Tau Fleet

Tau Portal

The Tau Navy.

The Tau Fleet (known as Kor'vattra in the Tau language) is responsible for the defense of the Tau Empire and their stellar expansion plans. Tau vessels are operated by the Air Caste. ^[1]

The Tau also operate a mercantile armada known as the Tau Merchant Fleet.

History

A Custodian Class Battleship of the Tau Navy^[2]

The Tau Empire has only expanded into space during the last millennium. Despite this they have made remarkable progress in developing both civilian and military starships, and have now reached a level where their ships can be compared to Imperial designs. The development of the Tau fleet has been given the highest priority by the Ethereal Caste. By M39 they had spread through the T'au system and ringed their homeworld with orbital research and manufacturing facilities. Further expansion required a drive system capable of spanning interstellar distances, however, and this proved to be a formidable barrier.^[1]

Organisation of Tau Fleet aircraft units

Starship Development

The first major class of Starships built were the ponderous Gal'leath (Explorer) class vessels. These vessels laid the foundations for the Tau Empire and formed the basis of the Kor'vattra for its first wars with the Orks and the Nicassar. The Nicassar were less advanced than the Tau and after their speedy defeat were one of the first other races absorbed into the Empire. The Orks, however, posed a major problem: Ork ships were faster, better shielded and more heavily armed. The Gal'leath class was simply too expensive a resource to risk against such a dangerous adversary. Fortunately new, more compact gravitic drives led to the introduction of the smaller Il'fannor (Merchant) class and, to counter the numerous Ork escorts, the Tau developed their own Kass'l (Orca) gunships. The Tau were slow to build a gravitic drive with sufficient power for Warp drives small enough to create an independent escort, so the Kass'l would travel inside a larger vessel's gravitic sheath over long distances, disengaging when back in normal space. This, combined with the introduction of super-heavy Ion cannons and Barracuda fighters, helped restore the balance - but it was the power and efficiency of the Tau shipyards that prevented the Empire from being devastated.^[1]

The Kor'or'vesh Initiative

Naval engagements with the Imperial Navy during the Damocles Crusade were unfavourable to the Tau, particularly the losses they sustained in their first battle in the Tau-claimed Hydass System. Additional losses against tendrils of Hive Fleet Behemoth immediately afterward demonstrated to the Tau that despite the Kor'vattra's valor, it was out-gunned, out-maneuvered, and required better hardware and reevaluation of its doctrines.^[3]

With the full blessing of the Ethereal Caste, Tau High Command began a bold fleet expansion and development program. Entitled Kor'or'vesh that would see new ship designs, built with the newest of Tau technology, and informed by the costly losses they had already sustained. The program was given the highest priority, applying the best of the Earth Caste engineers to the project and sparing no expense in resources. The result were several new classes of Tau ships, beginning with the Il'Porrui Class Cruiser which served as a test bed for many of these new design philosophies, and continuing to include the Kir'shasvre escort, and the mighty Or'es El'leath Class Battleship and its Kir'la Carrier Escorts. While individual craft from this program were encountered by Imperial forces prior, the Taros Campaign was the first time multiple examples of these new generation Tau ships would see battle against the Imperium.^[2]

The Initiative continues as of the Era Indomitus, with the Tau Fleet continuing to wage war on the Imperial Navy, sometimes alongside Demiurg allies and mercenaries.^[5][6]

Warp Capability

The T'au's knowledge of the warp (or lack thereof) and history with it, as well as their related access to Faster-than-Light travel, has been described differently according to various sources, primarily the naval Battlefleet Gothic (game), the land based Warhammer 40,000 game, as well as differences in the Black Library novels:

Battlefleet Gothic

• The Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (Book), recounts that in the early years of T'au space exploration, when they were still using Gravitic Drives, their first contact and confirmation with alien life occurred on one of T'au's seven moons, where they discovered a buried alien vessel with a Warp Drive. The T'au were able to reconstruct the warp drive, but without psychically attuned minds to guide them, they were unable to fully breach the dimensional barriers. Instead they could perform partial transitions, forcing (i.e. "diving") their ships into the void that separates the Warp and realspace for a period of time before being hurled out, like a floating ball held underwater that is then released. The Water Caste would conclude that the boundary between realspace and the warp was not a distinct line, but more as a turbulent ocean churned by the tides of the warp below. By improvements into their gravitic drive methods and technology, they could "hold" a vessel down longer and extend the duration of the dive. The method of FTL they achieved was five times slower than Imperial Warp Travel, but unlike Imperial Warp travel was consistent and did not expose them to the perils of the warp. Thus for the first time the Tau were able to leave their home star.^[7]

Warhammer 40,000

• In the various Tau Codexes we are told that the earliest form of T'au space propulsion were rockets^[11] that this that allowed them to escape the atmosphere of their planet. The First Sphere of Expansion ended largely in part due to limitations in these earlier engines. By that time the T'au empire, linked by a series of space stations through the void, could not be traversed in a single tau's lifetime with then available propulsion methods.^[9c] The next breakthrough by the Earth Caste would be the invention of the ZFR Horizon Accelerator Engine, which allowed "near-light speed" travel and thus helped open up the way to the Second Sphere of Expansion^[d9] At the end of the 2nd Sphere of Expansion, by the time of the Damocles Crusade and the The Dal'yth Campaign, the T'au still had "no knowledge or understanding of the warp" and that efforts to understand it from captured Imperial warp drive operators were thwarted by the humans' own lack of understanding and superstitious operation of these drives.^[9a] By the end of the Third Sphere of Expansion the Ethereals had ordered a determined effort to understand how the Imperium managed their far-reaching jumps across the void of space, and after several decades of skirmishes with the Imperium managed to combine salvaged Imperial wreckage with a Kroot Warsphere to create the AL-38 Slipstream Module. With this, a single ship could now travel in days what previously took months using the previous ZFR Horizon Engines. However, despite being warned against this, the Ethereals declared a test to move a fleet of many thousands of Slipstream equipped ships at once to herald the Fourth Sphere of Expansion. The result was the creation of a great wormhole, a wound in reality, known as the Startide Nexus.^[9b]

Black Library

Spoiler!

The following paragraphs contain spoilers for:

Kill Team (Novel)

• In Kill Team (Novel), Lieutenant Kage onboard a T'au vessel observes the vessel use what the T'au call a Sho'kara, a "window" or "hole", to enter the warp and "ride the currents within." Por'la'kunas, acting as an interpreter for Kor'el El'savon explains that the ship travels through "predesignated pathways" and navigate through the use of "powerful beacons." Lt. Kage is able to briefly see the entry into the warp through the ships screen, a sickening and nauseating sight for him and the other humans, but the Tau seem unaffected at all, before the screen is blanked and the view of the warp cutoff.^[8b]
  • Gav Thorpe in his Patreon Discord, states his original intent for the Sho'kara was a "very short range warp gate"^[12]
  • The Startide Nexus and Sho'kara bear similarities, that being a rift through the warp that the Tau use to travel across great distance. The Startide Nexus represents a singularly unique channel of travel between the Sept Worlds of the Tau Empire proper and the Nem'yar Atoll at the frontier of Imperial Space, created at the end of the Fourth Sphere of Expansion.^[9b] The Sho'kara in the Kill Team novel is used to travel from the Sarcassa System in Imperial Space to Me'lek in the Kobold System in the T'au Empire.^[8a] It is feasible the Sho'kara and Startide Nexus are one and the same. Lt. Kage and Inquisitor Oriel as part of the diplomatic envoy to the Tau expressed they had no knowledge of even the Damocles Crusade^[8b], so it is possible they lack any wider context to the Sho'kara.

Spoiler!

The following paragraphs contain spoilers for:

War of Secrets (Novel)

• In War of Secrets (Novel) in 2018 by Phill Kelly, Tau Commander Surestrike, in charge of the (at that time lost) Fourth Sphere of Expansion fleet, is viewing out the window of his ship into what he at that time presumed was simply the 'Sub-Realm,^[10a] the place where T'au vessels go as they are "skimming" the warp^[10b]. He sees the flames outside as somewhat hypnotic, moving more as he looks at them, and notes "hideous visages that grinned and howled and screamed" outside the viewing dome, but initially dismisses them as tricks of the mind, enforcing pattern recognition on abstract sights. He recounts some of the T'au's history with space travel up to that point: that during the First Sphere of Expansion earth caste had experimented with how to briefly oscillate between reality and the warp - utilising only the surface of the deep, mysterious dimension they had first encountered in the Damocles Gulf. With it they were able to make short jumps, like a stone skimming along the surface of a pond. During the Damocles War, Tau scientists looked at envy at the way Imperial warships vanished completely into the alternate dimension, diving wholly into the underwater currents and then then surfacing in real space without warning.^[10a] Later in the story Twiceblade recounts to the reawakened Kais how, after Dalyth, the Earth Caste would combine an Imperial Warp Drive with the engines of a Kroot Warsphere, harvested in secret without the Kroots knowledge, creating the Slipstream drive. It was the mass activation of so many of these drives all at once that caused the entire Fourth Sphere of Expansion to be lost. This event appears to have been simultaneous with the arrival of the Great Rift in the galaxy, now visible in T'au space, and that the Fourth Sphere fleet was pulled into the very Empyrean spoken of by the Gue'vesa, and that it was deeper than the T'au had ever known.^[10b] Trapped in the depths of this realm, they were ultimately rescued by a Many armed entity, which sent the fleet through the Startide Nexus and out into the Nem'yar Atoll.
  • This story appears to blend and acknowledge both Gravitic Drives and the AL-38 Slipstream Module/lore.
  • When the predators in this strange realm attacked, they did not attack the ships that were only crewed purely by T'au, instead attacking the other mercenary ships in the fleet. In particular the Nicassar ships suffered the worst of the attacks^[10b]
  • The T'au names for the Great Rift are The Greater Axial Rift and Mont'yhe'va meaning The Devourer of Hope.^[10a]

Gallery

• 

  Tau navy along with Demiurg allies.

• 

  Tau fleet on the attack.

• 

  Tau fleet in battle.

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  Tau fleet on the attack.

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  Tau fleet in battle.

See also

• Tau Merchant Fleet
• Tau Fleet Equipment
• Tau Fleet Weaponry
• List of Lists

Sources

• 1: Battlefleet Gothic Resources: Tau Fleets, pg. 96 (accessed 2010.11.26)
• 2: Imperial Armour Volume Three - The Taros Campaign, pg. 212
• 3: Forge World (saved archive page, dated Jan 2005, last accessed 19 December 2018)
• 4: Codex: Tau Empire (8th Edition), pg. 22
• 5: Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II
• 6: 'Battlefleet Gothic: Armada - Tau Empire Trailer (saved archive page, dated 28 August 2018, last accessed 29 October 2025, original link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCXrBMl648)
• 7: Battlefleet Gothic: Armada (Book), pg. 96
• 8: Kill Team (Novel) (e-version):
  • 8a: Chapter 3
  • 8b: Chapter 5
• 9: Codex: Tau Empire (8th Edition) (e-version):
  • 9a: pg. 17
  • 9b: pgs. 22-23
  • 9c: pg. 13
  • 9d: pg. 14
• 10: War of Secrets (Novel) (e-version)
  • 10a: Chapter Six - Six Kai’rotaa
  • 10b: Chapter Seventeen - The Blade Unsheathed
• 11: Codex: Tau Empire (6th Edition) pg.19
• 12: Gav Thorpe's Patreon Discord - Gav Thorpe's Patreon. See Tau Fleet/Sources for more details.

Uncited

This article purports to rely on sources which are not cited in the body of the text. For help on citation see the citation guidelines. You can help Lexicanum by fixing it.

• Tau Forgeworld Fleet PDF (accessed 2007.03.19)
• Lar shi Variants PDF (accessed 2007.03.19)