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 Eetion wrote:

Just what does that mean for the imperium and area surrounding tau space.

Overtime for Hydra gunners. Or an ace-boom amongst Imperial fighter pilots. Or maybe a minor Air Caste riot as the pilots will get the idea that the drones "can't feel the Air" (and dodging those clumsy dronesin the middle of a wild dogfight is super-duper annoying).

If the Imperium could capture some of them, then maybe some Magos on some random forge worlds will have a cool toy for a few days until they grew bored and return to continue the design of their phase-moduled warp-integrity arcshatter macro-cannon (what they are designing in the last 5000 years).

 Grey Templar wrote:
Warp Rifts are "natural" occurances in real space, so yes they arn't any better off when they are involved. But in areas where there isn't a warp rift they arn't at risk.


As I recall, the Tau find the idea of psykers and the warp to be utterly incomprehensible. Just like someone babbling on about such a thing today would be dismissed out of hand. As far as the Tau are concerned, the Warp doesn't exist and Daemons are just another species of alien.

That doesn't preclude an opportunistic race from using Psyker powers (which they might view as just another tool) to assist them in travel or use as weapons of war. One doesn't necessarily need to understand how something works to value its use. For example, Native American's had never ridden or even seen horses before colonization and never really grasped how to make guns and ammunition, but that didn't stop them from becoming famed horse riders or using guns to kill each other and whites as well.

As for the whole AI backfiring on the Tau concept, I think Skynet is fairly well stereotyped by the Necrons already. GW isn't going to introduce a new robot army as a breakaway faction from an already under-popular army, so while it might be possible it'll never happen rules-wise. As well I don't think there's real evidence fluff-wise pointing to the use of AI. Drone's, like RL UAV's, can operate on pre-programmed routines or be operated by someone from a distance. You can imagine that Fire Warriors and suits are fit with something comparable to the cancelled US Land Warrior system, which was essentially a bad-ass hard-wired drone controller. Even in the instance that drones seem to be creative, they are no more creative than an advanced computer program, and all software is written by developers with codes etc. An AI would be able to write its own code for itself, something I don't think drones are doing.

Tau Philosophy in general is very different from that of the IoM. The Tau approach to a problem is simply to create a technological solution, and distribut that as widely as possible. A hammerhead, for example, is a much better tank than anything the IoM has besides super heavies in terms of abilities, but being so advanced is available in much smaller numbers, the same as a crisis suit, they are much better than power armoured marines, but the tau are always short of them.

If we were to draw a familiar analogy, i would say we could use WW2. The germans concentrated on building the best possible tanks and aircraft, at the expense of numbers, so in a 1v1 encounter the German equipment was superior. The allies concentrated on having larger numbers of inferior vehicles. The result was that the Allies could easily replace their losses, and the Germans could not.

When you take into account the fact the IoM is several orders of magnitude larger, and has a vastly superior industrial base to the Tau empire. if/when the IoM decides to squish the Tau, there is nothing they could do about it.

even if remora drones are superior to anything the IoM can deploy, i very much doubt they can be manufactured in sufficient quantity to make a difference against a concerted attack. certainly production would outstrip that of barracudas, but it probably wouldn't be enough in the face of a massive imperial war effort

And the Imperium is a huge fan of nuking the site from orbit.

They can quite easily achieve space superiority, and bombard the living crap out of any air bases the Tau have planetside. Then they send in the IG landing transports. Which come down in such numbers as to actually cause a massive planetwide weather disturbance. A wave of air pressure that itself can damage defenses, drones would be knocked around like leaves in the breeze. Anything airborne would be in serious trouble.

madtankbloke wrote:
If we were to draw a familiar analogy, i would say we could use WW2. The germans concentrated on building the best possible tanks and aircraft, at the expense of numbers, so in a 1v1 encounter the German equipment was superior. The allies concentrated on having larger numbers of inferior vehicles. The result was that the Allies could easily replace their losses, and the Germans could not.

This is a myth perpetuated by revisionists marketing the Second World War as some sort of heroic conflict against a foe superior to ourselves. Truthfully, the German tanks were inferior to the Soviets because they had no domestic sources of aluminum and couldn't upgun their tanks, which is why they had to build such large fighting platforms like the Panther to fit guns which could easily be fit on a smaller chassis by either the Americans or Soviets. By the end of the war tanks like the T-44 and the M26 outclassed anything the Germans had, and the Mustang and LA-7 outclassed any German fighter except the jet fighters, which were easily enough handled at take-off and didn't score enough victories to matter. The British even had their own jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor.

As for the Tau, I wouldn't say their production is lower relative to the Imperium (the Imperium suffers from chronic idiocy) it's just that they have fewer factories. Billions of worlds versus maybe a hundred, it's a wonder at all the Tau could win. The Tau remind me of the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war, no one expects them to be good but they surprise people and are on the rise.

Having a lack of resources doesn't make you inferior except in having resources.

German Engineering and Tactics were far superior to anything the Allies had.


If the germans had had the Manpower and Resources, they would have won with no possability of an alternate outcome.

heck, if they had focused on aquiring middle eastern oil reserves and Hitler hadn't knocked off his competant generals the war may have progressed very differently. Invading Russia instead of focusing on aquiring sources of oil and consolidating their holdings brought the Nazis down.

German training and military leadership was superior to anything else the world had at the time. Hitler was a brilliant leader, skilled at propaganda and public rallying. But he was an utter moron with military matters, and as such his decistion to personally oversee all military matters was a serious problem.

Its actually why some of his generals tried to assassinate him. They knew his leadership would lead to utter ruin on the battlefield, and they wanted a Third Reich as much as he did. They knew the slow and steady approach was what would win.


All other things being equal, the Germans had superior military leadership, equipment, and tactics. Unfortunatly their leadership was ruined by Hitler and they didn't have the resources to support their war effort.

Doesn't mean they won't experience the just that they can't explain the phonomena.
The Tau can and will face off against any race at present. The discovery of warp travel doesn't change that

And the Tau don't have the resources of warp travel and population. Give it to them, and they'd beat the Imperium hands down. But they don't, and the Germans didn't, both had to deal with their deficiencies. I don't think that the Tau will at any point challenge the IoM, which is the posterboy of 40k anyways. There is no other faction aside from the Tyranids maybe which can challenge the Imperium as a whole, but the Imperium is fighting on so many fronts at once that it can't focus on any single target at a time.

And even if the Tyranids could beat IoM, it'd take a while for them to finish their space travel and actually get there.

Tau are the next Order race to enjoy a golden age. Just plan on it taking a few dozen millenia.