Orbital Bombardment

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**theonetruedonut**

I'm curious as to how the creators of 40k explain how large standing armies, like imperial guard, orks, or 'nids, don't just get smashed by a lance strike or a nuke or railgun shot or what have you from orbit, destroying most of the army instantly. It seems to me that any large conglomeration of troops could be destroyed by a ship in orbit at minimal cost. Is their something I'm missing?

**Dawi-Marine'Va**

There are many variables, cost of the attack, possible space battles going on, the risk of hitting your own army, risk of destroying info/terrain/relics/money/something else your army wants, among other things.

**Trondheim**

Because you would most likly wipe out your own army as well. Orbital bombardment are not known to be a surgical strike, more like all hell comes to town

**Harriticus**

1.) The world is too important to reduce to rubble. Keep in mind that you're not just destroying cities or what have you with large-scale orbital bombardment. You'll re-arrange the geography, mess with the planets tectonics, maybe even shred it of its atmosphere. It's beyond devastating.
2.) The worlds vital installations and locations are protected by Void Shields
3.) The world is too well-defended by ground-to-space torpedoes silos, defense lasers, etc.. and a low-orbit bombardment would be too costly.
4.) The ships are too occupied with space-based action (usually the case with fighting Tyranids).
5.) Limited resources. The Imperial Navy is relatively small given its mission. It's stated in BFG that all of Fleet Obscurus operates 900 Cruisers (the most numerous kind of major combatant). That really isn't that much given its size and scope of its mission. Imperial starships can take centuries to make and are enormous investments, and a slowly dying art on top of that. This isn't Star Wars where the Empire churned out 30,000 Star Destroyers in 15 years. Because of all this, ships are too busy and the fleet is overstretched with more pressing missions. It's not uncommon for a ship to simply drop off its Guardsmen then leave the system, onto its next mission (this happens in 15 Hours for instance).

Keep in mind that to the Imperium, they'd rather lose 20 million guardsmen taking a mining world then the mining world itself. Imperial manpower is a nigh-infinite and self-replicating resource whereas the number of worlds it possesses is far more limited.

**Mahtamori**

40k has an odd cost-efficiency built into it, where it's simply costly and ineffective to use orbital bombardment. Additionally a lot of the time there are engagements in space which prevents bombardment of the surface. Add to this that the ultimate goal of the force most often capable of orbital bombardment (namely the Imperial Navy - i.e. Imperial Guard) has a strong tendency to wish to retain a functional planet afterwards.

Then you also have the other stuff. Orks generally don't like tactical bombardment since it's no fun, Chaos usually infiltrate and corrupt, Daemons are their own bombardment, Eldar usually do not engage in conflicts on the scale where their ships capable of orbital bombardment are involved, Tau are not the greatest in space, Space Marines usually prefer to get down to the surface so they can personally wake the Necrons from their slumber and later fight a glorious retreat and Dark Eldar simply don't have the capacity (nor inclination) to do it since they are webway-based and not a space faring force.
The only force I can't really say why they don't simply evacuate the atmosphere around planets more often are the Necrons.

Of course, there is the fact that the battles we do fight on the table are parts of a larger conflict where such battles are possible.

**Reanimator**

It's like mahtamori said: a bastardised version of the anthromorphic principle- if it was easy as all that there'd be no 40k. No 40k and you wouldn't be here asking the question..

**LastCameTheRaven**

I remember answering a similar question (albeit limited to IN) a few months ago; the answer, much like Harriticus said, was:

Well, there are several possible reasons.
- The world could be heavily defended with orbital and suborbital AA defences (missile and laser silos, void shield covering or any other equivalent), making an orbital assault impossible or at least extremely costly for the IN. So, dropping in specialized troops (SM, drop regiments, stormtroopers) via fast transports, covert insertion or teleportation to disable said defences could be a good idea (like in the initial phases of the Taros Campaign in IA vol.4).
But that's not always possible: heavy AA covered, well guarded and spread-out defences (meaning you cannot overwhelm them with a single surprise assault), lack of local intelligence (and homer beacons, making drop or teleportation attempt extremely risky) and terrain knowledge can limit the usufulness of such tactics, forcing imperial forces to land on some less-defended areas of the planet and move from there, attacking from the ground (a really good example of the reasons behind such tactics can be found in the first volume of the Siege of Vraks trilogy, IA vol.5).
In addition to that, you must always remember the basic truth of imperial strategy: life is expendable, tecnology is not (so wasting millions of lives is fine, risking ships is not).
- The installation, resources and materials (or civilians, but that tends to be a matter of secondary importance to the Imperium) that could be destroyed by an orbital bombing could be too valuable to waste. Think for example of an occupied forgeworld, hive world, shrine world or mining station: if you delete the opponents hidden there by bombing every single building form orbit, you could as well leave the planet to the enemy: the military action would bear no fruit (apart from denying resources to the enemy).
- It could be impossible or impractical to eradicate the enmy from orbit: air force can pound the enemy, disperse his (its) formations, break his supply lines, but it's alwayse the infantry that has to fight on the ground to clear him out. Think for example about warfare in a urban area or in a forested terrain: you could never know where the enemy is hidden through simple orbital scanning: you need troops on the ground to guide air strikes and make sure the enemy doesn't just slip away. Or think about trench warfare: a well entrenched opponent could be virtually impossible to destroy without ground forces to fisically occupy enemy positions.
- Imperial forces could not hold air superiority: without total air domination, parking a battleship in low orbit to rain down lance strikes, torpedos and macrocannon shells with any possible precision would make it a sitting duck, easy for even ground based aircrafts to target (40k ships, imperial ones in particular, never struck me as extremely agile, expecially in similar circumstances, with the obvious exception of Eldar ones) and potentially slow reaction to surprise attacks from enemy forces hidden inside the sistem or jumping out of the warp (a continous menace that forces most of the ships to perform sweeps or maintain picket lines at the edge of the sistem or near jump points).