Let's do some roleplay: you are a Guardsman, you have been enlisted to the masses of the Astra Militarium in order to protect the Imperium from Xenos and Daemon alike. Only, you are in a rather unusual situatuion as a Guardsman: you have been given a choice.
For whatever reason the Lord Comissar has singled you out to give you a choice on your deployment (probably some kind of behavioural experiment), he tells you that you can either be deployed in the Eastern Fringe to defend the populous as they escape an unending tide of Tyranids or you can deploy with a contingency of Grey Knights on the outskirts of The Eye of Terror in order to hold back the tide on a fledgling Daemon world as Inquisition hurry to extract vital information from the archives.
Your chances of surviving are unlikely on both missions: unlikely to survive the Tyranids as they will likely swarm your possision before all of the populous have escaped and unlikely to survive the Daemon mission as your exposure to the warp will most likely win an execution.
If you are unfortunate enough to not be blown to pieces from a far then the Tyranids will eat you alive and you will die missing limbs, bleeding to death and slowly being melted by the biomorph's acid. The Daemons will do different things to you depending on their deity; Khornate Daemons will tear you apart and harvest your skull; Tzeentch Daemons will either burn you alive in warp flame or destroy your mind with their psychic abilities; Nurgle Daemons will corrupt your body with Plagues of the warp from which you may not ever know the cure of death; and Slaanesh Daemons will likely not kill you, but that is not a good thing among those beasts.
So Guardsman, what will it be? The Great Devourer or the ruinous powers? You decide.
I'm an Imperial Guard soldier fighting off a planetary invasion. In all likelihood, either I'm going to die, or we're going to win the fight, or both.
Tyranid weapons are biological in nature, consisting of things like acid and carnivorous bugs.
Chaos weapons, depending on who exactly we're fighting, are boltguns, lasguns, or psychic powers. If we're fighting demons I'm going to be killed by the Grey Knights afterward.
I think I'll take being shot to death over being melted or eaten alive. Marginally less-painful.
Really though, there's no pleasant way to die on a battlefield.
Join up "against Chaos", then blast a Grey Knight with a melta gun, swear allegiance to Slaanesh and get pooped out as a Daemon Prince. Seems the only logical choice.
Chaos weapons, depending on who exactly we're fighting, are boltguns, lasguns, or psychic powers. If we're fighting demons I'm going to be killed by the Grey Knights afterward.
This is specifically fighting a Daemon incursion, not Chaos Space Marines, so no quick death by boltgun or lasgun for you, sorry.
Chaos weapons, depending on who exactly we're fighting, are boltguns, lasguns, or psychic powers. If we're fighting demons I'm going to be killed by the Grey Knights afterward.
This is specifically fighting a Daemon incursion, not Chaos Space Marines, so no quick death by boltgun or lasgun for you, sorry.
Oh.
Then I'm not being sent there at all, the Grey Knights are going instead and are going to close the rift before destroying the planet.
As an average guardsman I don't think you're even meant to be aware of the existence of the grey knights and if you fight with them you'll be executed afterwards as you're not valuable enough for mindwiping.
Both options are like choosing how you want to die really. However against the tyranids at least if you win and survive you'll not be executed afterwards. Also according to the primer they have stubby little claws that can't cut through flakk armour anyway and most are no bigger than a dog.
They just kill you, Whilst Chaos will have fun with your soul for the rest of eternity.
Eldar still wear their soulstones when they're not anywhere near forces of Chaos, you know.
Your soul's getting played with by Chaos regardless of who you get killed by.
It's all got to do with your psychic presence, most non psyker humans don't actually have a soul strong enough to maintain consciousness in the warp and if they do it's moments at most.
n0t_u wrote: As an average guardsman I don't think you're even meant to be aware of the existence of the grey knights and if you fight with them you'll be executed afterwards as you're not valuable enough for mindwiping.
Both options are like choosing how you want to die really. However against the tyranids at least if you win and survive you'll not be executed afterwards. Also according to the primer they have stubby little claws that can't cut through flakk armour anyway and most are no bigger than a dog.
Uhh, I've seen Hormagaunt models.
Those things are so long they will pierce both sides of your armor on opposite sides of your body, when they attack you from the side.
It's all got to do with your psychic presence, most non psyker humans don't actually have a soul strong enough to maintain consciousness in the warp and if they do it's moments at most.
So what you're saying is that my soul wouldn't be played with anyways?
Retrogamer0001 wrote: The Grey Knights will also mind-wipe, if not outright kill, any survivors of the demonic incursion, so there's even less incentive to choose Chaos.
Either way, we're pretty fethed.
As an Imperial Guard soldier, I am expected to fight until I die. There is no option of retirement, and there is no going home.
Surviving a Tyranid attack just means I die later in another war on some other planet.
n0t_u wrote: As an average guardsman I don't think you're even meant to be aware of the existence of the grey knights and if you fight with them you'll be executed afterwards as you're not valuable enough for mindwiping.
Both options are like choosing how you want to die really. However against the tyranids at least if you win and survive you'll not be executed afterwards. Also according to the primer they have stubby little claws that can't cut through flakk armour anyway and most are no bigger than a dog.
Uhh, I've seen Hormagaunt models.
Those things are so long they will pierce both sides of your armor on opposite sides of your body, when they attack you from the side.
It's all got to do with your psychic presence, most non psyker humans don't actually have a soul strong enough to maintain consciousness in the warp and if they do it's moments at most.
So what you're saying is that my soul wouldn't be played with anyways?
The guardsmen are given the uplifiting infantrymen's primer, which will be most of their knowledge on a lot of the threats they're going to fight since they die so often. It's full of propaganda rather than information with stuff like Orks being afraid of melee and weak, the stubby claws and bug size thing I mentioned as well.
Your soul would still be devoured you just wouldn't be aware of it after a few seconds at most.
n0t_u wrote: [The guardsmen are given the uplifiting infantrymen's primer, which will be most of their knowledge on a lot of the threats they're going to fight since they die so often. It's full of propaganda rather than information with stuff like Orks being afraid of melee and weak, the stubby claws and bug size thing I mentioned as well.
If we're basing this on what Imperial Guardsmen know, then the only correct response is, "What the hell is Chaos? What are demons?"
Your soul would still be devoured you just wouldn't be aware of it after a few seconds at most.
That's not terrible then. I'm pretty sure being melted by Tyranid acid would take at least that long anyways.
n0t_u wrote: [The guardsmen are given the uplifiting infantrymen's primer, which will be most of their knowledge on a lot of the threats they're going to fight since they die so often. It's full of propaganda rather than information with stuff like Orks being afraid of melee and weak, the stubby claws and bug size thing I mentioned as well.
If we're basing this on what Imperial Guardsmen know, then the only correct response is, "What the hell is Chaos? What are demons?"
That's the impression I got from this.
mrhappyface wrote: Let's do some roleplay: you are a Guardsman, you have been enlisted to the masses of the Astra Militarium in order to protect the Imperium from Xenos and Daemon alike. Only, you are in a rather unusual situatuion as a Guardsman: you have been given a choice.
They'd probably just put it as "well you could go to the eastern fringe, or you could fight along side some space marines". Either way as a guardsman you're being screwed over 99.99% of the time without being aware of it only to die on some rock and be reprimanded posthumously for failing to properly return munitorum equipment.
Tyranids because if I survived, I wouldn't be killed by the GK.
And I'd be sure to raise a lasgun to my head before the battle ended, but dissolving in acid is a lot better than being captured by Slannesh daemons or the such.
And I'd be sure to raise a lasgun to my head before the battle ended, but dissolving in acid is a lot better than being captured by Slannesh daemons or the such.
You have enough control over your personal weapon that suicide is always an option over surrender or capture if you deem it necessary.
Well, not always, since you could be injured in a way that prevents you from doing it. Say if you were rendered unconscious or had a limb blown off.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Personally, if I found myself transported to the fictional universe of WH40k and found myself as an Imperial Guardsman, but with my own present knowledge of the setting, my first action in any circumstance would be to locate my Commissar, inform him that I am not going to fight in any battle, then run away from the fighting as fast as possible because there's absolutely no way he understood my 20th-century English well enough to have any idea what I just said, and talking to him at all was just to get him to pay attention to me. The natural result of that is that I would suffer a blessedly swift death from a bolt round from the Commissar's pistol. If I am extremely fortunate, it will be a headshot and I will die without having heard the gunshot. If I am less fortunate, I will be hit in the torso and suffer such intensely catastrophic trauma that the shock will prevent my brain from experiencing pain, and likely I will be unconscious until my death. The worst-case scenario is that he hits me in the arm or leg, and I bleed out extremely rapidly from the arteries in the limb having been severed, and no one would even bother to try a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
Any of those three scenarios are preferable to being an Imperial Guardsman at all.
Skymate wrote: Great devourer, easily
Tyranids CAN be easy to take out [from a distance] once the big ones have been dealt with. The ruinous powers on the other hand
Generally the human strategy for warfare and weapons since the days we first started tying rocks to sticks has been, "Stay as far away from them as you can while still being in weapons range. Then try to kill them." The stick was meant to put some distance between the mammoth and the human, because having the ability to kill something when it can't reach you is the kind of thing you do as a species as physically pathetic for combat as humans are. Literally we are the MacGuyver of Earth species, and we are god damned overpowered because of it. If Earth was a tabletop game, its species were factions, frankly, the message boards would be nothing but complaints from other factions complaining about humans being overpowered, and many of them simply quitting when their army gets squatted because humans just kinda needed stuff. Then the humans would go, "Well, just don't come onto our turf then, and we won't have a problem." and every other species goes, "Your turf covers the entire planet and keeps friggin growing, and even when we stay in our turf, like, you know, in the OCEAN, where you can't friggin live, you just find loopholes in the laws of physics to come onto our turf and kill us anyways!"
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, if you think that heavily-armed and armored melee troops will wipe out a well-organized, much-smaller group of ranged troops with few, if any, melee troops of their own, there's this one historical battle I've heard of that put that idea to the ultimate test, extremely famous because of the result. It's called Agincourt.
As a guardsman with this much knowledge, I choose the only viable option. I step forward proudly, look the comissar in the eye, and ask him extremely loudly if he believes that love can bloom on the battlefield.
Suicide by Comissariat: the only death you can trust in.
Unyielding Hunger wrote: As a guardsman with this much knowledge, I choose the only viable option. I step forward proudly, look the comissar in the eye, and ask him extremely loudly if he believes that love can bloom on the battlefield.
Suicide by Comissariat: the only death you can trust in.
Yeah, I already came to that conclusion. I just didn't assume that the Imperium would kill me for propositioning stuff, nor that he would understand my 20th century English and turns of phrase, so I also started running away from the battle, because running away from a battle is something Commissars understand means "Kill me!" in EVERY language.
I can deal with the concept of chaos. They hate the imperium because their "ideology" conflicts with the imperium. They just want me dead because they hate me.
Tyranids are like a force of nature. It doesn't want me dead, they don't think of me as an enemy. I'm just there and if I happen to be where they are I'm fethed. Tyranids, more than any other race, are numberless. They throw millions of organisms at a single purpose without concern for their lives.
They're the worst kind of enemy, the one that doesn't care about it's own well-being. Daemons are at the very least reluctant to get cut up because it sends them back to the warp.
Tyranids. There's a hope of victory that doesn't result in my death, and my death would more likely than not be swift. Heck, I might just walk off the ship and asphyxiate if I'm really lucky. Against Daemons, I'm literally facing my nightmares, and death isn't the end of my suffering. And no, can't just pop a grey knight and call it a day of daemon princedom. Chances are the Grey Knight senses my heresy and kills me first, or I shoot and the attack does nothing to it, or I kill it and my reward is death anyways because lulz, or I kill it and AM rewarded... with Spawndom.
I think your soul's alright as far as you're concerned. Fairly certain human souls are torn apart in tye warp so you wouldn't be conscious. That's part of why it's so horrific what Slaanesh does to eldar, as their souls retqin cohesion and consciousness after death.
As for whether i'd prefer to die to the Tyranids or die to Chaos (i'm a Guardsman...i'm going to die) i feel like the Tyranids would be a really horrible way to die.
Saying that, i feel like Chaos could be really creative if they wanted...
Well... at least fighting Tyranids, I'd be fighting something that can in fact be killed.
Not like Chaos demons where merely looking at them is enough to drive you to the point of ripping yourself and everyone around you apart... (can't remember which 40k rule book that was from, but that did happen for at least one Guard outpost.)
Cothonian wrote: Well... at least fighting Tyranids, I'd be fighting something that can in fact be killed.
Not like Chaos demons where merely looking at them is enough to drive you to the point of ripping yourself and everyone around you apart... (can't remember which 40k rule book that was from, but that did happen for at least one Guard outpost.)
So you're saying a single Chaos Daemon is sufficient to defeat any number of Imperial Guardsmen who simply verify its presence visually?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Wouldn't they just, like, issue you a blindfold of some sort and tell you to walk toward the noise of battle and shoot randomly in the general direction of anything that didn't sound like a human?
And then watch their army dissipate and just call in the Grey Knights who can look at demons without committing fratricide?
oldzoggy wrote: Some daemons do accept deals right ?
I vote daemons.
What deal could you offer a daemon that it would consider beneficial, as a guardsman?
Have you heard of Heretic Guard and/or Cultists?
I know they exist, but what I meant was what can you, John Doe, private of the Imperial Guard, offer the six foot tall purple daemon right in front of you to convince her that is not worth her time to skin you alive, lube up, and wear you like a brand new Edgar suit. It takes time to work out a deal, if they just don't flat out possess you.
oldzoggy wrote: Some daemons do accept deals right ?
I vote daemons.
What deal could you offer a daemon that it would consider beneficial, as a guardsman?
Have you heard of Heretic Guard and/or Cultists?
I know they exist, but what I meant was what can you, John Doe, private of the Imperial Guard, offer the six foot tall purple daemon right in front of you to convince her that is not worth her time to skin you alive, lube up, and wear you like a brand new Edgar suit. It takes time to work out a deal, if they just don't flat out possess you.
At that point, I think she's doing more for me than I could ever do for her.
Do I get to stay conscious? If so, that's just a bonus!
I have trypophobia and a lot of those Nids look like they are filled with all kinds of holes and porous flesh.
You ever met a plague bearer?
Probably shouldn't have mentioned them by name. He or she might Google them.
If Brutus plays 40k they are bound to run into them eventually, better to prepare yourself before the battle than to be caught out in the middle of it.
You know, some of those genestealers might take over some other female guardswomen and they might get quite randy all of a sudden... not that you'd likely survive afterwards as "you" but heck, a genestealer cult is at least like a family!
sudojoe wrote: You know, some of those genestealers might take over some other female guardswomen and they might get quite randy all of a sudden... not that you'd likely survive afterwards as "you" but heck, a genestealer cult is at least like a family!
I've seen fanart that suggests that some Tyranid biomorphs might be worth just skipping the humans and getting randy with the Nids.
Though I've also seen similar fanart of various Chaos creatures. Including Bloodletters.
sudojoe wrote: You know, some of those genestealers might take over some other female guardswomen and they might get quite randy all of a sudden... not that you'd likely survive afterwards as "you" but heck, a genestealer cult is at least like a family!
Not the worst way to go in the 40k universe.
I am sure a Daemonette could offer you a more exciting family life though.
sudojoe wrote: You know, some of those genestealers might take over some other female guardswomen and they might get quite randy all of a sudden... not that you'd likely survive afterwards as "you" but heck, a genestealer cult is at least like a family!
I've seen fanart that suggests that some Tyranid biomorphs might be worth just skipping the humans and getting randy with the Nids.
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
Ahh he's wasting the Emperor's precious ammo. And possibly talking to the dead! Psyker Herectic! *Stab with power sword* (saves ammo)
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
So if I waste all your ammo, you can't shoot the other Guardsmen? My brain no longer exists, so I can't feel pain. Or anything at all.
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
Ahh he's wasting the Emperor's precious ammo. And possibly talking to the dead! Psyker Herectic! *Stab with power sword* (saves ammo)
Just FYI, I do a lot of roleplaying. And I used to read a lot of fiction.
You may now look back on my previous posts and consider what the lack of quotation marks might actually mean.
Automatically Appended Next Post: However, this concept of Commissars executing other Commissars pleases me. Please, continue.
sudojoe wrote: You know, some of those genestealers might take over some other female guardswomen and they might get quite randy all of a sudden... not that you'd likely survive afterwards as "you" but heck, a genestealer cult is at least like a family!
I've seen fanart that suggests that some Tyranid biomorphs might be worth just skipping the humans and getting randy with the Nids.
Though I've also seen similar fanart of various Chaos creatures. Including Bloodletters.
vs
I can see that argument but what's the chances of the bloodletter actually letting you bed her?
I mean you can totally go slanesh
but you're still way better off with the randy genestealers as you'd probably survive in some fashion afterwards.
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
Ahh he's wasting the Emperor's precious ammo. And possibly talking to the dead! Psyker Herectic! *Stab with power sword* (saves ammo)
"He killed a Comissar preventing that Comissar from executing more Guardsmen! He is attempting to prevent the Emperor's justice from being carried out!" *BLAM* (Continues to execute Guardsmen)
You're now putting bolt rounds into my remains purely to obliterate the body for some reason. I died from the first shot, now you're just wasting ammo on cleaning up the mess.
"I am not taking any chances heretic! Besides, if you are dead why are you still talking!?" *BLAM* *BLAM* *BLAM*
So if I waste all your ammo, you can't shoot the other Guardsmen? My brain no longer exists, so I can't feel pain. Or anything at all.
You damned hethen! I will climb into the Warp and execute your heretical Soul!
sudojoe wrote: I can see that argument but what's the chances of the bloodletter actually letting you bed her?
Sex can be angry and violent too. And also involve bloodshed.
And there's nothing at all stopping you from finishing off your mate with a deathblow when you're done having your fun with them.
I mean you can totally go slanesh
I do enjoy intersex life forms of a wide variety of sorts.
but you're still way better off with the randy genestealers as you'd probably survive in some fashion afterwards.
They're genestealers, so I'd only survive until the Hive Fleet arrives.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
mrhappyface wrote: "He killed a Comissar preventing that Comissar from executing more Guardsmen! He is attempting to prevent the Emperor's justice from being carried out!" *BLAM* (Continues to execute Guardsmen)
Since a Commissar's Ld value is the highest in the squad, thus they're using his, isn't it the Commissar who failed to stand fast and not flee? Should he not execute himself?
You damned hethen! I will climb into the Warp and execute your heretical Soul!
Please do. I encourage you to enter The Warp to execute my soul. Watching what the demons here do to you would be most gratifying. Depending on what they do, I may videotape it for alone time later. Or perhaps whenever I need a laugh. We'll see what happens.
They're genestealers, so I'd only survive until the Hive Fleet arrives.
Just keep volunteering to "infiltrate the imperium" to your patriarch when the hive fleet closes in. Hop on the next shuttle with a few "companions" and get going! Stick to targeting mid to low hive housewives and just keep moving on before the 3rd or 4th generation comes out and you're all set!
They're genestealers, so I'd only survive until the Hive Fleet arrives.
Just keep volunteering to "infiltrate the imperium" to your patriarch when the hive fleet closes in. Hop on the next shuttle with a few "companions" and get going!
So I'd get to mate with Genestealers until I died.
Sounds pretty good.
But so does mating with some Chaos demons until I died.
Hmm, you ever realize that this thread was originally "If you were a soldier in the Imperium, which would you rather get killed by?" and at some point became, "If you were a soldier in the Imperium, which would you rather join?"
Imperium sounds pretty bad when joining Chaos or Tyranids is preferable.
mrhappyface wrote: "He killed a Comissar preventing that Comissar from executing more Guardsmen! He is attempting to prevent the Emperor's justice from being carried out!" *BLAM* (Continues to execute Guardsmen)
Since a Commissar's Ld value is the highest in the squad, thus they're using his, isn't it the Commissar who failed to stand fast and not flee? Should he not execute himself?
Who was fleeing? That Comissar was standing tall and proud blowing the brains out of his Guardsmen when another Comissar ruined the execuations with all his talk of 'crazy', he was not crazy! He was purging the heresy from a dead Guardman who was talkimg to him from inside his head.
You damned hethen! I will climb into the Warp and execute your heretical Soul!
Please do. I encourage you to enter The Warp to execute my soul. Watching what the demons here do to you would be most gratifying. Depending on what they do, I may videotape it for alone time later. Or perhaps whenever I need a laugh. We'll see what happens.
First! I am going to execute every Daemon in the warp for being heretical Guardsmen who fled into an alternate dimension!
Next! I am going to execute those Gods of yours for not accepting the Emperor's light and running from battle (in the form of not attacking with our forces)!
Finally! I will bring you back to life via the life force of the Emperor himself just to execute you again, only this time no beings within the Warp are going to save you from being triple executed by me!
n0t_u wrote: It's less mating with daemons and more them exploding out of your body into the materium.
But they get to be completely inside me before I die instantly, right?
That'll be an interesting fetish to explore, for sure.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
mrhappyface wrote: First! I am going to execute every Daemon in the warp for being heretical Guardsmen who fled into an alternate dimension!
Next! I am going to execute those Gods of yours for not accepting the Emperor's light and running from battle (in the form of not attacking with our forces)!
Finally! I will bring you back to life via the life force of the Emperor himself just to execute you again, only this time no beings within the Warp are going to save you from being triple executed by me!
"That's it! Sergeant! Follow me!"
"But sir, that's a portal into the warp... If we go in there we will surely die and"*BLAM*"..."
"You there! You are the new Sergeant! Follow me!"
"Y-y-yes sir, what are we going into the warp for though?"
"To kill the chaos Gods of course!"
"But sir, that's impos"*BLAM*"..."
"Now you are the new Sergeant! Follow me!"
"Sir yes sir!"
mrhappyface wrote: "That's it! Sergeant! Follow me!"
"But sir, that's a portal into the warp... If we go in there we will surely die and"*BLAM*"..."
"You there! You are the new Sergeant! Follow me!"
"Y-y-yes sir, what are we going into the warp for though?"
"To kill the chaos Gods of course!"
"But sir, that's impos"*BLAM*"..."
"Now you are the new Sergeant! Follow me!"
"Sir yes sir!"
And so chaos was doomed.
How did you handle the fact you literally just traveled into THE WARP.
"Did you not here what I said!? I am going to kill the chaos Gods, therefore all Daemons shall cease to be! Honestly you heretics have no common sense!"
mrhappyface wrote: "Did you not here what I said!? I am going to kill the chaos Gods, therefore all Daemons shall cease to be! Honestly you heretics have no common sense!"
I heard you making a threat that you are not actually capable of carrying through on.
Hence my lack of concern and goading you into being skullfethed to death by demons for my amusement.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
n0t_u wrote: Maybe this thread should get back on topic before it starts getting lewd.
mrhappyface wrote: "Did you not here what I said!? I am going to kill the chaos Gods, therefore all Daemons shall cease to be! Honestly you heretics have no common sense!"
I heard you making a threat that you are not actually capable of carrying through on.
Hence my lack of concern and goading you into being skullfethed to death by demons for my amusement.
"The poor deluded fool thinks that I cannot destroy the Chaos Gods, I would pitty your ignorance if you weren't such a heretic."
n0t_u wrote: Maybe this thread should get back on topic before it starts getting lewd.
mrhappyface wrote: "Did you not here what I said!? I am going to kill the chaos Gods, therefore all Daemons shall cease to be! Honestly you heretics have no common sense!"
I heard you making a threat that you are not actually capable of carrying through on.
Hence my lack of concern and goading you into being skullfethed to death by demons for my amusement.
"The poor deluded fool thinks that I cannot destroy the Chaos Gods, I would pitty your ignorance if you weren't such a heretic."
n0t_u wrote: Maybe this thread should get back on topic before it starts getting lewd.
I derailed it much further up the page with the genestealer cult idea. Though i havent really seen an argument against that plan yet. Seem like the way to go!
Back on topic, the nids codex is relatively old and less powerful than the new chaos legions codexes. Id take my chances with my astral militarium codex with enough antiair to down the flying mc's.
Additionally, is there a chance for me to potentially impress an inquisitor and join as an acolyte henchman?
n0t_u wrote: Maybe this thread should get back on topic before it starts getting lewd.
I derailed it much further up the page with the genestealer cult idea. Though i havent really seen an argument against that plan yet. Seem like the way to go!
Back on topic, the nids codex is relatively old and less powerful than the new chaos legions codexes. Id take my chances with my astral militarium codex with enough antiair to down the flying mc's.
Additionally, is there a chance for me to potentially impress an inquisitor and join as an acolyte henchman?
Generally, I don't believe the Imperium is good enough to even consider staying in if a better life presents itself, regardless of which faction you go with.
I think it will really come down to the chances to get either settlement rights or retirement to a paradise planet. Ultimately that path would lead to a potential outcome that could trumph nearly unlimited matings with the genestealer cult. Mostly cause think of how many dipers youd have to change in the cult!
mrhappyface wrote: "Did you not here what I said!? I am going to kill the chaos Gods, therefore all Daemons shall cease to be! Honestly you heretics have no common sense!"
I heard you making a threat that you are not actually capable of carrying through on.
Hence my lack of concern and goading you into being skullfethed to death by demons for my amusement.
"The poor deluded fool thinks that I cannot destroy the Chaos Gods, I would pitty your ignorance if you weren't such a heretic."
The Emperor can't do it.
You're not more powerful than the Emperor.
You cannot do it.
"Of course tge Emperor could destroy chaos, he, uh, just chose not to! Yeah, he thought it would take all the fun out of life if we had no one to fight so he let the Chaos Gods live."
sudojoe wrote: I think it will really come down to the chances to get either settlement rights or retirement to a paradise planet. Ultimately that path would lead to a potential outcome that could trumph nearly unlimited matings with the genestealer cult. Mostly cause think of how many dipers youd have to change in the cult!
It's the Imperium.
WHAT "paradise planet"? They're all god-awful and the Ecclesiarchy and Battle Sisters who burn you to death for being a heretic are EVERYWHERE.
You're an Imperial Guardsman.
WHAT "retirement"? You are simply going to DIE before reaching an age at which retirement is possible. Some planetary wars require the ENTIRE Imperial Guard force on the planet to be replaced because they ALL died in the fighting, then that happened AGAIN.
sudojoe wrote: I think it will really come down to the chances to get either settlement rights or retirement to a paradise planet. Ultimately that path would lead to a potential outcome that could trumph nearly unlimited matings with the genestealer cult. Mostly cause think of how many dipers youd have to change in the cult!
It's the Imperium.
WHAT "paradise planet"? They're all god-awful and the Ecclesiarchy and Battle Sisters who burn you to death for being a heretic are EVERYWHERE.
You're an Imperial Guardsman.
WHAT "retirement"? You are simply going to DIE before reaching an age at which retirement is possible. Some planetary wars require the ENTIRE Imperial Guard force on the planet to be replaced because they ALL died in the fighting, then that happened AGAIN.
THERE. IS. NO. OPTION. BUT. DEATH. IN. BATTLE.
They actually talk about those paradise planets in the grey knights first novel. Its an incentive for the imperiums high ranking people to keep working and not betray the emperor. The chances for an average guardsman to go there are essentially zero though.
Which means that getting randy in the genestealer cults first and second gen era wins for longevity and payoff before death. Sounds like we have a winner!
I dont suppose if we just have the comissar execute enough higher ups that i as the lowly guardsman can be promoted to colonel? And then sweet talk my way onto said paradise planet?
sudojoe wrote: I dont suppose if we just have the comissar execute enough higher ups that i as the lowly guardsman can be promoted to colonel? And then sweet talk my way onto said paradise planet?
How many Colonels do you think the Imperial Guard has, exactly?
Is it a small enough number to deserve similar retirement packages to the Lords of Terra?
Here's the list of human inventions, discoveries, and interventions for the 1,000 year period of the 8th millennium BC.
Rise of agriculture
The earliest evidence of lentil cropping is in association with wheat and barley at Mureybet in Syria 8500–7500 BC, Hacilar and Çayönü in Turkey 7500–6500 BC[2]
Bladed tools found in southwest Iran date from around 8000 BC; they were made from obsidian that had been transported from Anatolia[3][page needed]
Potatoes and beans are cultivated in South America
Beginning of millet[4] and rice cultivation in East Asia
Domestication of the cat and Bos aegyptiacus ox in Ancient Egypt
Domestication of sheep in Southwest Asia
Huts, hearths, granaries, and nonportable stone tools for grinding grains Africa
Catal Huyuk, men wear animals skins, plus hats of the same material Asia
Houses, kilns, pottery, turquoise carvings, tools made from stone and bone, and bone flutes China
Clay and plaster are molded to form statues at Jericho and Ain Ghazal Mediterranean
First evidence of incised "counting tokens" about 9,000 years ago in the Neolithic fertile crescent, Asia
Japanese potters begin to decorate pottery cooking vessels
Simple pottery traditions sometimes with cord impressions or other decorative markings Korea
Evidence of wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and pigs suggests that a food-producing economy is adopted in Aegean Greece
Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, Greece, attests to the earliest deliberate burials in Greece
North Sea: large areas of sea floor exposed in Doggerland Europe
Pottery making, burial mound construction, and garden technology Mexico
In the valley of Mexico, chili peppers and "grain" (amaranth and maize) are grown
World—Between 12,000 BC and 5000 BC it appears that massive inland flooding was taking place in several regions of the world, making for subsequent sea level rises, which could be relatively abrupt for many worldwide
And for fun, here's Wikipedia's page for the 100-year period of the 20th century AD:
Please notice how long the "Developments in brief" article is, and what kind of things happened in a 100-year period in real life in which you have probably lived some part of your life in.
Frankly, the WH40k Imperium is actually LOW-tech, given how far into the future it is. Like, EXTREMELY primitive. EVEN while the Emperor was alive. Their power armor can't even take a nuke. We could probably design power armor that could do that in the MODERN day if a spacefaring civilization lent us their infrastructure, technology, and production facilities because they were a bunch of pacifists being attacked and came to us IRL, right NOW, and asked for us to use our expertise in military matters to save them with whatever tech they could make for us, with us providing the blueprints for whatever and they just make it and give it to us. And yes, they could build us a space navy that could kick the crap out of the Imperium too if we simply gave them the blueprints of literally anything we considered practically possible as a weapon of war and they just BUILT it for us.
However, the reality of traveling to other star systems at all requires three things that, combined, should mean that the Imperium would have no real enemies in the 40k setting.
1. Unlimited energy from fusion reactors. Solves any realistic energy problem you need solved.
2. Mining asteroid belts. Solves your resource problems.
3. 100% perfect recycling capabilities. Required for starships to operate.
These three fundamental requirements for interstellar travel mean that by the time any civilization can get to another planet, it can fix whatever problems it caused on its own planet that might make it want to wipe out another civilization for their resources. And the Imperium has 1,000,000 planets that are linked by interstellar fleets. In real life, a civilization as large as the Imperium would probably take care of enemies like the Chaos Gods by just, like, killing them, with regular weapons. Demons can be hurt, even in the Warp. So can the Chaos Gods then. The Imperium should possess the resources necessary to wipe out the entire Warp in a war. Tyranid Hive Fleets would also not pose a serious challenge in real life if humanity spanned a million worlds.
Pouncey wrote: Frankly, the WH40k Imperium is actually LOW-tech, given how far into the future it is. Like, EXTREMELY primitive. EVEN while the Emperor was alive. Their power armor can't even take a nuke. We could probably design power armor that could do that in the MODERN day if a spacefaring civilization lent us their infrastructure, technology, and production facilities because they were a bunch of pacifists being attacked and came to us IRL, right NOW, and asked for us to use our expertise in military matters to save them with whatever tech they could make for us, with us providing the blueprints for whatever and they just make it and give it to us. And yes, they could build us a space navy that could kick the crap out of the Imperium too if we simply gave them the blueprints of literally anything we considered practically possible as a weapon of war and they just BUILT it for us.
However, the reality of traveling to other star systems at all requires three things that, combined, should mean that the Imperium would have no real enemies in the 40k setting.
1. Unlimited energy from fusion reactors. Solves any realistic energy problem you need solved.
2. Mining asteroid belts. Solves your resource problems.
3. 100% perfect recycling capabilities. Required for starships to operate.
These three fundamental requirements for interstellar travel mean that by the time any civilization can get to another planet, it can fix whatever problems it caused on its own planet that might make it want to wipe out another civilization for their resources. And the Imperium has 1,000,000 planets that are linked by interstellar fleets. In real life, a civilization as large as the Imperium would probably take care of enemies like the Chaos Gods by just, like, killing them, with regular weapons. Demons can be hurt, even in the Warp. So can the Chaos Gods then. The Imperium should possess the resources necessary to wipe out the entire Warp in a war. Tyranid Hive Fleets would also not pose a serious challenge in real life if humanity spanned a million worlds.
The tech level was lowered significantly due to the widespread event of the iron men (M23), then later again during the heresy when the dark mechanicum formed and mars was in a full on war. Religious dogma then keeps the development of new tech almost completely static as well.
I mean the Imperium even still uses combustion engines for its vehicles (most of them at least and not the space ships).
The Imperium had those above problems back when it was just humanity and sending out colony ships in like M3, thanks to the internet today's date is 0 985 016.M3, which as a fun fact puts us ~84 years until mars is terraformed in the timeline and humanity starts colonising the rest of the solar system before later sending out those Ohnyl Cylinders. However humanity doesn't start colonising the surrounding systems until M15 with the start of the first dark age of technology. The warp drive being invented in M18, the stcs being perfected in M22 (leaving a lot of room for colonies to be sent out without enough tech or having to rely almost on living memory I guess), M21 titans are finally invented. After the iron men in M23 which wiped out a lot of humanity, most of the separate colonies were cut off from each other until the great crusade ~7000 years later. Sure they had plenty of time to advance and some really did however a lot were reliant on their stcs if they had survived to that point and thus if the stc failed they just lost the technology as there wasn't much understanding of how it all worked at this point as the machine did that for you.
Humanity still has a lot of leftover tech and some knowledge of some things still, however a lot of the knowledge of making new stuff is just gone and too far gone to catch back up with the religious stuff in the way as well.
But this is getting off topic to the point where it could be a thread of it's own.
Pouncey wrote: Frankly, the WH40k Imperium is actually LOW-tech, given how far into the future it is. Like, EXTREMELY primitive. EVEN while the Emperor was alive. Their power armor can't even take a nuke. We could probably design power armor that could do that in the MODERN day if a spacefaring civilization lent us their infrastructure, technology, and production facilities because they were a bunch of pacifists being attacked and came to us IRL, right NOW, and asked for us to use our expertise in military matters to save them with whatever tech they could make for us, with us providing the blueprints for whatever and they just make it and give it to us. And yes, they could build us a space navy that could kick the crap out of the Imperium too if we simply gave them the blueprints of literally anything we considered practically possible as a weapon of war and they just BUILT it for us.
However, the reality of traveling to other star systems at all requires three things that, combined, should mean that the Imperium would have no real enemies in the 40k setting.
1. Unlimited energy from fusion reactors. Solves any realistic energy problem you need solved.
2. Mining asteroid belts. Solves your resource problems.
3. 100% perfect recycling capabilities. Required for starships to operate.
These three fundamental requirements for interstellar travel mean that by the time any civilization can get to another planet, it can fix whatever problems it caused on its own planet that might make it want to wipe out another civilization for their resources. And the Imperium has 1,000,000 planets that are linked by interstellar fleets. In real life, a civilization as large as the Imperium would probably take care of enemies like the Chaos Gods by just, like, killing them, with regular weapons. Demons can be hurt, even in the Warp. So can the Chaos Gods then. The Imperium should possess the resources necessary to wipe out the entire Warp in a war. Tyranid Hive Fleets would also not pose a serious challenge in real life if humanity spanned a million worlds.
The tech level was lowered significantly due to the widespread event of the iron men (M23), then later again during the heresy when the dark mechanicum formed and mars was in a full on war. Religious dogma then keeps the development of new tech almost completely static as well.
I mean the Imperium even still uses combustion engines for its vehicles (most of them at least and not the space ships).
The Imperium had those above problems back when it was just humanity and sending out colony ships in like M3, thanks to the internet today's date is 0 985 016.M3, which as a fun fact puts us ~84 years until mars is terraformed in the timeline and humanity starts colonising the rest of the solar system before later sending out those Ohnyl Cylinders. However humanity doesn't start colonising the surrounding systems until M15 with the start of the first dark age of technology. The warp drive being invented in M18, the stcs being perfected in M22 (leaving a lot of room for colonies to be sent out without enough tech or having to rely almost on living memory I guess), M21 titans are finally invented. After the iron men in M23 which wiped out a lot of humanity, most of the separate colonies were cut off from each other until the great crusade ~7000 years later. Sure they had plenty of time to advance and some really did however a lot were reliant on their stcs if they had survived to that point and thus if the stc failed they just lost the technology as there wasn't much understanding of how it all worked at this point as the machine did that for you.
Humanity still has a lot of leftover tech and some knowledge of some things still, however a lot of the knowledge of making new stuff is just gone and too far gone to catch back up with the religious stuff in the way as well.
But this is getting off topic to the point where it could be a thread of it's own.
Yeah, uh, generally my point is WH40k lore is BS, but we already knew that. It's not a matter of them not knowing how to make new stuff, it's a matter of the stuff they SHOULD have been making in their glory days, before Horus did his Heresy thing, outclasses what they DID make to a degree you have to believe that for some reason they deliberately chose to make terrible stuff instead of good stuff when they could easily do both and use the WH40k stuff for cosplays. Literally, a human soldier from the 30th millennium IRL encounters a Custodes, the IRL human would be going, "Cute cosplay, but did you have to go with that much gold?" Then the Custodes threatens the IRL human, who goes, "Are you... serious?" Then the Custodes tries to kill the IRL human with his weapon, who just leaves at walking speed. Or possibly fires a round and explodes the Custodes into goo if he needs to defend himself and says to the second Custodes, "The hell was his problem?" Because boltguns need to pack explosives into the round to explode, the IRL human's weapon's bullets get a much more impressive effect by just traveling at relativistic velocities. It's not a matter of "laying siege to Terra" it's a matter of just torpedoing anything from orbit you want to destroy after obliterating the defense fleet.
Also, uh, all those problems probably wouldn't stop humanity IRL.
Also daemons could be a isolated insurgence. Sacrificing myself to safe the village from daemons might be useful, tyranids are just an unstoppable wave of doom.
oldzoggy wrote: Also daemons could be a isolated insurgence. Sacrificing myself to safe the village from daemons might be useful, tyranids are just an unstoppable wave of doom.
I was imagining that maybe sometimes the demons would just kill stuff fast in a rush, without torturing it.
Then I remembered that IG are deployed to planets by the tens of millions per planet.
Killing tens of millions of soldiers while making sure each one died tortuously? Wouldn't that take so long you'd get bored?
We have a finite amount of ways to torture people but Daemons are stuff of the warp with infinite power when it comes to torturing the body and/or the mind. Once again, if you cannot fathom these infinite possibilities then you aren't being creative enough.
Lol so much heresy on this thread. The comissriat would be ashamed to hear of such low morale. I feel like we are all due for an execution in our near future lololol
What ever happened to dying gloriously for the throne?
We have a finite amount of ways to torture people but Daemons are stuff of the warp with infinite power when it comes to torturing the body and/or the mind. Once again, if you cannot fathom these infinite possibilities then you aren't being creative enough.
Many of those ways are in fact very similar to others.
The same way that there are many ways to waterboard someone IRL, but they're all similar enough that experimenting with the particulars isn't interesting enough to a sadist to consider them different.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
sudojoe wrote: Lol so much heresy on this thread. The comissriat would be ashamed to hear of such low morale. I feel like we are all due for an execution in our near future lololol
What ever happened to dying gloriously for the throne?
We have a finite amount of ways to torture people but Daemons are stuff of the warp with infinite power when it comes to torturing the body and/or the mind. Once again, if you cannot fathom these infinite possibilities then you aren't being creative enough.
Many of those ways are in fact very similar to others.
The same way that there are many ways to waterboard someone IRL, but they're all similar enough that experimenting with the particulars isn't interesting enough to a sadist to consider them different.
You greatly underestimate sadists. Sadism is causing personalisef pain: first I will select the method of torture, next I will personalise it for my chosen recipient and finally I shall impliment my craft, making tweeks to the process as a go along. With such a vast number of subjects the possibilities are endless.
We have a finite amount of ways to torture people but Daemons are stuff of the warp with infinite power when it comes to torturing the body and/or the mind. Once again, if you cannot fathom these infinite possibilities then you aren't being creative enough.
Many of those ways are in fact very similar to others.
The same way that there are many ways to waterboard someone IRL, but they're all similar enough that experimenting with the particulars isn't interesting enough to a sadist to consider them different.
You greatly underestimate sadists. Sadism is causing personalisef pain: first I will select the method of torture, next I will personalise it for my chosen recipient and finally I shall impliment my craft, making tweeks to the process as a go along. With such a vast number of subjects the possibilities are endless.
Even if Tyranids eat your body, your soul is still going to be ripped apart by daemons in the warp so technically daemons are better as they kill you once for good rather than dying twice if the Tyranids ate you.
Unless your soul is somehow drawn to the light of the God-Emperor and he eats it instead, which is probably less traumatic.
mrhappyface wrote: It is extrapolated from the tamer form of torture: teasing.
I have not yet had the pleasure of full blown torture I am affraid. Not that I would carry out torture in the glorious name of Slaanesh...
Of course you wouldn't. Slaanesh is fictional. Doing anything in hir name would be as absurd as doing something in the same of Emperor Palpatine.
Yes, of course I wouldn't kill in the name of a fictional character... That would be silly...
Loopstah wrote:Even if Tyranids eat your body, your soul is still going to be ripped apart by daemons in the warp so technically daemons are better as they kill you once for good rather than dying twice if the Tyranids ate you.
If Daemons killed you they would claim your soul so thst they may torture it later.
mrhappyface wrote: Yes, of course I wouldn't kill in the name of a fictional character... That would be silly...
Um.
I'm the schizophrenic here. You probably aren't.
Why am I the one trying to convince you what is real and what isn't?
If Daemons killed you they would claim your soul so thst they may torture it later.
So basically no difference then? You die by Demons, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp. You die by Nids, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp.
So essentially what happens to your soul after you die in battle is the same either way.
And, I mean, if we're gonna argue things like, "Well, maybe what would happen is that you'd die this particular way that's not so bad," I'm gonna argue that the variety of bad deaths from either Demons or Tyranids range so widely that there's enough overlap to argue that one particular end from one side is better than one particular end from the other side, so it doesn't matter which side you choose to die by.
If Daemons killed you they would claim your soul so thst they may torture it later.
So basically no difference then? You die by Demons, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp. You die by Nids, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp.
So essentially what happens to your soul after you die in battle is the same either way.
And, I mean, if we're gonna argue things like, "Well, maybe what would happen is that you'd die this particular way that's not so bad," I'm gonna argue that the variety of bad deaths from either Demons or Tyranids range so widely that there's enough overlap to argue that one particular end from one side is better than one particular end from the other side, so it doesn't matter which side you choose to die by.
Would the shadow in the warp prevent Chaos from taking your soul though? If it prevents psychic connections to the warp then maybe it prevents souls from entering the warp.
I'd pick Chaos Daemons, I'm going to die either way. May as well go out with the honour of fighting side by side with the GreyKnights some of the Imperium's greatest warriors!
If Daemons killed you they would claim your soul so thst they may torture it later.
So basically no difference then? You die by Demons, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp. You die by Nids, Chaos Demons torture your soul in the Warp.
So essentially what happens to your soul after you die in battle is the same either way.
And, I mean, if we're gonna argue things like, "Well, maybe what would happen is that you'd die this particular way that's not so bad," I'm gonna argue that the variety of bad deaths from either Demons or Tyranids range so widely that there's enough overlap to argue that one particular end from one side is better than one particular end from the other side, so it doesn't matter which side you choose to die by.
Would the shadow in the warp prevent Chaos from taking your soul though? If it prevents psychic connections to the warp then maybe it prevents souls from entering the warp.
Maybe. Tyranids themselves have psykers though.
Also, yeah, it could work that way.
DOES it, though?
Automatically Appended Next Post:
TheWizard wrote: I'd pick Chaos Daemons, I'm going to die either way. May as well go out with the honour of fighting side by side with the GreyKnights some of the Imperium's greatest warriors!
I think we have different opinions on the Grey Knights.
Cothonian wrote: Well... at least fighting Tyranids, I'd be fighting something that can in fact be killed.
Not like Chaos demons where merely looking at them is enough to drive you to the point of ripping yourself and everyone around you apart... (can't remember which 40k rule book that was from, but that did happen for at least one Guard outpost.)
So you're saying a single Chaos Daemon is sufficient to defeat any number of Imperial Guardsmen who simply verify its presence visually?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Wouldn't they just, like, issue you a blindfold of some sort and tell you to walk toward the noise of battle and shoot randomly in the general direction of anything that didn't sound like a human?
And then watch their army dissipate and just call in the Grey Knights who can look at demons without committing fratricide?
No, not saying that any single demon. That was a unique case where some sort of Greater Demon Prince thing appeared, again, I cannot remember the specific story (and again... it was in one of the two books that came with the BRB.) Just with my luck that is the one thing I'd actually encounter.
Cothonian wrote: No, not saying that any single demon. That was a unique case where some sort of Greater Demon Prince thing appeared, again, I cannot remember the specific story (and again... it was in one of the two books that came with the BRB.) Just with my luck that is the one thing I'd actually encounter.
Uh-huh.
So basically, any time Chaos can actually manifest one of these things onto an Imperial world, all ordinary humans cannot offer any serious resistance, and anyone capable of fighting back will have to be more like a Sister of Battle (they are more resistant to the effects of Chaos than ordinary humans, or even most Space Marines, or even Grey Knights in full armor at times. Remember the Blood Tide incident? Grey Knights needed extra protection. Sisters of Battle survived just fine in their standard equipment.), or at least a Space Marine of some sort.
That was certainly not the ONLY time it showed up on an Imperial world. If it can only show up once every 500 years, that means it's shown up 20 times in the 10,000 years since the Horus Heresy.
And it damned well isn't unique, so there are absolutely more of them with similar capabilities.
I would rather fight the Ruinous Powers. Despite all the Warp crap, they can be fought and beaten like any other military force. Daemons can be banished. The Imperium is almost geared toward Chaos being "Enemy Number One", and has ways to counter them. The Imperium has held the line against chaos for over 10,000 years.
The Tyranids are different. They are like a force of nature. A material force like no other. They have no fear. You can't goad them into making strategic or tactical blunders. You cannot communicate, negotiate, or reason with them. They can't be banished with glorified parlor tricks. They cannot be corrupted. They are an anathema to the Warp.
And they just keep coming.
Just about every canon force in Warhammer 40k has suffered defeats inflicted upon them by the all-consuming Great Devourer, including the Daemons of the Dark Gods. If there would be any winners in this age of decay and endless war, the Tyranids (along with DA ORKZ ) are at the top of that list.
oldravenman3025 wrote: The Tyranids are different. They are like a force of nature. A material force like no other. They have no fear. You can't goad them into making strategic or tactical blunders. You cannot communicate, negotiate, or reason with them. They can't be banished with glorified parlor tricks. They cannot be corrupted. They are an anathema to the Warp.
So they're like humans who:
-are willing to take losses to the point none of their soldiers consider their deaths a sacrifice at all
-are too intelligent to fall for the enemy's tricks
-do not speak the same language as their alien enemies at all and have not bothered to even try
-are immune to glorified parlor tricks
-are immune to corruption, whatever that means
-their mere existence tells the Warp to feth off in their general vicinity
So basically they're like people IRL in a lot of ways.
Humans IRL have been willing to die performing human wave attacks on machine gun nests while armed with farm equipment, and don't care if they die doing it. Imagine WW1 if the troops didn't care about being gunned down by machine guns. That has HAPPENED IRL when dictatorships get so bad their people consider being shot to death better than living under the government's rule.
Humans IRL are intelligent enough to consider the possibility of enemy deception and avoid reacting the way the enemy wants them to.
Human languages are different enough from each other you need a translator who knows both languages to interpret for you sometimes. Alien languages would be even MORE different than that, and until a human learns an alien language, or vice-versa, no interpreters will exist. Frankly, human larynxes may not be CAPABLE of speaking alien languages even if we DID learn them, and vice-versa.
Humans IRL are pretty much immune to stage magicians' magics, and generally are amused by them, rather than believing they are literally magic. You said parlor tricks, right?
A valuable trait in humans IRL is being incorruptible. Some of us are. If you mean by Chaos, well, there's the Grey Knights and Sisters of Battle, so, yeah, we can do that too. We've never tested if that would work IRL, because we've never encountered Chaos IRL to see if it would. Demons exist in some mythologies, and in those mythologies there are those who are so resistant to their corruption that they are considered incorruptible. Consider the story of Job for an easy example.
Humans IRL don't have a version of the Warp to try out being anathema to it, but have you heard of the concept of... I don't remember what they're called, but they're basically anti-psykers. They're one of the types of Assassins. So humans can do that too.
KingmanHighborn wrote: I like my chances with daemons...just not with the Grey Knights around. Even if we win those cowards will pop me in the back of the head.
You're an Imperial Guardsman and you like your chances?
You ever read IG lore that states their numbers of casualties?
They consider 50,000 soldiers dying in ONE BATTLE to be "light casualties".
Being an Imperial Guardsman is like being a soldier on the front lines during World War 1. Very, very much like that in fact, given how often the IG relies on, literally, TRENCH WARFARE.
You ever watch a movie about WW1? Whatever movie it is, unless it was a documentary, the reality is worse than what they're showing you. Even with a documentary, living it was worse than watching the documentary.
You saw Pearl Harbor, a movie that was considered to be so much bullcrap that it pissed off both American and Japanese veterans alike? The opening scene of that movie has a rather abusive father being violent with his kid who just took a cropduster for a joyride. The kid eventually calls his father a "dirty German" (it's a movie about a time during which that language was acceptable), and instantly the father just stops, taken aback, and says in a very different tone of voice, "I fought the Germans... I fought them in the trenches... I pray to God no one ever has to see the things I saw."
Automatically Appended Next Post: You might survive the war. Imperial Guardsmen do. If you do, you will not be the same anymore. It will change you, and leave you with nightmares.
This is in fact one of the things IG fans find appealing about the faction. They go into a horrible, horrible situation, and they stand fast in the face of the galaxy's worst horrors, and die where they stand.
Balls and ovaries of neutronium, those lads and lasses of the IG.
Compared to everything else in the 40k universe, and tasked with a choice, yeah, I like a million to one shot to survive over a trillion to one shot. You can't really beat the Nids head on and being eaten is something I'd actively like to avoid.
Daemons can be beaten, they are surprisingly less numerous then Nids, and are insubstantial and waver in and out of existence. People have killed them with prayer and sharpened sticks and 'holy' symbols. So the 'chance' to survive IS greater. Again as long as the GK aren't around cause even if you DO win out, they cap you ANYWAY and take all the credit and glory.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Compared to everything else in the 40k universe, and tasked with a choice, yeah, I like a million to one shot to survive over a trillion to one shot. You can't really beat the Nids head on and being eaten is something I'd actively like to avoid.
Daemons can be beaten, they are surprisingly less numerous then Nids, and are insubstantial and waver in and out of existence. People have killed them with prayer and sharpened sticks and 'holy' symbols. So the 'chance' to survive IS greater. Again as long as the GK aren't around cause even if you DO win out, they cap you ANYWAY and take all the credit and glory.
The chance to survive exists, yes. No matter how unlikely the event, it'll probably eventually happen if you try it enough times. I mean, if you just bounce a basketball at a wall, it's not actually impossible for the atoms to line up in such a way that the ball passes right through the wall by random chance. It's just so unlikely that you shouldn't ever expect it to happen during your lifetime.
Surviving, as an Imperial Guardsman, is not likely enough that it's a possibility that's worth basing your decisions on. A guardsman surviving to die of old age is almost unheard of, since they are simply shuffled around from one war to another until they die. You're probably more likely to be killed by a meteorite than live to retirement age as a Guardsman. So it's not really a matter of "if you die in battle" but "when you die in battle" while accepting the reality that probably some guardsmen out there do in fact not die in battle, but simply not considering that possibility likely enough to be worth mentioning.
I mean, you've heard of neutrinos, right? Trillions of them are passing through you every second, and through the entire Earth in fact. They simply don't interact with your body often enough to affect you at all. Very rarely though, one actually does, and they're pretty harmful when they do, but the amount that do it are so low you'll never notice. Hell, if enough of them start interacting with your body, you could die of neutrino radiation poisoning, but that just never happens. However, one astrophysicist once asked a colleague, "Could a supernova cause a human to die from lethal radiation poisoning?" as a serious question, even though, "dying from neutrino radiation poisoning," is a sentence that makes scientists weird the hell out the same way contemplating the sentence, "a football stadium filled to the brim with ants," does for normal people like you and me. We can understand the words, we know what they mean, we know how they make sense, we simply can't imagine a situation where it might ever happen in real life.
And really, supernovae are powerful enough that yes, if you were close enough to one, you would be exposed to enough neutrinos that even if you survived the situation of being inside a star that goes supernova (the explosion takes out planets in other star systems, by the way. That's how powerful an explosion we're talking about), you're still gonna die from neutrino radiation poisoning. Because god damn are supernovas massive, to the degree where a scientist who studies the science of them for a living has a saying, "No matter how big you think it is, a supernova's bigger."
And if you're looking for a quick, relatively painless way to die as a Guardsman, even Guardsmen know the answer to THAT question. Just run away from a battle, and make SURE your Commissar sees you doing it. They'll plug you in the back of the head with their bolt pistol, and you'll die so fast your brain won't even know you've been shot, because your brain is the thing getting exploded here. Not just shot, EXPLODED, because bolt rounds are actually small anti-personnel grenades that penetrate the target's body before going off inside them, instead of on contact with the target's skin. Imagine a small grenade going off inside your brain. It's gonna be messy and gory, but you'll never know it.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Compared to everything else in the 40k universe, and tasked with a choice, yeah, I like a million to one shot to survive over a trillion to one shot. You can't really beat the Nids head on and being eaten is something I'd actively like to avoid.
Daemons can be beaten, they are surprisingly less numerous then Nids, and are insubstantial and waver in and out of existence. People have killed them with prayer and sharpened sticks and 'holy' symbols. So the 'chance' to survive IS greater. Again as long as the GK aren't around cause even if you DO win out, they cap you ANYWAY and take all the credit and glory.
Tyranids are finite. Daemons are infinite. It's actually otherway around. Tyranids can be all killed. Daemons cannot be.
Also tyranids will kill you and that's it. Daemons can do even worse to you.
I think I take marginally better odds of facing tyranids and knowledge that at least death is worst I have to worry about.
KingmanHighborn wrote: Compared to everything else in the 40k universe, and tasked with a choice, yeah, I like a million to one shot to survive over a trillion to one shot. You can't really beat the Nids head on and being eaten is something I'd actively like to avoid.
Daemons can be beaten, they are surprisingly less numerous then Nids, and are insubstantial and waver in and out of existence. People have killed them with prayer and sharpened sticks and 'holy' symbols. So the 'chance' to survive IS greater. Again as long as the GK aren't around cause even if you DO win out, they cap you ANYWAY and take all the credit and glory.
Tyranids are finite. Daemons are infinite. It's actually otherway around. Tyranids can be all killed. Daemons cannot be.
Also tyranids will kill you and that's it. Daemons can do even worse to you.
I think I take marginally better odds of facing tyranids and knowledge that at least death is worst I have to worry about.
Demons aren't actually infinite. They are finite, but they simply are so vast that we mistake them for infinite.
They are immortal, yes, so they never die, but they are not created from nothing, they are in fact spawned from the minds of creatures like humans. Humans, even in WH40k, are not infinite. There are a finite number, and if you can kill enough of them, you can clear them out of an area. If you can devise a way to kill all humans in the Imperium, humanity goes extinct. They are simply so numerous no one's been able to do it yet.
If the Emperor were powerful enough, he could wipe out the Chaos Gods and all of their followers. If they reappeared, he could simply kill them again and again as they keep cropping up.
The Emperor is massively powerful, but he is not omnipotent. There are things beyond his power, and Chaos is simply so vast even he is incapable of defeating them. Even when he had access to the 30th millennium Imperium and all 20 Space Marine Legions and virtually every human in the Imperium, at a time when humanity was progressive and forward-thinking, his solution to Chaos was to try to ensure humanity never found out about it, not to simply use the vast resources of the Imperium to defeat Chaos once and for all.
So I guess really, even though Chaos isn't ACTUALLY infinite, they're vast enough that defeating them is simply beyond anyone's realistic capabilities.
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slip wrote: So I 'm role playing as a guardsman, and I get to choose wether to fight daemons and tyranids?
Hm
I'd pick imperial guard.
Good point.
Why not just turn your weapon on your own troops? Then you die by them instead of either of the other two.
Simple. Elegant. I like it.
I thought of Commissars in particular, but I failed to consider that I might be able to convince OTHER Imperial troops to kill me too, not just Commissars.
oldravenman3025 wrote: The Tyranids are different. They are like a force of nature. A material force like no other. They have no fear. You can't goad them into making strategic or tactical blunders. You cannot communicate, negotiate, or reason with them. They can't be banished with glorified parlor tricks. They cannot be corrupted. They are an anathema to the Warp.
So they're like humans who:
-are willing to take losses to the point none of their soldiers consider their deaths a sacrifice at all
-are too intelligent to fall for the enemy's tricks
-do not speak the same language as their alien enemies at all and have not bothered to even try
-are immune to glorified parlor tricks
-are immune to corruption, whatever that means
-their mere existence tells the Warp to feth off in their general vicinity
So basically they're like people IRL in a lot of ways.
Humans IRL have been willing to die performing human wave attacks on machine gun nests while armed with farm equipment, and don't care if they die doing it. Imagine WW1 if the troops didn't care about being gunned down by machine guns. That has HAPPENED IRL when dictatorships get so bad their people consider being shot to death better than living under the government's rule.
Humans IRL are intelligent enough to consider the possibility of enemy deception and avoid reacting the way the enemy wants them to.
Human languages are different enough from each other you need a translator who knows both languages to interpret for you sometimes. Alien languages would be even MORE different than that, and until a human learns an alien language, or vice-versa, no interpreters will exist. Frankly, human larynxes may not be CAPABLE of speaking alien languages even if we DID learn them, and vice-versa.
Humans IRL are pretty much immune to stage magicians' magics, and generally are amused by them, rather than believing they are literally magic. You said parlor tricks, right?
A valuable trait in humans IRL is being incorruptible. Some of us are. If you mean by Chaos, well, there's the Grey Knights and Sisters of Battle, so, yeah, we can do that too. We've never tested if that would work IRL, because we've never encountered Chaos IRL to see if it would. Demons exist in some mythologies, and in those mythologies there are those who are so resistant to their corruption that they are considered incorruptible. Consider the story of Job for an easy example.
Humans IRL don't have a version of the Warp to try out being anathema to it, but have you heard of the concept of... I don't remember what they're called, but they're basically anti-psykers. They're one of the types of Assassins. So humans can do that too.
While these are interesting points to be sure, you have lost me here. I was, more or less, responding to the topic of the thread. Not comparing Humanity and the Tyranids.
As for your question, you are thinking of psychic nulls. The Adeptus Astra Telepathica generally ranks them from Phi-plus (your average "Blank") to the super-rare Omega-minus (among which include Culexus Assassins and Sororitas Inconcessus/Sisters of Silence ). Blanks, also known as "Untouchables", are those who possess a recessive form of the so-called "Pariah Gene". Normal folks normally shrug off the effects of the Blank's "otherness" as the person being simply odd, weird, or having a standoff-ish air about them. Psykers, on the other hand, know when they are around by the feelings of discomfort, and the fact that their abilities will be "nullified" in the general vicinity of said Blank. The most terrifying (to psykers) are the "Pariahs" (or "Blacksouls"), whose aura of otherness is so strong that even baseline Humans react negatively to them. And they have the capability of incapacitating, or even killing, psykers just by their presence, or by siphoning a psyker's energy to the point of death. The Sisters of Silence and Culexus were/are made up entirely of powerful Pariahs.
There were also singular examples of other kinds of nulls, like the "Black Pariah" and "Protiphage". But they were one-off types and haven't popped up (that I know of) since the Heresy.
What is noteworthy is that if you gather enough Blanks and Pariahs in a given location, it creates an effect similar to the Hive Mind's "Shadow in the Warp". (which happened once on Terra back during the Great Crusade, which caused the Navis Nobilite and other psyker-using agencies of the Imperium to freak the hell out, call for laws banning nulls, and for their extermination as "dangerous mutants")
Actually I'm a Callidus assassin and I'm here to kill this Commissar for giving choices to guardsman, clearly this is some sort of nefarious heretical plan.
oldravenman3025 wrote: While these are interesting points to be sure, you have lost me here. I was, more or less, responding to the topic of the thread. Not comparing Humanity and the Tyranids.
As for your question, you are thinking of psychic nulls. The Adeptus Astra Telepathica generally ranks them from Phi-plus (your average "Blank") to the super-rare Omega-minus (among which include Culexus Assassins and Sororitas Inconcessus/Sisters of Silence ). Blanks, also known as "Untouchables", are those who possess a recessive form of the so-called "Pariah Gene". Normal folks normally shrug off the effects of the Blank's "otherness" as the person being simply odd, weird, or having a standoff-ish air about them. Psykers, on the other hand, know when they are around by the feelings of discomfort, and the fact that their abilities will be "nullified" in the general vicinity of said Blank. The most terrifying (to psykers) are the "Pariahs" (or "Blacksouls"), whose aura of otherness is so strong that even baseline Humans react negatively to them. And they have the capability of incapacitating, or even killing, psykers just by their presence, or by siphoning a psyker's energy to the point of death. The Sisters of Silence and Culexus were/are made up entirely of powerful Pariahs.
There were also singular examples of other kinds of nulls, like the "Black Pariah" and "Protiphage". But they were one-off types and haven't popped up (that I know of) since the Heresy.
What is noteworthy is that if you gather enough Blanks and Pariahs in a given location, it creates an effect similar to the Hive Mind's "Shadow in the Warp". (which happened once on Terra back during the Great Crusade, which caused the Navis Nobilite and other psyker-using agencies of the Imperium to freak the hell out, call for laws banning nulls, and for their extermination as "dangerous mutants")
Right, obviously they're not EXACTLY like humans, but there are similarities, not just differences.
One of those differences is how they reproduce. When they need a new organism, they simply genetically engineer it for their purposes. They thus never needed to invent guns, they just created organisms with biological attacks that kill from range. They never needed to invent spaceships, they just created organisms that can travel between star systems. They can basically create any organism they need to, with perfect obedience to the hive mind, because they can create the brain, too.
ANY organism.
You know, like humans. Their genestealer cults have sampled our DNA, and they took some good ideas from human biology, but they didn't simply copy it.
If they wanted to, they could create an entire race of humans whose only difference from ordinary (no sense saying "ACTUAL" when they literally are humans down to the DNA level, is there?) humans is that they obey the Tyranids instead of the Imperium. Imperial citizens sometimes do that anyways for one reason or another, in genestealer cults.
But they didn't. They keep creating different types of Tyranids, instead of Orks, or any sort of other creature they come across, taking the best from whatever they find, but not copying anything.
Ever wonder what that might mean about what Tyranids think about humans in terms of our actual capabilities?
Ever wonder what the fact that they've been wiping out everything they come across without ever bothering to copy humans should imply about the idea that humans are the best at anything? Forget not being perfect, we're not even the best. Tyranids could make an army of humans who all fought for the Tyranids. They didn't. They made Tyranids, despite knowing everything there is to know about humans.
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Shuma-Gorath wrote: Actually I'm a Callidus assassin and I'm here to kill this Commissar for giving choices to guardsman, clearly this is some sort of nefarious heretical plan.
Okay, cool, but do you have to say it first? Couldn't you kill the Commissar first and explain it later?
How did you pass Assassin school without learning not to warn your targets you're going to kill them prior to killing them?
Shuma-Gorath wrote: Actually I'm a Callidus assassin and I'm here to kill this Commissar for giving choices to guardsman, clearly this is some sort of nefarious heretical plan.
Okay, cool, but do you have to say it first? Couldn't you kill the Commissar first and explain it later?
How did you pass Assassin school without learning not to warn your targets you're going to kill them prior to killing them?
Shuma-Gorath wrote: Actually I'm a Callidus assassin and I'm here to kill this Commissar for giving choices to guardsman, clearly this is some sort of nefarious heretical plan.
Okay, cool, but do you have to say it first? Couldn't you kill the Commissar first and explain it later?
How did you pass Assassin school without learning not to warn your targets you're going to kill them prior to killing them?
He's actually an eversor assassin.
I don't know the different assassins well enough to remember which is which other than that Vindicare is the sniper.
What are you telling me about Eversors that makes the difference relevant enough to be worth making the distinction?
Shuma-Gorath wrote: Actually I'm a Callidus assassin and I'm here to kill this Commissar for giving choices to guardsman, clearly this is some sort of nefarious heretical plan.
Okay, cool, but do you have to say it first? Couldn't you kill the Commissar first and explain it later?
How did you pass Assassin school without learning not to warn your targets you're going to kill them prior to killing them?
He's actually an eversor assassin.
I don't know the different assassins well enough to remember which is which other than that Vindicare is the sniper.
What are you telling me about Eversors that makes the difference relevant enough to be worth making the distinction?
Yep
They have the subtlety of a shotgun in a knife fight. Less typical assassin and more drugged up raging beserker.
n0t_u wrote: They have the subtlety of a shotgun in a knife fight. Less typical assassin and more drugged up raging beserker.
I'm a fan of that artist's works actually.
It's just, I mean, everyone's going to know there's an Eversor assassin in your base anyways. They'll probably figure it out from all the gunfire and screaming. And everyone in the area dies, so striking fear into a population isn't going to be more effective by announcing you're there. If any survivors can know you said that, they probably recorded it on some sort of microphone or camera, which means they also recorded all the gunfire and screaming and messy, messy deaths.
So, like, why are you telling people you're gonna kill them, before you kill them? What good does that ever do? They can't do anything with that information after they're dead, which is your plan for the immediate future.
I mean, when assassins IRL who decide to murder politicians do it from a range close enough that the politician can hear what they're saying, they only say things like, "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." for the benefit of the other people watching who are not going to die after the intended assassining is going on, assuming all goes to plan (and if you think your plan is at all likely to fail, then just, like, pick a different plan before doing anything?). The reason they don't simply wait until after and explain after being arrested is because people who do things like that generally expect to be killed immediately afterward by the retaliatory gunfire from the nearby bodyguards. I mean, technically, if you wanted to, you could kill the US President, or the Canadian Prime Minister, and it's not even THAT difficult to do it, as far as skills go. It's just that the people who can do that tend to be very skilled and well-trained in killing people, and they generally understand that if you do something like that, what happens afterwards is that they, the assassin, are either killed by bodyguards or hunted the feth down mercilessly and executed or put in prison for life, depending on whether the country has the death penalty or not. Then the country that hired them gets obliterated from the map, and the UN will NOT save them. You saw what the world did to Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11? Yeah, even Canada supported the US enough there to supply our own troops. Lots of countries did. Basically that level of retaliation, so no one does it, because few people are THAT crazy, and most of them aren't good enough that you can hire someone to do it for you.
With an Eversor, everyone in the immediate vicinity is going to die. They don't just kill the commander and their advisors, they take out EVERYONE. And anyone who watched it happen from a recording device is already going to know who did it and how awful it was for the people who died by the time it's all over and the area is safe enough to go retrieving footage in.
If the goal is to create fear of these assassins, I think the friggin gory mess of the entire command center's corpses is good enough at that. Eversor assassins don't need to SAY anything too, do they?
So does spilling an oil drum full of sulfuric acid on yourself, for whatever reason. The acid just kills you, without any malicious intent to cause you any suffering or even to kill you at all.
As does being struck directly by a falling meteorite that hits you in the head with enough force to cause you, personally, instant death. It just kills you.
I think the particulars are important enough to make more of a difference than whether the intent is simply to kill or to cause immense suffering. The weapons that a species creates when it cares as little about the deaths and suffering of individuals as Tyranids... I mean, in the Ender's Game series, a species like that existed. They were kinda like humans. They had no malicious intent or desire to see anything die, but they simply didn't care if any individuals died because they were an insectoid hive mind, not a collaboration of individuals.
They finally met their first humans, in space. Both fleets were curious to learn about the capabilities of the other. The humans, valuing the lives of individuals and assuming others did the same, opted to scan the alien fleet with non-invasive sensors and extrapolate their capabilities from there from what they were able to learn from sensors designed specifically to avoid killing things when you want to learn about them.
The aliens, on the other hand, not valuing the lives of individuals enough to develop any tools or methods like scanners, and until they learned that humans differed in that opinion, simply assuming humans did the same thing, opted to not harmlessly scan the human fleet, but to take a more direct approach of having their ships open fire on the human vessels, to have each of the two fleets battle to the death, because they assumed that humans, like them, would gladly welcome the deaths of those individuals to learn something valuable for their species. They had no intention of ever wiping out humanity when they opened fire, it was just the best way to learn about what we could do in a fight.
Imagine Star Trek where instead of saying, "Worf, do not open fire on those Romulans, instead scan their ship." Literally just replace all orders to scan an unknown vessel with an order to "Open fire, let's see what they can do in a real fight."
Humans were so offended by the aliens doing their equivalent of a harmless sensor scan to determine the capabilities of an unknown vessel, they tried to exterminate an entire alien species because they mistakenly believed they were in a war for their very survival. And the aliens fought, and lost that war, dying by the trillions, wondering why the hell the humans were so pissed off, and what they ever did to deserve this.
Watch the movie Ender's Game and see what humans would do to an alien species whose only significant diffference from humans is that they are a hive mind and humans are not. They encounter a new species, they want to learn about it, not wipe it out.
Did you watch the movie?
So then you watched the human military trick a child into exterminating an entire alien species that was simply defending its territory against aggressive human fleets decades after learning why the first war even started and decided to simply pull so far out of human territory that they assumed humans would decide to not launch an unprovoked attack of their own, because no humans were being killed anymore.
Because that first war happened because humans retaliated, HARD, against what they mistakenly believed was intended as an attack. And the aliens simply retaliated against a hostile, aggressive species that responded aggressively to being scanned, and because the aliens were more advanced, they were winning that war, which actually WAS a fight for their survival. Then they learned why humans were so pissed off in the first place, and actually understood humans well enough to recognize that they didn't view that first encounter the same way they did. As clueless as the humans were, the aliens were equally clueless. When the aliens found out, because they're a hive mind, they didn't need to communicate anything. They simply retreated far enough out of human territory to never come in contact with a human fleet again.
Humans mostly never learned the truth. Because instead of trying to understand a different point of view, they simply wiped out an entire species over a legitimate misunderstanding that resulted in people dying in a situation where no one was being hostile. Well, almost. One human did learn the truth, because he understood different points of view. His name was Ender. His ability to understand a diffferent point of view is why he was effectively genetically engineered to KILL that alien species by learning enough about them to understand how to kill them. He wasn't really able to live with himself afterward, and became a recluse. He spent so much time traveling on relativistic spaceships that he was still alive over a thousand years later, because of relativity. He was an old, old man then, but still alive. And he found a surviving alien queen, and because he understood them, he hid her from other humans, and found a planet where she might recreate her species in peace.
Even a thousand years later, having won that war and believing the species extinct, humanity was so unforgiving of those aliens that they effectively tried to kill them on sight after discovering that a species they thought they wiped out a thousand years earlier had actually survived.
I wonder if the people who boycotted the author's books even READ any of them first.
n0t_u wrote: I'm not sure they're even able to say anything when drugged up enough to be sent out.
Okay... Then how could you announce what kind of assassin you are, who you're here to kill, and why you've been sent to kill them?
Especially that last part. Imperial assassins aren't told that part, and they don't care, either.
They generally don't, I was originally making a point for the lack of subtlety which is the eversor's speciality.
By doing so, you are actually OVERSTATING an Eversor's subtlety. An Eversor wouldn't even bother to explain afterwards, and it's not so much because they want to be subtle, but because there's no point because everyone who could hear it is either going to die very shortly or is already dead.
So does spilling an oil drum full of sulfuric acid on yourself, for whatever reason. The acid just kills you, without any malicious intent to cause you any suffering or even to kill you at all.
As does being struck directly by a falling meteorite that hits you in the head with enough force to cause you, personally, instant death. It just kills you.
I think the particulars are important enough to make more of a difference than whether the intent is simply to kill or to cause immense suffering. The weapons that a species creates when it cares as little about the deaths and suffering of individuals as Tyranids... I mean, in the Ender's Game series, a species like that existed. They were kinda like humans. They had no malicious intent or desire to see anything die, but they simply didn't care if any individuals died because they were an insectoid hive mind, not a collaboration of individuals.
They finally met their first humans, in space. Both fleets were curious to learn about the capabilities of the other. The humans, valuing the lives of individuals and assuming others did the same, opted to scan the alien fleet with non-invasive sensors and extrapolate their capabilities from there from what they were able to learn from sensors designed specifically to avoid killing things when you want to learn about them.
The aliens, on the other hand, not valuing the lives of individuals enough to develop any tools or methods like scanners, and until they learned that humans differed in that opinion, simply assuming humans did the same thing, opted to not harmlessly scan the human fleet, but to take a more direct approach of having their ships open fire on the human vessels, to have each of the two fleets battle to the death, because they assumed that humans, like them, would gladly welcome the deaths of those individuals to learn something valuable for their species. They had no intention of ever wiping out humanity when they opened fire, it was just the best way to learn about what we could do in a fight.
Imagine Star Trek where instead of saying, "Worf, do not open fire on those Romulans, instead scan their ship." Literally just replace all orders to scan an unknown vessel with an order to "Open fire, let's see what they can do in a real fight."
Humans were so offended by the aliens doing their equivalent of a harmless sensor scan to determine the capabilities of an unknown vessel, they tried to exterminate an entire alien species because they mistakenly believed they were in a war for their very survival. And the aliens fought, and lost that war, dying by the trillions, wondering why the hell the humans were so pissed off, and what they ever did to deserve this.
Watch the movie Ender's Game and see what humans would do to an alien species whose only significant diffference from humans is that they are a hive mind and humans are not. They encounter a new species, they want to learn about it, not wipe it out.
Did you watch the movie?
So then you watched the human military trick a child into exterminating an entire alien species that was simply defending its territory against aggressive human fleets decades after learning why the first war even started and decided to simply pull so far out of human territory that they assumed humans would decide to not launch an unprovoked attack of their own, because no humans were being killed anymore.
Because that first war happened because humans retaliated, HARD, against what they mistakenly believed was intended as an attack. And the aliens simply retaliated against a hostile, aggressive species that responded aggressively to being scanned, and because the aliens were more advanced, they were winning that war, which actually WAS a fight for their survival. Then they learned why humans were so pissed off in the first place, and actually understood humans well enough to recognize that they didn't view that first encounter the same way they did. As clueless as the humans were, the aliens were equally clueless. When the aliens found out, because they're a hive mind, they didn't need to communicate anything. They simply retreated far enough out of human territory to never come in contact with a human fleet again.
Humans mostly never learned the truth. Because instead of trying to understand a different point of view, they simply wiped out an entire species over a legitimate misunderstanding that resulted in people dying in a situation where no one was being hostile. Well, almost. One human did learn the truth, because he understood different points of view. His name was Ender. His ability to understand a diffferent point of view is why he was effectively genetically engineered to KILL that alien species by learning enough about them to understand how to kill them. He wasn't really able to live with himself afterward, and became a recluse. He spent so much time traveling on relativistic spaceships that he was still alive over a thousand years later, because of relativity. He was an old, old man then, but still alive. And he found a surviving alien queen, and because he understood them, he hid her from other humans, and found a planet where she might recreate her species in peace.
Even a thousand years later, having won that war and believing the species extinct, humanity was so unforgiving of those aliens that they effectively tried to kill them on sight after discovering that a species they thought they wiped out a thousand years earlier had actually survived.
I wonder if the people who boycotted the author's books even READ any of them first.
n0t_u wrote: I'm not sure they're even able to say anything when drugged up enough to be sent out.
Okay... Then how could you announce what kind of assassin you are, who you're here to kill, and why you've been sent to kill them?
Especially that last part. Imperial assassins aren't told that part, and they don't care, either.
They generally don't, I was originally making a point for the lack of subtlety which is the eversor's speciality.
By doing so, you are actually OVERSTATING an Eversor's subtlety. An Eversor wouldn't even bother to explain afterwards, and it's not so much because they want to be subtle, but because there's no point because everyone who could hear it is either going to die very shortly or is already dead.
And the alternative is Chaos, death by gribbly bits still more attractive
You guys remember that this is the internet right? Its obvious that assasin is from the vanus temple. An evissor wouldnt have anything like the patience waiting for dakka to load and a calidus would have already left after killing the comissar making it look like someone else did it. The vanus temple would use the forums alerting the local inquisitors that there was the heresy of a comissar giving choices to guardsmen in the area!
sudojoe wrote: You guys remember that this is the internet right? Its obvious that assasin is from the vanus temple. An evissor wouldnt have anything like the patience waiting for dakka to load and a calidus would have already left after killing the comissar making it look like someone else did it. The vanus temple would use the forums alerting the local inquisitors that there was the heresy of a comissar giving choices to guardsmen in the area!
If i fight the daemons, do I have the option to switch sides and pledge myself to one of the gods? Either way I'll go daemons because I'd feel better having grey knights around.
sudojoe wrote: You guys remember that this is the internet right? Its obvious that assasin is from the vanus temple. An evissor wouldnt have anything like the patience waiting for dakka to load and a calidus would have already left after killing the comissar making it look like someone else did it. The vanus temple would use the forums alerting the local inquisitors that there was the heresy of a comissar giving choices to guardsmen in the area!
Does Dakka still exist as a thing by then though?
It was a line in the book Titanicus but what it said was the mechanicus never deletes anything! Though they may sequester quite alot of things
In both situation i'm likely to die, but helping evacuate people from the battlefield, there's an immediate purpose to it. I could see the gratification on the faces of the people i'm saving.
And hey, if things get really fethed, maybe in the heat of battle i can just hop on one of the transports with the refugees.
But the comforting part about this universe is that there is the concept of a soul. So, taking the Tyranids, I know that my soul will find rest after i'm dead; I can't make the same claim regarding a battle with demons in the warp.
Probably Chaos because if I'm going out either way it'd be awesome to see/work-with an elite, professional team like the Grey Knights. That's a memory in and of itself.
Take them out though (so I'd fight Chaos with other Guardsmen) and I'd probably pick Tyranids. Better chance of survival and better chance for a non-sucky afterlife.
sudojoe wrote: You guys remember that this is the internet right? Its obvious that assasin is from the vanus temple. An evissor wouldnt have anything like the patience waiting for dakka to load and a calidus would have already left after killing the comissar making it look like someone else did it. The vanus temple would use the forums alerting the local inquisitors that there was the heresy of a comissar giving choices to guardsmen in the area!
Does Dakka still exist as a thing by then though?
It was a line in the book Titanicus but what it said was the mechanicus never deletes anything! Though they may sequester quite alot of things
Did Dakka survive to the days of the Mechanicus then?
) are at the top of that list.
