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[GiglameshDespair]

40K vs. X-Com.
Who would win: the emperor's finest, a walking wall of ceramite bristling with tank-melting weaponry, heavily augmented and with 200 years of combat experience, OR one squaddie with a blaster bomb.

I believe that's called Chaos Gate and is a very fine game.

Chaos Gate was sick.
Great soundtrack as well.

[Egan_BW]

First, 40K is not a HFY setting. Just isn't.

Next, the Imperium may have a lot of mass behind them, but that doesn't translate to a linearly better force. They have systems and systems of resources, but are corrupt, selfish, zealous, incompetent, ignorant, stagnant, poorly managed, have poor communication, little centralized command, and little to no ability to actually replace any of their best stuff. Including space ships. You know, you get to the place where the fight is happening? They refuse to try advancing their technology or making new designs because grimdark. Humanity of 2018 has no such hangups.
The huge, untrained, uncoordinated brute with a sledgehammer does not win against a seasoned swordsman.

The point of using nukes isn't to use them in ground combat. Ground combat is the very worst way to fight imperial forces. They'll just keep dropping bodies on you until you die, and if you survive that for long enough more elite units appear to punch your teeth in. No, nukes are for space combat.

What we're seeing here is a bunch of guardsmen being dropped onto a "primitive human splinter world", except they get defeated by tanks that actually work and infantry who use actual tactics. Once that initial ground force is defeated by the earthlings, the imperial navy has to order some replacement guardsmen. If that second wave arrives, the earthlings are pretty much doomed. But this is 40K grimdark verse we're talking about here, reinforcements take years to arrive. And while you're traveling through the warp, the earthlings are TRAINING.
They'll take every bit of IG tech they can get and study the crap out of it. Sort the useless barely-industrial crud out from the remaining glimmers of DAoT splendor. Scale it up, make it their own. That turns getting to space from hard and expensive to trivial. What did the guardsmen arrive in? Shuttles that can fly from orbit to the ground and back without refueling. We'll take those~

Now you have earthlings with easy access to space as well as nifty tech like efficient batteries upscaled from lasguns. We have a lot of nukes. A lot of them. Now we can put those in space for cheap. The imperium find it rather difficult to replace destroyed ships. It doesn't matter how many guardsmen or even space marines you cram into a ship if it takes 100 nukes to the face the moment it jumps into the system. The imperium has countless bodies, mass produced armor, and mind-bogglingly deadly elite troops of a hundred different flavors. None of them can travel through space unaided. None of them will survive the ship they're riding disintegrating around them.


"What's that system?" "That's sol. We don't go to sol."

[Hanslanda]

And then Sol was Ravenholm IN SPAAACE

[Telgin]

I'm not sure that modern nukes would be all that threatening to 40K spaceships...  we do have thousands of them, but not nearly so many that can be launched into orbit, and even if we could hit one of their ships, I'm a little doubtful that the nukes would be more powerful than a relatively mundane space torpedo.  Which is plenty dangerous of course, especially since I'm pretty sure missiles and torpedoes go through void shields, but since the Imperium would own space in this case their fighter screens and point defenses would probably destroy most that we could fire at them.

I kind of wonder now how much power a macrocannon has, since 40K ships are able to survive being bombarded by macrocannon battery salvos pretty readily.  That might give some idea of how tough the ships actually are and how many nukes would have to hit, say, a typical cruiser to destroy it.

Oh, and don't forget that the Imperium's ships have pretty good orbital imaging and targeting systems, so our missile silos are going to start eating lance battery shots in response.

[ArchAIngel]

First, 40K is not a HFY setting. Just isn't.

Next, the Imperium may have a lot of mass behind them, but that doesn't translate to a linearly better force. They have systems and systems of resources, but are corrupt, selfish, zealous, incompetent, ignorant, stagnant, poorly managed, have poor communication, little centralized command, and little to no ability to actually replace any of their best stuff. Including space ships. You know, you get to the place where the fight is happening? They refuse to try advancing their technology or making new designs because grimdark. Humanity of 2018 has no such hangups.
The huge, untrained, uncoordinated brute with a sledgehammer does not win against a seasoned swordsman.

The point of using nukes isn't to use them in ground combat. Ground combat is the very worst way to fight imperial forces. They'll just keep dropping bodies on you until you die, and if you survive that for long enough more elite units appear to punch your teeth in. No, nukes are for space combat.

What we're seeing here is a bunch of guardsmen being dropped onto a "primitive human splinter world", except they get defeated by tanks that actually work and infantry who use actual tactics. Once that initial ground force is defeated by the earthlings, the imperial navy has to order some replacement guardsmen. If that second wave arrives, the earthlings are pretty much doomed. But this is 40K grimdark verse we're talking about here, reinforcements take years to arrive. And while you're traveling through the warp, the earthlings are TRAINING.
They'll take every bit of IG tech they can get and study the crap out of it. Sort the useless barely-industrial crud out from the remaining glimmers of DAoT splendor. Scale it up, make it their own. That turns getting to space from hard and expensive to trivial. What did the guardsmen arrive in? Shuttles that can fly from orbit to the ground and back without refueling. We'll take those~

Now you have earthlings with easy access to space as well as nifty tech like efficient batteries upscaled from lasguns. We have a lot of nukes. A lot of them. Now we can put those in space for cheap. The imperium find it rather difficult to replace destroyed ships. It doesn't matter how many guardsmen or even space marines you cram into a ship if it takes 100 nukes to the face the moment it jumps into the system. The imperium has countless bodies, mass produced armor, and mind-bogglingly deadly elite troops of a hundred different flavors. None of them can travel through space unaided. None of them will survive the ship they're riding disintegrating around them.


"What's that system?" "That's sol. We don't go to sol."

Uh. Nukes are fucking peanuts to space combat in 40k m8. Void shields and the like on top of that will uh... not give a wop.


Sol would be fucked. Unless we've got another GEOM lying around due to also being Terra. Never mind how 40k does in fact use tactics beyond the memes.


Hell, us being Terra, unless said GEOM shows up? Means we have power-armored magical girls with chainsaws and flamethrowers lusting for our blood for being HERETICS. Forever. And one system cannot fight a million worlds.


That's 40k for you. The tiny get crushed.

[Trekkin]

They'll take every bit of IG tech they can get and study the crap out of it. Sort the useless barely-industrial crud out from the remaining glimmers of DAoT splendor. Scale it up, make it their own. That turns getting to space from hard and expensive to trivial. What did the guardsmen arrive in? Shuttles that can fly from orbit to the ground and back without refueling. We'll take those~

Those ships run on plasma fuel gathered from blue-white stars, though, or certain very specific ores apparently. You may notice that we have none of those handy. Nor have we a ready source of adamantium, ceramite, several forms of promethium or many of the other resources available to a galaxy-spanning empire that are not present on Earth in harvestable quantities.

Ah, you might cry, but "we" will reverse-engineer those too~ And, I'm sure, the tools required to analyze them and the tools required to build those tools and, in short, the Imperium's industrial base in miniature. Perhaps we'll even start synthesizing the requisite elements en masse. All of that will, however, take considerable time, because we not only have to understand how to make those requisite tools, we also need to actually make enough of them to start using them. Technology advances at the speed of industry, not theory, and reverse-engineering is contingent on sufficient industrial commonality between the reverse engineers and the original engineers. It can tell you what to make, but if you don't have a ready answer for how to make that thing it rapidly loses utility.  And yes, the Imperium's infamous STC tractors and so forth can be built anywhere, but those aren't spacecraft and plasma weaponry, are they?

[wierd]

The obvious Achilles heel in 40k is the damn warp itself.

EVERYTHING about the warp is "It will kill you. Horribly."   A tiny imbalance in the engine while traveling through it, and oops, you are all dead. A loss of hull integrity while traveling through it and whoops-- all dead.


All you really need to do is set up a sufficiently long-distance perimeter around your system, such that any ship trying to traverse the warp to get there will experience engine trouble from purposefully induced instabilities. (Instead of reverse engineering a warp drive, you instead produce a denial of service perimeter using the technology used to enter/exit the warp. You dont want to rip reality apart, you just want it to be sufficiently abnormal from what the imperium's navigators and engineers expect that they experience unpexpected irregularities in transit, and whoop, the warp has their ship.)   They would have to exit far outside the system, in order to arrive safely.  They of course, would never know that, because they would attempt to enter the system in dropship range, and the difference in distance traveled would be tiny for people still traversing the warp. (Less than human reaction time.) As such, they could never alert the imperium of the blockade devices.

Result- Imperium does not know why all the ships they send there never return. Does not know why none of them even report leaving the warp.

Still "We dont go to sol."


All you need to do is slightly alter the normal fabric of reality in the direct vicinity of your system, such that normal warp travel is impossible.  For a highly isolationist world, this would be fine; They dont use warp travel anyway.

[Telgin]

Those ships run on plasma fuel gathered from blue-white stars

This is the second time I've seen a comment like this and I don't think I got an answer last time, but this is canonical?  The Imperium harvests plasma from stars instead of making it on demand by fusion?  I always assumed that "plasma generators" were just a fancy term for fusion generators.

[pisskop]

They actually harvest stars.

[Trekkin]

Those ships run on plasma fuel gathered from blue-white stars

This is the second time I've seen a comment like this and I don't think I got an answer last time, but this is canonical?  The Imperium harvests plasma from stars instead of making it on demand by fusion?  I always assumed that "plasma generators" were just a fancy term for fusion generators.

Per the description of Goliath Factory Ships "scoop[ing] the plasma" from stars, it appears so. Apparently their plasma uses "photonic hydrogen" or other "base molecules" reduced from again unspecified "rare elements" (apparently you can extract whole molecules from elements, who knew) and suspended already in a plasma state, which they can either manufacture from unspecified "ores" or gather from stars, but the former process evidently requires enough energy to make it uneconomical to use part of the resultant plasma to fuel the rest of the conversion.

[Telgin]

This is a setting with space magic, zombie robots, mind bullets and space ships that fire cannon shells the size of cars at each other in salvos and brush if off, so I really shouldn't be so irrationally upset at how dumb that is.

[wierd]

Look, hydrogen is like, the most abundant material in the universe.  The game makers had to find some way to restrict that glut of material, so that scarcity based economy makes sense.

Handwavium about blue stars is probably a minor sin, compared to what they COULD have stated.  (But if you ask me, they should have an economy based on degenerate matter from neutron stars.  That shit would be insanely useful if you could keep it contained, and harvest it safely.)

(there is also a very very rare class of star, where a neutron star core comes to rest inside a giant star's fusion cloud.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93%C5%BBytkow_object Now, THAT looks like a winner for "produces unusual matter AND is very rare!" to me.)

[GiglameshDespair]

The obvious Achilles heel in 40k is the damn warp itself.

EVERYTHING about the warp is "It will kill you. Horribly."   A tiny imbalance in the engine while traveling through it, and oops, you are all dead. A loss of hull integrity while traveling through it and whoops-- all dead.


All you really need to do is set up a sufficiently long-distance perimeter around your system, such that any ship trying to traverse the warp to get there will experience engine trouble from purposefully induced instabilities. (Instead of reverse engineering a warp drive, you instead produce a denial of service perimeter using the technology used to enter/exit the warp. You dont want to rip reality apart, you just want it to be sufficiently abnormal from what the imperium's navigators and engineers expect that they experience unpexpected irregularities in transit, and whoop, the warp has their ship.)   They would have to exit far outside the system, in order to arrive safely.  They of course, would never know that, because they would attempt to enter the system in dropship range, and the difference in distance traveled would be tiny for people still traversing the warp. (Less than human reaction time.) As such, they could never alert the imperium of the blockade devices.

Result- Imperium does not know why all the ships they send there never return. Does not know why none of them even report leaving the warp.

Still "We dont go to sol."


All you need to do is slightly alter the normal fabric of reality in the direct vicinity of your system, such that normal warp travel is impossible.  For a highly isolationist world, this would be fine; They dont use warp travel anyway.

I'm sure nothing could go wrong with deliberately trying to warp reality across an entire solar system using dodgy warp-drive technology on a scale magnitudes large than any space ship uses

[wierd]

The obvious Achilles heel in 40k is the damn warp itself.

EVERYTHING about the warp is "It will kill you. Horribly."   A tiny imbalance in the engine while traveling through it, and oops, you are all dead. A loss of hull integrity while traveling through it and whoops-- all dead.


All you really need to do is set up a sufficiently long-distance perimeter around your system, such that any ship trying to traverse the warp to get there will experience engine trouble from purposefully induced instabilities. (Instead of reverse engineering a warp drive, you instead produce a denial of service perimeter using the technology used to enter/exit the warp. You dont want to rip reality apart, you just want it to be sufficiently abnormal from what the imperium's navigators and engineers expect that they experience unpexpected irregularities in transit, and whoop, the warp has their ship.)   They would have to exit far outside the system, in order to arrive safely.  They of course, would never know that, because they would attempt to enter the system in dropship range, and the difference in distance traveled would be tiny for people still traversing the warp. (Less than human reaction time.) As such, they could never alert the imperium of the blockade devices.

Result- Imperium does not know why all the ships they send there never return. Does not know why none of them even report leaving the warp.

Still "We dont go to sol."


All you need to do is slightly alter the normal fabric of reality in the direct vicinity of your system, such that normal warp travel is impossible.  For a highly isolationist world, this would be fine; They dont use warp travel anyway.

I'm sure nothing could go wrong with deliberately trying to warp reality across an entire solar system using dodgy warp-drive technology on a scale magnitudes large than any space ship uses

Dont be silly.  You use a constellation of small devices that each individually are not a threat to an imperial vessel.  It is only the combined, but subtle influence of the entire swarm of devices that causes the effect.  That's the thing here-- each device is very low power.  Since this is spacetime mechanics we are dealing with, energy will fall off at the inverse square of the distance.  Rather than create one giant device that can reach that big of a diameter, you create a shell of small devices that produce the desired level of disturbance, at the desired distance from your star system.

The warp drives of imperial ships produces a much bigger distortion; It is able to create literal holes into the warp from normal space.  We dont want that.  Instead, we want it to be "Space is thin, but not torn, and no holes poked in it".   

It would be very expensive to "mine" large areas. (lots of devices to service and maintain, lots of raw material invested to create the swarm, etc.)  But for a more constrained area it could be practical.

[Telgin]

Look, hydrogen is like, the most abundant material in the universe.  The game makers had to find some way to restrict that glut of material, so that scarcity based economy makes sense.

Handwavium about blue stars is probably a minor sin, compared to what they COULD have stated.

Yeah, I guess they could have said that their ships ran on prometheum or firewood instead.  The idea of harvesting plasma directly is just almost a parody in how backwards it is.  Why would you start with a fuel that's already partially burnt and in this case monumentally difficult to contain compared to said fuel?

It's kind of like depleted deuterium bolter shells, I guess.  Fancy words, but the writers either don't know how science works or are deliberately doing things wrong because the Imperium is so backwards in its science.

(But if you ask me, they should have an economy based on degenerate matter from neutron stars.  That shit would be insanely useful if you could keep it contained, and harvest it safely.)

That would have been a much better idea.  Degenerate matter could be used as stupidly advanced armor or explosive material, for example.  Or they could make their ships powered by dark matter or something.