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To be honest, the whole idea is slightly inconcievable. The Tau are very careful when it comes to protecting their homeworld and most important planets will have orbital defences. So even getting close enough to Tau would be a suicide mission with little chace of success. Anyway the 'nids will eventually gobble up the Tau Empire so why bother.

DA's Forever wrote:

Zed wrote:They have an entire caste devoted to space flight/combat, and technology miles ahead of Mankind's. Good luck bypassing that.

I have one thing to say to you good sir... THE EMPEROR PROTECTS

You know what this means, we just need a Marine Chaplain to pull a Slim Pickens and ride the torpedo down a la Dr. Strangelove.
His rosarius should handle any of those pesky defense batteries and/or ship weapons aimed at it.

My only question is, what marine chapter has a cowboy hat for him? The minotaurs?

You assume exterminatus is as simple as dropping a big bomb on a planet. In the second Space Wolves omnibus it goes into detail about how complex the process is. They talk about a pattern of munitions dropped in such a manner as to ignite the atmosphere. I'd imagine you couldn't do that very easily with a defense fleet shoving heavy lances down your throat the whole time with only a single battlebarge.

What would happen if you just rammed the planet with the ship? Maybe detonate the warp drive? If it did for a Tyranid fleet then it'll hurt a planet

yes that is possable, but the impierium isen't going to throwaway a battle barge just to throw the T'au into the warp.

Not a battle barge maybe just a few smaller cruisers or a bunch of warp capable SDF ships

Folks, you are aware that half the eastern fringe is populated by Tau, right? And even the First Sphere contains a.o. the planets T'au, Tau'n, Sa'cea, Vior'la, Dal'yth, Bork'an, Fal'shia, and D'yanoi. And you are aware that the Damocles crusade tried to invade the Tau Empire but failed miserably, right? So the "just walk in, throw a grenade and end the Tau Empire" is nothing more than a childish dream.

purplefood wrote:What would happen if you just rammed the planet with the ship? Maybe detonate the warp drive? If it did for a Tyranid fleet then it'll hurt a planet

Then the problem would be solved wouldn't it, and that just won't do.

What would happen if Chaos just rammed Terra with a ship? Maybe detonate the warp drive?

Rube wrote:What would happen if Chaos just rammed Terra with a ship? Maybe detonate the warp drive?

The same problems exist (defence, gravity), just on a much greater scale.

Rube wrote:Because Battle Barges are sucktastic, to put it non-confrontationally. After the HH they were retrofitted specifically so that they couldn't take on another battleship in a stand-up fight. They are forbidden to carry lance batteries and have inferior void shields compared to regular Imperial battleships. They do have superior armor, but lances ignore armor. Yeah.

Almost every Tau ship either has ion cannons (which are lance batteries) or carry Orcas (which carry ion cannons (which are lance batteries)). I guess if the Battle Barge could get a few boarding parties off they'd have a chance but not against however many Tau ships would be guarding T'au... or 2 Tau ships.

I believe there's an instance in the Tau codex of their navy taking on a Tyranid hive fleet splinter in space without suffering a single loss. They're not slackers in that regard.

Dude, BattleBarges kick-ass. They're one of the best units in Battlefleet Gothic. They designed for planetary assault don't cha know.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
There's alot of ways to kill a planet but only 1 out of a million world is habitable. The Imperium doesn't just blow up every planet that has a problem. From their perspective its better to go to war for 1,000 years to capture a planet than destroy it. There's an endless supply of Imperial Guard but only so many habitable world.

Exterminus is only standard for world lost or being lost to the Tyranid becasue they're going to eat the planet anyway.

Rube wrote:You mean a torpedo? Yeah, they have those. Presumably 40k tech is pretty good at detecting such things and neutralising them before they can hit their target. If they didn't, the question would quickly become 'How come Terra is still around if any Chaos/Eldar/Two-bit rebel force could snipe it with viral torpedoes from out of sensor range?'

Are you replying to me? If so I don't think you read what I wrote. I was talking about swarms of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of tiny (maybe the size of a pill bottle) capsules filled with life-eater (or maybe a mix of different viruses and other fungal and bacterial pathogens) fired from all directions simultaneously at a single planet. I don't think they could detect and defeat that many things of that size hurtling at ridiculous speeds.

Is it really likely that something like that would be possible or doable from a logistics standpoint? Probably not, but I don't think the tau defenses are designed to pick up things that small or they would be blasting every mini meteorite out of the sky and even if they could I doubt their systems could shoot them all down when arriving by the thousands and thousands at the same time from all sized and angles.

Now why hasn't this been done before if it was possible? Because then we wouldn't have a game background. I think such a thing would be possible, but after a few such attacks they would develop defenses against it. I think the first such attack could work and would definitely hurt if used on a central homeworld of the tau or any species.

Im pretty sure the tau would have advanced point defense systems around their homeworld. (Lasers, rockets ect)

Why do people put so much faith in point defense systems?
It nearly impossible to get all incoming "shots" of any type ( missiles, torpedoes, bombs,....) with 100% success rate.

Surely, its possible to assume the lack of official background of some races defense systems allows to imagine
any desired defensive capability but seriously the only fact in 40k is the grimdarkness and it would add to it
if a sept world gets exterminated so what should stop a "multilazor" style piece of fluff really?

Tau are seen as the "non grim-dark" race in 40k (probably why people have little sympathy for them) but an advanced "sensible" race such as them would have the common sense to install some kind of "anti-apocalypse countermeasure". Sure they certainly arn't 100% accurate, but this coupled with the huge amount of firepower from their fleet would surely stop MOST incoming attacks.

Nukes.

"Virus bomb launch in T-minus- HOLY S**T!!"
KAAAPOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!

Imperial PDF Officer:
"Sir, why don't we just fire nukes every time a battle barge approaches a planet?"
General:
"We don't have enough nuclear warheads"
Imperial PDF officer:
"But we've been manufacturing nukes for 40,000 years on millions of planets"

.....

BLAMM!

Plus, planetary defense cannons, torpedoes, missile shooters-down, and the fact that just firng a massive missile and a big BANG! isnt as cool as millions of troops deploying to a blood and corpse-strewn battlefield from orbit.

vodo40k wrote:Tau are seen as the "non grim-dark" race in 40k (probably why people have little sympathy for them) but an advanced "sensible" race such as them would have the common sense to install some kind of "anti-apocalypse countermeasure". Sure they certainly arn't 100% accurate, but this coupled with the huge amount of firepower from their fleet would surely stop MOST incoming attacks.

But MOST could be NOT ENOUGH to stop a Doomsday device.

If something poisonous tries to hit you and a very small portion of this poison will kill you,
would you consider a 95% chance to evade unharmed take as proof of the attack beeing a irrelevant threat or
do you accept the 5% chance to suffer a fatal wound as proof of the attack beeing serious?

Plus, there is a piece of fluff where Fab B. stole a Tau colony from Tau space.
What may happen if he returned them, infected with a super violent virus that may not break out soon but grow and spread amongst
the empire undetected, also is set to do its disastrous work at a preset time?

Yea thats what I mean, if one virus bomb gets through your pretty much screwed.

even one virus bomb can wipe out a large section of a planet.

the reason that a full on exterminatus takes so long is because they want to planet to be completely sterilized as quickely as possable with no chance of escape from its surface.

spread out ships ensures any surface to space transports are shot down.

maximum efficiency is the goal for a exterminatus like in the SW omnibus.



if you just do a drive by shooting of a few hundred torpedos then the planet may not be completely destroyed or it won't be quite instantanious, but it will still be destruction on a massive scale and the planet would be rendered uninhabitable.

Quick question: Doesn't the Imperium want the Tau worlds for themselves? They're perfectly inhabitable.

There's also the problem that bombing important Tau worlds leads to all-out-war. And although the Imperium could crush the Tau like bugs, that's only if they weren't tied up in so many other places.

The Imperium could probably defeat any foe if that was their only foe (Possibly not Tyranids). The problem is, the Imperium is not fighting one foe, it is fighting everyone.

Thatguyoverthere wrote:It doesn't work because GRIMDARK gets in the way. If the Imperium had an easy solution to their enemies, then their enemies wouldn't exist as anything other than foot notes in a library that'll be burned at some point.

Virus Bombs themselves only exist because of GRIMDARK. Someone at GW thought, "What would be a cool way to destroy a planet? Conventional Nuclear destruction? Mass Drivers? Naw, not GRIMDARK enough. I know! A bomb that liquefies people into goey puddles and then sets the entire planet on FIRE!!!!1!!!eleven!!!"

Aforementioned person had a GRIMDARK-gasm, and so it became cannon.

Necroman wrote:Quick question: Doesn't the Imperium want the Tau worlds for themselves? They're perfectly inhabitable.

There's also the problem that bombing important Tau worlds leads to all-out-war. And although the Imperium could crush the Tau like bugs, that's only if they weren't tied up in so many other places.

The Imperium could probably defeat any foe if that was their only foe (Possibly not Tyranids). The problem is, the Imperium is not fighting one foe, it is fighting everyone.

necroman has it down cold.


Impierium could if it really wanted to, destroy any single race in the galexy(except probably da orks ) but it would leave them exposed on every other front and then they would be severely weakened by the inevitable invasion.

T'au are also the lowest danger on the xeno threat list.

Halsfield wrote:Are you replying to me? If so I don't think you read what I wrote. I was talking about swarms of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of tiny (maybe the size of a pill bottle) capsules filled with life-eater (or maybe a mix of different viruses and other fungal and bacterial pathogens) fired from all directions simultaneously at a single planet. I don't think they could detect and defeat that many things of that size hurtling at ridiculous speeds.

Is it really likely that something like that would be possible or doable from a logistics standpoint? Probably not, but I don't think the tau defenses are designed to pick up things that small or they would be blasting every mini meteorite out of the sky and even if they could I doubt their systems could shoot them all down when arriving by the thousands and thousands at the same time from all sized and angles.

Now why hasn't this been done before if it was possible? Because then we wouldn't have a game background. I think such a thing would be possible, but after a few such attacks they would develop defenses against it. I think the first such attack could work and would definitely hurt if used on a central homeworld of the tau or any species.

No, you really hit the nail on head there. If it were doable, they would've done it at some point in the last 10,000 years. They don't because they can't - perhaps the smaller warheads you described would burn up in the aptmosphere whereas a larger protected warhead wouldn't, perhaps at such a long range they would be much easier to detect and counter whereas at close range there isn't enough time...

And finally, there are multiple factions with far greater technology than the Imperium that have been trying to destroy Terra for the last 10,000 years. If it were possible to blow a planet up at zero risk to the firing ship with no way for the targetted planet to reliably stop the attack, Terra would not exist.

The Imperium essentially tried what is being described here anyway. It was called the Damocles Crusade. They made it so far through Tau space before the Tau fleet stopped them. They never even reached T'au to enact any kind of exterminatus. Whatever the Tau's failings when it comes to warp travel they can apparently detect and intercept the ingress of Imperial fleets, because they did.

In addition to everything else, keep in mind that viral bombing wouldn't affect any drones and AIs plus the Air Caste living in Orbit stations. Even IF some bomb could be dropped on ONE Tau main world, the ship would face certain annihilation.

Like I said:

There's alot of ways to kill a planet but only 1 out of a million world is habitable. The Imperium doesn't just blow up every planet that has a problem. From their perspective its better to go to war for 1,000 years to capture a planet than destroy it. There's an endless supply of Imperial Guard but only so many habitable world.

Exterminus is only standard for world lost or being lost to the Tyranid becasue they're going to eat the planet anyway.

One in a million habitable, sure.

Good thing theres like 999999999999999 to the 999999999th power planets available for the 1:1,000,000 ratio ...

kill dem stunties wrote:One in a million habitable, sure.

Good thing theres like 999999999999999 to the 999999999th power planets available for the 1:1,000,000 ratio ...

and?

kill dem stunties wrote:One in a million habitable, sure.

Good thing theres like 999999999999999 to the 999999999th power planets available for the 1:1,000,000 ratio ...

100,000,000,000 is the number of stars. About every other star has a planet. so that's 50,000,000,000 (planets) and then the 1:1,000,000. That's only 50,000 habitable planets. I think the 1:1,000,000 thing is off, but so it the "999999999999999 to the 999999999th power".
Conclusion: even if it was 1:100,000,000, it would not be worth preforming exterminatus on every planet that bugged you.

Regarding the idea of firing multiple capsules loaded with bad stuff from loads of angles simultaneously, would it be possible that home worlds such as T'au and Terra have massive Void Shields or something similar to protect from Orbital Bombardement? While they won't keep a determined foe out, they would at least prevent hit and run attacks of this kind...

Klawz wrote:

kill dem stunties wrote:One in a million habitable, sure.

Good thing theres like 999999999999999 to the 999999999th power planets available for the 1:1,000,000 ratio ...

100,000,000,000 is the number of stars. About every other star has a planet. so that's 50,000,000,000 and then the 1:1,000,000. That's only 50,000 planets. I think the 1:1,000,000 thing is off, but so it the "999999999999999 to the 999999999th power".
Conclusion: even if it was 1:100,000,000, it would not be worth preforming exterminatus on every planet that bugged you.

buddy Fail. You're saying every star has 1/2 a planet. Our own star has 8. Probably not the galactic record holder either.