It's been bugging me.
Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor
Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.
So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?
Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.
But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?
Because the fundamental assumption you start with is wrong as in 40K everything is not determined in space.
Void shields provide protection against bombardment.
Also with reference to the BFG rulebook, the average planetary defense laser silo packs almost as much firepower as the broadside of a Gothic cruiser, with greater range than the Gothic. Likewise, the average planetary defense missile silo has the launch capacity of a full cruiser, and the average planetary defense air base has enough short range aerospace fighters and bombers to match a Dictator cruiser.
we can see the defenses of each hive on Armageddon comprised at least 4 air bases, 8 missile silos, and 8 laser silos. That kind of firepower would be enough to shred your average Imperial frigate, and even your average cruiser, if they tried to bombard the hive. Even if one takes Armageddon to be a more heavily defended than usual hive world, it still gives a rough gauge of the defenses a typical hive might have, which still is likely to overpower most spaceships.
So in other words, in 40K, ground based defense installations can pack equal or superior firepower to an orbiting starship, and if point values are any indicator, at a lower cost too.
I suppose they do sometimes orbital bombard to oblivion with exterminatus and stuff, and it could be argued that that and space battles should be all that happens, but the lore stems from a tabletop game, so there needs to be land battles otherwise there’s no game.
It could be compared to modern warfare where air strikes serve a purpose but are usually in support of land forces. Resources, etc require land forces. Also the much of the warmaking from an imperial perspective is about expanding/preserving the imperium, so exterminatus is too lethal. They want the planet to be habitable and functional after the battle.
Why don’t the factions other than the imperium stick to orbital bombardment? Here’s my suggestions:
Tau: they also want to expand their empire and conquer/absorb their enemies.
Dark Eldar; not many slaves without ground forces to capture them.
Craftwold: not sure, possible want to preserve planets that were formerly eldar? Or that they aren’t human and their motivations are ineffable.
Tyranids: they land ground forces to gain biomass
GSC: they rise up inside the population
Chaos: it’s more evil/fun/sadistic/visceral to go with ground forces?
Orks: it’s more about the fighting than the winning, ground based combat is their “national pastime”.
Necron: this one I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with recent lore to come up with a plausible explanation. Possibly for preservation of their ancient artefacts and orbital assault would risking destroying something they are trying to preserve/recover?
Firstly, in a universe with space ships and orbital attacks being used, folks will have developed reliable defences and whole books of tactics to use against space ships and orbital attacks.
Beyond this, your space ships turns up with its munitions to blow stuff up - where do you go? Planets are pretty frickin big. By several orders of magnitude above ships. It's like an elephant scaled against a tardigrade. Now, where do you shoot? You need ground forces in place to identify the things that may be a good target.
Now, do you really actually want to blow stuff up? Oftentimes you don't - what you want to do is seize what's on the ground, take it from them and hold it yourself for your own use, not blow it up with an orbital strike.
Those orcs on a nice verdant resource world or agri world? Well, your orbital strike is probsbly destroying all the infrastructure you need for extraction of said resources (for example, the spaceport). So you might blow up some orcs. Now what? The planets essentially a wreck, and no use to you. Never mind considering how much it will take to rebuild. Never mind the fact the orbital strike won't have killed everything, and you'll still have to deploy ground forces.
Guardsmen are ten-a-penny. They're cheap and expendable. You can lose plenty of them in seizing a planet and have the infrastructure mostly intact when they're done. Titans and spaceships? Yeah, far far far more expensive and many, many many times fewer of them. The resources that go into one space ship can probably fund a couple of dozen full scale planetary invasions.
Sure, bombard a shielded planet who’s resources you need.
Kill the individual you’ve been hunting to question.
Kill the allies stranded on that world that need aid.
There’s a couple of reasons for land combat.
It’s not just fighting because they want to fight.
Most battles are fought because of an objective or point of interest.
Simply killing a planet doesn’t achieve that very well.
back in the twenties and thirties there where airforce generals who thought that the next war would be fought entirely by strategic bombers. they where proven wrong. Ultimately you need boots on the ground if you want to secure anything.
I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.
It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.
I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.
So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?
And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?
BFG fighters can intercept torpedoes which are roughly equivalent to ICBM so yes there is a defense, just as there is a defense against direct fire weaponry in void shields. People have already answered your question but you seem unwilling to accept the answer. Quite simply within the 40K paradigm, space combat is not the be all and end all of everything, no matter how much you might say otherwise.
Short response: It makes a better story than just than being like; well we'll just nuke them from orbit. With a giant meteorite, we don't even have to invest anything in ordinance or anything. I mean it worked for the dinosaurs.
40k Response: They have shields and presumable effective batteries for stopping dinosaur level rocks hitting the ground and killing everyone (does not seem to work against ork rocks though) But yeah,
Also if you want to make sure the enemy is all dead and/or want to save your own people on the planet you have to land troops.
You said it yourself, it is worse than carpet bombing. That's one of the main reasons you don't want to do it.
Wars aren't fought to kill the other side (outside some bizarre exceptions), you kill the other side as much as you need to in order to fulfill the actual objectives like grabbing land or mystic technoartifacts. Bombing that land into useless irradiated glass from the orbit is a prime way to lose by your own actions and pretty much all sentient beings even in the insane galaxy of 40k still want to inhabit the planets they fight over.
Boots on the ground is the way every conceivable war in the history of ever has been won, because while you can cause massive destruction with scifi weapons of super murder, that's it. Destruction alone does not mean you won anything, if what you're left with is a cloud of dust and less munitions than you had in the beginning.
roboemperor wrote: I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.
It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.
I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.
So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?
And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?
As shown in the Heresy novels, an Imperator titan can survive Exterminatus. It's not worried by an orbital bombardment.
OP doesn't understand why 40k exists in the first place...
The entire reason what you suggest does not happen (and the game does) is because presumably that patch of land you are fighting over is for some strategic reason and blowing the ever loving gak out of it defeats the purpose.
You could simply read the responses and it would answer your question.
However, ask yourself this.
Why is there fighting in that planet to begin with?
Armies don’t just show up to fight randomly, there tends to be a reason.
roboemperor wrote: It's been bugging me. Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.
So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?
Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.
But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?
Because if you glass a planet you can't settle it afterwards and claim its resources. Remember that the Imperium of Man's goal is to reclaim worlds that were lost to them and settle them. Can't do that if said worlds are inhospitable. Despite what the memes may tell you, the Imperium doesn't just declare exterminatus on a whim. That's reserved for cases where a world cannot be recaptured.
roboemperor wrote: I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.
It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.
Incorrect. It can be a rain of nuclear hellfire. It can also be a limited, precision strike. Or a more localised, heavy yet indiscriminate strike - see the star phantoms standard doctrine.
I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.
So What If they were conventional. That was 80 years ago. This is 40k. Don't forget Escalation is a thing. Batman begins. 'We carry semi automatics, they carry fully automatics. We wear body armour, they start carrying armour piercing rounds. And your wearing a mask...'
Stands to reason in a setting where orbital strikes and space ships exist, counter measures to those orbital strikes and space ships will also exist, and will have been in use for ten thousand years.
As to there not being any way to defend against nuclear missiles or weapons - Um, shoot the missile or shoot down the bomber?
Remember, in an era where these things exist, counter measures will also exist. Especially when the defenders have ground to orbit defense as a matter of course.
So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?
Yes, shields and anti orbital weapons are a thing.
And also, agin, you're not getting it. Why are you launching a rain of a thousand nukes in the first place? what happens when you actually want something On said planet. After a rain of your 1000 nukes everything is glass, and uninhabitable for thousands of years. You really gonna go and do that to the emperors worlds? Me thinks you'll be seeing a visit from an inquisitor very shortly for dereliction of duty and misuse of the emperors forces and for destruction of the emperors realms.
And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?
Course you do. How else do you find and confirm your targets?
you can only see so much from the air. Basically no better than a blurry snapshot. you don't want to waste your shots blowing up the Sahara desert, when the real targets are elsewhere, do you? .if you want to argue you can zoom in with fancy cameras that can let you read a newspaper from orbit (pretty sure we can do that now), but you still need to know where said newspaper are in the first place is to zoom in on. What happens when the targets are underground or in hidden locations? And you can only 'see' so much from intercepted comma chatter. You really need to see for yourself. Hence boots on the ground is a vital component of any operation.
If you want to take a planet and use its resources and infrastructure for your own gain - bombarding it with heavy nuclear ordinance and worse isn't a good first step. Now you've irradiated it for generations and destroyed many of the structures that were present. You've buried the resource you wanted if its a mineral and you've rendered any potential food output of the world 0 by destroying the surface.
Well done, now you've got to spend generations investing vast amounts of resources building mega-cities with shields against the radiation so your serfs can mine. But you've also got to ship in vast quantities of food and water all the time to keep that population functional. You've turned a net gain into potentially a net loss.
The Imperium wants to either capture or recapture worlds. The better the condition of the world the less they have to invest to get a return on their investment. Many worlds have huge factories and cities, far better to take them and use them than to obliterate them from orbit.
Yes they can obliterate planets, but its a huge cost both in resources and in political impact. Even against Tyranids their strategy of burning whole worlds was frowned upon heavily. Sure they denied and starved the fleet of fast food sources, but the result was that the Imperium also lost those worlds. Each one now lost utterly or taking vast investment to return to some semblance of use for the Imperium.
The Imperium can far better send in copious ground troops to fight it out on the ground. To secure facilities; resources and in the end win victory with far less destruction. Crippled cities can be rebuilt fast if all they've taken is ordiance pounding. Fields can be ploughed up very fast after the war is over if all you've got to do is clear munitions and plough.
Because if you glass a planet you can't settle it afterwards and claim its resources. Remember that the Imperium of Man's goal is to reclaim worlds that were lost to them and settle them. Can't do that if said worlds are inhospitable.
Despite what the memes may tell you, the Imperium doesn't just declare exterminatus on a whim. That's reserved for cases where a world cannot be recaptured.
Pretty much this. Short of Exterminatus you also aren't guaranteed to kill everything with orbital strikes. You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority. There are tons of reasons. You may not need to kill an entire planet/continent/province/city/suburb to stamp out the enemy. The infrastructure may be too valuable.
Kayback wrote: You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.
If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.
Kayback wrote: You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.
If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.
Not true by any means, you may have local air or orbital superiority, you may have forces on the ground already, you may even have orbital or air parity. You can also make hot insertions like the SM can with drop pods or even teleport in like the Necron or Eldar can.
Kayback wrote: You may also not have aerial or even orbital superiority.
If you do not have aerial and orbital superiority then you have no chance of successfully launching an invasion of a planet as your forces will not make it to the surface in sufficient numbers, and sufficient organisation, to establish a beachhead and hold that beachhead to enable reinforcement and resupply.
You clearly underestimate the Imperiums willingness to throw Imperial Guard at a problem until the problem goes away
Losing a few transport ships on the way down is simply the price to be paid to retake the world when bad generals or under supported ones are tasked with the impossible.
40k canon has plenty of examples of contested invasions, since the scales are so much larger than our mundane wars you can have a roiling space battle raging up above with landing craft punching through here and there. Presence of super-soldiers or inhuman monsters naturally helps with this, as you need a smaller volume of things to make an impact than with purely human forces, but still.
Ghazghul's Armageddon invasions fought with the navy while sending roks down, heedless of lives lost. Heresy saw fights like the battle for Nuceria during the Shadow Crusade where Ultramarines led a large fleet where warships charged against the traitors' flagships to keep their guns occupied as titan carriers and dropships ran past... it's a scifi classic.
OldMate wrote: Short response: It makes a better story than just than being like; well we'll just nuke them from orbit. With a giant meteorite, we don't even have to invest anything in ordinance or anything. I mean it worked for the dinosaurs.
Just wanted to reply to this with a bit of a classic from BFG history:
Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen. Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel. Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet. After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away. After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).
Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following: Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI Total: 9.8 MI
Contrasted with the following: 5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI Total: 2.9 MI
Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet. The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.
For the Emperor, Bursarius Tenathis, Purser Level XI, Imperial Office of Outlays.
Follow that up with the fact that even tried-and-true Exterminatus weaponry may not actually work. Consider Istvaan III: Horus virus-bombed the planet, destroyed the biosphere, set off the resulting planet-wide inferno, killed eight billion people, and because Tarvitz got word to the troops on the ground a lot of the Astartes he was actually aiming at got to bunkers in time and survived the bombardment.
The biggest weapon you can find isn't necessarily the most efficient or effective solution to your problem.
Bombarding a planet from space is actually very difficult, Ship-to-ship weaponry is generally not optimized for planetary assault, with many weapons losing their effectiveness quite drastically. A ship needs to move into very low orbit in order to attack with some effect, and will have to cope with the planet's gravity and other athmospheric conditions, all the while being extremely vulnurable for attacks, from both the surface and space.
I think we can summarize the OP: “Hey, everyone, why don’t everyone use scorched earth policies in 40k?”
Either that, or the OP has some strange notion that “land armies” are parked next to, rather than occupying, whatever valuable things exist on the planet. Especially if there’s an orbital fleet approaching.
And you wind up in a situation where orbital weaponry is just air superiority with bigger guns. There are enemy forces scattered throughout a city. Your orbital weaponry is going to blow up entire blocks of the city when you fire upon it, if it’s using enough firepower to ensure killing the targets.
It’s the same situation of “Why have snipers and sharpshooters if you can just use an aerial drone to kill the target?” Answer: Collateral damage.
Even in the grim darkness, with only war, you don’t go blowing up and wrecking the places you want to put your stuff.
roboemperor wrote: It's been bugging me.
Spaceship > Titan by a huge, huge factor
Orbital Bombardment > Entire land army.
So what's the point of land combat when 100% of the battle is determined in outerspace and everything on the planet is annihilated by orbital bombardment?
Tyranids I understand because their orbital bombardment is dropping a mega **** ton of soldiers. Soldiers are their orbital munitions.
But the rest? Why doesn't Imperium of Man orbital bombard the entire opposing faction to oblivion instead of sending space marines and imperial guard to the ground? I mean I understand v.s. Chaos because chaos is born inside a settlement and IoM can possibly contain it with land forces. But Tau, Eldar, Ork, Necrons (especially Necrons) what's their excuse?
It's like asking why do we have armies who's primary battlefield weapon is a sword in a universe where tanks, aircraft, artillery, and automatic weapons exist.
It's because 40k is a Space Fantasy setting, not really a science fiction one. 40k Space combat is more Age of Sail, or at the very best, Battle of Jutland, in SPAAAAAAACE than it is anything else. It's all rule of cool, and having space ships show up and blow everything away makes for a very poor company level tabletop wargame.
Once one starts to really dig into questions like these, the entire setting falls apart quickly. One realizes a million Space Marines would be several orders of magnitude too few to have any meaningful relevance in fighting the Imperium's wars on a Galactic scale, that starships with turrets hauled onto target by literal chain gangs of slave-crew probably wouldn't work very well, that Genestealer cults could be pretty easily rooted out and destroyed with modern 21st century technology, that 41st millenium air combat is largely just reskinned Battle of Britain imagery and that nothing in the setting remotely resembles the advanced radar/C3-networks/AA systems of the modern world, etc ad nauseum
The idea is that the armies on the battlefield represent the lucky few who have threaded the needle of the various theatres of war and made it within striking distance of the strategic objective which correlates with the specifics of the mission being played.
It is assumed that vast legions of soldiers are destroyed while attempting to move out from forward operating bases into enemy territory. The models that end up on the tabletop are the thinned ranks of those forces and/or the elite units tasked with defending the strategic importance of the mission content.
roboemperor wrote: I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.
It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.
I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.
So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?
And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?
Not quite true: the problem is analogous to a naval ship fighting a shore fortress.
Anti-orbital guns like defence lasers that protect planets are massively, massively more powerful than the equivalent weapons on a starship.
Planet-wide shields are not a thing (I'm sure there are archeotech exceptions but they're rare), but a hive or fortress can pack shields able to hold off that kind of firepower.
The upshot is that an Imperial warship cannot survive in bombardment orbit above a militarized planet.
To put it in perspective, one of the best examples we have of planetary siege is Vraks - the citadel was protected by 40 defence laser silos: roughly equivalent of the firepower of thirty gothic-class cruisers: more than many sector battlefleets. Until at least the outer silos were destroyed, no starship could remain above the horizon Long enough to launch an effective bombardment, and even later in the siege, an astartes battle barge was practically crippled during a brief pass that only crossed the starport and stayed below the horizon of the citadel's main guns.
Secondly, this assumes you're okay with apocalyptic destruction. If you want the planet to be something other than an uninhabitable cinder, massed bombardment rather than drop troops or precision strikes is not a great plan.
IRL we have had enough nuclear weapons to kill everything on the planet multiple times. We have had this capability for decades. Only two nuclear bombs have ever been used in war, and that was in 1945. We have had lots of wars since then without nuclear weapons. Just saying.
Rule of basic logic is better. And precludes glassing planets just because you can.
Pretty much every faction wants something from planets, so barring complete disasters like 'if we don't do something, its going to become a daemon world' glassing isn't on anyone's agenda.
In one of the star wars stories Moff tarkin was asked why the imperial forces didn't just use their star destroyers turbo lasers to destroy everything on a rebellious planet.
He said words to the effect of "The strength of an empire lies not in what it can destroy, but what it can control." (As I typed those words I actually heard them in peter cushing's voice, BTW. )
Now yes he stardusted Alderran but hey, that was just to see if his new toy worked and to let the audience know the empire was eeeevilllll. (Subtly was a rare item in the star wars universe.)
The imperium wants to control every human world and life in existence. It destroys worlds when it either can't control them or they pose a threat to the imperium's control of other worlds. Like a genestealer overrun world.
Plus I imagine most casualties sustained in ground action are IG, not space marines, and hey, the imperium always has more guardsmen, so maybe their causalities are a form of population control. Plus the survivors are tougher and more experienced. Good for the future's need for the best guardsmen possible.
Its the same reason that Nukes haven't rendered other military forces obsolete in the real world.
You can't just deal with every military problem by blasting it with your Space Ships or Exterminatus'ing the place. That planet most likely has valuable stuff. Stuff like industry, a civilian population, natural resources, etc... Stuff that would be destroyed if you were to use the massively destructive weaponry on your space ships. In order to take those valuable things, that is what ground forces are for. Fortunately, the Imperium has an endless supply of warm bodies, unlike the ammunition for all of those space ship cannons.
Planets are really the most valuable resource the Imperium has. They need to be preserved whenever possible. Which means that defending or attacking one is always going to involve ground troops.
Of course, ground invasions will be supported by tactical support from the Imperial Navy, which would include limited orbital bombardment when possible.
Tygre wrote: IRL we have had enough nuclear weapons to kill everything on the planet multiple times. We have had this capability for decades. Only two nuclear bombs have ever been used in war, and that was in 1945. We have had lots of wars since then without nuclear weapons. Just saying.
Not actually true. There has never been anywhere near enough, nor is there actually enough fissile material on this planet to make enough, nuclear weapons to destroy all life on Earth. The worst that could happen would be destruction of modern society as well as some environmental damage that would take a couple thousand years to resolve, though the environmental recovery that would occur due to modern society ceasing to exist would probably completely outweigh that in the grand scheme of things. Human's would also survive such an apocalypse since the nukes that exist/could exist are not numerous enough to actually eradicate humanity. There are simply too many people spread out across too much of the world for the approximately 14,000 nuclear weapons that exist to wipe us out. Enough to kill a few billion both directly and in the immediate aftermath of global collapse yes. Wipe us out? hell no.
The environmental damage caused by nuclear weapon detonations are also vastly overstated by Hollywood and the media in general. You'll notice that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fully inhabited today with no lasting environmental damage, and the bombs that were dropped on them were far dirtier than a modern nuclear bomb. A nuclear apocalypse would be an initial burst of death and destruction, but the blast sites would be completely safe after a couple months in terms of radiation danger. Even Chernobyl is no that bad, at least if you're thinking about extinction level's of nastyness. Wildlife thrives despite the radiation, little worse for wear beyond an higher rate of cancer and other mutations. Even human life would be mostly ok with that.
The reason why we still use soldiers instead of nukes is because we don't want to escalate. We'd rather sacrifice our soldiers and lose the war rather than use nukes to wipe out other humans.
But we're not talking about other humans. I'm pretty sure no human would give a damn about committing unspeakable unforgivable atrocities to orks.
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So I get that IoM doesn't nuke their own planets because they want to keep their planets usable. That makes sense. But that's like only half of the battles. Imperium of man is the aggressor too in lots of cases, especially v.s. the Tau. So why didn't the IoM just exterminatus the entire Tau planets when they decided to wipe em out?
I guess the question should've been "what's the point of soldier combat" because shooting close range nukes just as easily renders soldier combat irrelevant.
We don't use close range nukes because nukes are an unforgivable atrocity and using it on another country will turn all other countries with nuclear capabilities against us until everyone is dead. Not because soldier combat has a use.
roboemperor wrote: The reason why we still use soldiers instead of nukes is because we don't want to escalate. We'd rather sacrifice our soldiers and lose the war rather than use nukes to wipe out other humans.
But we're not talking about other humans. I'm pretty sure no human would give a damn about committing unspeakable unforgivable atrocities to orks.
Of course they don't mind about committing unspeakable atrocities to orks - that's just 'doing your job'. But that's not the problem here.
So I get that IoM doesn't nuke their own planets because they want to keep their planets usable. That makes sense. But that's like only half of the battles. Imperium of man is the aggressor too in lots of cases, especially v.s. the Tau. So why didn't the IoM just exterminatus the entire Tau planets when they decided to wipe em out?
They do, when it's required or absolutely necessary and when there is no other choice. See the wars against the tyranids, or plenty chaos risings.
But you forget the big picture - this is a last resort, akin to our 'we do not want to escalate'. It's not just that the imperium wants to keep its worlds, it wants their worlds too. And those worlds are not much use when turned into glass. Most of the imperials worlds were once inhabited by aliens - fake, for example, Armageddon. What did they do? Turn them to glass, or actually try to use the most afterwards?
Why would other worlds be any different. If they can potentially be of use, the imperials will use them.
vut this is only half the story. Planetary conquest isn't the only reason to strike at an enemy world. What happens when you want to rescue an important captive, or steal some viral bit of technology, or an ancient relic they have stolen and take to their world as a trophy? What happens when it's a recon operation and you just want to see what's going on? Nuking what you're after is not a very clever idea.
And beyond that - can they actually nuke the world? The imperials aren't the only ones out there with orbital defences and giant solos etc.
I guess the question should've been "what's the point of soldier combat" because shooting close range nukes just as easily renders soldier combat irrelevant.
We don't use close range nukes because nukes are an unforgivable atrocity and using it on another country will turn all other countries with nuclear capabilities against us until everyone is dead. Not because soldier combat has a use.
And yet soldier combat has uses, far more than nukes, which is why the humble infantry grunt is still such a hugely vital cog in any military's arsenal.
You know, ww1 taught lots of generals that trench warfare was the thing, and that cavalry was a silly idea when machine guns were a thing. And yet, after ww1, there were still lots of manuals written and operations/strategies developed that used, and relied on cavalry. It's not because they were idiots. It's because Trench warfare didn't make horses obselete in many other areas and so, they were used.
Now, Who says they don't use tactical nukes when appropriate?
Nukes are not the answer to every tactical challenge and yes, you do need boots on the ground for the many, many things that nukes are not appropriate for. Nukes still won't take and hold a city. Nukes won't rescue the captive. Nukes don't do recon for you. Nukes can't man a checkpoint. Nukes can't go room to room. Nukes cause lots of long term consequences after the war - you know, radiation, making the area uninhabitable etc.
Also, nukes are expensive. As are the means of deploying them. Especially if we are flinging them around like confetti, as you suggest. And for that price,I can train and equip a hell of a lot of guardsmen.
And tell me, if we have millions of nukes, what happens if some 'go missing'. I'm sure there's a few ratlingsout there who know a guy who knows a guy who might pay a few imperials for the nukes - he's got a few spikes and flayed skins on his belt, and he's covered in blood but his money's good. What harm could possibly come from selling him one or two nukes on the black market? guardsmen, on the other hand are far more easily replaceable.
But we're not talking about other humans. I'm pretty sure no human would give a damn about committing unspeakable unforgivable atrocities to orks.
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So I get that IoM doesn't nuke their own planets because they want to keep their planets usable. That makes sense. But that's like only half of the battles. Imperium of man is the aggressor too in lots of cases, especially v.s. the Tau. So why didn't the IoM just exterminatus the entire Tau planets when they decided to wipe em out?.
The Imperium doesn't care about Xenos - but they do care about food production, mineral extraction, use of facilities and staging grounds. If you nuke a planet into oblivion then all the surface areas (all that rich food producing soil) is wasted. The atmosphere is polluted and unbreathable. Now if you want minerals or a staging ground to push your invasion further you've got to invest VAST amounts of resources in building sealed habitats and shipping in air, water, food, materials long before you can make any local resource extraction. This is on top of conducting a war and wanting to push the front line further forward.
Your attitude is abit like a player at the end of a 4X game when you've got planetary destructive weapons and you're the biggest fish in the game. You can blast worlds apart because you don't need any more. You are out producing all the other races so you're just mopping up by going around the game board destroying things. That works because you're in a position of ultimate superiority. You dont' need those worlds; the enemy isn't able to rise up against you so you can destroy without any holdback.
However the Imperium is no where near there. They DO need those worlds. They need them as staging grounds; local control hubs; resource centres; production; food; humans (yes they've billions upon trillions but thye still need more to be bred and raised). Their opponents can rise up against them; they can conquer them.
Also dont' forget, even in the Tau empire, there are many worlds settled with humans with human habitation. The Imperium would rather capture those people and settlements and use them for their own ends. Rather than obliterate the lot. Remember Exterminatus isn't just cleaning the planet of xenos; its stripping the atmopshere and upper layers of soil and minerals; destroying habitation options.
But I just can't help but feel when I see a space marine kicking ass, killing titans on his own, fighting chaos space marines who also felled titans on their own, that a nuke detonated in their vicinity would end both him, his rival, and his entire squad.
So why don't they? I'm looking at Necrons. Why aren't they WMD spam happy?
Orks & Tyranids are WMDs themselves so I get that.
IoM & Tau, I guess for further potential for expansion they would try to preserve the environment
Dark Eldar want slaves not property so it makes sense for them to not blast everything to nothing.
Eldar... Why aren't they nuking the gak out of every xenos that threatens them? They don't even need planets right? Everything is wraithbone craftworld.
Chaos actually does use nukes. 13th black crusade started with a planet cracker and then ended with a meteoric impact.
Necrons are perhaps the only race that could use exterminatus style weapons and have a lore reason why they can use them and a justifiable reason for not caring if a planet can be lived on after by organic life. They have no vested interest in resources save for minerals and they've no real need to worry about irradiation or such.
I can only presume that the reason they don't is because they are the exterminatus weapon. An army of machines, built to destroy who can teleport out to repair and return to the battle forever. A neverending tide that just marches ever onward. They don't need a planet busting weapon, they are the weapon.
Also because they clean the world manually with gauss guns they are likely more effective than exterminatus - leaving no corner for tiny spores to hide and repopulate ork and tyranids and other xenos. No bunker to hide in against the bombs - no armoured and shielded facility.
Also Eldar do live on planets, the Exodites hold many worlds on the fringe. Craftworlders just left the planets because so many were corrupted and sucked into Chaos. Eldar just hasn't the numbers to go toe to toe with the Imperium and secure an empire for themselves. Even Tau are only managing because they are in the backwater corner of nowhere that the Imperium forgot about.
The same reason that carpet bombing didn't achieve much in Vietnam/Afghanistan etc. Bombing doesn't occupy/claim land/territory, it just destroys a lot of it, and makes people there hunker down and wait it out as best they can.
Boots on the ground are how wars are won.
The IoM have used a scorched earth policy against Tyranids, it was used to 'starve' the fleets, but was a very desperate measure, as it ultimately cost the IoM some planets that it may have salvaged from the Tyranids.
A lot of times the battle is about something you want on the plannet.
- Orks wanne fight. This also makes them stronger then killing a plannet from orbit.
- Nids want the food. And the DNA since they need DNA strands to CRISPR new genetic materials.
- Eldar usualy have backdoor aces to planets. They often wanne mess with future event by manipulating fate. Bombaring a planet might not be the best scalpel. In battle of mymnenia book they are looking for a lost phoenix lord.
- Dark eldar wants slaves for torture and work force.
- Imperial guard and SM often want to save the local population. Or old factories they can not copy.
- GSC wanne spread the dease, or throw of the oppresors. Infiltration might be better
- Daemons do not wanne manifest on a dead plannet.
- Chaos might wanne blow up a plannet.
- Necrons might wanne blow up a planet if they do not have realestate on it.
- Tau might wanne blow up a plannet, but liberating it is usually better.
- A lot of loyal forces might not have the authoraty to blow up a plannet, or get in trouble for doing it.
A lot of armies want to recover some form of relic.
But I just can't help but feel when I see a space marine kicking ass, killing titans on his own, fighting chaos space marines who also felled titans on their own, that a nuke detonated in their vicinity would end both him, his rival, and his entire squad.
Better people than you and me have tried this with far nastier things than just nukes and failed. take istvaan iii during the Horus heresy. Horus almost literally turned the world to goop with the life's eater virus and then set the whole thing on fire. Most of the marines who were planetside survived. They found whatever shelter they could, went underground, shut doors, etc and just waited it out.
Besides, your assuming you're able to launch a nuke in the first place. What's actually going to happen is While your targeting one squad with your nukes, the other nine squads in the company are seizing your silo.
So why don't they? I'm looking at Necrons. Why aren't they WMD spam happy?
Eldar... Why aren't they nuking the gak out of every xenos that threatens them? They don't even need planets right? Everything is wraithbone craftworld.
Chaos actually does use nukes. 13th black crusade started with a planet cracker and then ended with a meteoric impact.
Necrons, what's their excuse?
You wake up and there's loads of cockroaches in your house. Do you (a) burn it down, or (b) get the exterminator in?
Just because they hate life doesn't no mean the necrons will be wmd happy - who knows, maybe they like pretty sunsets on planets other than irradiated rocks. In any case, they're reclaiming their old worlds. Chances are they want to maintain them in some manner akin to what they envision they used to be.
As to eldar - maybe they can't? Firstly, There's so many threats, and so few eldar. Plus, they are limited in how they can travel since the web way is so fragmented.
They need planets, they have planets (see exodites) and biel tan in particular is notably fierce in protecting what they regard as their maiden worlds, as they have not yet given up the idea of rebuilding their empire. Plus, nuking all the nature kind of goes against the 'elf' source material. They'd probably see it a shame and terribly wasteful, and frankly, beneath them.
As to chaos - sure, they use nukes, where necessary. Like the imperials. They also make extensive use of ground forces. They're less interested in seizing ground rather than, say exterminating the emperors lapdogs, but they still need resources, munitions, recruits etc. Plus, look at their psychology. Nurgle worshippers and their love of dirty war would be the most likely to use nukes, and even then it's for the rads, not the initial blast. Black legion? Sure, but they have far more plans. khorne - you can't claim skulls properly with nukes. You need a chainaxe. Slaanesh? Again, they like the more intricate kind of murder. Nukes are boring and for brutes. Tzeentch? Mortals are far more interesting to toy with than nukes. World bearers? You need people to fuel your demons. Nukes are a very bad idea. Night lords? Prefer to inflict fear and terror, nukes are too quick. Alpha legion. Yeah, they'd use them, but like the black legion, have far bigger plans.
Eldar... Why aren't they nuking the gak out of every xenos that threatens them? They don't even need planets right? Everything is wraithbone craftworld.
Depends what they're fighting for.
The most militaristic craftworlds tend to be fighting to protect the 'maiden worlds' - uninhabited worlds terraformed by the eldar that they resent other races using.
They're basically fighting what they see as a vermin investigation in their perfectly manicured garden: carpet bombing with napalm would get rid of the mon-keigh but it's kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face....
Other eldar are often trying to cause some subtle manipulation of destiny - kill this individual, cause that one to rise to a leadership position, that sort of thing. Again, exterminatus is a bit ill-suited to that sort of plan.
Necrons also really don't want to be robot skeletons - or at least the ones that haven't gone crazy and became Destroyers or contracted the Flayer Virus. How are they meant to undo their biotransference if all life in the galaxy has been completely annhilated and all planets are left entirely uninhabitable to everything that isn't artifical life?
That and some necron lords and the like still think they're Necrontyr back in their civil war times- such as Zahndrekh. Doesn't make much sense to try and destroy your own people and planets (even if said 'people' are actually orks, and the planet you thought was Sephrokh-011 is actually some planet on the far reaches of the galaxy that the Necrontyr never settled).
It could be that Eldar and Necrons don’t want to feed all the poor souls on the planet to Chaos. Which is where a bunch of them are probably going to end up.
1) Almost any excuse for a war all boils down to one guy wanting to take the other guy's stuff.
2) Sometimes the victim then gets the idea "If I cannot have my stuff, then no-one can!"
3) Sometimes the offender gets the idea "If I cannot take his stuff, then he cant have it!"
4) Sometimes the offender just wants to hurt the defender really bad and is willing to destroy some of the stuff he wants to take.
All ground wars are the process of point #1.
The bombardments, virus bombs, exterminatus and nukes or whatever is all part of #2 and #3.
Funny you mention the Tyranids as munitions: they just want to eat the enemy and harvest bio-mass: what is the point of blowing them up??
If you've ever played something like Stellaris then the answer should be apparent. You can't really capture a planet without winning the war on the ground. Space combat is a extremly important factor but those spaceships are produced by the people on the planets. Or at the very least planetary production is part of a production chain of ultimate military superiority. Capturing the production chain, not just annihalating it, requires ground forces.
Nerak wrote: If you've ever played something like Stellaris then the answer should be apparent. You can't really capture a planet without winning the war on the ground. Space combat is a extremly important factor but those spaceships are produced by the people on the planets. Or at the very least planetary production is part of a production chain of ultimate military superiority. Capturing the production chain, not just annihalating it, requires ground forces.
And once you've got the planet and you've populated it (or subjugated the population) you've now got a new world. Generating wealth, resources and potentially ships and infantry to further the war. This after spending large amounts of resources (influence to capture; materials for the fleet; credits for the upkeep of it all) to gain the planet. It's far more valuable to own it and make a profit and use it as a new staging ground to push further into the enemy. Against a strong opponent you might have to fight and war world to world in a slow advance.
Plus it means if the other end of the empire gets attacked you can leave the system with its defensive battlestation and fly off to tackle other problems that will arise.
You might destroy a world entirely because you can't win the war, so you deny it to your opponent to weaken them in the long run, knowing that you also can then only gain asteroids in that system.
And, as I noted earlier, if its nearer to the end-game when your empire is far more powerful than the competition, you can then roll out your planet busters at a whim; tearing worlds apart because you're at a point where you are steam-rolling over every opponent.
Nerak wrote: If you've ever played something like Stellaris then the answer should be apparent. You can't really capture a planet without winning the war on the ground. Space combat is a extremly important factor but those spaceships are produced by the people on the planets. Or at the very least planetary production is part of a production chain of ultimate military superiority. Capturing the production chain, not just annihalating it, requires ground forces.
I do play stellaris. As an exterminator gestalt robot race I do armageddon bombardment until everything on the planet is dead and then I send a single ground troop to claim the annihilated world. Stellaris is part of the reason why I came up with the question.
Part of it might be that planets have the means of production-the imperium wouldn’t want to commit a planet to Exterminatus if it was a productive member of the imperium. It might produce soldiers, food, arms, or munitions. If nothing else, they would have to start over from scratch. Fighting with boots on the ground gives them a chance to keep producing for their war machine. Likewise, the Tau May have use of imperial citizens. The imperium May want Xenos tech or prisoners for studying and or intel. Dark eldar is pretty self explanatory... as are orkz. Eldar, though, I can’t really speak for.
I think the parts you're missing for the Necrons are:
1. Most of them are asleep.
2. If they're waking up and annoyed about other races being present, remember that they're annoyed because it's their worlds.
3. As illustrated in the Psychic Awakening material, that death-by-apathy effect sure looks like a mass scale weapon.
For the Elder, it's probably a combination of factors:
1. Lack of resources and/or motivation to deploy those resources. If the craft worlds have a fleet, that fleet is more likely to be used to defend the craft world and the craft worlds aren't generally going near other worlds.
2. As demonstrated by the Exodite faction(s), there are Eldar who rather be living on planets, so probably sentimental reasons not to destroy worlds.
If a game like Stellaris leaves out penalties like ecological damage caused by warfare or bombardment...
You don't orbitally bombard or Exterminatus every planet that ends up in conflict. If an Imperial Governor knew that calling for help was going to mean "fleet rains fire upon me", he wouldn't call for help and he'd join the rebellion.
"What is the Point of Land Combat, Conan?"
"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women"
"Very good, Conan."
To add to my previous comment, planets in general make really very little sense to fight over when you have technology that every faction in 40k has access to (fusion reactors, engines that can accelerate ships to meaningfully high fractions of C, etc, much less truly fantasy stuff like FTL and artificial gravity).
For living space, there's countless objects that can be made into habitats in any given solar system (or that can be used to construct artificial habitats), that collectively will give you far more living space than planetary surfaces will. Meanwhile gravity wells and thick atmosphere make rocky planets like Earth monstrously expensive options for resource extraction compared to literally any other source of materials. We tend to focus on planets because, well, we live on one, and that's what we know, but again, 40k is really Fantasy in Space, and once you start to apply realistic views to it, nothing really makes sense. It's best to think of it all as, at best, reskinned mid 20th century warfare, with naval warfare being mostly Age of Sail in inspiration and operation, and just go with that vibe, because that's where the writers are coming from.
If for nothing else, planets would have value for food production even if you can get everything else from asteroids and other celestial objects. You CAN hydroponically grow food, but that needs water. If a planet already has water on it you might as well, plus people would prefer to live in a more natural environment.
That said, plenty of humans in 40k do live completely in space. In the old RPG, there was a specific racial option for Voidborn humans who are people who have lived for generations in space.
Vaktathi wrote: To add to my previous comment, planets in general make really very little sense to fight over when you have technology that every faction in 40k has access to (fusion reactors, engines that can accelerate ships to meaningfully high fractions of C, etc, much less truly fantasy stuff like FTL and artificial gravity).
To be fair to this idea though, only the Imperium and Tau really fight for territory in this sense. Orks kinda do, but mostly they take territory to get in more fights.
But fusion reactors and ships don't really provide solutions to most of the basic food/fire/shelter problems. Warmth, yeah, but that's about it.
But I just can't help but feel when I see a space marine kicking ass, killing titans on his own, fighting chaos space marines who also felled titans on their own, that a nuke detonated in their vicinity would end both him, his rival, and his entire squad.
So why don't they? I'm looking at Necrons. Why aren't they WMD spam happy?
Orks & Tyranids are WMDs themselves so I get that.
IoM & Tau, I guess for further potential for expansion they would try to preserve the environment
Dark Eldar want slaves not property so it makes sense for them to not blast everything to nothing.
Eldar... Why aren't they nuking the gak out of every xenos that threatens them? They don't even need planets right? Everything is wraithbone craftworld.
Chaos actually does use nukes. 13th black crusade started with a planet cracker and then ended with a meteoric impact.
Necrons, what's their excuse?
They are used, but they are both rare and the destruction they cause are very severely controlled.
Vortex grenades, D-Cannons, Deathstrike missiles, Doomsday Cannons and likewise. They are WMD's, but they are tuned to a level of destruction to wipe out very small, controlled areas.
And even the Necrons are interested in taking planets "alive" - they were awoken by the Silent King to counter the Tyranid threat because the latter threatens their living herd that they intended to cull. Cull for what? Both to increase their ranks in the initial push and as fuel to return them from robotic bodies back to living, immortal flesh.
Vaktathi wrote: To add to my previous comment, planets in general make really very little sense to fight over when you have technology that every faction in 40k has access to (fusion reactors, engines that can accelerate ships to meaningfully high fractions of C, etc, much less truly fantasy stuff like FTL and artificial gravity).
To be fair to this idea though, only the Imperium and Tau really fight for territory in this sense. Orks kinda do, but mostly they take territory to get in more fights.
True, though the Eldar seemingly do to from time to time, and the Necrons seem to have chosen planets for some reason to mostly secret themselves on, as opposed to deep space objects that would make far more sense, etc. Admittedly not hold great stellar empires of planets for the most part however. The Craftworld Eldar live probably what is one of the most realistic versions of far future life, at least in that respect. Planets are more trouble than they're worth once you can get yourself off one
The Tyranids seem be drawn to planets, but nothing about them makes sense either really
But fusion reactors and ships don't really provide solutions to most of the basic food/fire/shelter problems. Warmth, yeah, but that's about it.
If you have fusion reactors, you have the the technology base and all the energy you need to more than take care of all that other stuff. Find a ball of ice and rock a few kilometers wide, carve out the inside, stick a fusion reactor in it, and you've got a home that will last millenia and can hold millions of people and doesn't need to expend obscene amounts of energy fighting a gravity well to interact with its neighbors. Though this is also the same setting that thinks Thunderhawks (bricks with decidedly non-aerodynamically shaped wings) make effective atmospheric dropships...
Grey Templar wrote: If for nothing else, planets would have value for food production even if you can get everything else from asteroids and other celestial objects. You CAN hydroponically grow food, but that needs water. If a planet already has water on it you might as well, plus people would prefer to live in a more natural environment.
Water is an incredibly abundant resource in space however, or can be manufactured from abundant sources of hydrogen and oxygen, and you don't need oceans of it to grow food, especially food that's been chosen and adapted for growing in space. Even if it weren't, the expense of hauling food out of a gravity well would generally defeat any other advantages.
That said, plenty of humans in 40k do live completely in space. In the old RPG, there was a specific racial option for Voidborn humans who are people who have lived for generations in space.
Aye, it's just not portrayed all that much with tabletop 40k unfortunately. That would definitely be a cool avenue to explore more in 40k however.
Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.
Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.
Neutron bomb?
It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.
And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.
Nerak wrote: If you've ever played something like Stellaris then the answer should be apparent. You can't really capture a planet without winning the war on the ground. Space combat is a extremly important factor but those spaceships are produced by the people on the planets. Or at the very least planetary production is part of a production chain of ultimate military superiority. Capturing the production chain, not just annihalating it, requires ground forces.
I do play stellaris. As an exterminator gestalt robot race I do armageddon bombardment until everything on the planet is dead and then I send a single ground troop to claim the annihilated world. Stellaris is part of the reason why I came up with the question.
Ah well that makes the question easy to answer then. Imagine Stellaris endgame. You’ve already conquered the galaxy and every world is under your command. Some worlds rebel though. Some Xenos come and enslave part of your population. Some Xenos keep spawning to raid and destroy planetary buildings. Of course you’d bombard the defenders first but inscriminate bombardment would remove your own pops. Would you delete your own pop and infrastructure or save time by sending armies in these cases?
Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.
Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.
Neutron bomb?
It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.
And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.
And there's a central conceit of the 40k universe. Human lives are dirt cheap, and can be spent by the million.
The god emperors holy neutron warheads on the other hand are ancient priceless relics. The making of which has long been forgotten, and which must only be unsealed from their tech-vaults in the direst of circumstances.
Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.
Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.
Neutron bomb?
It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.
And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.
And there's a central conceit of the 40k universe. Human lives are dirt cheap, and can be spent by the million.
The god emperors holy neutron warheads on the other hand are ancient priceless relics. The making of which has long been forgotten, and which must only be unsealed from their tech-vaults in the direst of circumstances.
Would a Neutron Bomb work on a Plague Marine? OR even an Ork? How radiation proof are Tau suits/mechs/tanks? Neutron bombs *Enhanced Radiation Weapons* work fairly well against humans because of our physiology. Are we sure that'll work on other species?
Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.
Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.
Neutron bomb?
It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.
And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.
And there's a central conceit of the 40k universe. Human lives are dirt cheap, and can be spent by the million.
The god emperors holy neutron warheads on the other hand are ancient priceless relics. The making of which has long been forgotten, and which must only be unsealed from their tech-vaults in the direst of circumstances.
Would a Neutron Bomb work on a Plague Marine? OR even an Ork? How radiation proof are Tau suits/mechs/tanks? Neutron bombs *Enhanced Radiation Weapons* work fairly well against humans because of our physiology. Are we sure that'll work on other species?
All questions that matter very little, when the easier solution is to just send in the guard and drown the enemy under a mountain of corpses.
(Replace neutron bomb with any other technological solution to the problem. The point I was getting at is that in 40k, human life is always cheaper.)
roboemperor sits at the helm of a mighty Imperium warship. The bridge's targeting screens flicker, displaying hazy images of the great celestial body below. His fingers tap against his baroque armrests, as he ponders another thread about what the Necrons might be able to do if they did stuff they've never done in the story before. The servitor crewmen scurry about busily, tending to the vast instrument of impossible ordinance they wield.
"Gunnery Admiral Cimex-Epsilon 835, when will the estimate for the margins of error be done on the PLANET ENDER 3 TRILLION?" "Well, my liege," the cowled figure stammered, "not for quite some time, really, we're calibrating the potential accuracy modifiers of the gravity well drop, and then factoring in any local atmospheric abnormalities. These servo-skulls just don't have the gray matter, I'm afraid, probably something in the corpse-starch on their homeworld before they were converted, not to mention-" "ENOUGH!" barked roboemperor. "Just prepare to fire the damned thing, it'll wipe out almost everything planetside anyway. Nothing bad ever happened in 40k from leaving a tiny trace of your foe unkilled, but assuming they were dead and waltzing off..." "Right you are, roboemperor, we'll begin manually loading the PLANET ENDER 3 TRILLION with our ship-slaves, the safest thing to prevent rogue AI and malevolent machine spirits from compromising this whole endeavor and killing us all-" "Just hurry up, alright?"
Suddenly, the bridge is illuminated by a brilliant flash of blinding, blue-white light. 9 Terminators crackle through the warp, onto the bridge. One is stuck in the wall, and is kept alive by his armor long enough to howl out in agony as his organs are suddenly interrupted by steel bulwark walls. The targeting screens crackle with change, as the roar of stormbolters shreads the industrious silence that had permeated the bridge before their arrival. Through the targeters, roboemperor can see all manner of horrifying things. Breacher squads engage armsmen throughout the ship, mowing down the puny Navymen with their hulking bolters. On the surface of [mining planet name goes here], drop pods screech through the sky, divulging power-armored wrath into the complex used to extract the materials to build the ship. Meanwhile, on a manufactorum world, whole legions of skitarii make planetfall, hidden by the orbit of numerous moons, until the defenders realize too late, that the adeptus mechanicus has come to punish them for their mass-producing PLANET ENDER 3 TRILLIONs, without proper imperial paperwork (they did apply, really, it just got lost in a pile of receipts somewhere 483 Terran years ago, blame the old scribe-itor, he was really lax until they augmented him with a second parasympathetic implant). After years of brutal groundwar, 2 whole regiments of guard manage to break the defensive line around the spaceports on the same world, unleashing a hail of artillery from several columns of self-propelled guns, smashing any capacity to launch further ships.
roboemperor sneers, and snarls at the terminators; "Fools, do you think I'd have only one PLANET ENDER 3 TRILLION-class megafrigate? I have-" before jumping into the warp, 4 more megafrigates are intercepted at a void defense satellite station. Two are shot to pieces, detonating harmlessly in deepspace. The remainder make the jump into the warp, sliding into unreality. "okay, I have two, but still, that's enough to kill several planets worth of-" One megafrigate makes the jump out, but on the wrong side of the planet. "okayyoufireeverythingyou'vegotfortheloveofterra" The element of surprise is lost, the frigate picked apart by ship-hunting fighters before it can even calibrate its weapons.
Three years before roboemperor is born, the fourth and final megafrigate flickers out of the warp. It's crew are all desiccated skeletons, the flesh stripped from their centuries-old bones by the mouths of ravening warp-spawn. It drifts past an ancient moon. Great metalic pylons on the moon's surface crackle into life, and a mighty gauss blast scythes through the heavens, splitting the ship asunder, as the moon is heaved off course by the immense energy burst from below the surface of its long-forgotten crust.
Like, don't get me wrong, there's a very real element to warfare (see almost every English campaign in medieval France) where rocking up, destroying everything, and then leaving, has a practical application. You can deny your enemy resources, and sap the moral of the civilian population. But without a coherent strategic purpose (Vietnam), it become expensive, and utterly futile. On top of that, if after all this time, humans still can't drop a bomb from a plane and make it go exactly where they want, regardless of the circumstances, 100% of the time? Like, doing that from space with technology from pretty much every race, from a safe enough range that the planet can't threaten you back (fortress worlds are practically ALWAYS described as brimming with anti-orbit defences)? A shot in a million. The Inquisition calls exterminatus when they lose control, not as a magic strategic tide-turner. In a setting like 40k, all the races aren't vying for some abstract videogame conquest milestone. It's a tooth and claw battle for survival. You can't survive, fundamentally, as a terrestrial race if there is no terrain to live on. And as a terrestrial species, you need terrain to support your space navy anyway. If your only way to defend your industrial/spaceport/mineral resources are to... nuke 'em from orbit like...? Virus bombing some planet can deny it to your enemy, and yes, like as Istvaan, if you pull it off right (they couldn't) potentially cripple a critical part of your enemy's war machine. But I can't think of a single war that has ever gone entirely to plan no surprises nothing goes wrong nuh-uh perfect everytime baybeeeeee. And I know a LOT of wars.
On top of that, if this were possible, it'd be hella boring. Gimme chainsaw dudes fighting big green football hooligans on a desert, gimme terrified human conscripts surrounded by undying metal horrors, gimmie a fallen race of fancy elf boys trying to decide between dying with honor, but losing their souls to save their descendants, or being turned into nightmarish walking ghost machines bound to fight forever-or-at-least-until-they-try-to-steal-my-soul-again. Space is cool, but it's the drama in space that makes it fun.
posermcbogus wrote: Like, don't get me wrong, there's a very real element to warfare (see almost every English campaign in medieval France) where rocking up, destroying everything, and then leaving, has a practical application. You can deny your enemy resources, and sap the moral of the civilian population. But without a coherent strategic purpose (Vietnam), it become expensive, and utterly futile.
You guys gotta stop using conventional warfare as examples.
1. Vietnam was lost because of political bs. The vietkong used every single country surrounding vietnam as a sanctuary and safe refuge where they can stockpile soldiers and weaponry without building up any defenses while the americans were forced to stay inside south vietnam exclusively. This political dumbassery is what cost us the war. Can't invade the attackers, can't attack their bases, all they could do was sit there like sitting ducks while they're completely surrounded and incapable of retaliating. The one time US left the south vietnam borders they seized so much stockpiled weaponry yet they still decided to abide by the political dumbassery and lose the war.
2. Compare Battleships pounding the enemy with artillery shells v.s. submarines launching nukes. One strategy is considered ineffective and does more harm than good because it gives the defenders cover in the form of craters. There's lots of academic papers regarding the subject matter. And the other ends the entire war within the first few hours to the point mutually assured destruction had to be achieved to keep the peace.
The only real argument in this thread is that guardsman are cheaper than all WMDs. I heard somewhere that a lasgun was more expensive than a guardsman and that damaging a lasgun resulted in execution.
Still doesn't change the fact that Necrons, who did war to kill the old ones entirely would use conventional warfare. I understand their epic doomsday weapons are all offline or damaged from the hibernation, but day to day their weapons should've been saturated with WMDs like anti-matter because their day-to-day during war in heaven was exterminatus of every planet.
No? Their day-to-day in the War in Heaven was to fight the Old Ones to build a galaxy-spanning empire, teleporting masses of troops from pocket dimensions as Monoliths, Nights Scythes and the like made planetfall, and the C'Tan brought forth the destructive elements of reality to match the psychic might of the adverseries.
Now yes, there were definitely times where they did destroy the odd planets, sun or even system (especially with hungry star gods in tow). But that definitely wasn't the norm as they'd have nothing left to rule over, which would be pretty dumb since the whole reason to start the war was to unify their people against a common enemy.
1. Vietnam was lost because of political bs. The vietkong used every single country surrounding vietnam as a sanctuary and safe refuge where they can stockpile soldiers and weaponry without building up any defenses while the americans were forced to stay inside south vietnam exclusively. This political dumbassery is what cost us the war. Can't invade the attackers, can't attack their bases, all they could do was sit there like sitting ducks while they're completely surrounded and incapable of retaliating. The one time US left the south vietnam borders they seized so much stockpiled weaponry yet they still decided to abide by the political dumbassery and lose the war.
You say that like the US didn't drop over 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos.
Exterminatus is supposed to be a last resort, not the first thing in your list of options you reach for. Because usually, planets have tons of resources so they are better conquered rather than smashed into oblivion from space.
Planets with bases like Cadia usually are heavily defended. So even a fleet may not be able to kill off the defenders by simply bombarding it from space.
posermcbogus wrote: Like, don't get me wrong, there's a very real element to warfare (see almost every English campaign in medieval France) where rocking up, destroying everything, and then leaving, has a practical application. You can deny your enemy resources, and sap the moral of the civilian population. But without a coherent strategic purpose (Vietnam), it become expensive, and utterly futile.
You guys gotta stop using conventional warfare as examples.
1. Vietnam was lost because of political bs. The vietkong used every single country surrounding vietnam as a sanctuary and safe refuge where they can stockpile soldiers and weaponry without building up any defenses while the americans were forced to stay inside south vietnam exclusively. This political dumbassery is what cost us the war. Can't invade the attackers, can't attack their bases, all they could do was sit there like sitting ducks while they're completely surrounded and incapable of retaliating. The one time US left the south vietnam borders they seized so much stockpiled weaponry yet they still decided to abide by the political dumbassery and lose the war.
2. Compare Battleships pounding the enemy with artillery shells v.s. submarines launching nukes. One strategy is considered ineffective and does more harm than good because it gives the defenders cover in the form of craters. There's lots of academic papers regarding the subject matter. And the other ends the entire war within the first few hours to the point mutually assured destruction had to be achieved to keep the peace.
The only real argument in this thread is that guardsman are cheaper than all WMDs. I heard somewhere that a lasgun was more expensive than a guardsman and that damaging a lasgun resulted in execution.
Still doesn't change the fact that Necrons, who did war to kill the old ones entirely would use conventional warfare. I understand their epic doomsday weapons are all offline or damaged from the hibernation, but day to day their weapons should've been saturated with WMDs like anti-matter because their day-to-day during war in heaven was exterminatus of every planet.
Why do you struggle so much with the concept that blowing up planets left right and centre is a dumb plan?
The problem with this thread is that the OP is stuck in their preconceived notion of big armaments winning wars and the utter disconnect with why such conflicts are fought in the first place.
posermcbogus wrote: Like, don't get me wrong, there's a very real element to warfare (see almost every English campaign in medieval France) where rocking up, destroying everything, and then leaving, has a practical application. You can deny your enemy resources, and sap the moral of the civilian population. But without a coherent strategic purpose (Vietnam), it become expensive, and utterly futile.
You guys gotta stop using conventional warfare as examples.
1. Vietnam was lost because of political bs. The vietkong used every single country surrounding vietnam as a sanctuary and safe refuge where they can stockpile soldiers and weaponry without building up any defenses while the americans were forced to stay inside south vietnam exclusively. This political dumbassery is what cost us the war. Can't invade the attackers, can't attack their bases, all they could do was sit there like sitting ducks while they're completely surrounded and incapable of retaliating. The one time US left the south vietnam borders they seized so much stockpiled weaponry yet they still decided to abide by the political dumbassery and lose the war.
South Vietnam received substantially more outside materiel and financial support than North Vietnam did (and that was wasn't being actively attacked and destroyed at the same rate as outside support to North Vietnam was), and couldn't make it work, and the North got hit with more ordnance than both Germany and Japan combined did during WW2 and suffered 650k-million military dead, while the US dropped literally megatons worth of ordnance on North Vietnam's neighbors. Chalking the outcome up to "political BS" is to profoundly misunderstand that conflict.
2. Compare Battleships pounding the enemy with artillery shells v.s. submarines launching nukes. One strategy is considered ineffective and does more harm than good because it gives the defenders cover in the form of craters. There's lots of academic papers regarding the subject matter. And the other ends the entire war within the first few hours to the point mutually assured destruction had to be achieved to keep the peace.
O_o Heavy artillery and naval support has been considered extremely effective and was one of the reasons (actually the biggest one) why the Iowa's were kept in service decades after their value as surface naval combatants had waned, and why such bombardments were used extensively in every operation near a coastline where it was possible even into the Gulf War in the 1990's. Just because it wasn't the right tool applied in the right way every time doesn't make such bombardments worthless. Likewise, your assumption that a nuclear war would end in hours is, well, just that, and mostly based on what sounds like Fallout lore, particularly when both the US and the Soviet Union/Russia had extensive plans and means for continuing nuclear wars for significant lengths of time.
Because despite bombing Iraq back nearly to the dark ages with the most precision aerial bombardment in the history of the world for weeks on end, Iraq did not fall until the ground troops went in.
You can destroy from afar, but you can only conquer on the ground. So if you want anything other than destruction, you must have land combat.
alextroy wrote: Because despite bombing Iraq back nearly to the dark ages with the most precision aerial bombardment in the history of the world for weeks on end, Iraq did not fall until the ground troops went in.
You can destroy from afar, but you can only conquer on the ground. So if you want anything other than destruction, you must have land combat.
But with sufficient bombing and airpower you can make the ground combat much less deadly as you have already wiped out the majority of the enemy force and disrupted their logistics and organisational structure.
For example, in the '90-'91 Gulf War the Coalition forces suffered 292 killed, of which 147 were killed by enemy action. Add that to ~4,200 Kuwaiti casualties and you have around 4,500 killed on the side of those opposing Iraq. Iraqi casualties are estimated at 25,000 killed at least, potentially up to 50,000 killed.
The Imperial forces do use orbital bombardment and artillery in copious amounts - yet bunker and shield technologies and aiming countermeasures mean that they still don't win until ground troops make the big push.
Vaktathi wrote: O_o Heavy artillery and naval support has been considered extremely effective and was one of the reasons (actually the biggest one) why the Iowa's were kept in service decades after their value as surface naval combatants had waned, and why such bombardments were used extensively in every operation near a coastline where it was possible even into the Gulf War in the 1990's. Just because it wasn't the right tool applied in the right way every time doesn't make such bombardments worthless. Likewise, your assumption that a nuclear war would end in hours is, well, just that, and mostly based on what sounds like Fallout lore, particularly when both the US and the Soviet Union/Russia had extensive plans and means for continuing nuclear wars for significant lengths of time.
One of the main reason for the high losses at Omaha was the lack of naval firepower, not that too much is ineffective.
Vaktathi wrote: O_o Heavy artillery and naval support has been considered extremely effective and was one of the reasons (actually the biggest one) why the Iowa's were kept in service decades after their value as surface naval combatants had waned, and why such bombardments were used extensively in every operation near a coastline where it was possible even into the Gulf War in the 1990's. Just because it wasn't the right tool applied in the right way every time doesn't make such bombardments worthless. Likewise, your assumption that a nuclear war would end in hours is, well, just that, and mostly based on what sounds like Fallout lore, particularly when both the US and the Soviet Union/Russia had extensive plans and means for continuing nuclear wars for significant lengths of time.
One of the main reason for the high losses at Omaha was the lack of naval firepower, not that too much is ineffective.
The weather was pretty darn terrible for most of the preparatory phase for any operations there, hard to blame them. In the future, where most bombardment has to happen from low orbit, extreme planetary scifi weather could limit the possible time windows just as well.
Overread wrote: The Imperial forces do use orbital bombardment and artillery in copious amounts - yet bunker and shield technologies and aiming countermeasures mean that they still don't win until ground troops make the big push.
An enemy trapped in their bunker is an enemy who cannot manoeuvre to oppose your advance.
Overread wrote: The Imperial forces do use orbital bombardment and artillery in copious amounts - yet bunker and shield technologies and aiming countermeasures mean that they still don't win until ground troops make the big push.
An enemy trapped in their bunker is an enemy who cannot manoeuvre to oppose your advance.
Unless they are using the underground rail network to move between bunkers and to ship huge shells to their own armoured bunkers in mountainsides with artillery guns to fire back.
But yes bombardment even against bunkers works - if you can make them keep their heads down you can draw closer before you have to stop your own bombardment to make the killing blow
posermcbogus wrote: Like, don't get me wrong, there's a very real element to warfare (see almost every English campaign in medieval France) where rocking up, destroying everything, and then leaving, has a practical application. You can deny your enemy resources, and sap the moral of the civilian population. But without a coherent strategic purpose (Vietnam), it become expensive, and utterly futile.
You guys gotta stop using conventional warfare as examples.
1. Vietnam was lost because of political bs. The vietkong used every single country surrounding vietnam as a sanctuary and safe refuge where they can stockpile soldiers and weaponry without building up any defenses while the americans were forced to stay inside south vietnam exclusively. This political dumbassery is what cost us the war. Can't invade the attackers, can't attack their bases, all they could do was sit there like sitting ducks while they're completely surrounded and incapable of retaliating. The one time US left the south vietnam borders they seized so much stockpiled weaponry yet they still decided to abide by the political dumbassery and lose the war.
South Vietnam received substantially more outside materiel and financial support than North Vietnam did (and that was wasn't being actively attacked and destroyed at the same rate as outside support to North Vietnam was), and couldn't make it work, and the North got hit with more ordnance than both Germany and Japan combined did during WW2 and suffered 650k-million military dead, while the US dropped literally megatons worth of ordnance on North Vietnam's neighbors. Chalking the outcome up to "political BS" is to profoundly misunderstand that conflict.
Arguably a very large part of the ‘political BS’ that caused Vietnam to go fubar was the focus on body count as a metric of success as opposed to actual strategic objectives. Yeah it may be easy to measure, but simply racking up the kills does not win wars if you can’t hold the ground or support your economy as multiple conflicts have demonstrated.
The Imperium glassing planets when enemies rock up is failing on both counts and is completely counterproductive to its actual strategic objectives.
Yeah it’s great from an operational perspective - but absolutely terrible strategically.
Planets are finite resources as is the infrastructure on them. Indiscriminate magma bombing of the surface is a last recourse, no matter what pithy oversimplified internet meme may say about the cavalier attitude of the Imperium to exterminatus
Planets are themselves armed like space stations and are much larger. This means their entire surface can be protected from enemy ships. So at the least you require ground war to remove the defence installations so your ships can get into firing range. Only massive flotillas would have a chance of overwhelming the defences of a planet
Contrary to oversimplification, the majority of wars the imperium fights aren't multi planet-spanning colossal battlefronts. The ability to carpet bomb a whole planet is not something the average ship squadron from the average war would have. They can certainly drop some ordnance, but not a comprehensive amount
contrary to oversimplification, the imperium doesn't fight wars of meaningless destruction. Most of the time they are defending their worlds, or trying to take back their worlds, or in the last case taking new worlds they've never owned. only that last one creates the space to indiscriminately bomb everything to oblivion assuming the enemy hasn't fortified the planet against that
TLDR, if you only see 40k through the lens of exterminatus memes, then sure, there's no point to ever fighting land wars.
Also if the imperium is taking new land it may actually want to capture infrastructure, to be used in the current campgain or for when they secure the planet, Idealy you'd aim to not have to ask the mechanicus to terraform a cratered wasteland into something inhabitable, or invest tons of resources making the planet actually productive again.
Overread wrote: The Imperial forces do use orbital bombardment and artillery in copious amounts - yet bunker and shield technologies and aiming countermeasures mean that they still don't win until ground troops make the big push.
An enemy trapped in their bunker is an enemy who cannot manoeuvre to oppose your advance.
Unless they are using the underground rail network to move between bunkers and to ship huge shells to their own armoured bunkers in mountainsides with artillery guns to fire back.
But yes bombardment even against bunkers works - if you can make them keep their heads down you can draw closer before you have to stop your own bombardment to make the killing blow
An underground rail network can be disrupted by seismic events which you can trigger with specialised weaponry and a bunker in a mountainside can be buried under tons of rock by causing a landslide over it.
That type of expertise might call for the mechanicus to help out, and well they would rather be left undisturbed from their pursuits by every little campaign.
OldMate wrote: That type of expertise might call for the mechanicus to help out, and well they would rather be left undisturbed from their pursuits by every little campaign.
Not really, you just need some weaponry that causes a big bang, your bog standard modern day nuke will do the trick or an equivalent amount of conventional explosives, then you drop it on top of where the railway line is or on the mountainside above the bunker.
Expertise is exactly that, don't matter if you have the biggest boom, that expertise is coming from somewhere and it seems like the field of the red hooded guys is all I'm saying.
Just remember, 99% of all knowledge has been lost, and innovation is pretty heretical.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I find it sort of silly that no-one has tried something like this through a campgian, perfected it and wrote it down somewhere for future reference of the fleet/regiment, but hey, it's the setting. People are ideologically adverse to innovation, there's tools and there's their job, you don't use them outside of that. You've lived your entire life being taught this. Unless you're a heretic in which case report to your closest Commissariat office.
Automatically Appended Next Post: On the other hand the regiment is probably carting tons and tons of this knowledge around and no-one has actually noticed yet, then some day a new commander decides to see what's in "that cupboard" and uncovers a wealth of tactical and technical info, could be an interesting narrative.
As its more interseting to the thread at this point, when is it appropriate to glass a planet?
What limited or unlimited world ending measures might be applied and when?
I'd suggest that even if all you wanted was a planets mineral wealth(adimantium mines, maguffin crystals), its still cheaper to throw millions of guardsman at it and leave a breathable atmosphere for the penal legions/serviotors to work in- rather than set the atmosphere on fire and have to provide your miners with spacesuits and imported oxygen.
Just personally I'm not brought on mineral wealth of planets, rare resources is fine, but minerals? That's what asteroids are made out of. They're not exactly rare.
I'd think you'd use the planet for it's ability to easily support a large population of potential soldiers and workers. Therefore, the investment of millions or even of soldier's lives will always be worth it, because that world will send millions of soldiers to fight for the imperium, and support a population of billions of workers until it is taken over by other forces.
Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.
Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.
Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.
Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.
Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.
True, but at the same time don't forget the Imperium is a multi-layered beast. Whilst as an entity and empire it doesn't mind hundreds of years; you can bet those who are alive at the time do care about timescales and cost. Even the super-long lived with life extending medical support would rather that they could earn profit from their newly conquered world rather than have to wait centuries before its terraformed (with the risk of warp storms, trade disruption and moving trade lines and all that which could make a prize into a burden). When the costs are either vast Exterminatus or cheap guard I suspect most would rather send in the guard and have a faster profiting potential from a captured world rather than all the requisition forms and approvals and more forms that likely have to be filled in before you can get the order slip to request a terraformer.
I'd say Chaos infestation where resettlement or even the ground was would endanger the Imperium, Tyranid /geenestealer infestation, Ork world or system that's too powerful to allow to continue existing and too time or resource draining to fight?
Kayback wrote: I'd say Chaos infestation where resettlement or even the ground was would endanger the Imperium, Tyranid /geenestealer infestation, Ork world or system that's too powerful to allow to continue existing and too time or resource draining to fight?
Yeah I'd have to agree, but geanestealers lead to nids and nids leave the planet, and leave it stripped of life and resources. So that's not something you'd glass, it's something you'd ignore.
Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.
Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.
Said regiment was it an error that is apparently so common in universe? If so just like the countless worlds/regiments/orphaned puppies that starved because some scribe here or other forgot a 0 or decided to roll this page up and smoke it becasue their life sucks and hopefully the ink is toxic, strategically if you take a planet you want it productive as soon as possible.
I can see it taking ages to a populate a planet due to an error. But Intention and error are not the same beast.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also there is more room for timely errors and downright refusal if the red robed boys do have to come in and terraform the thing, better to throw guardsmen at it till it's yours and request a few million migrants. Who will augment and raise families with the the surviving guardsmen.
roboemperor wrote: I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.
It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.
I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.
So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?
And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?
Orbital bombardment is a tool, and when it is necessary they use it, but different problems require different tools.
Everything is relative. A barren rock of a planet with little population on it is likely not even worth the energy spent to blast it from space.
A teeming world with massive infrastructure and a massive population producing tons of war machinery becomes a big target. But you can bet such a world would be heavily protected. Void shields, its own huge number of defense force, space station bases, maybe even its own defense fleet.
Spaceships that can fight are not exactly an infinite resource. Large battleships and battle barges are even more rare. You want to take on a heavily defended planet, you will need an entire fleet. And even then, it may not be totally suppressed.
A huge planet has the entire planet in which to build upon. A spaceship has only enough space to fill out the capacity of its hull. If a spaceship voidshield can cover its entire hull and is say toughness 7 (arbitary number). Imagine how powerful a planetary voidshield that covers miles upon miles of land can be, It could easily be a toughness 10 in comparision.
A nova cannon on a spaceship is powerful yes. But imagine how many such nova cannons you can fit into a planet. And you can easily scale up to super nova cannons and such.
An undefended barren planet isn't even worth the energy to blast it into bits. But the "capital" of the imperium ... you can bet that would be the most heavily defended planet of the imperium. So, trying to take that out even if you have achieved some sort of local space superiority is not such a simple thing. Remember the siege of Terra ?
Horus had achieved space superiority over Terra. But he still had to crack it open by landing troops. The void shields of Terra were simply too strong for him to just blast it into bits from space.
In the novel 1984, it was said that "The object of torture is torture."
In 40k all too often the object of war is war. Period.
Many in the 40k universe want war and combat, up close and personal, as an end unto itself.
Orks. Can you imagine an ork mekboy or painboy inventing a weapon or virus that would wipe out all opposition on the planet while leaving the resources intact for the taking? Thrakka would throw him thru the nearest airlock, or weak spot in the hull, on just the nearest part of the hull period.
Thrakka knows the orks need combat in and of itself, period..
Likewise the Necron Maynarkh dynasty needs to kill, to massacre, to slaughter. Personally, directly, as close, painful and bloody as possible. During their infamous Orphean war, they attack a major imperial world en masse, established beacheads and began expanding. They forced imperial defenders to fall back. Had the point of the war been conquest they would have followed and destroyed the retreating and regrouping forces. They did not do so. They began a total extermination of every imperial civillian they found in the areas they'd taken. They stopped their advance to slaughter simply for the sake of slaughtering rather than pursue a legitimate military campaign. To the decayed and degenerate Maynark killing was not a means to an end, it was an end. So bitter, warped and degenerate they were after their long sleet and infection by the flayer virus, perhaps in a slow burning form, that to them war was about slaughtering and milling, nothing else.
So in 40k the point of land combat often is land combat, bloody, up close and personal killing. Writ large.
Also illusive enemies must be hunted down, contacted, closed with, and slain in close combat, no amount of bombardment, or gunfire will harm a target it hasn't hit. Close with them and make sure you've made the kill. Be it with gunfire, grenades, bayonet or sword.
OldMate wrote: Also how well do you thin the imperium would hold up if suddenly there was no enemies pressing it's borders for a century or even a few decades?
Automatically Appended Next Post: It is geared to fighting enemies within and without, without enemies it will wage war within.
The vast majority of the Imperium's conflicts are actually against other humans. Be they non-Imperial or Rebels. So not much would change other than it could actually focus on internal strife a little more.
Anyway, the Imperium could just lie and say they still have external enemies. Its not like their citizens are in any position to find out if its true or not. Most Imperial planets are actually peaceful and don't see any real conflict other than occasional civil unrest.
I think the OP also underestimates the sheer size of a planet, they are big, and the space around them is even bigger. Unless you're cracking the planet open with some kind of ludicrous-cannon, targeting its entire surface is going to either take an enormous amount of time, or an enormous amount of ships to hit it all - not to mention the amount of ordnance you would need to do so. Which makes it largely impractical.
Ans as many have said, the planet is the objective, rendering it useless generally defeats the purpose of turning up in the first place. Sure if all you want to kill is one big city, you can glass the thing - but if you actually want to use it yourself for anything later, not terribly helpful in the long run, and once you've blasted it to nothing, you now have to build up defenses very quickly against counter attack - or fresh attack from someone else who wants the planet!
The US carpet bombed Vietnam for years and never managed to dislodge the Cong, and that was a much smaller area. Afghanistan the same.
Unless you dropped bombs that literally covered the surface of the planet - the earth has a surface area of 510.1 million km² -, you aren't guaranteed to hit everyone.
And as has been shown previously, the imperium isn't as exterminatus-happy as internet memes describe
OldMate wrote: Also how well do you thin the imperium would hold up if suddenly there was no enemies pressing it's borders for a century or even a few decades?
Automatically Appended Next Post: It is geared to fighting enemies within and without, without enemies it will wage war within.
The vast majority of the Imperium's conflicts are actually against other humans. Be they non-Imperial or Rebels. So not much would change other than it could actually focus on internal strife a little more.
Anyway, the Imperium could just lie and say they still have external enemies. Its not like their citizens are in any position to find out if its true or not. Most Imperial planets are actually peaceful and don't see any real conflict other than occasional civil unrest.
Initially I'd actually be less worried about the general population, but having things like space marine chapters that do their own thing without oversight, and whose sole purpose is war, and then sitting around idle, well without enemies to keep them busy they're just going to feud and then that's going to drag in other arms. Same with the different arms of the mechanicus and inquisition, structurally the imperrium is unsound, without external pressure or chaos uprising it's going to crumble, and astartes know a chaos uprising from a non chaos uprising and will likely not appreciate being lied to by the inquisition. When these structures start to feud the populations will in places take sides at first, and then eventually become disillusioned and then finally uprise.
Automatically Appended Next Post: TLDR: The Imperium needs constant war and persistent outside threats to stop an internal collapse/ major internal conflict.
I'm sure the Space Marines would easily be retasked to deal with Rebellions. Again, they're going to spend most of their time fighting rebellious humans and that's not going to change even if the Imperium "Wins". Same with the Inquisition. They are already partially tasked with defending against rebellion and heresy(which doesn't have to be Chaos heresy), it'd be a simple matter to move all Ordo Malleus and Xeno Inquisitors to the Ordo Hereticus. Most Inquisitors don't even specialize anyway.
Yes, the Imperium will be constantly fighting against its own entropy, but it would hardly become intolerable if external threats disappeared. The Imperium can get away with lying to its population about aliens if the aliens all get destroyed because there is no way for the average citizen to find out about the lie. There is no intergalactic internet, most planets won't even have a local internet, and the few people who do space travel were again more likely to run into human pirates than alien ones. Aliens were already a vague nebulous threat to human security anyway from a psychological standpoint as most humans would never encounter one.
Grey Templar wrote: I'm sure the Space Marines would easily be retasked to deal with Rebellions. Again, they're going to spend most of their time fighting rebellious humans and that's not going to change even if the Imperium "Wins". Same with the Inquisition. They are already partially tasked with defending against rebellion and heresy(which doesn't have to be Chaos heresy), it'd be a simple matter to move all Ordo Malleus and Xeno Inquisitors to the Ordo Hereticus. Most Inquisitors don't even specialize anyway.
Yes, the Imperium will be constantly fighting against its own entropy, but it would hardly become intolerable if external threats disappeared. The Imperium can get away with lying to its population about aliens if the aliens all get destroyed because there is no way for the average citizen to find out about the lie. There is no intergalactic internet, most planets won't even have a local internet, and the few people who do space travel were again more likely to run into human pirates than alien ones. Aliens were already a vague nebulous threat to human security anyway from a psychological standpoint as most humans would never encounter one.
Are you sure you wanted to post that in the "Why land combat" threat, not in the "assume the imperium would win, what then" threat?
Back on subject I think the price and value of naval assets also is a big factor here. I imagine a lot of the fleet's activities in the immediate vicinity of the planet they're going to be very defensive.
Especially if there's an enemy fleet present, but even without, a strike from a concealed orbital defence weapon is capable of bringing down a ship which would a bigger blow than losing an entire army group on the planet's surface.
Firstly in most cases I imagine your fleet would be protecting your reinforcement convoys and forces planetside from the enemy fleet's bombarent, because they are presumably still controlling planetary shielding network. And simultaneously trying to trap and kill the enemy defence fleet outside the curtain of orbital defence weapon range, and also patrolling and keeping an eye out for enemy reinforcement. So I suspect you'd need a rare superiority in fleet strength to be able to overwhelm the enemy orbital defence network.
Even then this is a high priority op, because you'd be stripping entire sectors of heavy fleet assets.
I think with or without fleet superiority, if you want to conquer a hive planet or a forge world, even if you are capable of turning the whole planet into molten slack, it probably doesn't really advance your purpose most of the time, and will generally even defeat it.
"ooh, our industrial assets suffer a 10% loss in productivity, due to urban unrest. Let's just blow everything to smithereens, that wiill teach em"
And yeah, there have been cases when exterminatus was declared on a whole planet. But those were exceptions of historical dimension. "Mankind" is capable of nuking cities since the mid 20th century. It still doesn't happen on a regular basis, and not every county sheriff can order a nuke, just because the local ruffians give his deputies a hard time.
AuntHerbert wrote: I think with or without fleet superiority, if you want to conquer a hive planet or a forge world, even if you are capable of turning the whole planet into molten slack, it probably doesn't really advance your purpose most of the time, and will generally even defeat it.
"ooh, our industrial assets suffer a 10% loss in productivity, due to urban unrest. Let's just blow everything to smithereens, that wiill teach em"
And yeah, there have been cases when exterminatus was declared on a whole planet. But those were exceptions of historical dimension. "Mankind" is capable of nuking cities since the mid 20th century. It still doesn't happen on a regular basis, and not every county sheriff can order a nuke, just because the local ruffians give his deputies a hard time.
Because when you want to recapture a Hive World that contains an important STC, I am sure the Ad Mech is going to allow you to nuke it from orbit and not instantly cause all your life support to shut down.
Saying that the Taros Campaign should have been easily winnable with the use of fleet and aeronautics assets, by landing troops to secure one water production facility at the start, and bombing the rest so the Tau and traitors just all die of dehydration.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Instead of marching around the desert in the heat of the day with limited water, which is just dumb.
Automatically Appended Next Post: So there is cases where nuking sites would be very handy, where there is definative target of high value.
Automatically Appended Next Post: But that goes without saying.
OldMate wrote: Saying that the Taros Campaign should have been easily winnable with the use of fleet and aeronautics assets, by landing troops to secure one water production facility at the start, and bombing the rest so the Tau and traitors just all die of dehydration.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Instead of marching around the desert in the heat of the day with limited water, which is just dumb.
Automatically Appended Next Post: So there is cases where nuking sites would be very handy, where there is definative target of high value.
Automatically Appended Next Post: But that goes without saying.
In the Taros campaign, the Imperials did not have space superiority as the Tau had a fleet in the system as well. Also Taros had a ground to space defense network of missile silos. A direct attack and landing against the main city or the other facilities was ruled out on account of these being the most heavily defended areas, and the Guard transports too vulnerable while descending from orbit, with a hit transport falling out of the sky resulting in the total loss of a large chunk of the already limited Taros campaign forces. If this had happened, the Taros campaign might have ended in an Imperial defeat even more quickly.
One could argue whether they should have taken the risk anyway instead of settling for the more cautious option of landing out in the desert (though not the "deep" desert). Even then there was one missile silo site that had to be taken out by Marine ground assault as it had survived 30 minutes of orbital bombardment.
Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.
Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.
Neutron bomb?
It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.
And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.
There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.
Overread wrote: You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field
Exactly this!
If stuff would be so easy to replace, why bother conquering it in the first place. Unless the universe in 40k is very very different from our own, there is no shortage of barren rocks to build on, and wasting resources just to create one more is just stupid.
Because planet's support large amounts of people, for the imperium at least which are needed for ships, production and land forces. Things like Orks just want to fight your security forces, and dark Eldar will enslave everyone if there is no resistanceso defencivly you already need ground forces.
My question here is why Tyrannids don't just seed the planet with toxic spores from space if they only want to nom the inhabitants.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I mean toxic spores are much more insidious than ground forces. Also when it comes down to your warriors going planet side, well the atmosphere is toxic to your enemy, so all you have to do is wound them, or damage their NBC protection and they're dead.
Automatically Appended Next Post: This is by far the most suiting type of exterminartus for any faction.
Overread wrote: You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field
Exactly this!
If stuff would be so easy to replace, why bother conquering it in the first place. Unless the universe in 40k is very very different from our own, there is no shortage of barren rocks to build on, and wasting resources just to create one more is just stupid.
Jingoism.
You act like wars haven't been fought over metaphorical barren rocks on our own planet. It isn't about whether the barren rock is valuable, it is about you wanting that barren rock because other people would like it too and by gum you're not going to let anyone else have that useless piece of rock.
For a real life example, see the Falklands War. The Falklands are not valuable from any strategic viewpoint. So why did Argentina invade them and start a war? Because they wanted to use jingoism to increase support for their unpopular military junta among the Argentine populace.
Overread wrote: You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field
Exactly this!
If stuff would be so easy to replace, why bother conquering it in the first place. Unless the universe in 40k is very very different from our own, there is no shortage of barren rocks to build on, and wasting resources just to create one more is just stupid.
Jingoism.
You act like wars haven't been fought over metaphorical barren rocks on our own planet. It isn't about whether the barren rock is valuable, it is about you wanting that barren rock because other people would like it too and by gum you're not going to let anyone else have that useless piece of rock.
For a real life example, see the Falklands War. The Falklands are not valuable from any strategic viewpoint. So why did Argentina invade them and start a war? Because they wanted to use jingoism to increase support for their unpopular military junta among the Argentine populace.
and the british responded with military force to KEEP that Barren rock. I mean I suspect neither side, if you looked at a purely logical "gains worth the means" spread sheet, should have been willing to fight for the Falklands, but it was a matter of national pride on both sides
I understand most battles being fought by the imperium to be defensive, so you'd not nuke your own planet while it's filled with loyalists becasue every other planet in the sector see what the reward for dedication and loyalty are.
You also have to consider snowball effects. If you don't squash a local military taking minor victories here and there, they might build momentum and support enough to attack somewhere important. Worst if they've gained support and funding the might actually win.
Suddenly you've got to devote way more resources to squash a serious uprising, whereas if you'd squashed the smaller ones you'd still have invested serious resources, but just not as many.
Overread wrote: You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field
Exactly this!
If stuff would be so easy to replace, why bother conquering it in the first place. Unless the universe in 40k is very very different from our own, there is no shortage of barren rocks to build on, and wasting resources just to create one more is just stupid.
Jingoism.
You act like wars haven't been fought over metaphorical barren rocks on our own planet. It isn't about whether the barren rock is valuable, it is about you wanting that barren rock because other people would like it too and by gum you're not going to let anyone else have that useless piece of rock.
For a real life example, see the Falklands War. The Falklands are not valuable from any strategic viewpoint. So why did Argentina invade them and start a war? Because they wanted to use jingoism to increase support for their unpopular military junta among the Argentine populace.
and the british responded with military force to KEEP that Barren rock. I mean I suspect neither side, if you looked at a purely logical "gains worth the means" spread sheet, should have been willing to fight for the Falklands, but it was a matter of national pride on both sides
I mean there was also probably a strategic calculation, that the UK would likely not actually fight to retain sovereignty over said barren piece of rock so far from their home soil.
I mean there was also probably a strategic calculation, that the UK would likely not actually fight to retain sovereignty over said barren piece of rock so far from their home soil.
If so, it was a catastrophic misreading of the situation vis a vis Cold War readiness at the time. That said, I'm sure that I read somewhere that part of the problem was time; Argentina had originally timetabled a later attack to coincide with the onset of the South Atlantic winter, where military ops would be a lot harder to conduct and so they'd gain extra time to bolster the defences. Instead something I can't recall led them to accelerate their plans.
Oh well.
OldMate wrote:My question here is why Tyrannids don't just seed the planet with toxic spores from space if they only want to nom the inhabitants.
It's a laboratory experiment. See which gene sequences work (they survived), which don't (they didn't) and analyse whatever the Hivemind equivalent of an After Action Report is to decide whether or not there are any particularly tasty/interesting new possibilities from what you've just eaten and what tweaks you need to make. To continue the videogame theme from earlier, it's the difference between clicking 'autoresolve' and taking heavyier casualties than you expected, and actually playing the battle out, so you can see that your faithful old Cavalry regiment from the start just doesn't cut it any more, no matter how much XP it's earned.
I've gotta say I like the idea that the hivemind is actually perfecting it's units and tactics as part of a kind of hobby rather than to just to consume everything.
OldMate wrote: I've gotta say I like the idea that the hivemind is actually perfecting it's units and tactics as part of a kind of hobby rather than to just to consume everything.
The horrifying truth - Tyranids are just gamers who are into efficiency.
I mean there was also probably a strategic calculation, that the UK would likely not actually fight to retain sovereignty over said barren piece of rock so far from their home soil.
If so, it was a catastrophic misreading of the situation vis a vis Cold War readiness at the time. That said, I'm sure that I read somewhere that part of the problem was time; Argentina had originally timetabled a later attack to coincide with the onset of the South Atlantic winter, where military ops would be a lot harder to conduct and so they'd gain extra time to bolster the defences. Instead something I can't recall led them to accelerate their plans.
Oh well.
The most ironic thing about that conflict (which rather reinforces the point here) is that the UKwasn’t particularly interested in hanging on to said barren rocks so far from home and had rather been trying to work out how to divest itself of them.
One invasion later and that is now a complete political impossibility...
I am presently reading the novel The Fall of Damnos. In it, the planet had an imperial navy battleship (can't remember its class) that targeted Necrons positions and bombed them with melta toperdoes. However, the necrons stroke back and with one shot of compressed energy, obliterated the ship.
In the novel The World Engine , the battleship fleet of several space marines chapters were unable to fight against the Necron mobile planet and suffered several major loss. The Chapter Master of the Astral Knights concluded that the only way to effectively fight it was to crash one of the ship at full speed, evading its attacks and mobile fighters. Once on its surface, they waged war on the necrons.
So, in short, land battle is mostly used when battleships just can't survive an encounter with an anti-battleship defense system.
Of course, there are other reasons : capturing a vital ressource or infrastructure, saving key individuals, retrieving something, etc.,
You act like wars haven't been fought over metaphorical barren rocks on our own planet.
I hear your argument, and it would be a valid argument if the discussion was about "What's the point of nuking stuff from orbit?". Sure, not every military decision directly aims at immediate economical advantage.
But, the main thesis of this thread is, that every military operation in 40k should be solvable by nuking stuff from orbit, so land combat no longer makes sense.
That's like saying car theft makes no sense, if you don't agree with someone else having a car, you can just blow it up and buy yourself a brand new car.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.
There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.
Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
OldMate wrote: I understand most battles being fought by the imperium to be defensive, so you'd not nuke your own planet while it's filled with loyalists becasue every other planet in the sector see what the reward for dedication and loyalty are.
Martel732 wrote: Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.
And lo and behold, humanity never progressed past stone tools.
Because never in the history of humanity have people ever bettered themselves by stealing schematics and developing technology from opposing militaries.
OldMate wrote: I understand most battles being fought by the imperium to be defensive, so you'd not nuke your own planet while it's filled with loyalists becasue every other planet in the sector see what the reward for dedication and loyalty are.
Sure you would. Their lives mean nothing.
And how do you think that would go, telling all those neighbouring systems that at the slightest hint of trouble, you'd rather wipe them and their families out, instead of sending the Emperor's Divine Armies to assist you?
The Imperium is only strong because it's made of millions of planets, once you break that contract of obligation you're only weakening yourself. Whoever carries out an action like this is well out of line and would likely be made example of. Because the administration knows it's a breach of obligation.
. Hive fleet Leviathan was different circumstances and those people are probably seen as martyrs.
OldMate wrote: The Imperium is only strong because it's made of millions of planets, once you break that contract of obligation you're only weakening yourself. Whoever carries out an action like this is well out of line and would likely be made example of. Because the administration knows it's a breach of obligation.
. Hive fleet Leviathan was different circumstances and those people are probably seen as martyrs.
and IIRC Kyptman burnt a LOT of bridges with that action
OldMate wrote: The Imperium is only strong because it's made of millions of planets, once you break that contract of obligation you're only weakening yourself. Whoever carries out an action like this is well out of line and would likely be made example of. Because the administration knows it's a breach of obligation.
. Hive fleet Leviathan was different circumstances and those people are probably seen as martyrs.
and IIRC Kyptman burnt a LOT of bridges with that action
He didn't burn bridges, he got declared a traitor and has a death warrant on him.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.
There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.
Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.
You seem to have missed a fairly major point about the Imperium of Man in general and the AdMech specifically. That's not how they work.
OldMate wrote: The Imperium is only strong because it's made of millions of planets, once you break that contract of obligation you're only weakening yourself. Whoever carries out an action like this is well out of line and would likely be made example of. Because the administration knows it's a breach of obligation.
. Hive fleet Leviathan was different circumstances and those people are probably seen as martyrs.
and IIRC Kyptman burnt a LOT of bridges with that action
He didn't burn bridges, he got declared a traitor and has a death warrant on him.
That's burning bridges. His actions were severe enough that he burnt the previously high standing he had among fellow Inquisitors. Yet even so he still seems to have retained the loyalty of a few Deathwatch who helped enact his later plan to divert the Tyranids to attack Orks. Who knows? Maybe he still has a few silent supporters within the Inquisition that don't dare speak up or who still feed him information and resources.
Whether one gets declared a heretic or not in the Imperium is often more about political connections.
Because never in the history of humanity have people ever bettered themselves by stealing schematics and developing technology from opposing militaries.
Heresy! Tau and Eldar tech is no where near as advanced as the Imperium's technology! There's nothing they have that the Imperium could possibly learn from or use in any meaningful way.
At least, that's what my Commissar tells me, so it must be true.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.
There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.
Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.
You seem to have missed a fairly major point about the Imperium of Man in general and the AdMech specifically. That's not how they work.
Trying to engage Martel in discussion about background is what's known as a lost cause.
So earlier in this thread we talked about Stellaris. I found this:
Spoiler:
It's two years old and you need to have played Stellaris to properly understand it. OP wrote that Stellaris was part of the reason for this thread so I found it fitting.
TLDW: Planets with lots of military are an incredibly time consuming buisness to eradicate from orbit. Trying to will likely lose you the war. Having military that can surpass the planetary military is a far faster process.
Because never in the history of humanity have people ever bettered themselves by stealing schematics and developing technology from opposing militaries.
Heresy! Tau and Eldar tech is no where near as advanced as the Imperium's technology! There's nothing they have that the Imperium could possibly learn from or use in any meaningful way.
Nerak wrote: So earlier in this thread we talked about Stellaris. I found this:
Spoiler:
It's two years old and you need to have played Stellaris to properly understand it. OP wrote that Stellaris was part of the reason for this thread so I found it fitting.
TLDW: Planets with lots of military are an incredibly time consuming buisness to eradicate from orbit. Trying to will likely lose you the war. Having military that can surpass the planetary military is a far faster process.
Yes, but why wouldn't you want to support your invading forces with tactical strikes from orbit?
I have read so many novels where orbital superiority is never taken advantage of. And it makes no sense.
Yes, but why wouldn't you want to support your invading forces with tactical strikes from orbit?
I have read so many novels where orbital superiority is never taken advantage of. And it makes no sense.
I suspect the "reason" for that is the lack of tactical accuracy of an orbital strike. When your strategy is "obliterate the enemy town" it probably works but when you need to frag that well placed pillbox 300m away you don't want a lance strike coming in.
Yes, but why wouldn't you want to support your invading forces with tactical strikes from orbit?
I have read so many novels where orbital superiority is never taken advantage of. And it makes no sense.
I suspect the "reason" for that is the lack of tactical accuracy of an orbital strike. When your strategy is "obliterate the enemy town" it probably works but when you need to frag that well placed pillbox 300m away you don't want a lance strike coming in.
So you are saying that the IoM can only - as a minimum - deploy city leveling weapons from orbit?
Yes, but why wouldn't you want to support your invading forces with tactical strikes from orbit?
I have read so many novels where orbital superiority is never taken advantage of. And it makes no sense.
I suspect the "reason" for that is the lack of tactical accuracy of an orbital strike. When your strategy is "obliterate the enemy town" it probably works but when you need to frag that well placed pillbox 300m away you don't want a lance strike coming in.
So you are saying that the IoM can only - as a minimum - deploy city leveling weapons from orbit?
Far from it, I'm saying using what's the equivalent of a multi megaton weapon to kill something a Valkyrie or even HW squad can is overkill, and may lack the accuracy to acheive CAS.
The Cain novels has him fairly close to lance strikes IIRC.
Of course the Imperium uses orbital support. It’s been both in rules and in the fluff. Rules wise we’ve had orbital strike in the deamonhunter/witchunter codex of 4th ed as a heavy weapon choice (very inaccurate large blast with different rules depending on weapon/payload). We’ve had space marine HQ with an orbital strike ability in... I want to say 6ed? We’ve also had stratagems and apocalypse rules of huge orbital bombardment templates. On the fluff side Krieg was purged by nuclear bombs fired from orbit. During Armageddons second war virus bombs where fired from orbit. No one (I hope) is denying the use of orbital fire support. Hell, we have countless examples of orks dropping big rocks from space on theirv enemies.
That’s not what this thread is about. Apologies if my earlier post was misleading. The OP:s statement was that land battles serves no purpose since you have the option of blasting away at targets from orbit. That I’d argue is not the case. Land battles (and boarding actions for that matter) certainly fills an important purpose in galactic warfare unless the goal is simply exterminatus.
Edit: I agree that literature where space superiority doesn’t support the ground troops is silly. Sometimes it can be explained by engagements being relatively small scale and ships needing to move into the correct orbiting position. Other times by infrastructure blocking the way (as in fighting in a hive city), general incompetents, insufficient communication between the fleet and ground forces or the fleet being preoccupied by space battles/patrols. Commonly planetary invasions and space battles happen at the same time. That said I do find it silly when the fleet is simply forgotten in stories.
That’s not what this thread is about. Apologies if my earlier post was misleading. The OP:s statement was that land battles serves no purpose since you have the option of blasting away at targets from orbit. That I’d argue is not the case. Land battles (and boarding actions for that matter) certainly fills an important purpose in galactic warfare unless the goal is simply exterminatus.
Edit: I agree that literature where space superiority doesn’t support the ground troops is silly. Sometimes it can be explained by engagements being relatively small scale and ships needing to move into the correct orbiting position. Other times by infrastructure blocking the way (as in fighting in a hive city), general incompetents, insufficient communication between the fleet and ground forces or the fleet being preoccupied by space battles/patrols. Commonly planetary invasions and space battles happen at the same time. That said I do find it silly when the fleet is simply forgotten in stories.
Assuming you have unrivaled fleet superiority planets and individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.
Most of the time I don't think the imperium has the capability for precise strikes, or are unwilling to risk expensive fleet assets for trivial gains, hence why it is generally a inquisitorial (who have the authority to command the navy into risky actions) or marines(who have their own ships) thing.
I personally like the idea of having smaller ships, (like river gun boats or monitors) which you'd deploy even if you were confident of space superiority.
An defence battery might annihilate a gunboat, but that's better than it damaging a cruiser.
Your big ships are ready to interdict enemy reinforcements to the system and the atmosphere navy cruise around in much more expendable ships, which would be effectively fire-power wise be flying titans.
Saying that if you have neutralised the enemy defence systems and are confident they don't have any hidden bases that will cause damage to the fleet, and you are confident the enemy don't/can't reinforce, yeah you might as well enter low orbit and glass them close up.
Hell you can even combat drop troops into the shadow cast by your battleships. It'd be risky, but stunningly cinematic.
OldMate wrote: individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.
I am ofc talking about novels where there were no shields or defence batteries. You could take "The Purging of Kadillus" as an example:
Spoiler:
The dark angels has ghazghkull cornered for ages in a factory building. But instead of just lancing the building, they decide to waste SM lives fighting their way to him.. and he ofc ends up teleporting before they got to him..
And they could have supported their ground troops with lance strikes on multiple occasions, with the orks just running around in huge numbers.
I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.
Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.
There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.
Quit using gak you don't understand or reverse engineer it.
You seem to have missed a fairly major point about the Imperium of Man in general and the AdMech specifically. That's not how they work.
Trying to engage Martel in discussion about background is what's known as a lost cause.
OldMate wrote: individual strong points generally have shield batteries or defense batteries to stop ships from striking them.
I am ofc talking about novels where there were no shields or defence batteries. You could take "The Purging of Kadillus" as an example:
Spoiler:
The dark angels has ghazghkull cornered for ages in a factory building. But instead of just lancing the building, they decide to waste SM lives fighting their way to him.. and he ofc ends up teleporting before they got to him..
And they could have supported their ground troops with lance strikes on multiple occasions, with the orks just running around in huge numbers.
Well tactically that is a very poor choice, better to lance the site and send a scout team to confirm the kill, just like what they do in real life. Or better yet just tell the guard to box barrage it with heavy artillery if you don't want to endanger your ship, or you know, your marines that take like ages to train and $$ to equip.
I'd personally put that down to lazy writing or a lack of understanding, or even writing yourself into a corner(in which case back the hell up and unpick the events that lead you to this impasse(or better, come up with a creative answer that no-one would think of) before you think of submitting), on the writer's behalf, I mean look at the Damacules capmagin, Tauros campgain and many more, the tactical, logistical and strategic understanding is not great, leading to many a face palm.
Hell the Catachans didn't like/use chimeras(THE most commonly manufactured guard heavy vehicle) until someone from Armageddon came and told them it was amphibious and would be great for jungle warfare(Although given it's width I'm pretty skeptical, becasue you know; trees.), and becasue you specialise in jungle warfare you should use it. Leading the unit to whole-heartedly adopt a vehicle they should have, by all rights been employing pretty heavily from the start.
This is a funny question.
Take away the ground troops of an army... How is that army even supposed to be "army" any more? How do subsue planets and quell rebelions or even defend a planet without troops?
If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go. Ship-to-ship combat is done entirely out of visual range, and comes down to expansive suites of ECM and using very high-tech weaponry to poke small holes in floating space bubbles.
The same thing happens with hard fantasy. Swords were a last resort in most cultures, yet a mainstay in fantasy films. Historical warfare was a lot of marching, maneuvering, supply lines, political gambits, trying to keep your rabble together and fed long enough to fight the other guy. When you finally showed up at a battlefield, with the two armies trying to meet on roughly even ground so that they could both maneuver, the weapon of choice was "anything that keeps me out of reach of the enemy." Skirmishers with bows and javelins, lines of spears and shields. If you ever watched the HBO series Rome, they had a really good example of cohort warfare - make a shield wall, stab any soft bits that came around the edge. And when the whistle blows every minute, first rank tucks in and goes to the back so they can rest, because it's exhausting to fight for even that long.
Most wars are won or lost by supply lines and technology. Not exactly the stuff of heroes.
40k isn't hard. It's fluffy space fantasy, with space fantasy races and space fantasy magic. It's not (usually) about average people trying to survive the maelstrom of war where your fate is decided by an artillery piece you'll never see and an unlucky breeze. It's not about people hiding behind cover and draining their magazines firing at shadows a thousand feet away (modern warfare has something like a 250,000:1 rounds fired to actual hits ratio, counting training).
It's about a squad of supersoldiers storming a bunker, chainswords revving, so they can kill that filthy xeno scum and make sure it stays dead. It's about the horror of fighting against things beyond your comprehension with no escape but victory. It's about opposing forces coming face to face and fighting to the death without worrying about things like "supplies." The point of land combat in 40k is the same as Death Stars in Star Wars, Gerard Butler's abs in 300, cramped corridor fights against aliens in Aliens.
It's cool. It's heroic. And they'll create whatever artifice is required to make sure it happens.
If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.
Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).
IIRC ship battles in 40k generally do base themselves on out of sight shooting. The Imperium seems to spend a lot of time firing torpedos at where the enemy will be in X time and waiting for them to dodge or be hit.
If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.
Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).
Though, if the enemy has any ground- or orbital-based defense systems, the fuel and operating expenses are paltry compared to buying a new warship.
With boarding pods still being a preference for some navies, the ranges seem to be flexible in the fiction. And I think I recall - I might be wrong here - that in many of the novelizations, they exchange broadsides close enough to the other vessels to see the damage they do, the incoming rounds, whether the other ship is on fire or crippled, etc.
My point isn't that there aren't in-universe examples of traditional warfare, but that it usually gets suborned into being more heroic as soon as the situation calls for it. Mooks might die from afar, but you better believe the hero's gonna get into fisticuffs with the sucker - the point of land combat isn't really practicality, but the fun of the narrative.
If you read harder sci-fi series like The Expanse or Culture, future warfare isn't that exciting. Destroying planet-based cities is as easy as "throwing rocks down gravity wells." Forget even showing up in orbit, you just nudge some asteroids out of position and away they go.
Though even in BFG they note that much of 40k space combat is at extreme long distance (aside from when they’re trying to ram each other ), with the actual ships not being visible at the scale of the game (which is why you measured from the centre of the base - the ship was an invisibly small space in the middle of the stem).
Indeed. By the in-game scale that BFG provided even a point blank volley was still happening tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. Which actually makes 40k have some of the longest ranged space battles of any sci-fi.
I think in practice if you didn’t have orbital superiority/supremacy you’d probably bombard a planet with torpedoes. Fire off a couple of salvoes from outside the range of the planets defences then let them cruise to target (possibly falling the final bit under gravity if need be). Not quite as accurate as a lance strike but they’re capable of hitting a moving warship so they’ll be capable of hitting a reasonably small target on a planet with a predictable orbit.
WRT engagement ranges, there does seem to be a disconnect between how BL tends to portray space battles and the typical engagement ranges in BFG which are, as Grey Templar noted, really really far.
BL by contrast tends to play up to all the tropes from tv etc where everything is unreasonably close (though some novels like the Gothic War duology (unsurprisingly) and IIRC ADB’s Night Lords trilogy portray it more sensibly.
The Gothic War duology has most tracking be done at long range via console, though it does still have people looking through a big window on the bridge closer up.
That said, wrt ‘visual range’ given in space there’s rarely something in the way (not even the curvature of the earth you get in air combat), if your optical sensors are powerful enough you could potentially get ‘eyes on’ a target at some silly distances (though obviously you couldn’t see much at once). You’re not going to see a whole lot from that window on the bridge though, unless you’re moving out of dock (or ramming).
Andy Chambers' given scale for BFG was 1 cm = 1,000 km. Short range was 15cm or 15,000 km.
The angular size of what a viewer could see with the naked eye looking out the window can be calculated from this. A 3km long cruiser perfectly horizontal to the viewer at 15,000km is about 41 arcseconds long. That's about 2/3 the size of a soccer ball at 775m. Or in other words, tiny.
Even at BFG point blank range, there's virtually nothing to see if you look out a window with your eyes. This contrasts with what is written in the novels, but one way around that is to suppose even the bridge windows have some kind of magnification technology.
Shooting with torpedos seems a bad idea seeing as if you don't have superiority in orbit then surely that's because something else does? So that something can also shoot the torpedos, at least for Imperials.
pm713 wrote: Shooting with torpedos seems a bad idea seeing as if you don't have superiority in orbit then surely that's because something else does? So that something can also shoot the torpedos, at least for Imperials.
In BFG, a torpedo salvo is considered an easy target for fighter small craft. That's why a fighter squadron in BFG can wipe out a whole torpedo salvo. While ship-scale or ground to orbit ship scale weaponry find it harder to hit them, a torpedo is thin-skinned by BFG standards so even 1 hit by a capital ship weapon is enough to wipe out the entire salvo.
Torpedoes might be easy to shoot down, but they're cheap weapons and nearly all Imperial ships have them so you overwhelm the enemy with volume. They can also be fired well beyond range of any retaliation.
In terms of visibility, they most definitely have holo projectors that show what the long range sensors are detecting. The "windows" themselves may also not be actual windows, but rather screens like in Star Trek that can show exterior objects. It would be much safer not to have actual windows. This sort of jibes with how Navigators are put into a pod which is that raised up above the bridge to be outside the hull of the ship, which implies that the Bridge is NOT directly adjacent to the hull.
The BFG fiction definitely shows the bridge windows as windows as there are descriptions of them taking hits, cracking, having armored shutters, etc... That doesn’t exclude them from having built in tech as they are also shown to be able to selectively darken to protect the vision of the bridge crew. The BFG novels also have bits that show an Imperial cruiser’s bridge to be at the top of the superstructure and exposed though heavily armored, such as a vignette of an Ork fighter bomber strafing a cruiser and narrowly being shot down before it slams into the bridge where the main character is watching this.
There is a hint I think of at least one Imperial cruiser secondary bridge buried within the hull, but the main bridge is the Star Destroyer like projection. BFG clearly goes for a mix of Age of Sail, and WW1/WW2 imagery and themes.
Also don't forget many of them are flying Cathedrals. Complete with huge vaulted stain glass windows. So yeah the Imperium is a mix of sci-fi - age of sail - WW1-2 - religion - 70-80-90s sci-fi pewpew and more.
I think there’s also a bit of looking at modern warships which still have bridges sat on the top with big glass windows as well as planes and space shuttles which have big glass windows in the cockpit and thinking “oh, well obviously our space ships would need them too” without really considering how space combat would actually affect its utility.
And of course once you’ve established that 40k ships have bridges with big glass windows that’s then canon which everyone else needs to fit in around...
Usually the IoM wants the planet to be in one piece, specially if they are the defender. There is not much point in bombarding the enemy if whatever remains to be conquered or reclaimed is rubble.
