The 1997 order form for the original metal Thunderhawk Gunship asked you to tick a box confirming you were “barking mad” before it would let you complete the purchase. Six hundred and fifty American dollars, four hundred quid at the time, for a kit so dense with white metal that the finished model weighed over ten kilos and arrived in a felt-lined wooden crate, individually numbered from 40,001 to 40,500. Five hundred of them existed. People bought them anyway, mostly people who were, in fact, a little bit mad, and the whole run sold out fast enough that it’s been a collector’s punchline ever since. One sold at auction in 2021 for thirty-five grand.
I bring this up because Games Workshop just announced, thirty years and change later, that we’re finally getting a plastic Thunderhawk Gunship at 40k scale. It’s not a gunship, as it turns out. It’s the wreckage of one, and GW knew exactly how that would land before they hit publish.
Well, Almost
The reveal article opens with “it’s here,” lets that sit for a beat, then follows up with “well, almost.” What you actually get is the Thunderhawk Impact Site, a four-piece terrain kit built around a downed, broken Thunderhawk hull, releasing alongside Codex: Space Marines. It’s chapter-agnostic, so you can paint it as your own downed transport and mourn it, or paint it as somebody else’s and gloat over the crater. GW’s own copy leans into the joke, comparing it to the crashed Aquila lander from the Battle for Macragge starter box, which is a fair comparison, because that thing was also terrain and also not the vehicle everyone actually wanted.
Reaction has not been kind, and I don’t think it’s an accident that this landed in the same week Codex: Space Marines quietly Legends’d another chunk of the vehicle range. People asked for a flyable plastic gunship for three decades and got a diorama, in the same preview cycle where the Stormraven Gunship, the vehicle GW actually did give everyone as a proper flyer, got shown the door. Spikey Bits called it the best bait-and-switch of the year, which is generous. My first reaction, reading it at my desk on my lunch break, was something closer to a groan.
And then, a day later, I came around a bit. Which annoyed me, because I wanted to stay annoyed.
Thirty Years of Almost
The Thunderhawk isn’t just another unit that’s taken forever to get a plastic kit, though. GW has tried repeatedly, and it’s never quite landed as the thing people wanted. The 1997 metal monster was a proof of concept nobody could actually afford or lift. Forge World picked it up around 2004 in resin, gave it real rules through the Imperial Armour books for the first time, and re-sculpted it again in 2017. Neither resin version was plastic, and Forge World resin at that scale runs you the better part of a mortgage payment (last I checked it’s £532, which is roughly what I spent on my entire Imperial Fists army across two years of Christmas gift cards and eBay bundles). Legions Imperialis got an actual plastic Thunderhawk a few years back, at 6mm epic scale, which is a genuinely lovely kit and does not count, because it’s not the thing anyone meant when they said “plastic Thunderhawk.” GW does occasionally dust off an old resin design and give it a proper second life, like they did with Commissar Graves and his Centaur, so it’s not that they never do it. They just haven’t done it here.
That’s roughly thirty years of GW almost giving people what they want, which is about twice as long as I’ve actually been playing this game, and somehow exactly as long as my dad has owned the same ride-on lawnmower he refuses to replace.
So when the reveal article teased “at last, a plastic Thunderhawk gunship” and then the actual product turned out to be scrap metal you build terrain out of, the joke wasn’t new. It was the same joke GW’s been telling since I started this hobby, just with a punchier delivery this time. I don’t think that makes it funnier. I do think it means nobody should have been shocked.
Why the Real Thunderhawk Never Shows Up
Here’s where I’ll actually defend GW a little, because the in-universe logic holds up better than the marketing did. A Thunderhawk isn’t a Rhino. Chapters don’t roll off spares. The gunship was developed late in the Great Crusade specifically to plug the gap between the smaller Storm Eagle and the genuinely enormous Stormbird, and some Legions resisted switching over because they’d gotten attached to hauling more troops per drop. By the time the Heresy actually broke out, the Thunderhawk had proven itself enough to go into mass production, which tells you something: even at the peak of the Imperium’s industrial output, during a full-scale civil war, this thing still had to earn its numbers. It wasn’t handed out.
Ten thousand years on, the production knowledge sits with the Adeptus Mechanicus, who guard it the way they guard everything, jealously and with a straight face about it being for humanity’s own good. A Chapter’s Techmarines maintain their handful of airframes with what the lore keeps describing as fanatical devotion, which is not a phrase GW uses for a Rhino either. Losing one isn’t a rules problem, it’s an actual event. So when a Thunderhawk goes down, the wreck isn’t scrap. It’s still carrying gear, still carrying the Chapter’s own tech-secrets, and depending who gets to it first, it’s either salvaged with full ceremony or fought over like a corpse on a battlefield nobody wants to leave unattended.
It’s also probably why the Thunderhawk’s own children get more love than it does. The Stormraven and the Fire Raptor both borrow that bullish, no-nonsense front end, and both are plastic, both are common enough that a Blood Angels or Chaos player can just buy one at retail without an act of God. GW built two commercially available vehicles out of the Thunderhawk’s design language and kept the original rare enough that you need a Golden Demon plinth to see one up close.
Which, fine, means the terrain kit is actually a more honest object than a flyable model would have been. If Thunderhawks were common enough that GW could just sell you one as a normal army purchase, they’d stop being the thing the lore keeps insisting they are. The scarcity is the point, the same way it’s the point for every Land Raider variant GW never quite finished making. I said that out loud to Pete at the club last week and he just looked at me like I was reaching, and, fair, maybe I was reaching a little, but I still believe it.
The One I Actually Saw
I only ever saw a Forge World resin Thunderhawk in person once, at a Golden Demon a friend dragged me to years ago, sat on a plinth in someone else’s Imperial Fists display alongside a full company that put my own painting to shame. I remember being furious about it in the specific way you’re only furious about hobby stuff, which is to say not at all really, just sort of hollowed out with jealousy for twenty minutes and then fine again. I never got one. I’m not going to get one now either, because I’ve got a kid, a mortgage, and a Cadian army that isn’t finished, and a terrain kit that costs a fraction of the resin flyer is, if I’m honest with myself, probably the more sensible purchase for where I actually am in life. I still want the gunship though, mostly out of spite at this point.
What You Actually Get
Setting the disappointment aside, four pieces of chapter-agnostic wreckage is a genuinely useful thing to own. It gives infantry and vehicles cover on an objective that isn’t just another ruined wall, and it’s a decent canvas for weathering practice, since you’re meant to make it look burnt and broken rather than clean. You could run it as your own Chapter’s loss, or paint it up in someone else’s colours and treat it as a prize your army happened to find first. Either read works. I’ve seen suggestions online about hiding tech inside the fuselage as an objective marker, which is a nice enough idea that I wouldn’t be surprised if GW does exactly that in whatever mission pack ships alongside it.
Weathering a crashed hull properly is its own rabbit hole, by the way, and I mean that as a warning. Scorched metal isn’t just black paint over yellow. You go dark brown first, then a rust orange in patches, then black on top of that in a stippled pattern so it looks like actual carbon scoring instead of a chimney sweep, and if you’re doing it right you’ll spend an entire evening on one wing section nobody at the table will ever look at closely. I did this to a Rhino hull once for a battle-damage diorama base and it ate an entire weekend I was supposed to spend on actual army painting. Worth it, mostly. Ask me again after I’ve done four pieces instead of one.
Anyway. I’ll be picking up the terrain either way. The Imperial Fists can use the cover.
