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They can draw from the warp. They are the ultimate crafters of the warp.

They can draw what from the warp. Food? Electricity? Magic? If they can, then why do anything else at all? See what I am getting at? The entire 'OMG WE HAVE TO NOM STUFF' is pointless-it doesn't meet any need that any race would have in anything like a remotely sensible manner.

I'm not trying to be wise here, I've never heard that they could draw stuff from the warp. I've definitely not ever heard anything close to that they are the ultimate crafters of the warp. I'm a little suspect of that last claim.

The modern Tyranid fluff is pretty incoherent. It's more a case of 'rule of cool' than anything aiming at coherency and depth.

Not to mention all the FLuff we know is Guesses from Inquisitors and stuff, No-one knows HOW the Nids work

Nurglitch wrote:The modern Tyranid fluff is pretty incoherent. It's more a case of 'rule of cool' than anything aiming at coherency and depth.

What do you expect? GW is a buissness trying to stell anything and everything they have. They don't care that it doesn't make sense as long as they end up selling their product. so they make nonsense fluff that sounds cool. For example what sounds cooler.
1:the tyranids rampage across the galaxy consuming everything in thier reach,trying to quench an un-quenchable hunger.So fast is thier onslaught that few oppose them,even fewer succeed.
From this they create terrible monsters, ready to collect more matter.
2: the tyranids slowly make thier way across the galaxy, to planets were they can derive little bubbles of burger power from the rotting corpes of the brave defenders.Her they will spend a month collecting energy to go to another planet where they will get more ''burgerpower''
I don't know about you guys but the first one seems more likely to sell.

I don't see why they can't just say that the Tyranids, as part of the planetary digestive process, tap into a target planet's geothermal power and use most of the carbon and atmosphere they collected to store it as usable sugars in their ships tissues.

Yes but what the tyranids want DNA aswell.

They don't really want the DNA unless it contains something beneficial for them to absorb, and besides the vast majority of carbon/hydrogen/oxygen on a planet won't be contained in DNA.

Railguns wrote:They don't really want the DNA unless it contains something beneficial for them to absorb, and besides the vast majority of carbon/hydrogen/oxygen on a planet won't be contained in DNA.

No, but ALL DNA is beneficial. Creating a Copy of a Copy of a Copy causes damage, so they absorb new dna, start new gene stems and refine from there.

The DNA replication process already takes this into account and has multiple checkpoints and proofreading enzymes that take care of that sort of thing. It isn't 100% effective, and shouldn't be because that would genetically lock all organisms forever, but it does help keep the copies of copies from becoming unusable. It would probably be chemically easier for a cell to just start over creating it's own chromatin rather than try to absorb and adapt the foreign chromatin anyway. I suppose you could just come up with any reason though, it is science fiction after all.

Railguns wrote:I don't see why they can't just say that the Tyranids, as part of the planetary digestive process, tap into a target planet's geothermal power and use most of the carbon and atmosphere they collected to store it as usable sugars in their ships tissues.

They could, and aside from the geothermal bit, I assumed that they did use some sort of symbiotic hydroponic agriculture onboard the hive ships to create massive amounts of starch that are then stored somewhere else. Still- this doesn't come anywhere near meeting their power requirements. If you ate only beef, a highly energetic food, way more energetic than starch, you would need around 2500 pounds of the stuff to sustain yourself every year at normal levels of activity without loosing too much weight. Imagine how much less energy you use in a year than say, your car does. Now imagine how much less energy your car uses in a year than a space shuttle that making repeated trips up and down through the atmosphere. Now imagine how much more power a fleet of living warships would need to accelerate into another solar system in a reasonable time frame.

Finally, consider that even in the most efficient creatures, there is a huge net loss of energy when something is consumed- from the power it gives in death to how much it consumed during life. Even if the tyranids could get up into an impossible number, like 80% efficiency, all the carbon on a planet wouldn't meet their power demands for more than a few days, at most. During peak expenditure in the middle of a campaign, you are looking at hours worth of power. Compared to the nuclear fission and fusion that their enemies have access to on a wide scale, they just can't match the Imperial armies (much less anyone else) for power production.

Railguns wrote:The DNA replication process already takes this into account and has multiple checkpoints and proofreading enzymes that take care of that sort of thing. It isn't 100% effective, and shouldn't be because that would genetically lock all organisms forever, but it does help keep the copies of copies from becoming unusable. It would probably be chemically easier for a cell to just start over creating it's own chromatin rather than try to absorb and adapt the foreign chromatin anyway. I suppose you could just come up with any reason though, it is science fiction after all.

Evolution is never perfect.what could be benificial on a lava world will not be helpful on a gas world. Which is why the tyranids try to eat everything. So they can be prepared for a problem.

Gwar! wrote:

Deathbot wrote:Since they plan to eat the planet anyway, wouldn't it be easier to just kill everything via orbital bombardment, thus averting the possibility of having the ground troops wiped out and being unable to eat the planet?

You do know that the Nids Recycle their dead, so the total loss is minimal, even over years, especially when you factor in the fact they will get enough new material to replenish the energy suspended.

Don't forget the nids eat everything. EVERYTHING! Even the Air! Orbital Bombardment could mess with the Air!

This!

If they do use geothermal, it could be posiable for them to tap the mantel and core and suck that, I mean thats a crap load of energy and I think the codex says the capliary towers do that, I could be wrong however

The problem is that they would need a storeable, usable form to convert that geothermal energy into, which is part of what Silverthorne is trying to point out. They would have to convert that into usable carbohydrates, but it would not be efficient enough to power the hive fleets by several orders of magnitude.

Personally, it's sci-fi so they start with an action first, and hope they have a plausible enough super science explanation later. Whatever allows Tyranids to overcome such a massive energy barrier makes them that much nastier, really.