Something I LOL at..
If the fluff describes the Fra'al as having an "attraction to wildly asymmetric designs and configurations", why is the Fra'al ship in the Planet Killer Magazine (the one darkened in the background here) and Demiurg (which might have been Fra'al) look so symmetrical?
Also, the Ether Cannon, having something that hits say: 1-3 miss, 4 one internal hit and one blast marker, 5-6 one internal hit and blast markers equal to shield rating, something over the top? I have a Rogue Trader cruiser that I modified to mount an Ether Cannon and with this set-up it's not overpowering or ridiculous at all.
-Zhukov
The Fra'al battleship in Planet Killer was a scratchbuild using Emperor Battleship and Space Marine battlebarge parts, with old Necron destroyer parts tossed in. This model wasn't built to fluff, which admittedly was very scant back in 2000 and isn't much better even now. It was built as a cool one-off raider scenario vessel, with its entire fluff based on a single caption on the picture of the
Divine Right in the rulebook.
Without getting too deep in the weeds, the ordo Xenos bases what races get exterminated based on the Sector Stabilis mandate. if a threat gets too big, too dense in a particular area or to threatening in general, they go try to kill it. If not, its decided to not be worth the effort. the Dark Eldar have exceeded this on numerous occassions, and the Ordo Xenos would absolutely love to exterminate their planet if they could just find the damn thing (stupid webway!). Eldar? Yeah, good luck. Orks aren't exterminated because they breed like cockroaches and frankly come closest to parity with the Imperium when taken in sheer numbers. Again, yeah good luck. Ditto for Necrons and Tyranids, each for their own reasons.
Now we come to the minor races: the Ordo Xenos has an uncountably long list of xenos races exterminated by the Imperium. Those that remain have either not yet been contacted, or they have been contacted and are scheduled for extermination provided the Imperium can muster the forces to do it without getting distracted by something else. Case in point are the Tau, which didn't get ransacked because of the Tyranids and the 13th Black Crusade sucked away so much of the Imperium's resources.
There are also those that have been contacted but deemed inoccuous enough to be not worth the effort. the Demiurg fall neatly into this category, as do any number of alien races such as the Stryxis and Loxatl that while annoying to a greater or lesser degree, they pose so little a threat that with all the wars the Imperium is prosecuting, they aren't worth the time.
Background states the Fra'al fall into this category, mainly because for al their predations their technology is only little better than the Orks, and they are many orders of magnitude less numerous than the greenskins. Now if you toss in a weapon system that bypasses shields and hits very effictively, that significantly changes the equation. the Imperium is above anything else a superstitious race, and anything that can bypass something as technologically advanced as a battleship's shields (think "magic!" when considering how ordinary citizens regard technology) will immediately be precieved as a grave threat. Not only that, but a weapon that can bypass shields with every shot will be something dearly coveted by the Adeptus Mechanicus. All of a sudden the Stabilis mandate is exceeded, and battlefleets are mustered to hunt down and destroy the Fra'al, with the AM leading the pack to salvage this cool new weapon before the Imperial Navy grinds them all to dust.
Our two options become thus:
1. The Fra'al are actually advanced and widespread enough that despite the Stabilis mandate being exceeded, they manage to persist, meaning they aren't exactly a minor race anymore.
2. the Fra'al are actually only a minor race, which means even though they managed to create a small number of captial ships, they aren't good or numerous enough to be worrisome to the Imperial Navy.
Because we absolutely CANNOT create new races for the WH40k canon or expand upon any existing WH40k race beyond the materials we already have from the game creators, the Fra'al can only be a minor race. Thusly they can't have any cool weapon system on their capital ships that would raise the Imperial Navy's ire, keeping in mind that just HAVING capital ships would attract the Imperial Navy's attention. This also gets rid of having yet another weapon mechanic in a game that already suffers from an overpopulation of weapon mechanics.
- Nate
