Shadowsword - Role: On the battlefield, the Shadowsword's sole and unique role is that of Titan-killer. Its Volcano Cannon is able to bring down a Warlord Titan in one fell shot if the Titan's Void Shields fails at dissipating the blast. This capacity for sheer destruction makes the Shadowsword a welcome addition to the Imperial Guard's vehicle pool, for it allows the soldiers of the Imperium to engage enemy Titans without the support of the Adeptus Mechanicus' Titan Legions. If no enemy Titans are present, the Shadowsword is sometimes deployed as siege tank, obliterating enemy fortifications at long range, or as a super-heavy armour hunter. The sheer capacity for devastation of the Volcano Cannon is often enough to demoralise and put to rout those enemies of Mankind who care about their survival, but most Imperial Guard commanders are loathe to field their rare and precious Shadowswords in any other role than Titan-hunting.This reluctance stems from the fact that for all the devastating might of the Volcano Cannon, the Shadowsword's drawbacks almost always overshadow the potential advantages of fielding it, except when hunting Titans. The Volcano Cannon was first designed as a Titan-grade weapon, and when fitted to a Battle Titan, the power required to fire comes directly from the God-Machine's Plasma Reactor. Installing a Plasma Reactor into a super-heavy tank's chassis has proven impossible for safety reasons, hence the Mechanicus devised a power converting system, which allows the weapon to draw the necessary power from the tank's engine by increments and build it up in a set of capacitors until the charge is high enough to fire the Volcano Cannon. The system has proven effective, but it imposes severe limitations on the Shadowsword. In a combat situation, the tank's engine must simultaneously propel the tank and charge the gargantuan Volcano Cannon capacitors. This results in the Shadowsword maintaining an extremely low maximum speed, forcing the tank to lumber forward slowly metre by metre. Even with the majority of the engine's energy output going towards charging the capacitors, the Volcano Cannon itself has a low rate of fire of less than one shot per minute, and has almost no traverse in its fixed setting, requiring the tank to be bodily aimed at the target. Worse, the engine of the Shadowsword must be stopped before firing the Volcano Cannon, to prevent any feedback from the capacitors with potentially catastrophic results. This makes any form of dynamic targeting impossible, and leaves the Shadowsword a sitting duck, highly vulnerable to air assault and counter-battery fire for long moments as it must restart its engine and start lumbering forward again. Additionally, the energy demands of the Volcano Cannon are so voracious that the Shadowsword's secondary armament is reduced to two twin-linked Heavy Bolter sponsons, inadequate to fend off any form of concerted assault. All these drawbacks mean that in the absence of sufficiently large and potent targets, the Shadowsword will remain in reserve and out of harm's way, carefully tended by the Tech-priests and Enginseers for those moments when its extraordinary firepower is truly required.