Terminator armour makes you slow. That’s the trade nobody prints on the box. You get a suit that can shrug off a battle-cannon shell and keep walking, and in exchange you move like you’re wading through wet cement. The Cataphractii pattern the Legions wore during the Horus Heresy was the worst culprit, all those slab pauldrons and built-in shield generators straining the exoskeleton until the wearer dropped to a heavy plod. Great for clearing a corridor. Bad for nearly everything else. The Aquilon Terminators, which are the Adeptus Custodes answer to the whole concept, are the one design that ever properly got around it.
Aquilon armour is a masterwork variant of Cataphractii. Forge World’s old range, and the Talons of the Emperor material, describe it as the Cataphractii suit rebuilt with far greater power capacity and neuro-fibre uplinks tuned to sync with a Custodian’s physiology. It keeps the durability of the original while shedding most of the weight penalty, and the reason that’s possible is almost embarrassingly simple. The Custodes are strong enough to carry the thing.
The lore says the Emperor himself had a hand in the redesign. They say that about half the contents of a Custodian’s armoury, so season to taste, but the underlying claim holds up. The suit was built around a body that could bear more weight and strain than an Astartes could, so extra power systems and capacitors went in where a Space Marine’s suit would have buckled. That’s where the mobility comes back. The uplinks read the wearer’s movement and the capacitors feed it, so a Custodian in Aquilon plate keeps pace with one wearing no Terminator armour at all.
The warriors who wore it were the Tharanatoi. The Legio Custodes during the Heresy wasn’t one undifferentiated golden mass, it was split into castes with defined jobs, and the Tharanatoi were the heavy-assault lot, the ones issued the Terminator plate and the Adrathic weapons that erase a target rather than kill it. Even so, they barely fielded them. Aquilon Sodalities went in only when absolute need called for it, mostly Zone Mortalis work, the tunnel-clearing and boarding actions where the Legio didn’t want to spend lives it couldn’t cheaply replace. There are maybe a thousand Custodians in the entire setting, and nobody’s certain even of that. Committing a handful of them to the most lethal armour on the most lethal missions was not a casual call.
The reluctance runs deeper than headcount, and it comes down to how a Custodian is meant to fight. He isn’t a line trooper. He’s closer to a duellist, a single peerless warrior trained to read a battle and flow through it, every scrap of his wargear made for his hand alone. Bolting that sort of fighter into a slow box cuts against the entire idea of him. The Aquilon suit exists so it doesn’t have to, so a Tharanatoi can carry the near-invulnerability of Terminator plate into a boarding action and still move with a Custodian’s freedom. That’s a harder engineering problem than it sounds, and it’s why the pattern needed the Emperor’s attention in the first place.
The look sells it, too. The design has the hand-worked, almost ceremonial quality the Custodes range does so well, a raised gorget and a recessed helmet cavity that rhymes with the Legio’s Dreadnoughts, every plate fussed over like it was made for one specific warrior. In the fiction, it was. An Aquilon suit looks like a piece of jewellery that can punch through a bulkhead. It sits in the same rarefied bracket as the Custodes’ own Saturnine-pattern relics, the sort of wargear the Imperium can’t really make any more.
Why the Aquilon Terminators were always next in the queue
A couple of weeks back GW quietly pulled a large batch of Forge World kits from the webstore, forty-odd in a single sweep. The Baneblade was on the list, which I already went on about. So were the resin Aquilon Terminators. No announcement, no send-off, just gone one morning.
Then they turned up in the Warhammer Academy video. The Academy is GW’s new free tutorial project, something like a hundred and fifty videos pointed at brand-new hobbyists, and somewhere in that footage are Aquilon Terminators that very much aren’t the old resin. They match the size and the weapon loadout of the current plastic Custodes Terminators. Spikey Bits spotted it first, the community ran with it, and the read is obvious to anyone who’s watched GW work: the resin got pulled because plastic is inbound.
The loadout is what let people call it so fast. The old kit built three warriors, and a standard Aquilon carried a Solerite power gauntlet paired with either an Adrathic destructor or a Lastrum storm bolter, while a separate firepike variant swapped in infernus firepikes and Solerite talons for close work. Those are chunky, unmistakable silhouettes, big fists and stubby cannons, and the models in the Academy footage carry the same profile. Nobody had to squint. If you’d ever built the resin set, you’d know them across a room.
It’s the same move GW has run across the whole Custodes line. The Telemon Dreadnought went plastic. The jetbikes and the little grav-tank went plastic, the lot of it dual-branded for both Horus Heresy and 40k so a single box serves either game. The Aquilons were always going to be next. When a Forge World kit vanishes with no fanfare, the plastic version is usually already boxed up in a warehouse waiting for a Saturday.
Funny timing, actually. I was in Firestorm Games in Cardiff a few weeks before the removals, and there was still one resin Aquilon box sat on the Forge World shelf, price sticker gone slightly yellow at the corner. Must have been there a couple of years, quietly not selling to anyone. It’ll be about the last one that shop ever gets in resin, and standing there I didn’t think a single thing about it.
The one detail nagging at me, and it’s the sort of thing that only bothers people like me, is the heads. The old Forge World kit came with helmeted and bare options. The models in the video don’t seem to include the helmets. GW might have dropped them from the sprue, or the footage simply doesn’t show everything, and I genuinely can’t tell which from a tutorial clip that wasn’t trying to reveal a kit in the first place. The bare heads are fine. I just think a closed helm looks better on something this heavy, and I’ll be quietly furious if the sprue lost them.
No Legends, no resin, no way back
The rules situation is where it bites, if you own these or want to. In 11th edition the plastic Custodes kits are staying out of Legends, GW’s holding pen for models it’s stopped writing proper rules for. Once the resin’s gone, the plastic kit becomes the only way to keep Aquilon Terminators on a table that counts. If you’ve already got the resin ones built and based, they still physically work, nobody’s kicking your door in. Buy in fresh, though, and you’re waiting on the plastic.
Resin Custodes were their own kind of penance. Warped halberds, bubbled gold, mould lines running straight through the details you most wanted crisp. I’ve stripped and re-primed worse in my time, though not by a lot, and I say that as someone whose Imperial Fists have survived some genuinely poor decisions. A styrene sprue you can clip and glue in one evening is what a lot of the people eyeing this kit have been quietly after since 2017.
I should own up to something. I have a set of the resin ones. Bought them in, I want to say 2018, right after Burning of Prospero had convinced me I was going to run a little Custodes force alongside my Imperial Fists… I got them home, opened the bag, looked at the small mountain of fiddly resin components and the mould lines threading through all that gold, and put the box back on the shelf. It’s still there. Eight years, near enough, roughly as long as I’ve owned my car, and I’ve not glued a single part. Pete asks about them every time he’s over. “How’re the golden lads getting on.” He knows precisely how they’re getting on.
And honestly, part of me is relieved I never built them, because now I can just buy the plastic set that’ll go together in one evening without three pinning jobs and a tin of glue remover. Except that’s not quite honest, is it. If I’m buying the plastic anyway, the resin set becomes eight years of sunk cost glaring at me from the shelf, and I’ll probably assemble it out of pure spite. I don’t know. Ask me again when the plastic ones have a price.
Nothing’s official. No price, no date, no flat confirmation that the plastic models are even the Aquilons and not some new unit that happens to look identical. GW hasn’t said a word, which is its own sort of confirmation, because they don’t strip a kit off the store and then leave the gap. The golden lads are coming back in plastic. I just want to know if they kept the helmets.
