rifle is a T'au weapon of pinpoint lethality, a man-portable magnetic accelerator that flings a solid slug to hypersonic speed along twin rails. The projectile crosses the battlefield in an instant and strikes with such violence that it punches clean through armoured targets, often slaying the warrior standing behind the one it first struck.

Rail weapons are the pride of the T'au armoury, scaled up into the fearsome railguns that arm their battlesuits and grav-tanks, and down into the marksman's rail rifle. All share the same principle and the same terrible precision, delivering a killing blow at ranges that make return fire all but impossible: the target is dead before the crack of parting air even reaches him.

In the hands of the T'au Empire's Pathfinders, the rail rifle is a hunter's tool, used to pick off enemy leaders, weapon crews and light vehicles from concealment. A patient marksman lies hidden, waits for the moment, and with a single squeeze of the trigger removes a commander, a heavy gunner, or the driver of an advancing machine. It is warfare stripped to its coldest essence, the T'au philosophy of maximum effect for minimum risk distilled into one perfect, unanswerable shot. To those it hunts there is no duel and no warning, only the sudden absence of a leader or a gunner and the slow, dawning terror of knowing that somewhere out in the haze a patient eye has already chosen who will die next.