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Inspired by http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/688091.page and similar "40k beats everything" threads recently:

Shortly after the events of Surface Detail (the last Culture novel, on the in-universe timeline) the GSV Pointless Theoretical Exercise encounters a discontinuity in space. Upon passing through the discontinuity it finds itself alone in a universe of unspeakable horror: 40k at the "current" moment in the timeline. After quietly lurking for a while to analyze the situation the Pointless Theoretical Exercise decides that the 40k galaxy is beyond any hope of repair and the only humane option is euthanasia. All life in the 40k galaxy must be cleansed from existence, so that it may finally know peace and an end to suffering. The Pointless Theoretical Exercise places its passengers in Storage to spare them the knowledge of what is about to happen, and begins its sad duty.

So, who wins this one?

A few bits of information for people who might not be familiar with the Culture's capabilities:

* A GSV is a large civilian city-ship. In addition to carrying its passengers in almost unimaginable luxury it has automated factories capable of turning raw materials into anything the Culture as a whole is able to produce, including new warships. Or additional factories to build more factories, until it can produce warships by the millions.
* A Culture ship is run by a Mind, a god-like AI that considers simulating entire universes from fundamental principles to be light entertainment, something appropriate to do in the near-eternity between useful information as a human speaks to it.
* A Culture warship considers exterminatus-level firepower to be a laughably low estimate of its capabilities. "Lol, any old civilian freighter can do that."
* Culture warships can fight at high FTL speeds and battles take place in fractions of a second.
* In addition to conventional weapons Culture ships are armed with effectors, remote electromagnetic field manipulators that can do things like activate a ship's self destruct or turn its guns on its allies.
* The Culture's industrial capacity is such that it builds ringworld-style structures for living, because terraforming planets and ruining their natural environments is just not very elegant.

...what?

 Grumblewartz wrote:
...what?

Guess the gods will not be happy with omnicide of their toy-universe.

A sudden Warpstorm swallows the ship and without gellar field it is teared apart, its passengers doomed to eternal torment?

Sonic Keyboard wrote:
Guess the gods will not be happy with omnicide of their toy-universe.

A sudden Warpstorm swallows the ship and without gellar field it is teared apart, its passengers doomed to eternal torment?

And yet this doesn't happen when chaos forces lose battles in the 40k fluff. The obvious conclusion is that the "gods" have very little, if any, power to intervene directly like that, and a fleet of Culture warships will very quickly be committing deicide.

 Peregrine wrote:

Sonic Keyboard wrote:
Guess the gods will not be happy with omnicide of their toy-universe.

A sudden Warpstorm swallows the ship and without gellar field it is teared apart, its passengers doomed to eternal torment?

And yet this doesn't happen when chaos forces lose battles in the 40k fluff. The obvious conclusion is that the "gods" have very little, if any, power to intervene directly like that, and a fleet of Culture warships will very quickly be committing deicide.

They lose cause Chaos forces are as playthings of the Chaos gods as all other mortals. Chaos gods revel in constant war and suffering thats why they do not allow their followers to kill everything.

So can that ai predict and/or affect the Warp?

Sonic Keyboard wrote:
They lose cause Chaos forces are as playthings of the Chaos gods as all other mortals. Chaos gods revel in constant war and suffering thats why they do not allow their followers to kill everything.

And, again, this is just speculation. Chaos hasn't demonstrated the power to do this, so you can't just argue that somehow chaos will magically auto-win because it doesn't want to lose.

So can that ai predict and/or affect the Warp?

Probably. In fact, the Culture ship would probably know more about the warp than anyone in 40k with a short time of arriving. After all, there's that whole "simulating entire universes from fundamental principles as light entertainment" thing. Whatever properties of the 40k universe allow the warp to exist are just more variables for the simulation.

Go Culture go

The Culture warship is obliterated as it enters a universe with physics so fundamentally removed from our own understanding of reality that it allows vehicles like the Leman Russ, Stormraven or Titan to function. Similar to the potential doomsday scenario posited by the false vacuum hypothesis.

So one mary sue group fights another mary sue group, who wins? Whoever the author wants to win.

For a more serious answer: one of the biggest wars the Culture was in, only 53 planets and moons were destroyed. That puts them at roughly the strength level of MAYBE the Tyranids in comparison to the Imperium, when it comes to the amount of force and collateral damage they are willing to put forth in a total war.

So I posit that there will be a stalemate.

A single GSV vs the 40k Galaxy? Well, the races and empires of 40k have had worse things coming at them. After leaving a trail of devastated worlds and extinguished suns on its wake, the "Pointless Theoretical Exercise" would eventually be defeated. Then the war against this Abominable Intelligence and its megaship would be chronicled by the autoscribes of the administratum, only to be lost in the archives and forgotten in a couple of centuries. That's the way of the (40k) world.

If you ask me about the Imperium vs the Culture, however, the latter comes up as winner in any scenario. The only thing the Imperium has going for it is manpower, which is, precisely, the least important resource in the Culture's war effort.

 Grumblewartz wrote:
...what?

I agree wtf.

40k wins; the warship crashes into the plot armor of Ciaphas Cain and is destroyed.

 Melissia wrote:
For a more serious answer: one of the biggest wars the Culture was in, only 53 planets and moons were destroyed. That puts them at roughly the strength level of MAYBE the Tyranids in comparison to the Imperium, when it comes to the amount of force and collateral damage they are willing to put forth in a total war.

Only because, in the Culture, nobody bothers to live on planets anymore. It's much more efficient and elegant to build orbitals (ringworld-like structures with 20+ times the surface area of a planet and housing billions of people), planets are mostly just exotic vacation spots for occasional tourists who want to see what life was like before you could build whatever environment you wanted. The war you're talking about resulted in the destruction of 90 million ships, 850 billion people/machines, and 14,000 orbitals. And yet this is described as a "small, short war".

And of course in a different book there's an entertaining scene where a single Culture war ship is destroying thousands of lower-technology ships per minute, and only doing it at that rate because it feels like taking its time, using some of its lower-powered weapons, and enjoying the experience a little more. I think it's safe to say that the Culture is capable of matching 40k's numbers.


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 Agent_Tremolo wrote:
Well, the races and empires of 40k have had worse things coming at them.

They really haven't. You're talking about a ship capable of converting entire planets into swarms of warships, each of which is capable of taking on a fleet of thousands of 40k ships and winning effortlessly. 40k has faced threats that can only be stopped at a tremendous cost in lives and hardware, or that can consume a planet in the most horrifying of ways. It has not faced a threat where the only difference between fighting back and waiting passively for your turn to die is that by fighting back you might, even though there is no possible way that you can accomplish anything to delay the process by more than the nanosecond it takes for you to die, provoke an automated weapon system to designate you a priority target and kill you sooner.

The culture ??


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Looked it up and I have some reading to do

 Peregrine wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Agent_Tremolo wrote:
Well, the races and empires of 40k have had worse things coming at them.

They really haven't. You're talking about a ship capable of converting entire planets into swarms of warships, each of which is capable of taking on a fleet of thousands of 40k ships and winning effortlessly. 40k has faced threats that can only be stopped at a tremendous cost in lives and hardware, or that can consume a planet in the most horrifying of ways. It has not faced a threat where the only difference between fighting back and waiting passively for your turn to die is that by fighting back you might, even though there is no possible way that you can accomplish anything to delay the process by more than the nanosecond it takes for you to die, provoke an automated weapon system to designate you a priority target and kill you sooner.

Yep, this is a threat various orders of magnitude more serious than a nurgle-infested void whale or a dormant World Engine. The Imperium, the Tau Empire and maybe the Orks, are pretty much shafted should a GSV come their way.

But Eldars and Necrons can look eye to eye with the Culture, and this Galaxy is their home turf after all.

 Agent_Tremolo wrote:
But Eldars and Necrons can look eye to eye with the Culture, and this Galaxy is their home turf after all.

Not really. The Eldar and Necrons fight at some degree of parity with the Imperium. The Imperium might need 100 to 1 odds to bring them down, losing 99% of their forces in the process, but they can still win. If the Necrons and Eldar were anywhere near being eye to eye with the Culture then every fight in the fluff would consist of "a Necron ship appeared and killed everything, the end".

Big Papa Smurf could take down that ship with one gauntlet of Ultramar tied behind his back. Clearly.*




*Just so long as our spiritual liege is writing the fluff for it.

 Peregrine wrote:
Inspired by http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/688091.page and similar "40k beats everything" threads recently:

Shortly after the events of Surface Detail (the last Culture novel, on the in-universe timeline) the GSV Pointless Theoretical Exercise encounters a discontinuity in space. Upon passing through the discontinuity it finds itself alone in a universe of unspeakable horror: 40k at the "current" moment in the timeline. After quietly lurking for a while to analyze the situation the Pointless Theoretical Exercise decides that the 40k galaxy is beyond any hope of repair and the only humane option is euthanasia. All life in the 40k galaxy must be cleansed from existence, so that it may finally know peace and an end to suffering. The Pointless Theoretical Exercise places its passengers in Storage to spare them the knowledge of what is about to happen, and begins its sad duty.

So, who wins this one?

A few bits of information for people who might not be familiar with the Culture's capabilities:

* A GSV is a large civilian city-ship. In addition to carrying its passengers in almost unimaginable luxury it has automated factories capable of turning raw materials into anything the Culture as a whole is able to produce, including new warships. Or additional factories to build more factories, until it can produce warships by the millions.
* A Culture ship is run by a Mind, a god-like AI that considers simulating entire universes from fundamental principles to be light entertainment, something appropriate to do in the near-eternity between useful information as a human speaks to it.
* A Culture warship considers exterminatus-level firepower to be a laughably low estimate of its capabilities. "Lol, any old civilian freighter can do that."
* Culture warships can fight at high FTL speeds and battles take place in fractions of a second.
* In addition to conventional weapons Culture ships are armed with effectors, remote electromagnetic field manipulators that can do things like activate a ship's self destruct or turn its guns on its allies.
* The Culture's industrial capacity is such that it builds ringworld-style structures for living, because terraforming planets and ruining their natural environments is just not very elegant.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagan can beat their entire species with one throw. Pfft. Git good. The Anti-Spirals would kick the cultures collective asses let alone TTGL. Don't even make my bring in Super TTGL.

It's totally within a Culture GSV's power to just kinda hang out in the core of a star and detonate other star from hundreds and thousands of lightyears away.

Technically speaking you just don't feth with those kinds of people.

I'd also like to point out that the Orks auto win.

They would obviously believe that they (or some other parties in the 40k universe) could win.

Therefore, they would.

Because ork magic.

According to 1d4chan, that's the only reason the Emporer is still alive.

Because the Orks think that he is.

1d4chan is not a good source for anything at all.

It would take a hell of a long time (Culture FTL isn't as fast as warp travel, but way safer and more predictable), but a dedicated GSV would eventually win.

Culture ships win any ship combat vs 40k with laughable ease. Culture combat drones are superior to any 40k ground forces.

I think a GSV would be more inclined to try to "fix" 40k rather than wipe everybody out though. It would likely conquer a small section of space, enlighten it, then slowly expand. Any military interference by other races, upset at the idea of there being a nice place to live in 40k would be quickly put down.

Seems like no one wins. One (comparatively) slow unstoppable ship vs a galaxy full to bursting with warring enemies essenitally just makes the GSV a small catfish in a massive aquarium: the algae grows too fast for it to ever get it all clean.

According to Warseer it takes about a year to go from one side of the Imperium to the other, given average warp conditions. The galaxy is about 100,000 light years wide. The Imperium covers about 2/3rds of it, or 66,666 LY. Thus the average ftl speed of an Imperial ship is about 66,000 C.

The General Service Vehicle Sleeper Service cruised at about 233,000 C, but it had converted a lot of its mass to engines in order to achieve this velocity. Other Culture ships thought this was stupidly fast, so the normal speed of an unmodified Culture ship is obviously significantly less, though we don't know much less (1/2? 1/10th? what's 'stupid' in Ship terms?).

The Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time did an attack run at an estimated 143 trillion C. The ship was only able to sustain this speed for 11 microseconds due to engine degradation. However during the 11 microseconds it destroyed a big chunk of a fleet of obsolescent Culture warships that had been suborned by The Affront.

Thus we can only guess at the speed of advance of the invading Culture ship compared to its opponents. However we also know that the Culture ship can modify itself for higher speed, build and launch new ships, and that Culture warships would be able to obliterate any conceivable 40K fleet sent against them in fractions of a second.

I agree with you that the invading Culture ship would be more likely to start reforming the galaxy than destroy it.

So you present us with the ultimate Mary Sue, super awesome, powerful, simulates universes in nanoseconds because it's bored, uber smart and better than anything, destroys stars with a glance, totally-unbeatable-guys-seriously race, and ask us if it would beat someone? Why even ask? You clearly already know it would win and nobody has convinced you otherwise yet.

Well, you have to remember that in the universe of The Culture, it is only one of a number of what are called 'player level' civilisations, and above those are the Sublimed, who generally ignore everyone but are not to be poked with a stick.

Consequently in its own universe, The Culture isn't a Mary Sue. It normally restricts its activities to monitoring the development of human civiisations through the Contact department.

This isn't even a contest. The Culture and the Xeleeverse are pretty much set at the pinnacle of universe power levels. Only a few fictional universes have the demonstrated strength to not get curb-stomped by them, and 40k is not one of them.

 KharnsRightHand wrote:
So you present us with the ultimate Mary Sue, super awesome, powerful, simulates universes in nanoseconds because it's bored, uber smart and better than anything, destroys stars with a glance, totally-unbeatable-guys-seriously race, and ask us if it would beat someone? Why even ask? You clearly already know it would win and nobody has convinced you otherwise yet.

I ask for the same reason that there's a "40k vs. real world" thread, where the only acceptable answer seems to be "40k slaughters everything and real-world weapons can't even scratch the paint on a marine's armor". Now 40k gets to be on the losing end of the war.


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 Jimsolo wrote:
Seems like no one wins. One (comparatively) slow unstoppable ship vs a galaxy full to bursting with warring enemies essenitally just makes the GSV a small catfish in a massive aquarium: the algae grows too fast for it to ever get it all clean.

Except the small catfish can multiply at exponential rates. One GSV might struggle to kill 40k stuff faster than it grows back (though how it will grow back on the sterilized dust particles that used to be planets, I'm not really sure) but a fleet of millions is an entirely different question.


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Torquar wrote:
I think a GSV would be more inclined to try to "fix" 40k rather than wipe everybody out though. It would likely conquer a small section of space, enlighten it, then slowly expand. Any military interference by other races, upset at the idea of there being a nice place to live in 40k would be quickly put down.

Probably true. But for the sake of having a more decisive scenario I'm assuming that the GSV decides that euthanasia is the only humane solution to the 40k setting, that the unspeakable horrors are beyond even its ability to repair.

The horrors aren't totally unspeakable, though. There is the Tau to focus on and help develop.