Doom-Flayer

The Doom-flayer is a motorised iron ball of whirling blades that was first deployed during the merciless underground battles against the Dwarfs of the World's Edge Mountains. Desperate to break through the shield walls of the bearded-things, and unable to get within range to deploy a Warpfire Thrower or Poisoned-Wind Globadiers, an unknown Clan Skryre Warlock-Engineer jury-rigged a heavily armoured attack device. Built from scavenged scrap, broken blades and the steam-powered roto-engine of a recently recovered crashed Dwarf Gyrocopter, the first destructive engine that was destined to evolve into the Doom-flayer was born.

Although the first rudimentary designs did not survive, the idea did. Various incarnations of the killing machine with the spinning, stabbing and slashing blades began to assail the subterranean strongpoints of the Dwarfs. The first few Doom-flayers were largely Skaven-powered, as the pushing crew generated much of the impetus to spin the belts and cogs that drove the whirling weaponry. The Skaven crew, protected by a scrap-barrier of old shields, metal-reinforced planks, and even the patched-together armour plates of fallen enemies, could just about avoid incoming missile fire and steer the device to plow into enemy lines. To this rough concept, the Warlock-Engineers added the full verminous ingenuity of their wicked race. This of course meant that a warpstone generator provided the real power behind the swirling abattoir. Now the death-dealing apparatus could crash into the foe with hellish vigour, lopping off limbs, and scything down any who dared to stand before it. The great splashes of gore and entrails the device leaves behind it inspires the Clanrats and Stormvermin who advance in its carnage-filled wake.

Although the infernal device has never achieved the sheer blood-soaked devastation it wrought in the confined tunnels of the underworld, the Doom-flayer has proven its worth in several surface battles, notably shredding many Imperial soldiers in the tightly-confined streets of Nuln during that short-lived, but devastating, invasion of the man-city.

Source

 * Warhammer Armies: Skaven (7th Edition)
 * pg. 62

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