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Don't forget that Jump troops also use Deep Strike rules, and they can't (usually) claim thousands of miles or orbit as the reason they went off target. They jump out of low-flying transports. So what is it that makes them scatter then? Wind? Enemy fire? Dodging ground support fliers? Plain bad sight due to massive jamming and smoke cover on the ground?

Spetulhu wrote:Don't forget that Jump troops also use Deep Strike rules, and they can't (usually) claim thousands of miles or orbit as the reason they went off target. They jump out of low-flying transports. So what is it that makes them scatter then? Wind? Enemy fire? Dodging ground support fliers? Plain bad sight due to massive jamming and smoke cover on the ground?

I think that's exactly the case.

The BRB talks about 'bad coordinates' or 'instrument jamming'. Consider the absolute worst misplaced mishap would be corner to corner on a 4'x6' board (about 7'). If we consider 1" to be about 6' in game terms (25mm or so) then from corner to corner, you're looking at around 500' off-target. Granted, it's the FUTURE! but 500' is a tiny distance when considering the factors (exactly like you mentioned) that can affect even a relatively 'simple' grav-chute drop out of a Valkyrie. Plus that's the worst case scenario. 90% of the time you're looking at an average of 250-300 feet game distance; less than a hundred metres dash.

A full 2D6 scatter? About 75 feet in game terms. Whoever said "damn near surgical" is correct!

DoW

If 12" is 75 feet, then every single weapon in the 40k universe has a laughably short range.

McNinja wrote:If 12" is 75 feet, then every single weapon in the 40k universe has a laughably short range.

Yep.

Troops only move about 40 feet a turn too, what's your point?

DoW

... That the scale in 40k is terrible and represents a battle about as accurately as Call of Duty?

Scale doesn't matter as long as it's relative. It's difficult to have a realistic scale, use futuristic weapons, keep the 28mm heroic figures, and play on only a 4'x6' board but GW seems to have done a reasonable job considering the popularity of 40k.

Regardless, the distances being what they are, deep strike misplacements and scatters are relatively minimal in the grand scheme of things.

DoW

McNinja wrote:... That the scale in 40k is terrible and represents a battle about as accurately as Call of Duty?

This is a game with an extremely tenuous link to reality, in the best of situations. Distances and such are balanced internally, unto itself. It's not meant to really represent any real-life distances, at any scale. If they were going to try to do this, then they'd have to increase the size of the battle-tables by a factor of at least 3, probably closer to 5, and your CC armies would be right fethed, because the shooty guys on the other end of this 30' table are going to be shooting you for a long, long time as you advance 18" a turn.

Alternately.... yes, in the 41st millennia, weapons only shoot 12 to 24" (with some variance)... but, then, a powerful super-human warrior is about an inch and a half tall, and three-quarters of an inch wide. At some point during the DAoT, the universe was shrunk down, only no one noticed.

Melissia wrote:

Sigvatr wrote:Well, fluff usually breaks with rules and even design anyway...I mean...Necrons are considered to be the technologically most advanced race yet all of their vehicles are rather fragile and even have pilots...

Obviously this is because Orks are the most technologically advanced race.


`

McNinja wrote:the Orks [...] their tech only works because they want it too.

It works with no orks present at all.

Ha. Ork tech has been stated repeatedly to only work because the user is an ork.

As for the necrons, Warp energy can affect the physical world, and the churning a battle would cause could throw necrons off balance.

Melissia wrote:

Sigvatr wrote:Well, fluff usually breaks with rules and even design anyway...I mean...Necrons are considered to be the technologically most advanced race yet all of their vehicles are rather fragile and even have pilots...

Obviously this is because Orks are the most technologically advanced race.


`

McNinja wrote:the Orks [...] their tech only works because they want it too.

It works with no orks present at all.

Pretty sure it's been stated multiple times that "Ork tecknoligy" only work around orks. When they're used by humans, they either function very poorly or not at all. I remember reading a quote somewhere where the mechanicus opened up a shoota only to realize that it was a steel pipe with a box full of bolts being used as a "magazine."

An interesting exception to this is in the book "Death World", which is about Catachan jungle fighters fighting against orks. At one point, they use the shootas against some orks since they're almost completely out of ammo. The shootas worked just fine, but that was probably because the orks could see them and expected them to fire. After all, why would they think the guns wouldn't fire?

Functioning very poorly is still functioning. The average shoota is a high-calibre hunk of junk, but it's capable of putting rounds down-range, more-or-less on target, with only the occasional jam (read as: every quarter of a magazine). In the hands of an Ork, however, it becomes much more reliable, because of the WAAAGH effect.

McNinja wrote:

Galdos wrote:

Veteran Sergeant wrote:If you think about the accuracy in meters, to which even the maximum deviation is, it's really not that bad.

What this guy said, things are kind of relative. I mean if you were going from one side of a house to another side of a house than ya the stuff is kind of inaccurate. If you are on another continent? Sounds like you are simply plugging in an 8 digit grid coordiante and hoping you land correctly. When you are getting something thousands of miles away (read, in orbit around a planet) and you are trying to land it anywhere, you are not going to land it on a dime. Even more so if you physically cant see the object from your position and you are just trying to litterally disappear from one spot and reappear at another spot.

We have bullets than can correct their trajectory mid-flight. Current day GPS is accurate down to a few meters, and they orbit tens of thousands of miles above the earth. We have satellites that take extremely high-resolution (even higher res if military) pictures. Hell, the CIA can pick out license plate numbers from satellites.

Besides, how hard would it be to mark a spot with a laser or radar designator from orbit? All the ship has to do is maintain geosynchronous orbit for the duration of the teleportation/drop, then move on. That's not even mentioning Jump Infantry, who have direct control over where they land, since they have presumably trained with their jump device for at least a year or two.

Well, there's conservation of momentum to consider, plus no system is foolproof. Hitting a spot to within a few metres, from a ship in orbit or beyond, moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour, in the midst of a battle, with enemy fire and counter-signals and jamming and even the influence of the Warp to consider, is nothing short of miraculous.