Last weekend was Warhammer Fest and 2 things came out of the event that I paid most attention to; Dark Angels are at least 2 and a 1/2 to 3 or 4 years off and there's a new type of Dreadnought coming. From the Rouge Trader Era you had Deredo (Eddy), Furibundus (Fury) and Contemptor (Chuck). The 3 of them where more or less the same body, Eddy had wider shoulders, the main differences where leg lenght, Chuck had longer legs and weapon load out.
Now in 2nd Ed you got the new metal Dreadnought which went un-named till Forge World got there hands on it much much later (Casterferrum which means, more or less, Iron Fort/Army), this version also gave us the Blood Angles Furioso type and the Dark Angels Mortis type Dreadnought. The best example of this type of Dread is the Venerable and huge chunk of lead that I would not want to get hit over the head by.
Come 4th Ed and technology and health and safety have progressed and we get plastic Dreads, in 5th ed you get the Ironclad Dreadnought and the plastic Furioso dread. In 6th the new one was the Helbrute, a name change and a reintroduction of the bio-mechanical nightmare that was hinted at in the Chaos Chuck and much less in the metal Chaos Dread. In 7th we got the Space Wolf box and a box for the Helbrute.
Alongside this Forge World have been making Dreadnoughts as well, Casterferrum mk4 and mk5 in Legion markings mostly and then came the new Contemptor, which has very little in common with it's name sake of old, but I think that has more to do with what injection modeling is now capable of doing compared to back in the 80's, (look at a Rhino from the 80's there's no way 10 Marines are fitting in that, but if it had been to scale it would be as big as a Land Raider and no one would have bought it).
So up to date just one ommission- Space Crusade. The Dread in that was listed as a Chaos Dreadnought and did make it into GW production in Epic scale, I have also seen a metak pre-production version posted on a facebook Oldhammer group post of the plastic version I had put up, so GW retained the rights to the design. Now I was reading Imperial Armour 2 2nd edition, looking for Mortis rules for the Mission Dreadnought project I'm waiting on magazines on, and came across the Casterferrum name and there's a tiny bit that says how older Unity War Dreads could be piloted by none Astartes and how there was another type that had less armour to the fore, the unhallowed Lucifer. Taking the design of the Space Crusade Dreadnought is a Games Workshop IP, even if it is a rip off of ED 209 from Robocop, could we be seeing a version of this return in the near future, made by Forge World? Any answer is I'm buying the gorram thing regardless as I do like Dreadnoughts.
