Vehicle facings and irregular shapes

[Symrivven]

The rulebook states that the facings of a vehicle (front, side, back) are found by drawing a line over the corners of a vehicle. This is shown with a nice picture of a predator. How does this work for non imperium vehicles that have more original shapes than cuboids, for example the razorwing or falcon.

While normally this shouldn't be a problem and can be resolved with common sense, sometimes it can make all the difference and having an exact way of measuring would be nice in such cases.

While I know Warhammer 40k is centred on space marines I'm just wondering if GW actually thought about these vehicles when writing these rules and if there's an official way of dealing with them.

Good luck, hopefully I just missed something.

[Cthell]

Nope, it's a long standing tradition that the people writing the rules are only concerned with Imperial Tanks (well, apart from 3rd Ed. when a vyper managed to sneak in as an example of vehicle cover).

At my club, we house-ruled it that you put an imaginary rectangle around the vehicle (as small as possible, obviously) and used that to work out the corners. Makes life a lot easier for Eldar players (and to a lesser extent, Tau, Dark Eldar, and Orks in converted vehicles). With the new Necron vehicles, it's pretty darned useful too

[Narf]

beer mat's, we game in a pub, with lots of square beer mat's about, so we centre these over a vehicle, and work out facings that way

[TheGreatDalmuti]

Don't those vehicles have the same armor front and side anyway?

[Radium]

Most of them do, but if could be very important for cover.

[Cthell]

Yes, but both Eldar and Necron have more vulnerable rear armour, and the size of that facing is pretty important

[Sons of Lorgar]

With eldar grav tanks for instance, I've always counted the tips of the forward vanes as the corners of the facing rectangle when calculating facings (Chaos and TG player myself)

[MajorWesJanson]

Make a rectangle so that the outermost points of the hull (sides, front and rear) touch the edges then use that to determine facings.

[Symrivven]

Thanks for the answers people. I to was thinking about the imaginary rectangle, its a simple and elegant solution for all these xenos crafts. To bad GW doesn't test their rules with non imperium forces, or simply doesn't seem to care.

[totgeboren]

We just put an imaginary square over the vehicle, so all facings take up 90 degrees of the vehicle. Though we might have to change that seeing as how you are supposed to use the edges of the vehicle. How do you do that with ork walkers who are based around round barrels? :P

[Cthell]

How do you do that with ork walkers who are based around round barrels? :P

Well, in 4th and 5th Ed it was explicitly stated that walkers had 90 degree armour facings; I'd suggest you keep using the same technique.

Odd that GW decided not to keep it in the 6th ed rulebook