A Doomsday Monolith armed with its devastating Gauss Obliterator
A Doomsday Monolith is a specialised, super-heavy variant of the mobile Necron fortress known as a Monolith. A Doomsday Monolith combines the properties of a transport craft, armoured super-heavy assault weapon and icon of undying Necron power. Its ponderous form can float across a battlefield upon its anti-gravitic engines, whilst its crystal core pulses with sickly energy that can be manipulated into powerful beams of Gauss lightning which whip out from its weapon mounts. The frontal section of the Monolith is also capable of opening a dark portal and transporting Necrons to the battlefield to cause fresh havoc.
Role[]
Nothing is more emblematic of Necron implacability than a Doomsday Monolith. Like all Necron constructs, it is composed of the living metal Necrodermis: a complex semi-sentient alloy that ripples and flows and adapts its structure to repair damage in the blink of an eye. Targeting matrices, motive units, power conduits and command nodes -- all are capable of comprehensive and near-instantaneous self-repair. When combined with the vehicle’s slab-sided armour plates and powerful Phase Shift Generator, this makes the Doomsday Monolith one of the hardiest vehicles in the Necron’s arsenal, and an incredibly daunting opponent for any enemy. Energy beams are absorbed and dispersed, whilst tank-busting missiles simply ricochet off the Doomsday Monolith’s armoured hide, leaving behind minor damage whose repair lies easily within the parameters of the living metal’s arcane function. Indeed, the only way to truly halt the advance of a Monolith is to target it with a sustained period of focussed fire. Only by punching through the armoured shell to the vital systems and crew within can there be any hope of ending its threat. Few enemies, however, have the discipline to be so precise under fire, and even they must be swift in their targeting lest they be disintegrated by the Doomsday Monolith’s devastating array of weaponry. However, formidable armour comes at the cost of speed. Due to a Doomsday Monolith’s ponderous bulk, it cannot move at speed, unlike other Necron skimmer vehicles and the more mobile vehicles by the militaries of the other star-faring races.
Even a single Doomsday Monolith can muster enough firepower to be considered an army in its own right. The most dramatic of its armaments is the Gauss Obliterator, channelled through a glowing focus power crystal atop the vehicle. A single ear-splitting discharge from a Gauss Obliterator is enough to reduce whole battlefields of armies to nothing but molecular vapour. Any enemies lucky enough to have survived will then have to run the gauntlet of the Doomsday Monolith’s Gauss Flux Arcs. These automated defence arrays rake the area around the Doomsday Monolith in pre-programmed execution patterns, finely tuned to predict the panicked motions of foes under fire.
Like standard Monoliths, a Doomsday Monolith also features an Eternity Gate. This shimmering energy field is nothing less than a captive, stable Einstein-Rosen wormhole, bound into the very heart of the Doomsday Monolith. With a simple mental command, the Doomsday Monolith’s undying Necron crew can transform the Eternity Gate into a portal of exile, and those that fail to resist its pull are sucked out of reality entirely; banished forever to a temporal prison from which there can be no escape. Alternatively, the Doomsday Monolith's crew can use the Eternity Gate as a form of dimensional corridor, pulling squads of Necrons from elsewhere on the battlefield, orbiting starships or even far-distant Tomb Worlds and deploying them to the Doomsday Monolith’s location. So is the Doomsday Monolith rightly known as a forerunner to disaster; for where a Doomsday Monolith teleports onto a planet’s surface, an invading Necron army is rarely far behind...
Necron Doomsday Monoliths are primarily deployed to act as a central anchor for Necron battlelines, mainly due to their abilities to quickly affect repairs upon those Necrons which teleport through its Eternity Gate, their potent firepower and near-impenetrable armour. Doomsday Monoliths themselves are often deployed onto a battlefield through teleportation methods, either from within a Necron tomb or from orbiting Necron fleets. However, Doomsday Monoliths can also descend safely from great heights using their sophisticated anti-gravitic engines.
Known Doomsday Monolith Formations[]
- Doomsday Phalanx - To date, there have been no confirmed records of Necrons fielding super-heavy vehicles comparable with the likes of the Imperial Baneblade and the Eldar Scorpion. Instead, the Necrons seem to favour the deployment of specialised Monolith formations whose combined might is greater than the sum of their parts. Such is the case with the Doomsday Phalanx. First sighted during the Damnos Incident, but since reported in many other conflicts, the Doomsday Phalanx holds at its core a heavily modified Monolith called a Doomsday Monolith by the Imperium that is protected by a phase shift energy generator of unknown design, and has been noted to be capable of focusing awesome destructive energies into devastating viridian beams which can be fired from its Gauss Obliterator. Worse still, a "Doomsday Monolith" is inevitably accompanied by several lesser constructions whose eldritch power it can siphon towards its own cataclysmic ends.
Armament[]
A Necron Doomsday Monolith is armed with a large power matrix crystal mounted atop its pyramidal form. This crystal can focus its alien energies to unleash devastating arcs of anti-matter lightning. However, unlike standard Monoliths which can project these energies in the form of a Particle Whip, a Doomsday Monolith can discharge its immense energies in the form of a Gauss Obliterator. The beams themselves are capable of outright destroying large swathes of infantry and vehicles alike. However, a Doomsday Monolith is inevitably accompanied by several other Monoliths, whose eldritch power it can siphon towards its own cataclysmic ends. This additional energy is drained from the power matrices of other Monoliths, and is discharged from the Gauss Obliterator in the form of additional blasts. This increases the weapon's rate of fire and all but ensures the doom of entire enemy armies. Doomsday Monoliths are also armed with four Gauss Flux Arc projectors positioned around its hull. Effectively batteries of three Gauss Flayers each, these weapons are often used to scour the immediate area around the Doomsday Monolith clean of enemies. Finally, all Necron Monoliths feature a powerful wormhole portal known as an Eternity Gate which is built into their forward hull face. The Eternity Gate can act as both a dimensional portal to teleport Necrons through from other worlds or elsewhere on the battlefield, as well as significantly aiding their repair processes whilst they do so. It can also serve as another offensive weapon, a portal of exile which can suck in and banish enemies nearby into oblivion. A Doomsday Monolith is also equipped with a Phase Shift Generator, which functions differently to the Phase Shift Generator also used by a Gauss Pylon. This variant of the technology affords the Doomsday Monolith additional defensive protection by placing the mobile fortress slightly out of phase with the normal flow of space-time, increasing its survivability, though not that of other nearby Necron units.
Ordo Xenos Departmento Analyticus Technical Specifications[]
The technical specifications for this Necron unit have not been obtained or released by the Ordo Xenos.
Sources[]
- Codex: Necrons (3rd Edition), pp. 2, 21
- Codex: Necrons (5th Edition), pp. 21, 47
- Apocalypse Reload, pg. 49