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 TheCustomLime wrote:
Damn Kain. Color me Impressed. Are you a drug lord?

I do Guard (Imperial Army) , Space Marines (Blood Angels/Vanilla Counts as and HH UM) and Kayoss Space Marines (Word Bearers). I don't care for Tyranids since I don't like an army that is undefeatable in 40k or other gaming settings. It's like a big slap in the face to the fans of the Imperium, Necrons, Tau etc. to know that they'll be wiped out no matter what by someone else's army. However, a big threat is always nice which is why I like Chaos.

I also like to imagine Chaos tanks without those big ass trophy racks the Chaos rhino kit gives you. Those things are just so stupid to put on a AFV. I can kinda get the spiky dozer blade but not those things.

I had upper-crust parents with money to burn when I started in the 90s and landed myself decently paying jobs (and a lucky lottery ticket) and married a wife with a similarly fair paying job.

I combined this with being an impulse buyer who was thankfully addicted to gaming rather than drugs and voila; I ended up with enough models to buy a decent home if I sold them.

But I never will.

Never.

Because it's my




I could have been living much better hadn't I pissed so much money down the drain to feed my gaming addiction but that's okay.

I could have invested that 100k I earned at the lottery much more intelligently but feth it; toy soldiers.

All the toy soldiers.

 Peregrine wrote:

 TheCustomLime wrote:
If only! Why don't you like Tyranids, Peregrine?

Two reasons:

1) They suck from a narrative perspective. They have no characters to identify with or storylines to follow, their entire role in the setting is to be a faceless force of nature. And even as a faceless force of nature they suck, since GW makes sure to remind us over and over again that you can't ever win against the Tyranids, reducing the "story" potential to "how long before we die". A good villain needs depth beyond "we eat you because we eat you".

2) They embody the worst "bio-tech" fanboyism. No, making things out of organic materials does not work. Flesh is never going to be as effective as metal when making tank armor, throwing blobs of acid is never going to be as effective as guns with explosive shells (or tactical nukes), etc. And 40k is not Star Trek with weapon "frequencies" to evolve to defeat: no amount of handwaving and saying "the Tyranids are evolving OMFG!!!!!!" is going to let them magically adapt to being shot in the face or vaporized by a nuke. The icing on the cake of horribleness is the sheer idiocy of having alien invaders from outside our galaxy that are somehow still compatible enough with our DNA that they can adapt by eating our corpses and absorbing our genes. FFS GW, a Tyranid swarm getting upgrades that way makes about as much sense as adding tree DNA to a human baby so that it will grow some nice pretty flowers and drop pine cones everywhere.

(And note that #1 also applied to the old Necron fluff. Say what you want about the quality of the new version, but at least it's better than the old "we're Tyranids, but metal" version.)

 Kain wrote:
To Peregrine, armies like Chaos Daemons and Tyranids don't fit his definition of realistic and sensible, thus he pretends they don't exist and makes his dislike of them rather vocal.

No, actually I'm fine with demons in general, I just hate that they're an entire separate army instead of being summoned in a chaos cult/CSM army. And I like orks, which are just as unrealistic as Tyranids (complete with absurd "our technology works because we believe it works" magic), but at least have the redeeming quality of being an interesting army for other reasons.

You know I disagree with you on many parts but I can really understand the dislike with Nids (then again I also have some problems with Necrons for similar reasons). Along with that, personal canon. one day, the CSM and Chaos Daemon codex shall be merged again (it'll never happen)

 Darth Bob wrote:

 TheCustomLime wrote:

I still want to know how they are any good at eating galaxies if their main means of finding suitable worlds to chow down on is throwing scouts around the target galaxy and seeing what sticks. Unless they have some handwavery about how they can tell a star has habitable planets by it's color or something.

They're attracted to our galaxy by the Astronomican. Since there's a clear psychic presence in our galaxy, the Hive Mind probably concluded that there must also be life. That's probably how they devoured other galaxies as well. Also, Genestealers and Genestealer Cults act as a psychic beacon that attract Tyranids to worlds that they inhabit.

Right, but how do they know that "X" star has habitable planets unless there are Genestealers there? If that is their main and only means of locating suitable worlds than they are really only eating a small portion of the available biological nutrition since they could only find worlds settled by space faring people or find them by a chance landing by a space hulk. I have another mini-hypothesis about Tyranids in that they don't actually scour entire galaxies clean of all available biomass. They just eat whatever space faring civilizations they encounter and, rather than going through the long and fruitless task of searching each star system for life, they just go to another galaxy containing a new civ that has discovered warp travel like the Imperium has. I am sure they have done repeat feedings on the same galaxy.

But that does mean they would spend most of their time traveling through intergalactic space spending biomass. Which is also really an inefficient means of growing. However, trying to comb an entire galaxy for suitable earth-like planets would take a few billion years if not more which wouldn't add up with the statement that they have eaten thousands of galaxies. In addition, they'd spend most of their time traveling between stars spending biomass. You know what? I'm just going to say that the line about them consuming thousands of galaxies is bull and that they've come from either a nearby dwarf galaxy, originate from some unknown part of the Milky Way or from a distant galaxy.

In any case, I'd be happy if the Tyranids were replaced with a nanomechanical berserker swarm as I talked about in my sig.

 Kain wrote:


If I had a faction of robotic tyranid like enemies added to 40k, they'd quite quickly end up outnumbering the Tyranids by a massive margin because there's so much more material for the creation of inorganic devices than there is biomass for living beings.

Even disregarding nanotech, there is two trillion tons of biomass on the Earth, that's a big number right?

Well the Earth is primarily Iron and Nickel by weight when taken as a whole (the 50% oxygen, 25% silicon figure is mostly based on the crust), to the point where there is sextillions of tons of metal on the Earth.

That is literally a billion times more matter to work with.

So what the Tyranids would need to strip an entire galaxy of life to achieve, my robot doomswarm would need only a single planet.

And this doomswarm would keep on growing, and it can devour any planet or space rock, not just those with biomass or chemicals useful for organic life. So it can eat the whole solar system too, and then this swarm keeps on growing, devouring every solid object it finds, and by now dwarfs the rest of the galaxy in numbers.

When it runs into an inhabited planet, it can throw what amounts to Hive Fleet leviathan times a thousand with the most generous possible estimates, at this one single planet, and it would be at best a drop in the bucket of it's total resources.

I keep on going with this berserker von neumann nightmare until the entirety of the galaxy is cleansed of anything but these constantly adapting, geometrically self improving machines that can keep on building smarter and smarter versions of their own A.I to design more and more sophisticated technology.

Even without FTL I could clean the entire galaxy in a few million years, with FTL I'd overwhelm every faction in 40k in perhaps even a few centuries, even Chaos flickers and dies as I completely cleanse the galaxy of all life capable of emotion. Maybe I can even kill everyone sooner depending on how fast I can von neumann my way to victory.

So that's right, a competently designed von neumann swarm I literally just scribbled out a few minutes ago, would break the entire setting through simply outproducing everyone by a ridiculous margin until I can fairly say that I have more capital ships than the Imperium has guardsmen.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

Right, but how do they know that "X" star has habitable planets unless there are Genestealers there? If that is their main and only means of locating suitable worlds than they are really only eating a small portion of the available biological nutrition since they could only find worlds settled by space faring people or find them by a chance landing by a space hulk. I have another mini-hypothesis about Tyranids in that they don't actually scour entire galaxies clean of all available biomass. They just eat whatever space faring civilizations they encounter and, rather than going through the long and fruitless task of searching each star system for life, they just go to another galaxy containing a new civ that has discovered warp travel like the Imperium has. I am sure they have done repeat feedings on the same galaxy.

But that does mean they would spend most of their time traveling through intergalactic space spending biomass. Which is also really an inefficient means of growing. However, trying to comb an entire galaxy for suitable earth-like planets would take a few billion years if not more which wouldn't add up with the statement that they have eaten thousands of galaxies. In addition, they'd spend most of their time traveling between stars spending biomass. You know what? I'm just going to say that the line about them consuming thousands of galaxies is bull and that they've come from either a nearby dwarf galaxy, originate from some unknown part of the Milky Way or from a distant galaxy.

Well, I mean, they just eat biomass. I don't think there's any confirmed requirement that the planet needs to have people or intelligent life on it. I've never thought of Tyranids as particularly picky about the nature of the biomass they consume. So long as there's some form of biomass (which can include microscopic organisms and sediment) they'll pay the world a visit. The Milky Way just happens to be particularly full of indigenous (or space-faring) species. We have no idea how their metabolisms work but it's a well-known fact that they recycle their biomass, so they don't necessarily "expend" it. By this process of recycling, they could exist indefinitely just drifting around looking for food. Many species of bacteria and parasite essentially float around waiting for a host to latch onto and they are very successful at it. There's no reason to believe Tyranids don't or can't do the same.

Kain, Kain, Kain... that makes sense. This is 40k! Basic Astronomy, Physics and Biology can all go die in a fire. We add spike to tanks, give things with no digestive tracks a tongue and have tank designs that were outdated before the 2nd World War.



@Darth Bob

The problem is finding the damned planets in the first place. When you look at a star all you see is a twinkling point of light. Since the Tyranids don't have any egg heads to look at these stars the Hive Mind has no fething clue what is where. Google a picture of the Andromeda galaxy. That is the fullest extent that the Hive Mind knows about the system. Now, if there are points of light saying "FOOD HERE" of course they'll go. The problem is that these points represent a minority of total planets, even those that have biomass, so they just consume maybe 5-10% of the biomass of a galaxy if they are lucky. Once the points of "FOOD HERE" have been eaten... what do you do then? You could go to each tiny point of light but it's likely that you will get nothing since the Nids have a very narrow band of matter that they can actually eat. If they could consume gas planets (Which, at this point, seem to make up the majority of worlds in our Galaxy) then they wouldn't even bother traveling very much since they could have spent the entirety of the Universe's existence scouring their home galaxy clean of these worlds.

It's just an issue with scale. Games Workshop's writers tend to put out numbers that they think sound cool without putting much thought into them. Eating thousands of galaxies sound cool until you realize that the space between galaxies is enormous. They would spend more time spending Biomass than they would actually getting it. You could recycle but organic systems are inherently not 100% efficient. If they managed to do that they wouldn't need to bother with this whole eating thing. Then you run into the problem of diminishing returns. Their first few feasts may have increased their numbers greatly but at one point (Which they have already arrived at, most likely) eating another galaxy won't net them much more thanks to their constant losses. The Tyranid Hive Fleet that is attacking here isn't much bigger than the one that attacked the previous galaxy. Which is why the statement "The Tyranids have consumed thousands of galaxies" isn't all that impressive when you realize that their growth was incredibly slow over time. At least when it comes to assessing how huge the actual Hive Fleet is. It is big, to be fair, but not as big as putting the total biomass obtained from 1000 galaxies together. Not by a long shot.

So really what would benefit the Nids is to either figure out ways to start utilizing hydrogen/helium gas, stop their terrestrial planet fetish and to stop being so aggressive towards sentient life. Eventually someone is going to figure out the Nids' game since there is only so much you can do with organic life. If they turned towards sucking gas and eating asteroids they'd be much better off. But GW needs their space bugs so that'll never happen.

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Kain, Kain, Kain... that makes sense. This is 40k! Basic Astronomy, Physics and Biology can all go die in a fire. We add spike to tanks, give things with no digestive tracks a tongue and have tank designs that were outdated before the 2nd World War.

Wrong! The tanks were never even tanks! In reality it was a tractor STC with a battlecannon shoved on the top

Interestingly, for all the lethality of Genestealers, they still get their asses kicked by Terminators.

The Matrix shows what happened on earth during the war with the Men of Iron.

After Chaos won the 13th Black Crusade, the World Eaters reformed and subjugated the Imperium, turning into a Khornate Empire, like the Sabbat Worlds, but on a much larger scale.
Like the prophecy...

The Age of Kharneth will begin
With Fire and with Storm.
The Gates of Hell shall open wide
And through them shall outpour
A tide of Blood, in Daemon's form,
The host of Mankind's doom.

The Tau ethereals (and their "they came out of nowhere" origin) are a Special Circumstances operation to fix the 40k universe. And it is working.

 Veteran of The Long War wrote:
-All the C'tan except the Void Dragon, the Deciever, The Nightbringer and the Outsider are shattered instead of all of them.
-the Tyranids have committed a third of there forces to fighting and they have 3 more massive hive fleets left in space, the biggest of which contains the Hive Mind itself.
-Abaddon has taken most of Cadia and allmost all of Segmentum Obscuras during the 13th Crusade and most of Segmentum Pacificus during the Night of 1000 Rebellions. He has since established The Empire of Man and Chaos United across these two realms and will soon launch his final Crusade to conquer the Imperium and become the New Emperor of Mankind.
-Perpetuals were part of the ancient Shaman who created the Emperor but decided not to commit suicide.
-Magnus The Red is working with Ahriman to stab Tzeentch in the back by finding out his true name from the Black library and punishing him for what he did to the Thousand Sons.
-Kaldor Draigo only defeated a tired and wounded Mortarion who had killed all of Draigo's Brotherhood.
-Kaldor Draigo's victories in the warp are illusions created to turn him to chaos but non have worked.
-Constantin Valdor was crucified and flayed by his Custodes Brethren and entombed in a status field right across from the Golden Throne.
-The Necrons are made up of 2 factions: the loyalists who still serve the 4 living C'tan and the traitor under the Silent King who fight against him.
-Malal is the original God who was deposed by Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle. His destruction split the Warp in two creating The Immaterium and The Materium and Malal currently resides at the bottom of The Well of Eternity, waiting to rise again.

I really like the way you think

I don't particularly like Necrons, first because of their original shoehorn-based entry into the IP, and second because their new incarnation are Tomb Kings in Space and Tomb Kings have never appealed to me.

But.

Newcrons are and will remain the only good thing Matt Ward has done for the 40K background in my eyes, because the rewrite finally allowed me to deal with the fluff-atrocity that is the "hurr durr Da Emprah made da Dragun do it hurr" retcon of the Mechanicus' origins. Besides selectively ignoring large parts of the novel Mechanicum of course, which was annoying since in other respects it's quite good.

The combination of the new fluff about Necrons and C'Tan with the story, such as it was, from Xenology gives me all the components necessarity to reinterpret the events of Mechanicum such that; only a shard of the Dragon is imprisoned on Mars, the allegorical vision that Dalia has relates to a Necron battling the Dragon on Earth(or rather aforementioned shard of it - a primitive culture could easily conclude "metal robot = knight") and the parts which were supposed to hint that Da Emprah was psychically stripping ideas out of the Dragon's mind and feeding them to the proto-Techpriests are actually the shard's memories of being whole and the Necrons shattering it, the "guardian" bloke is actually a Necron Lord(perhaps even the one that battled the shard). The Lord needs Dalia to take over as guardian because his form is failing(why is unimportant, maybe he ate a poison rusty cog or something) as is the modest tomb complex he inhabits, and he wants to ensure that the Dragon-shard remains secure and in the control of his own Dynasty when the Necrons reawaken. The Necron ships that raid Mars in M41 are of that same Dynasty coming to reclaim the shard.

And once all the annoyances from Mechanicum are thus explained away, the Mechanicus can go back to their far superior origin fluff.

All the numbers thrown out by GW (at least the old ones) are actually multiplied by at least 10. The Administratum uses a wonky numbering system due to the massive numbers they deal with. There are 10000 of each of Codex Chapter of Space Marines, plus initiates and "retired" older marines who run support or pilot vehicles. In some parts of the galaxy, the numbers are even more abbreviated, making the actual numbers 100 or even 1000 times more.

While Chaos Marines have their fair share of raving psychos, they also have many tactically brilliant warriors who can outmaneuver the Imperium and other Xenos races at every turn due to their centuries of combat experience (yes, even Khorne aligned marines; ESPECIALLY Khorne aligned marines). There are also many Chaos worshipers who aren't mustache twirling bad guys. They see the Imperium as an evil, backwards, fascist empire (which it is) and Chaos as the only force that can truly save mankind. The line between radical Inquisitor and saner Chaos worshiper is a thin one. Also, the Xanthites, more grounded Chaos worshipers are right. Learning to use the warp in a positive way IS the only way mankind can secure its future.

Humans have more psychic potential than any other race. This is why Alpha Plus psykers can do things even Farseers can't. It's just that the Eldar have mastered their psychic power while humans are still immature and unstable. The Imperium's treatment of psykers makes it incredibly difficult for psykers to get proper training, making the problem worse. The Schola Psychanum isn't allowed to study the warp, so it actually teaches very little beyond a few techniques that help weaker psykers avoid perils of the warp. The psychic screening process kills stronger psykers. Very strong Psykers like Ravenor are actually unsanctioned and illegal, although once an Inquisitor gives them a pass, it doesn't really matter. Because Inquisitors are the only ones in the Imperium who can actually study the warp, they're the only ones that can properly train stronger psykers.

The humans who worshiped Chaos on Cadia started as Eldar slaves who started worshiping Chaos after the Fall killed their Eldar masters and gave them visions of the Warp.

The Thousand Sons make new Rubric Marines out of captured Marines from other Legions and Chapters. Once the Rubric is recited, the Marine is enslaved to the Tsons Sorcerers who performed the Rubric. Chaos Marines in general take in just as many new recruits as loyalist Space Marines.

The Tau Ethereals were made by the Eldar, but not not the Craftworld Eldar. They were created by the Harlequins, guided by Cegorach.

Necron Pariahs still exist. They were created by the Deceiver, who managed to escape the shattering of the other C'tan (basically, the big 4 C'tan are still alive and kicking, like someone else said earlier in the thread). Also, the Deceiver has actually been manipulating the entire Officio Assassinorum since its inception to use against the rebellious Necrons, the rival C'tan, and the rest of his enemies. The Culexus Temple, the C'tan Phase Sword the Callidus Assassins use, the Necronesque skull motif, none of it is coincidence.

 Peregrine wrote:
The Tau ethereals (and their "they came out of nowhere" origin) are a Special Circumstances operation to fix the 40k universe. And it is working.

As much as this made me smile, I think I will choose to go with Necron involvement of some kind on this one.

I think that whenever we hear about how "grim dark" civilian life is in any faction it is just propaganda from the other factions. Not to say they aren't vicious and brutal to most everyone, and despotic, and all kinda evil... But it is exaggerated.

 Peregrine wrote:
[1) They suck from a narrative perspective. They have no characters to identify with or storylines to follow, their entire role in the setting is to be a faceless force of nature. And even as a faceless force of nature they suck, since GW makes sure to remind us over and over again that you can't ever win against the Tyranids, reducing the "story" potential to "how long before we die". A good villain needs depth beyond "we eat you because we eat you".

As somebody else mentioned in a previous thread came up, this characterisation is perfectly valid. Zombies, for example, have basically the same mindset and they're both commonly used and widely successful. We also see similar stuff with factions like the Zerg or the Borg. Meanwhile, in 40K, there's a large range of factions with widely varying characterisations, so you can get by on mostly ignoring the Tyranids if you want. I don't really see the harm in having one "mindless swarm" type faction. Clearly, it's an characterisation that sees some success, and holds some appeal to people.

As for them being the ultimate threat against which there is no victory, I think that fits in with 40K's grimdark atmosphere. It's more or less all about how the Imperium is facing ever more impending doom anyway, and the Tyranids fit in with the rest of the universe in that regard. And besides, it's not like the story is going to advance anyway. We're not actually going to see the Tyranids overrun the Milky Way and eat everything.

 Peregrine wrote:
2) They embody the worst "bio-tech" fanboyism. No, making things out of organic materials does not work. Flesh is never going to be as effective as metal when making tank armor, throwing blobs of acid is never going to be as effective as guns with explosive shells (or tactical nukes), etc. And 40k is not Star Trek with weapon "frequencies" to evolve to defeat: no amount of handwaving and saying "the Tyranids are evolving OMFG!!!!!!" is going to let them magically adapt to being shot in the face or vaporized by a nuke. The icing on the cake of horribleness is the sheer idiocy of having alien invaders from outside our galaxy that are somehow still compatible enough with our DNA that they can adapt by eating our corpses and absorbing our genes. FFS GW, a Tyranid swarm getting upgrades that way makes about as much sense as adding tree DNA to a human baby so that it will grow some nice pretty flowers and drop pine cones everywhere.

Well, you know, suspension of disbelief and all that. A lot of fictional stories have questionable logic that wouldn't really hold up IRL. But the purpose of such things aren't to provide accurate recreations of real life things, their purpose is to entertain.

If all else fails it is believed that the hive-ships perform some form of spectrographic analysis of the radiation from the nearest stars to select a destination. This has been borne out by the fact that 72.3% of encounters with hive-ships (as opposed to the smaller drones) have taken place in systems containing class F2IV - K9V stars. This spectral band covers 81% of the worlds inhabited by humanity. -p. 7 BFG magazine issue #1, also reproduced in 3rd ed. Tyranid Codex

The above is from an in-character Imperial report on the apparent target selection preference of Tyranids. They have vanguard drone ships that range ahead of the main fleet as scouts and these ships either seed worlds with vanguard organisms such as Genestealers and/or report back directly to the fleet on targets. When all else fails, the Tyranids target star systems with stars known to be of the type humanity prefers. So the Tyranids as a whole are far more systematic and intelligent than some players are giving them credit for.

Biological weaponry like the airborne spores or the parasites, bacteria, and viruses that spread ahead of the actual Tyranid ground swarms would be horrifyingly effective at incapacitating the enemy. This includes civilian populations, and critical infrastructure and logistical framework supporting the opposing armies. The Tyranid Codex from 4th ed. describes some Imperial Guard that are already partially incapacitated with diseases before they ever make it into combat. The plants get taken over by the Tyranids and become toxic and unusable for others. Water sources get contaminated. The destroyed wrecks of tanks are also described as rapidly corroding and being overrun with Tyranid plant life, so even inanimate infrastructure would start degrading. Sure, military forces might survive better due to first access to uncontaminated supplies and protective gear, but think what a true infectious pandemic can do to a world's population along with the resulting panic, fear, and riots. And because they are spread microscopically, with possible incubation time, it is not as obvious or easy to detect or defend against.

 Kain wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

The new line is that the Tyranids have devoured a thousand galaxies and ended millions of civilizations.

The aged priest stepped up to the podium, bearing the ponderous tome from which all his sermons were delivered. The book boomed in the sepulchral chamber as he settled it onto the podium, clearing his throat as he turned back its age-worn covers.

"From the Book of Lamentations, chapter forty-two," he announced before clearing his throat once more, beginning his recital.

"And the Emperor looked out upon all that was presented to Him, the data-slates and the codices, the Journals and the scrolls penned by the albino squats, the books of Armament and Armories, and all the other sundry texts and missives from the farthest reaches of His Domains. The God-Emperor looked out upon these reports, rumors, myths, lies and legends, and stated that He, as the Emperor of Mankind, gave not one single feth about their contents, for it would be as He stated, neither lesser nor greater, to come neither before, nor after, but only at His Word. And they saw that it was good. Ave Imperator."

My head-canon says 12, so 12 it is.

Ah but my vision that everyone is going to die and everything everyone does is ultimately useless as they're all going to be swept away to leave eternal silence and lifeless ruins in a few thousand years is far more grimdark.

That isn't grimdark, that's boring. There are things worse than death.

Iracundus wrote:

If all else fails it is believed that the hive-ships perform some form of spectrographic analysis of the radiation from the nearest stars to select a destination. This has been borne out by the fact that 72.3% of encounters with hive-ships (as opposed to the smaller drones) have taken place in systems containing class F2IV - K9V stars. This spectral band covers 81% of the worlds inhabited by humanity. -p. 7 BFG magazine issue #1, also reproduced in 3rd ed. Tyranid Codex

The above is from an in-character Imperial report on the apparent target selection preference of Tyranids. They have vanguard drone ships that range ahead of the main fleet as scouts and these ships either seed worlds with vanguard organisms such as Genestealers and/or report back directly to the fleet on targets. When all else fails, the Tyranids target star systems with stars known to be of the type humanity prefers. So the Tyranids as a whole are far more systematic and intelligent than some players are giving them credit for.

Biological weaponry like the airborne spores or the parasites, bacteria, and viruses that spread ahead of the actual Tyranid ground swarms would be horrifyingly effective at incapacitating the enemy. This includes civilian populations, and critical infrastructure and logistical framework supporting the opposing armies. The Tyranid Codex from 4th ed. describes some Imperial Guard that are already partially incapacitated with diseases before they ever make it into combat. The plants get taken over by the Tyranids and become toxic and unusable for others. Water sources get contaminated. The destroyed wrecks of tanks are also described as rapidly corroding and being overrun with Tyranid plant life, so even inanimate infrastructure would start degrading. Sure, military forces might survive better due to first access to uncontaminated supplies and protective gear, but think what a true infectious pandemic can do to a world's population along with the resulting panic, fear, and riots. And because they are spread microscopically, with possible incubation time, it is not as obvious or easy to detect or defend against.

Ah, okay, that is a lot better than other fluff suggests. They shoot a bunch of cheap probes at stars and sees what sticks. Still not a good way to harvest a galaxy of life (I don't think there really is a good way to go about it. At least for a faction like the Nids.) but Warhammer's relationship with science is like Twilight's relationship with the vampire mythos.

Another thing. The Boltgun does not have enough recoil to rip someone's arm off. It has a very low amount of recoil because the built in rocket in each bolt generates most of the speed of a flying bolt. You can fire it with one hand unaided without serious injury (You could sprain your wrist, though). However, Astartes Boltguns are built with much more dense metals so that their inhuman strength doesn't crush the things when they handle them. This makes them very heavy. This is untrue of the Bolt Pistol, though, which has a lot more recoil since the weapon requires more muzzle velocity due to it's role as a close assault weapon. You can still fire it unaided but you need to brace yourself.