The Spartan Tank Started as a 1989 Magazine Conversion Project
In November 1989, the Spartan Assault Tank wasn’t something you could buy. It was something you built, using the instructions on a few pages of a magazine, a Land Raider kit, and whatever scraps you had on the workbench.
The magazine was White Dwarf issue 119, and the feature ran in the Modelling Workshop section under the title “Spartan: Land Raider Variant for Terminator Transport,” on pages 60 to 64. According to Chaos Bunker’s look at the modern kit, it was introduced by Tony Cottrell, and it began as a conversion built from the Rogue Trader-era Land Raider kit, plastic card, and parts from the old Space Marine Rhino. The same review describes the result as a lengthened Mk II Land Raider designed to carry more Terminators. The Warhammer 40,000 fan wiki lists the same White Dwarf article in its bibliography.
The timing is worth a look. Space Hulk’s first edition came out in May 1989, and Terminators had originally been used only in Space Hulk-style scenarios before rules for them showed up in White Dwarf. None of the sources we read ties the Spartan to Space Hulk directly, so we won’t claim one caused the other. But six months after the game that made Terminators the stars of the table, a hobbyist magazine was showing readers how to give them a bigger ride.
The lore entry for the Spartan is generous. The fan wiki lists a capacity of 25 Space Marines or 12 Terminators, two sponson-mounted quad-lascannons, and twin-linked heavy bolters on the hull, and says it carries more than any other vehicle that isn’t super-heavy. That’s a fan wiki, not an official rules source, so treat the numbers as the community’s record of the old rules rather than the final word.
It took a long time for a conversion project to become a product. Chaos Bunker says the Spartan was updated in 2012 with the first Horus Heresy releases as a large resin kit from Forge World, then arrived in plastic in 2022 with the second edition of Horus Heresy, in the Age of Darkness boxed set. The same review says Spartans were added to Legions Imperialis as a squadron of four vehicles at a recommended price of £31.50 or €41. That review is dated August 2025, so check a current retailer before you budget for one.
Here is the catch for anyone who plays more than one scale. The review lists the Legions Imperialis Spartan with a transport capacity of five, against the 12 Terminators in the older lore. We read that as a difference in how each game measures a unit, not a mistake, but it means you shouldn’t carry a tank’s capacity from one game to another. Read the datasheet for the game you’re actually playing.
What we like about this one is where it started. A hobbyist-minded article, bylined to a person, told players how to cut and glue a bigger transport because the one in the box wasn’t big enough. Thirty-some years later, the same idea is a plastic kit with a decal sheet. Not many vehicles in this hobby can say they were a weekend project first.
Header image: Photo by Maryam Alruwaie, via Pexels.
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