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With that many Battle Barges in orbit, that's a heck of a lot of prow-mounted Bombardment Cannon (I think that was the name, haven't got my BFG books to hand) available - you know, the weapons specifically designed for planetary bombardment?

It does seem a bit odd that such a resource isn't being used.

I think every so often GW and BL should slip some lines into the text along the lines of –

Young Ship Lieutenant – “Sir, why don’t we just blast them from space??”
Ship Captain – “Jenkins, you idiot! Because …..”

Obviously it can’t always be done like that in a novel, entertaining way, but small comments here and there go a long way to fill in the gaps that are often left missing.

If a lack of orbital bombardment on Vigilus is ruining your 40k fun I doubt you have been paying much attention to the setting generally!
The ability of space ships, missiles and all round massive guns to wipe out the enemy should have made infantry completely redundant millennia ago. We have had missile guidance systems since the 20th century which have revolutionised warfare. I would be pretty confident the emperor could have designed a standard template construct that could have produced a kick ass guided missile. But instead he produced axe and chainsword weilding maniacs, with giant shooty guns.
Why? Because it makes for a better game with little plastic soldiers!

But the problem is not that vigilus story arc makes no sens in our world. I makes no sense in the w40k. There were a ton of cities leveled by chaos fleets durning the 13th crusade, and some of those fleets were just a few ships. A single battle barge is technicly able to extermintus a planet. With so many of them and other chapters no land enemy base should survive. Now if orcs, like the GSC had underground bases, that would make more sense. There could even be some cool fluff about Dune like borer squigs, which would explain why snake bites stil exist as a clan. GW could have made the whole thing make sense withing the boundries of their own fluff. And how being off on your own fluff ends any fan of the DC movie universe up till aquachad can tell long and sad tales.

Just to say on the spacecraft front - Astartes ships aren't that roomy, they are either blockade runners with mostly heavy armour and engines, or barges for planetary invasion with lots of space for training and logistics.

The 1 ship, 1 company bit comes from what a cruiser can deploy in one pass of an area. They can carry more, and do sometimes in the fluff, but have a deployment limit in the window available above a contested world.

But the barrges can be huge. Technically there is no upper limit to their size, other then at some time they just turn in to something like the Rock or the Phalanx. The GK strike cruisers are small, but the barrges they do have can transport the whole chapter, although GK never deploy the whole chapter in one place, and still have space for inqusitorial regiments.

Karol wrote:

40k weapons are not that accurate and missing by a mm in space is a lot of km on the ground you would probably hit your own forces and what you are doing is effectively a mini exterminates and the imperium only does that if there is 0 chance or a few hundred billion would die in a day so its not worth i

but the human population of vigilus is unimportant from both a tactical and strategical point of view. And if you do wipe them out, but it helps to secure the planet, you can always ship in more people. Also with so many ships accuracy stops being a problem you can turn small continents in to glass plains. At the same time burning out the orc spores making later spawns of them less common. using orbital bombardment is a win/win.

Wrong. Population might be unimportant but archaotech generators and cities housing old, ancient technology are not. People can be replaced, infrastructure, not really, especially if the planet is so important and you want to fortify if further instead of doing enemy work for him. Moreover, what people tend to ignore, Imperium is feudal. This means paying taxes, tithes and stuff to your overlords for the promise of defense. If Imperium's reaction to enemy showing up would be exterminatus first, ask questions later, a lot of planets would either openly rebel, or start massively under-reporting everything and hoarding resources for self-defense, leading to collapse of the whole thing pretty quickly. The point of throwing 20 IG regiments at the enemy attacking a planet in sector X is not because Imperium likes, or even wants to do so, it's showing all the worlds in said sector 'hey, this is your taxes at work, we have this really big stick so better stay in our good graces, okay?' with a good dose of 'or else'.

To add to the above, liveable planets are pretty rare, and it's very easy to make them much less so. Orbital strikes aren't just harmful little flashes of energy, that orbital lance creates a pillar of plasma kilometers thick, disrupting and damaging electronics in a huge radius. Explosions capable of destroying large force sterilize big chunks of land, disrupt climate patterns, disperse radioactive elements, trigger earthquakes, etc, etc. It might really be less costly, quicker, and much less problematic to throw a few regiments at enemy even if they end up destroyed at the end than to bomb him and risk whole hive of billions of people you're trying to defend collapsing (leading to manufacturing shortages for decades if not centuries) because you took a shortcut...

Banville wrote:
Unless 40k targeting systems are less accurate than 21st Century targeting systems, then this isn't the case. We can put a missile through a window of a moving car from a moving drone, compensating for wind resistance etc etc. A laser or lance weapon, fired from stable orbit, should be able to hit a square metre of a planet's surface, even using our current levels of technology.

There is a slight difference between subsonic missile being steered by (undamaged) GPS at some rebels who can't even jam a radio compared to trying to steer orbital weaponry from orbit at targets being shielded by insanely advanced force fields, alien jamming technology you don't understand at all, and literal magic. Laser can be aimed at a point X, but hitting said point, never mind being sure it's the right one or actually damaging it, is another matter entirely. Even today, judging by how often weddings or buses full of children (or clearly marked ambulances with uniformed doctors...) are being hit instead of big bad scary boogeymen should kind of make you question all the claims of technological wankery being perpetuated by some...

 Knockagh wrote:
The ability of space ships, missiles and all round massive guns to wipe out the enemy should have made infantry completely redundant millennia ago. We have had missile guidance systems since the 20th century which have revolutionised warfare. I would be pretty confident the emperor could have designed a standard template construct that could have produced a kick ass guided missile.

You are aware that the exact same claim was made about air power, thousands of times, no less? And last time someone tried to win purely air war, Nato vs Serbia in 1999, the gigantic war machine bombed tiny country so indiscriminately they destroyed whole infrastructure (even hitting a couple of embassies by "accident"...) and nearly everything that moved, and yet, only the thread of land invasion finally convinced Serbs to fold (who then proceeded to humiliate Nato even further by pulling almost all 'destroyed' tanks and planes out of hiding spots, expensive US guided bombs having largely been expended on 20$ mockups and decoys...). Ditto for Iraq, you had what, 16 year long bombing campaign ran there and yet, US planes failed to not only stop puny insurgents, they failed to stop ISIS advance to the point it overran 1/3 of Iraq and you again needed boots on the ground to actually push them back. And that was just a couple of militants in a pick-up, not horde of orks in killtanks with force fields and tellyportas.