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I get the feeling that a properly infested (Ork) world, or properly tained (Chaos) world would have a rather bad time with a influx of a Nid swarm, granted this idea strikes me as foolish, but I was replaying Star Craft 1 last night, and that mission with the Zerg Beacon got me thinking. Did that ever get tried anywhere other than the Ork planet where the Ork Horde is fighting off a Nid Horde, and it's getting out of control? Obviously this would require a tendril of a hive fleet to actually make contact with the specific world in question, and not go for any of the others, but I just want to know if this has ever been rationally considered in the fluff? Either by Imperial or by Xenos factions.

Yes, and it always ends badly. There's an Eisenhorn short story and at least one Deathwatch one (their might be a Cain one as well) about people trying to train 'Nids.

The Anphelion Project was set up to try and find weaknesses in the Tyranid hyper-evolution but the Nid's ended up breaking out and destroying the facility as well as the Inquisitorial investigation force sent to discover why contact had been lost.
Like Jurassic Park but with gribblies instead of dinos.

Deathwatch: Shadowbreaker deals with a..

*waves expansively at the Octarius Sector*

Basically what you’re suggesting but on a ludicrous scale.

Exterminatus planets in the path of the Hive Fleet, leaving them nothing to eat. Use fleet action to force them toward Octarius.

Let them eat Ork, deal with the fallout later.

It’s….not going well.

So has there ever been attempts at forcing Stealers to a planet in the grips of Chaos? Stealers evetually setup a Beacon to a hive fleet after sufficient time, correct?

Wasn't there a thing where Stealers can't mind steal someone already enthralled by Chaos? Or something like that. One of the Cain books?

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So has there ever been attempts at forcing Stealers to a planet in the grips of Chaos? Stealers evetually setup a Beacon to a hive fleet after sufficient time, correct?

Wasn't there a thing where Stealers can't mind steal someone already enthralled by Chaos? Or something like that. One of the Cain books?

In Spiral Dawn, we see some chaos vs GSC action. It seems like you can't really be mind whammied by the GSC once you've already got chaos in your noggin', and being brainwashed by the cult seems to make you pretty resistant to chaos. Yeah, excess, magic, and immortality are cool, but have you heard of serving the four-armed emperor? Plus, I'm pretty sure the GSC/'nids find chaos corruption to be repulsive/unappetizing.

What I'm getting at is that a planet that has already been overwhelmed by chaos is probably infertile soil for a 'stealer cult. So I wouldn't be surprised if any 'stealers dropped off on such a planet would fail to accrue the cult/physical transformations needed to become a beacon for the hivefleets. Plus, the hivemind has run into chaos worlds before and seems to have been pretty frustrated by the experience. Plus, I imagine such worlds make for questionable dietary choices. Plus, it takes a 'stealer multiple human generations to become a patriarch and reach beacon mode, so it would be quite the challenge to test the idea out. Presumably a chaos-controlled world isn't the easiest thing to spy on over the course of most of a century. Nor are stealth-specialist alien predators. Once you dropped the 'stealers off, you'd have a heck of a time knowing if/when they died.

I imagine your best bet would be to seed like, a thousand chaos worlds with 'stealers and have someone poke those planets a hundred years later to see if 'stealer cults had taken over. But that also sounds like a BIG and very heretical project. One that ultimately what? Lets you use tyranids as a really slow form of exterminatus while also adding fresh GSC vectors to the galaxy that might infect the imperium?

Yup. It happens in the novel The Infinite and the Divine. Trazyn sets a Genestealer on Orikan not entirely realising what it is, just dismissing it as some random curio from his collection (which he has thousands of similar specimens).

It goes horribly wrong afterwards, as now the maguffin planet that is the central plot of the novel has a Genestealer Cult uprising on its hands a few centuries later due to Trazyn simply being a dick to Orikan and trying to casually murder him with a random Stealer, which after the fight with Orikan runs off and turns itself into a Patriarch.

The imperium wants to take back worlds corrupted by chaos. Harder to do that after they’ve been stripped by tyranids. Exterminatus is only used under extreme circumstances, and there are too many unknown variables in trying to use a tyranid force rather than virus bombs or cyclonic Torpedoes. See the jokey assessment of the cost of throwing rocks at planets for exterminatus compared to just using virus bombs

There's also the fact that GSC can be corrupted by chaos.
There's even a small snippet in the GSC timetable from the last GSC dex of 8 mentioning a cult that fell to nurgle.
TBF though they literally crashlanded in nurgles garden during transit.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
*waves expansively at the Octarius Sector*

Basically what you’re suggesting but on a ludicrous scale.

Exterminatus planets in the path of the Hive Fleet, leaving them nothing to eat. Use fleet action to force them toward Octarius.

Let them eat Ork, deal with the fallout later.

It’s….not going well.

It served its purpose of buying time, because at that time the Imperium was unable to hold against Leviathan. That's why Kryptman first stalled with Exterminatus over worlds the Tyranids had just fought over before they could digest, and then diverted to Octarius. He was an Inquisitor that really did not consider any cost too great. His colleagues in the Inquisition despite that motto, clearly did consider some costs too high.

Kryptman's gambit worked though. It's just that after being cast out, Kryptman now has drastically reduced resources with which to do anything else. Perhaps if he had not been cast out, he might have been able to come up with something else now that the Tyranids seem to have ended the stalemate.

What would be the point of pitting nids against Necrons. Do Nids even acknowledge Necrons, because they aren't bio-matter, and where they live has usually been swept clean of all life, so I feel like nids would just ignore them? But I can see Necrons seeing Nids, and being "We gotta wipe this out, that over there is life, and we want it to be non-life".

It always goes horribly horribly wrong

the Deathwatch novel is especially horrible as it

Yeah, that was a very not good bit of the book. More recent novels are still creepy with the mind control and stuff but the Aliens vibe has been dropped in favour of religious overtones, which I much prefer.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
What would be the point of pitting nids against Necrons. Do Nids even acknowledge Necrons, because they aren't bio-matter, and where they live has usually been swept clean of all life, so I feel like nids would just ignore them? But I can see Necrons seeing Nids, and being "We gotta wipe this out, that over there is life, and we want it to be non-life".

The Necrons would be ignored or low priority targets I think if they kept to themselves. However if they threatened or deprived fleets of bio-matter by wiping out life bearing worlds that the Tyranids want to feast on, then the Tyranids might move to take them out to remove the threat.

That is the same rationale that could be said to apply to daemons. The Tyranids don't get direct sustenance from daemons, but the daemons and the Rift have been interfering with the Tyranids so Hive Fleet Kronos has come about to banish the daemons and close warp breaches. Kronos receives nutrition from other hive fleets in the form of not fully digested worlds that the other fleets leave behind for Kronos to feed from.

Wasn't the The Anphelion Project something of this nature?

 oni wrote:
Wasn't the The Anphelion Project something of this nature?

It’s up on Warhammer Vault, but I’ve not yet re-read it.

If memory serves, Anphelion was an attempt to study lesser Tyranids, only for them to evolve the bigger creatures regardless?

Last Chancers ended with an attack on a fortress used to study Genestealers as well. It's also been a recurring theme in the Cain novels.

Turn over a remote research station and you always find the local Weyland Yutani equivalent, usually with the same level of success

The Anphelion Project is presented as a narrative. The people running the facility get more and more problems. In the end everything goes to hell. (I belive this when FW made some excelent nid models and introduced them.)

Cut to an inquisitor who expected everything to go to hell. The facility was just one big data gathering project. The whole planet was expected to die from the start (or at least have that as a possible outcome.)

While not weaponising the Twisted Helix cult did research in genestealers. It did not end well. An it is now the Twisted Helix we love and know. Note it is a bit unclear when a patriarch was involved. It evolved at some point. But they where crazy long before that. The original plan was to reap some scientific victory from cutting edge research.

Now twisted helix are peddling cheap and needed medisin to fringe world. And also some stealer DNA but who is counting?

The Anephlion Project is basically the equivalent of Jurassic Park: 40K Edition.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So has there ever been attempts at forcing Stealers to a planet in the grips of Chaos? Stealers evetually setup a Beacon to a hive fleet after sufficient time, correct?

Wasn't there a thing where Stealers can't mind steal someone already enthralled by Chaos? Or something like that. One of the Cain books?

You could do that. The issue is that Tyranid fleets don't just pop in at one random planet, eat it, and then leave to go attack another random planet. They eat swathes of the galaxy, so luring them to a specific world for a specific problem is inefficient at best. Its going to doom all the worlds around it, not just that one.

That never ends well Mr Weyland.

 Grey Templar wrote:

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So has there ever been attempts at forcing Stealers to a planet in the grips of Chaos? Stealers evetually setup a Beacon to a hive fleet after sufficient time, correct?

Wasn't there a thing where Stealers can't mind steal someone already enthralled by Chaos? Or something like that. One of the Cain books?

You could do that. The issue is that Tyranid fleets don't just pop in at one random planet, eat it, and then leave to go attack another random planet. They eat swathes of the galaxy, so luring them to a specific world for a specific problem is inefficient at best. Its going to doom all the worlds around it, not just that one.

That's not always factual. For instance, on many planets nids have been "left behind" or straight up forgotten by the hive mind. Case in point, Catachan Devils. Which the fluff is still debating as to whether or not thats a Tyranid Bioform or not, but the Lictors hunted for sport on Catachan certainly are. Point being, there are times that the Hive Fleets "seed" a planet with infiltrator forms, or whatnot, not in an attempt to harvest the biomass, but to kill off any possible defense on the planet without launching a full on Invasion fleet across the warp. "The Last Ditch" was such a "scout fleet ship" that became stranded on an ice world, and got forgotten by the main fleet.

I would interpret that as the Tyranids having had hive fleets come through the galaxy before, possibly tens of thousands of years in the past, that were wiped out outside of a few lifeforms that have survived in certain niches. Most likely not as many or as large of hive fleets that currently invade the galaxy.

I find using fluff from a time so overwhelmingly distant in the past as to be pure myth a bad form. Obviously Nids have been through the galaxy at least once before, and the current fleets are not the same fleets as before. If the Nids HAD been in the galaxy before, and were since eliminated to such a degree that an entirely new set of fleets were made, then how can we accurately say what a Nid bioform is or isn't? Maybe the original nids were in fact the Saruthi, and having since died out, there is no longer a "true nid" the current bioforms just being the form chosen by the current hive mind.

But the flaw in that is that we know the current hive fleets still use the same forms as the previous fleets did, or do? Lictors are STILL very much a thing, as are Gaunts, Stealers, and Ravagers. Which according to the Magos in the Cain book, pre-dated the Earliest civilisations on the planet, and had likely been there far longer than any archeological records indicate.

The point is, it's not entirely uncommon to come across what I will call for lack of a better term, detached or cut off packs of Nids, who operate outside of the sway or direction of whatever the closest Hive mind is. That being the case, since we have proof that these exist autonomously, why could they not capture a Stealer, put it in a drop pod with a bunch of bio mass, and shoot it onto a Chaos world? Give it a few decades, and hey presto, you have a full scale Nid invasion on that planet, slaughtering the Chaos Worshipers. You can also do roughly the same thing with the Plant Orcs. "Seeding them" takes a more literal translation at that point, as all you need for them to grow more is enough of their corpses. The dead leak into the earth, and seed new orcs.

Even if what you say is true, there would be no guarantee that you'd attract this mythical splinter fleet to only attack that specific world. And even if successful, you've just made a new tyranid hive fleet in exchange for your previous problem and you've lost any ability to reclaim the target world without centuries of terraforming effort.

One the whole Chaos vs GSC thing, GSC cults are fully capable of infecting and flourishing even in Chaos controlled worlds.

CALL OF THE VOID

Upon the world of Heinrich’s March,
worshippers of the Dark Gods work their
tortured slaves to death as they attempt to erect
a monolithic ziggurat in honour of their foul
patrons. A new and hidden cult propagates
amidst the persecuted masses: the Choir of
the Void. Its leader, the blind prophet known
as the Conduit, preaches that a saviour race
from beyond the stars awaits them in a far-off
place, a paradise planet where they will find
salvation. In a great uprising, millions of slaves
overwhelm their masters and commandeer
several dozen cargo hulks. This armada of the
faithful makes for the nearby Tiamet System,
guided by the visions of the Conduit.

8th edition Tyranid codex, pg 38

@FezzikDaBullgryn
I'm not entirely sure what answer you are hoping to get, but it has been pretty conclusively answered that sure, you can wipe out an enemy by directing 'nids into them, and that often "works", but that it generally generates a bigger mess than you started with. However much you would like it to be otherwise, it doesn't change the basic fact that it just ends up with a strengthened Tyranid threat in most cases. Using Orks is similar, but a little less risky.

Octarius remains the archetypal example.

Look at it like this. You could try to cure bacterial tonsilitis by gargling large volumes of bleach, and it may be effective at wiping out the bacteria, but the side effects are far worse than the tonsilitis was to start with. Tyranids are the metaphorical bleach in this metaphor, you don't want it anywhere near you.

So, to turn the question on its head:

Have there been attempts by the Eldar or Tau to weaponize Humans?
I mean, just fake some distress signal or bury some artefact and let the imperium get the info. Eventually some of these mon-keys will show up, do their stupid thing of killing everything they find and afterwards you can clean up the mess, which should be much easier than dealing with a tyranid, orc or daemon infestation.