Field Ordnance Battery

A Field Ordnance Battery is a cluster of heavy, crew-served guns emplaced to lend an Astra Militarum line the punch its infantry lack. Each piece is a squat, brutally simple weapon served by a gun-team of Guardsmen and their attendant munitions-servitors, dug in behind gabions and sandbags where they can pour fire across the killing ground.

The battery's guns come in several patterns to suit the foe at hand: a bombast field gun to lob shells over cover into massed troops, a malleus rocket launcher to gut enemy tanks and monsters, or a heavy lascannon-pattern piece to snipe armour at range. Where the mobile artillery of the regiment ranges far behind the front, these guns stand shoulder to shoulder with the infantry, their crews sharing the same trenches and the same danger.

A well-sited battery can break the back of a charge before it reaches the wire, and its steady, thunderous fire lends heart to the men holding the line beside it. The work is exhausting and perilous, for a silenced gun draws the enemy's wrath, but so long as the crews keep loading and the barrels keep glowing, the position holds.