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Well unless the planet has an effective battery of anti-orbital cannon on a huge coastal installation that's also protected by huge void shields. Whilst the land-side of it is protected by a huge mountain range thus making a land ground assault insanely difficult.

Or (as oft happens) both sides have fleets in orbit so you can't waste time bombarding key installations on the ground because you're being shot at

Flesh and Iron by Henry Zou had a carrier in it IIRC.

 Overread wrote:
Well unless the planet has an effective battery of anti-orbital cannon on a huge coastal installation that's also protected by huge void shields. Whilst the land-side of it is protected by a huge mountain range thus making a land ground assault insanely difficult.

Or (as oft happens) both sides have fleets in orbit so you can't waste time bombarding key installations on the ground because you're being shot at

Which also raises the possibility of orbital defence batteries on naval assets of sufficient size.

Not necessarily common, but for any planet that’s roughly Earth equivalent in land/sea ratio? They’d make sense.

Consider the Pacific Ocean. A huge, wet expanse of Not Much Very Much. If your orbital defences are purely land based, such a feature is a weakness. Get an enemy ship in low geostationary orbit, and you’ve now strictly limited options for swatting it from the ground. Add in sea bases (ideally mobile ones) and you can cover it, any mobility making it damned difficult for the enemy to blast a gap. You’ve at least some chance of dodging direct hits, and have some capacity to shake up your grid, redistributing your assets.

Submersibles could easily carry surface to orbit missiles, remaining largely hidden, or at least much harder to detect.

Mass and boat physics is something fairly easily danced around. Suspensors and Anti-Grav may be relatively rare, but they do exist. In this theoretical application, you don’t need to lift the whole boat out the water. Just offset some of its mass to aid buoyancy and speed. Perhaps only temporary when deploying to a new location.

Also lets consider not every war is going to be world-wide in scale. Planets are BIG and in the 40K setting some are way bigger than Earth.

So in general you've got worlds where you could have lots of local warfare and contention which is big enough to warrant larger scale operations - like ships on sea - but in the grand scheme of things isn't big enough to warrant the Imperium sending a battlefleet in high orbit to bombard your world. Not to mention the radiation and other blowout from mass-firepower being used on that scale.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Consider the Pacific Ocean. A huge, wet expanse of Not Much Very Much. If your orbital defences are purely land based, such a feature is a weakness. Get an enemy ship in low geostationary orbit, and you’ve now strictly limited options for swatting it from the ground. Add in sea bases (ideally mobile ones) and you can cover it, any mobility making it damned difficult for the enemy to blast a gap. You’ve at least some chance of dodging direct hits, and have some capacity to shake up your grid, redistributing your assets.

This seems to assume land-based base defences can only shoot straight up - so need to get to the Pacific Ocean in order to shoot something in orbit above the Pacific Ocean. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have that issue today, never mind in the 40k universe.

Personally if you want Navies to be relevant, I wouldn't go for anything akin to OTL. Forget the "Aircraft Carrier, but larger." Embrace instead 40k's crazy scale creep.

Have giant floating Ad Mech cities - population whatever sounds cool - floating around predominantly ocean worlds, extracting minerals from the ocean floor. Or they don't even need to float, just have giant submerged Hiveworlds, because I'm sure Bioshock can't claim copyright. There's now something worth fighting over on the world - and ships are the mechanism for how you'd do it.

Not necessarily straight up. But the greater the angle (lesser? Guess it depend if straight up is your zero degrees) the more atmosphere the shot needs to deal with.

Not an issue for space bound rockets, as those fly in an arc. But lasers and other weapons (kinetic shells or energy) it may limit firing solutions.

And so having ocean based ones, which can redeploy can mitigate that.

On submerged Hive Worlds, I think they’re already a thing? Might be confusing sources though.

Certainly we’ve seen inverted Hive Cities on death worlds, plunging deep rather than high.

One of the Eisenhorn books had him in a submerged hive with some kind of aquatic view.

I'm willing to bet there's a 40k version of General Westmoreland..

"The first rule of ocean combat is to remove the water.".*


*modified from the original.

regarding brown water navys: I image those also being quite convenient for garrison duty on a lot of worlds. If one imagines some jungle world similar to Brazil or sout east asia with a lot of heavy terrain that can not really be crossed by tanks, few if any roads but lots and lots of rivers of various sizes, patroling the world with armed and armored rivercraft is quite practical. And they can move with a lot less fuel than their terrestrial or aerial counterparts.

Wet navies likely are a huge defense bonus while it is unlikely to be worthy for the attacker to bring a significant wet navy force.

The advantages of a wet navy: considerably cheaper hulls, artillery platforms and mobile airfields than void ships, are only true as long as you don't need to move them from planet to planet. So if you are attacking an enemy planet, they are highly inefficient unless you can built them there, but if you are defending they are very damn useful.