The XV25 Stealthsuit is one of the smallest of all the various Tau Battlesuits, and is designed for use in operations requiring a high degree of stealth. Fire Warriors serving in a Stealth Team specialise in covert operations such as infiltration, sabotage, reconnaissance and ambush. Stealth Teams are essentially the Fire Caste's special operations units. They are the "lone wolves" of the Tau military, typically operating independently of their Hunter Cadre. Suddenly appearing, as if stepping out from nowhere, a Stealth Team unleashes a hail of gunfire to cripple or eliminate their selected targets. Theirs is a secretive way of war, as they infiltrate enemy lines, seeking vulnerable targets to destroy. In order to pass unseen into enemy territory, Stealth Teams use light-bending disruption technology embedded in their sleek Battle suits to camouflage themselves. Additional cloaking fields deaden sound and shield them from heat-detecting sensors, allowing them to penetrate deep into hostile regions before launching precisely timed ambushes.
Performance[]
Stealth suits were tricky to counter effectively even able to detect other stealth suits without the latter knowing the XV25 was there. On several occasions a single XV25 could sneck into an axis of empires outpost and steal intel right under their noise. However they were eventually countered by the Combine. During the Second multiverse war the XV25 received several upgrades to tis amour and combat capabilities with the T'au battle suits taught how to actually fight in melee. The XV25 was among several amour that strengthen the user in all aspects and the XV25 was essentially a mobile tank when it was used in the Pol universe with many weapons and anti-tank unable to penetrate its amour even with tanks finding it difficult to destroy one, although it did seem that medium, heavy and later war year light tanks could destroy the XV25.
Modernisation[]
The XV25 was replaced by the XV28 during the second multiverse war, this new stealth battle suit took advantage of Imperial tech (Imperium of man) along with being an Alliance of Nations member. The XV28 was much stronger and had better stealth capabilities and could use more heavy weapons, along with a dedicated melee armament for close quarters when the situation arise. The XV28 by all accounts was the modern solution to the myraid of enemies the T'au faced in the Multiverse able to face against Combine amour thanks to the Combine's mistake of giving them some of its technology to the T'au when it had been an Axis of empires member during the First half of the multiverse war.
XV26 and XV27[]
These were failed attempts at making a new modern battle suit to replace the XV25 and become too expensive to produce and used weaponry that was either unreliable or didn't pack the punch that was needed. These prototypes were quickly abandoned but these lessons were used to make the more successful XV28 and helped the T'au understand the technology given to them by the Combine even if it was not a lot at the time.