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Of course you still have naval battles in the grim, dark future. As a wise man once said "If you ever have a coastline that you'd ever like to keep, then you really need a navy".

I mean air and space power are great, don't get me wrong, but actual floating boats are CHEAP, and they can move a LOT of not only men, but also materiel, which is notoriously expensive in fuel to move by air. I mean, it's the reason the US military keeps a navy around. It may be awesomesauce to drop in 100 marines by helicopter, but when you need to move, feed, and supply 100,000 troops on the other side of an ocean, nothing beats boats.

Plus, boats are easy to reproduce when destroyed (all Washington needed was makeshift rafts to cross the delaware), whereas aircraft and definitely spacecraft are much more difficult to replace once destroyed. After a long, hard battle, an army may well not have enough air or spacecraft to be able to move troops quickly enough or keep them supplied well enough over a body of water.

FeistierErmine wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:

FeistierErmine wrote:There would be any number of reasons to launch a naval assault when you have an air force. There could be no open spaces large enough to land drop ships in. The target could be too heavily defended with anti-air. Or you could just do it because you don't think the enemy will expect it.

You're only thinking in two of the four potential bits of warfare in the 40k background.

A target can have anti-air defenses which prevent dropships or strike aircraft...
But it'd still be vulnerable to a low orbit, precision bombardment from an escort(or larger)starship.

I was mainly just speaking in terms of launching an invasion and actually getting troops on the ground. That would be susceptible to anti-air defenses even using drop pods. We can also assume that if we're bothering to actually fight a battle that orbital bombardment is unavailable, ineffectual, or would just destroy whatever objective is being fought over.

Actually, Drop Pods are the only real form of insertion that the Imperium has at its disposal(outside of teleportation) that isn't susceptible to anti-air defenses.

Will some Pods potentially be lost? Sure. It's a fragile(relatively speaking) hull launched at hypersonic speeds from an orbiting vessel to deliver troops to the fight. It's entirely possible for a Drop Pod to be hit...but the enemy has to be throwing up so much AA fire at that point that launching a Drop Pod assault is the only way outside of flattening the place from orbit, or landing forces elsewhere and go from there.

Zed -I was thinking of building D-Day style landing craft for a beachead table I'm going to get on to with a few mates. It makes sense that people would fight on water- they're more than happy to do it everywhere else.

I was actually thing of doing the same thing and was contemplating converting a couple of FWs Caetus assault rams to a catamaran style landing craft for it.I always look at it from a modern military point of view,just because you only see or read about the main tanks,fighters and such doesn't mean there aren't other vehicles and support eguipment out there.

Thread is being locked due to thread necromancy.