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Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

 Gert wrote:
Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

Planets are even harder to make, and exterminatusing them all the time is probably also considered wasteful. Most of the time, you want the planet or something on it for yourself, blowing everything up is not an option that is relevant for the majority of cases.

 Gert wrote:
Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

No need to throw the ship, just turn the exhaust towards the planet and punch the throttle.

 AtoMaki wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

No need to throw the ship, just turn the exhaust towards the planet and punch the throttle.

I did like that scene in the new Avatar film, where they do exactly that, partly to land the ship, but partly to create a “safe” zone around their new encampment.

The Imperium's ships' drives are not powerful enough to destroy planets for the simple narrative reason that thee Imperium would never need to use specialized Exterminatus weapons or Nova Cannons to do so if it were so simple. The destruction of the prison planet of St. Josmane's Hope in the Cadia system was accomplished by an infiltration team precisely because the Imperium decided that destroying the moon was not feasible with what they had available. No Exterminatus devices were available and Imperial Navy ships with Nova Cannons would have required many hours of bombardment to break up the planet, which would have been long enough for the Chaos fleets to respond.

The estimate of thrust may also be overestimated because FFG also arbitrarily jacked up the size of ships from the original size proposed by Andy Chambers (BFG designer) on the old BFG mailing list. For awhile Black Library fiction was actually reasonably consistent with Andy Chambers's scale. Then it seems writers went all "MOAR!" and just increased the dimensions of ships without much thought into the flow on consequences.

Tsagualsa wrote:
Planets are even harder to make, and exterminatusing them all the time is probably also considered wasteful. Most of the time, you want the planet or something on it for yourself, blowing everything up is not an option that is relevant for the majority of cases.

Exterminatus is immensely rare. While there are a fair few levels of Imperial hierarchy that can order one (Chapter Masters, Navy Admirals, Inquisitors with enough political clout), it has to be a last-ditch effort to stop a serious threat such as a Hive Fleet tendril, Daemonic incursion, or if there is no chance of asset recovery and the planet's worth is low enough that it can be sacrificed.
Kryptman's Gambit is good proof of this as he is stripped of his rank and exiled specifically because he just started destroying planets that had value to the Imperium.

 Gert wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:
Planets are even harder to make, and exterminatusing them all the time is probably also considered wasteful. Most of the time, you want the planet or something on it for yourself, blowing everything up is not an option that is relevant for the majority of cases.

Exterminatus is immensely rare. While there are a fair few levels of Imperial hierarchy that can order one (Chapter Masters, Navy Admirals, Inquisitors with enough political clout), it has to be a last-ditch effort to stop a serious threat such as a Hive Fleet tendril, Daemonic incursion, or if there is no chance of asset recovery and the planet's worth is low enough that it can be sacrificed.
Kryptman's Gambit is good proof of this as he is stripped of his rank and exiled specifically because he just started destroying planets that had value to the Imperium.

Kryptman did nothing wrong. The Imperium is fond of claiming no cost is too high for survival...yet when it came to it, the Imperium did balk at the cost. His strategy slowed Leviathan to a crawl though in the time that it was in effect.

I find Kryptman intriguing as a character because he has always been right when it came to the Tyranids. At the time, the Imperium did not have the strength to stand against Leviathan, and the older Tyranid Codices said just that, that the fleets of Segmentum Solar were battered and could not stand against Leviathan. The Imperium needed time when its favored tactic of numbers was not enough against Leviathan, and Kryptman bought the Imperium a few years first with his scorched planet policy and then later by diverting the Tyranids onto the Orks. Of course the Imperium wasted those years though this was also because it was dealing with other threats.

Iracundus wrote:

 Gert wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:
Planets are even harder to make, and exterminatusing them all the time is probably also considered wasteful. Most of the time, you want the planet or something on it for yourself, blowing everything up is not an option that is relevant for the majority of cases.

Exterminatus is immensely rare. While there are a fair few levels of Imperial hierarchy that can order one (Chapter Masters, Navy Admirals, Inquisitors with enough political clout), it has to be a last-ditch effort to stop a serious threat such as a Hive Fleet tendril, Daemonic incursion, or if there is no chance of asset recovery and the planet's worth is low enough that it can be sacrificed.
Kryptman's Gambit is good proof of this as he is stripped of his rank and exiled specifically because he just started destroying planets that had value to the Imperium.

Kryptman did nothing wrong. The Imperium is fond of claiming no cost is too high for survival...yet when it came to it, the Imperium did balk at the cost. His strategy slowed Leviathan to a crawl though in the time that it was in effect.

I find Kryptman intriguing as a character because he has always been right when it came to the Tyranids. At the time, the Imperium did not have the strength to stand against Leviathan, and the older Tyranid Codices said just that, that the fleets of Segmentum Solar were battered and could not stand against Leviathan. The Imperium needed time when its favored tactic of numbers was not enough against Leviathan, and Kryptman bought the Imperium a few years first with his scorched planet policy and then later by diverting the Tyranids onto the Orks. Of course the Imperium wasted those years though this was also because it was dealing with other threats.

Quite fitting then, that the Imperium of Man, in its typical fashion, reacted badly to being told inconvenient truths, punished the messenger instead and squandered what was bought in blood on infighting and pointless ideological bickering.

Iracundus wrote:
Kryptman did nothing wrong.

Bet you think Magnus was right too

The Imperium is fond of claiming no cost is too high for survival...yet when it came to it, the Imperium did balk at the cost. His strategy slowed Leviathan to a crawl though.

I find Kryptman intriguing as a character because he has always been right when it came to the Tyranids. At the time, the Imperium did not have the strength to stand against Leviathan, and the older Tyranid Codices said just that. The Imperium needed time when its favored tactic of numbers was not enough against Leviathan, and Kryptman bought the Imperium a few years and kept the Segmentum Solar secure.

That's where ideology is tested by action and I think it's a pretty good showing of the hypocrisy in the Imperium while also proving the age-old adage of the road to damnation being paved with good intentions.
Kryptman goes his whole life being told no cost is too great, wins a war, gets a promotion, then loses it all because he's enacting the very ideology he was instructed by. However, he also lets his power go to his head and just does whatever he wants because he's a hero of the Imperium.

 Gert wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
Kryptman did nothing wrong.

Bet you think Magnus was right too

The Imperium is fond of claiming no cost is too high for survival...yet when it came to it, the Imperium did balk at the cost. His strategy slowed Leviathan to a crawl though.

I find Kryptman intriguing as a character because he has always been right when it came to the Tyranids. At the time, the Imperium did not have the strength to stand against Leviathan, and the older Tyranid Codices said just that. The Imperium needed time when its favored tactic of numbers was not enough against Leviathan, and Kryptman bought the Imperium a few years and kept the Segmentum Solar secure.

That's where ideology is tested by action and I think it's a pretty good showing of the hypocrisy in the Imperium while also proving the age-old adage of the road to damnation being paved with good intentions.
Kryptman goes his whole life being told no cost is too great, wins a war, gets a promotion, then loses it all because he's enacting the very ideology he was instructed by. However, he also lets his power go to his head and just does whatever he wants because he's a hero of the Imperium.

What happened later showed Kryptman was right about diverting the Tyranids too. His gambit with the Tyranids and Orks worked and probably was the single biggest stall the Imperium has achieved against the Leviathan. We have yet to see what will happen with the Tyranids later but they seem to have prevailed over the Orks at least temporarily with the death of the Overfiend and now successor Ork warlords squabbling over the title. I thought the War Zone Octarius book would have had a sequel with Kryptman stepping in to restore the balance, succeeding where the Inquisitor Van Roth failed. Just enough to preserve the dynamic equilibrium of the galaxy from an OOC perspective, and basically kicking the can of the final reckoning for Leviathan vs. Orks down the road, buying the Imperium yet more time. This was what the first book seemed to hint was coming next.

Kryptman just took the next step when it came to his cordon of scorched planet worlds. Those worlds were lost regardless of what Kryptman or anyone else could do, and it was not possible to evacuate their populations. There would have been nothing of value to reconquer once the Tyranids finished with them. Rather than just let the Tyranids consume them and replenish their biomass and losses, Kryptman just took the next step in resource denial: let the worlds fight and fall, and then destroy them before the Tyranids could finish feeding. Those populations were doomed anyway so the Imperium might as well make their deaths mean something by making their resistance sap the Tyranids of energy and biomass that would not be recoverable once the world was destroyed.

Octarius was always set up to be a loser's game though. It sent a tendril into Ork space and it bought the Imperium time but then the Imperium had to then set up another cordon to stop the war from spilling out and both Xenos started getting stronger. Even if GW hadn't done a new book it was never going to end well for the Imperium.

Also, Kryptman wasn't exiled because he destroyed worlds that had been evacuated or set up as traps. He was exiled because he started to jump the gun and started destroying planets that could have been evacuated.

It showed to a new extent the Imperium's dire straits. Instead of being able to rely on its numbers of Guardsmen and fleets to smother its enemies or even SM to somehow make a heroic effort, the Imperium was forced to divert its enemies into fighting each other. It's different from the usual SM hero saves the day against all odds and beats the nasty boss Tyranid causing all the Tyranids to suddenly fall apart in cohesion and allow the book to wrap up. That story template was used already at Tarsis Ultra. Though it defeated one fleet, it didn't stop the rest of Leviathan. However GW doesn't do a very good job of portraying that because of all the SM stories where they save the day, to the point where the question seems less "Why doesn't the Imperium fall yet?" to "Why hasn't the Imperium conquered everyone and won already?"


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gert wrote:
Octarius was always set up to be a loser's game though. It sent a tendril into Ork space and it bought the Imperium time but then the Imperium had to then set up another cordon to stop the war from spilling out and both Xenos started getting stronger. Even if GW hadn't done a new book it was never going to end well for the Imperium.

Also, Kryptman wasn't exiled because he destroyed worlds that had been evacuated or set up as traps. He was exiled because he started to jump the gun and started destroying planets that could have been evacuated.

No, he was exiled because the others wailed at the cost of committing the largest act of Imperial genocide since the Horus Heresy (the Codex's phrasing). He destroyed about 300 worlds according to the 4th edition Tyranid Codex. The Imperium does not have the shipping capacity to evacuate whole planetary populations. It may evacuate the important people but it still leaves the planet and the population as biomass for the Tyranids.

Dude come on, five edits. I can't have a proper discussion if you change what you've written after I post my reply.

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

Planets are even harder to make

They are literally everywhere. The Imperium has a million worlds. Just the Orion Arm (a "minor" spiral arm that includes Sol) has 800 million stars. There are 800 worlds for every world the Imperium has just on the same spiral arm as Sol. Scale in space tends to be pretty crazy.

 AtoMaki wrote:

Tsagualsa wrote:

 Gert wrote:
Because throwing ships at planets is generally considered wasteful and ships are hard to make, especially capital class.

Planets are even harder to make

They are literally everywhere. The Imperium has a million worlds. Just the Orion Arm (a "minor" spiral arm that includes Sol) has 800 million stars. There are 800 worlds for every world the Imperium has just on the same spiral arm as Sol. Scale in space tends to be pretty crazy.

Habitable worlds are a rarity, even with the Imperium's technology allowing for broadening of what habitable means. An airless ball of rock with no particularly rare resources is not going to be worth the bother of colonizing let alone terraforming.

Lifeless rocks are where the Imperium puts prisons. A sealed facility with artificial or enhanced gravity is easy enough to build and you don't need to really worry about escapees because the rest of the planet is utterly desolate.
The Imperium could also build listening outposts, Mechanicus research bases, and Astartes training grounds, or use them as anchors for trade stations or dockyards. Plenty of uses.

 Gert wrote:
Lifeless rocks are where the Imperium puts prisons. A sealed facility with artificial or enhanced gravity is easy enough to build and you don't need to really worry about escapees because the rest of the planet is utterly desolate.
The Imperium could also build listening outposts, Mechanicus research bases, and Astartes training grounds, or use them as anchors for trade stations or dockyards. Plenty of uses.

The penal colonies that have been portrayed have all been basically mining worlds, so the world still had some mineral resources of note. There are going to be many many more unremarkable balls of rock with no significant resources though.
Listening posts, research posts, trade stations, etc... all mean there is some other value to the world, such as its location.

The point however was that despite the raw number of planets being huge, only a small fraction are going to have any value (whether material or otherwise) and only a tiny fraction are going to be habitable. That is why the Imperium values its real estate and does not just Exterminatus at every threat.

 AtoMaki wrote:
I think it will be (33000000000*2.3^2)/2 = 2.88x10^21 Joules. As a comparison, it is roughly ten times modern Humanity's entire energy usage (3.9x10^20 Joules in 2013).

Your math is wrong

Energy is 0.5mV^2, not 0.5(mV)^2.

Exponents have priority over multiplication. You first square the 2.3 and then multiply all together. What you did was multiply the velocity with the mass and then square the result, which gives a hilariously larger result.

The order of the operations matters a lot.

 Tyran wrote:

 AtoMaki wrote:
I think it will be (33000000000*2.3^2)/2 = 2.88x10^21 Joules. As a comparison, it is roughly ten times modern Humanity's entire energy usage (3.9x10^20 Joules in 2013).

Your math is wrong

Energy is 0.5mV^2, not 0.5(mV)^2.

The order of the operations matters a lot.

As my old physics teacher used to say, always carry your units and check out if your end result works out to the right unit before even touching a calculator

Iracundus wrote:
The penal colonies that have been portrayed have all been basically mining worlds, so the world still had some mineral resources of note. There are going to be many many more unremarkable balls of rock with no significant resources though.
Listening posts, research posts, trade stations, etc... all mean there is some other value to the world, such as its location.

The point however was that despite the raw number of planets being huge, only a small fraction are going to have any value (whether material or otherwise) and only a tiny fraction are going to be habitable. That is why the Imperium values its real estate and does not just Exterminatus at every threat.

A mining world does not need to be a habitable world when the power claiming it can produce facilities to counter the lack of habitability. I also never claimed the Imperium is trigger-happy with Exterminatus, in fact, I explicitly argued the opposite.

 Gert wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
The penal colonies that have been portrayed have all been basically mining worlds, so the world still had some mineral resources of note. There are going to be many many more unremarkable balls of rock with no significant resources though.
Listening posts, research posts, trade stations, etc... all mean there is some other value to the world, such as its location.

The point however was that despite the raw number of planets being huge, only a small fraction are going to have any value (whether material or otherwise) and only a tiny fraction are going to be habitable. That is why the Imperium values its real estate and does not just Exterminatus at every threat.

A mining world does not need to be a habitable world when the power claiming it can produce facilities to counter the lack of habitability. I also never claimed the Imperium is trigger-happy with Exterminatus, in fact, I explicitly argued the opposite.

A mining world would still need to have enough mineral resources to justify the effort of building and maintaining facilities with life support. Not all planets will have enough resources to justify being made into a mining world. See again my earlier post about only a fraction of planets having any value to the Imperium as a whole to be worth colonizing, and yes by that I mean also establishing sealed habitats or bases. The Imperium does not mine every single airless ball of rock because the costs outweigh the benefits.

Regarding Kryptman, he was right but up to a point. His Exterminatus cordon made sense as those were worlds that were doomed and the IoM would never be able to defend.

But his gambit was pure arrogance and stupidity. He believed he could control both the Orks and Tyranids and the result was a FUBAR situation that the IoM has no hope to contain.

Kryptman is the kind of smart donkey-cave that is usually right but when feths up he does it apocalyptically. And he is too prideful to admit he fethed up and thus can only double down.

 Tyran wrote:
Regarding Kryptman, he was right but up to a point. His Exterminatus cordon made sense as those were worlds that were doomed and the IoM would never be able to defend.

But his gambit was pure arrogance and stupidity. He believed he could control both the Orks and Tyranids and the result was a FUBAR situation that the IoM has no hope to contain.

Kryptman is the kind of smart donkey-cave that is usually right but when feths up he does it apocalyptically. And he is too prideful to admit he fethed up and thus can only double down.

It's not like the Imperium had another option or other bright ideas at that point. The Imperium at that point did not have enough resources to go in a head to head slugging match with Leviathan, and desperately needed time to recover and also to deal with all the other myriad of threats it faced. The Warriors of Ultramar book acknowledged that their special toxin was a one off McGuffin that would not work again or against another tendril of Leviathan.

 Tyran wrote:

Energy is 0.5mV^2, not 0.5(mV)^2.

Oopsie

 AtoMaki wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

Energy is 0.5mV^2, not 0.5(mV)^2.

Oopsie

Come on, dude. It's not like this is rocket science or anything.

Also to be fair the given figures are ridiculous. 33 million tonnes is very light for the given dimensions. As in you could give it an additional zero and it would likely still float on water.

But also I don't believe there is any way to get around the issue that any ship that is able to move at interplanetary scales in days or weeks rather than months or years is inherently a weapon of mass destruction. Specially if said ship is a kilometer or more in length.

Space is massive, but that also means you need massive amounts of energy to move around in space. At least if you want to get somewhere in decent time.

 Tyran wrote:
Also to be fair the given figures are ridiculous. 33 million tonnes is very light for the given dimensions. As in you could give it an additional zero and it would likely still float on water.

To be fair, a Nimitz carrier can also float on water...

I always reckoned that the majority of volume within such vessels is empty storage areas, spaces between armour, and the engine interiors. The given tonnage may be the empty weight. The fuel is usually described as gas, although it is probably compressed for storage (or maybe not for better damage control?).

I feel monitors should be the dense ships- slow with small engines, no need for massive stores, extra focus on armour and weaponry.

But also I don't believe there is any way to get around the issue that any ship that is able to move at interplanetary scales in days or weeks rather than months or years is inherently a weapon of mass destruction. Specially if said ship is a kilometer or more in length.

Space is massive, but that also means you need massive amounts of energy to move around in space. At least if you want to get somewhere in decent time.

Well, they routinely are shown to be weapons of mass destruction. For example, a mass conveyancer in orbit went down over a major battle on Tallarn in the Horus Heresy, and ended the entire battle by itself- wiped out both sides with few survivors across much of a continent. The vessel was deliberately sabotaged knowing the troops it contained would swing the battle in favour of the Traitors, and the sabotage team knew the vessel's destruction would kill both sides of the battle. They simply figured mutual destruction was better than losing.

I think the only reason we don't see ships used as rams more is the ships are valuable and hard to replace.

 Haighus wrote:

I think the only reason we don't see ships used as rams more is the ships are valuable and hard to replace.

Have you looked at Imperial ships (not the old ones that are now in the hands of Chaos but the ones in use now by the Imperium)? They have an armored prow...and a ram. Ramming as a tactic is built into Imperial ship design and fleet doctrine.

 Haighus wrote:

To be fair, a Nimitz carrier can also float on water...

Sure but assuming there was such a thing as a 5 kilometer long Nimitz ultra-mega-duper-super-carrier, it would weight around 335 million metric tons (and it would still be able to float on water).

Iracundus wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

I think the only reason we don't see ships used as rams more is the ships are valuable and hard to replace.

Have you looked at Imperial ships (not the old ones that are now in the hands of Chaos but the ones in use now by the Imperium)? They have an armored prow...and a ram. Ramming as a tactic is built into Imperial ship design and fleet doctrine.

Not into planets though, which was the context. The question was why does the Imperium need exterminatus-class weapons when it could ram planets with ships.

Ramming other vessels and space installations is generally survivable for Imperial vessels. Ramming planetery bodies is not.

Tyran wrote:

 Haighus wrote:

To be fair, a Nimitz carrier can also float on water...

Sure but assuming there was such a thing as a 5 kilometer long Nimitz ultra-mega-duper-super-carrier, it would weight around 335 million metric tons (and it would still be able to float on water).

Fair. So an order of magnitude greater. The listed weight would fit better for the older 3km length for cruisers.

I wonder how much all the stores, fuel, and ammunition could reasonably weigh if 33 megatons is just the empty tonnage. Obviously unlikely to be 9 times the weight of the vessel, but may be as much again.

I think FFG did lowball the weight, but now we have that as canon to work with.