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A main imperial invasion force still probably wouldn't need major ECM cover. When you are landing thousands of drop ships at a time there really isn't much point in jamming incoming fire, blind fire would likely hit just as many as aimed shots.

When you are landing enough ships to disrupt the weather planetwide that's probably enough disruption. Not counting whatever after effects there are from the preliminary bombardment.

In the imperium live of the IG is of less worth than infrastructure, Void missile expensive, Platoon of IG not much, send in the IG!

 Peregrine wrote:

Or what if there is a renegade preacher spreading lies about the emperor? You could kill him but wouldnt it be better to capture him and force him to publicly repent? Martyrs are not fun.

I would nuke the renegade preacher and their entire city from orbit and broadcast the attack as a warning to anyone with similar ideas. Capturing the preacher is impossible because the preacher knows perfectly well what happens to captured heretics and will fight to the death.

Why do we still have gound troops when we have aircraft that can raze cities?

Because in the real world we don't like it when people raze entire cities to kill a target, and doing so would get the rest of the world to treat you like North Korea. In 40k civilian casualties from indiscriminate use of WMDs are a nice bonus because it means fewer civilians for your ground troops to exterminate once you win the war.

If you nuked an entire planet for every rogue preacher you would quickly find that you have more rogue preachers.
If you destroy billions of lives to get at one then billions of people on other worlds(there friends/family/people near them) will start to rebel. Imagine if the US nuked iran. Not only would the US have a million iranian americans in the US to contend with but all of the iranians in other countries as well.

If you nuked a planet in 40k, there would be friends, family, people who had trade conections, all angry with you and some of them might turn into cultists leaders or rogue preachers themselves.

From Gavin Thorpe on 25/04/2006:

Picture yourself as an Imperial Commander. You've got a world to rule, tithes to raise, Imperial Guard regiments to recruit and the Inquisition and the Arbites are sniffing around for even the slightest hint that you're a traitor. Why would you bother with any of this if you believed that should your planet actually be attacked, the Imperium would just use you as bait-and-switch fodder? The Imperium is nothing if not a mutual-defence pact between a million human worlds. They make every effort to save other worlds in recognition that those same worlds will reciprocate one day if the worst happens. Destroy that, and you destroy the Imperium.

Life is cheap in the 41st millennium, planets are not. The Imperium can afford to wage a war for a thousand years and spend fifty billion lives to do it, to protect a world if it means that a thousand and one years later it's still theirs and churning out the weapons, mulchburgers or whatever. A planet that falls is not lost – it can always be retaken by crusade at a later time. A planet destroyed is permanently gone, never to be part of the Imperium again. To talk of sacrificing whole worlds to kill what really amounts to a handful of the Imperium's enemies is defeatist and would have seen the Imperium crumble to dust millennia ago. The Imperium (as an organisation) may be ancient, corrupt, ineffective, ignorant and superstitious, but it has got staying power!

The Imperium exists as much as an idea as it does as a government. Part of the social and feudal contract with Imperial Commanders is that in return for tithes and obeying Imperial laws, they get the protection of the Imperium. If word spreads that this protection is a total lie and they are destroyed at the first opportunity without any attempt at actually helping them, then it will trigger widespread rebellion and secession. Even though the Imperium is a harsh regime, it still must meet some minimum expectations from its subjects for it to still exist.

Similarly the Imperium is interlinked economically. Indiscriminate destruction of production and resource facilities (people being a resource as well) can create cascading effects negatively impairing the military capabilities of other worlds or organizations. It is easy to destroy infrastructure. More difficult to build or rebuild, especially given the kind of ignorance and rote repetition that pervades much of the Imperium.

Iracundus wrote:
From Gavin Thorpe on 25/04/2006:

Picture yourself as an Imperial Commander. You've got a world to rule, tithes to raise, Imperial Guard regiments to recruit and the Inquisition and the Arbites are sniffing around for even the slightest hint that you're a traitor. Why would you bother with any of this if you believed that should your planet actually be attacked, the Imperium would just use you as bait-and-switch fodder? The Imperium is nothing if not a mutual-defence pact between a million human worlds. They make every effort to save other worlds in recognition that those same worlds will reciprocate one day if the worst happens. Destroy that, and you destroy the Imperium.

Life is cheap in the 41st millennium, planets are not. The Imperium can afford to wage a war for a thousand years and spend fifty billion lives to do it, to protect a world if it means that a thousand and one years later it's still theirs and churning out the weapons, mulchburgers or whatever. A planet that falls is not lost – it can always be retaken by crusade at a later time. A planet destroyed is permanently gone, never to be part of the Imperium again. To talk of sacrificing whole worlds to kill what really amounts to a handful of the Imperium's enemies is defeatist and would have seen the Imperium crumble to dust millennia ago. The Imperium (as an organisation) may be ancient, corrupt, ineffective, ignorant and superstitious, but it has got staying power!

The Imperium exists as much as an idea as it does as a government. Part of the social and feudal contract with Imperial Commanders is that in return for tithes and obeying Imperial laws, they get the protection of the Imperium. If word spreads that this protection is a total lie and they are destroyed at the first opportunity without any attempt at actually helping them, then it will trigger widespread rebellion and secession. Even though the Imperium is a harsh regime, it still must meet some minimum expectations from its subjects for it to still exist.

Similarly the Imperium is interlinked economically. Indiscriminate destruction of production and resource facilities (people being a resource as well) can create cascading effects negatively impairing the military capabilities of other worlds or organizations. It is easy to destroy infrastructure. More difficult to build or rebuild, especially given the kind of ignorance and rote repetition that pervades much of the Imperium.

This is true on a certain level and not so true on other levels. The Imperium is loosely based on Dark Age/Medieval feudal society. The occasional example is necessary to keep the rest in line. You don't burn all towns down, but occasionally doing it, or doing it to places that refuse terms would be acceptable practice.

If you do run 1 million worlds, and can live/exist on planets that shouldn't support life, then obliterating a few cities or even 1000 planets is a drop in the bucket and helps toe the line.

However, that doesn't negate orbital support. Orbital support does not have to level cities or waste continents. A drone missile can take out a building, or a tank, or whatever localized target you need. It is also cheaper and easier than the fighter craft which needs all of the ground support staff and logistics to get it going. Similarly, having deployable satellites or munitions from a battleship or gun boat could potentially be cheaper than needing to utilize lots of air cover if you want to provide pure ground support. No need to setup the air base, ferry in planes, men, ground crew, food, fuel, parts, etc. if you can launch something from space to get the same effect.

Not that it negates the need for airpower, but it doesn't have to be all or nothing or even ludicrously expensive. The AC130 isn't meant to level a city, but it does a damn good job of leveling an enemy advance. It isn't so expensive that it is never used.

It costs a lot to have a logistical supply line for the 'hordes of bodies' to throw at something. All of those lasguns add up in cost. This is why the Soviets would often arm only one out of 5 or 6 guys. They couldn't afford to equip all of the troopers, so the rest of the guys would get a clip of ammo to pick up the rifle after the first guy died to fight. In the end it cost them ~25 million people during the war. Yet they still had to build tanks, planes, artillery, etc and field them. The concept that a single missile is so expensive it doesn't get used or produced in quantity is ludicrous when you talk about the amount of troops that had to be armed, equipped, fed, housed, medically supported, transported, etc. Yes, expensive enough that it isn't used like candy, but no on life is so cheap we cannot risk a single orbital support vessel for help. Plus, if you are saying the IG can go through ~25 million guys to die on every world, it suddenly isn't a case of life is so cheap, life suddenly starts getting very expensive. Casualty rates that high all of the time would get ludicrously impossible to replace for a realm in perpetual war.

 Maniac_nmt wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
From Gavin Thorpe on 25/04/2006:

Picture yourself as an Imperial Commander. You've got a world to rule, tithes to raise, Imperial Guard regiments to recruit and the Inquisition and the Arbites are sniffing around for even the slightest hint that you're a traitor. Why would you bother with any of this if you believed that should your planet actually be attacked, the Imperium would just use you as bait-and-switch fodder? The Imperium is nothing if not a mutual-defence pact between a million human worlds. They make every effort to save other worlds in recognition that those same worlds will reciprocate one day if the worst happens. Destroy that, and you destroy the Imperium.

Life is cheap in the 41st millennium, planets are not. The Imperium can afford to wage a war for a thousand years and spend fifty billion lives to do it, to protect a world if it means that a thousand and one years later it's still theirs and churning out the weapons, mulchburgers or whatever. A planet that falls is not lost – it can always be retaken by crusade at a later time. A planet destroyed is permanently gone, never to be part of the Imperium again. To talk of sacrificing whole worlds to kill what really amounts to a handful of the Imperium's enemies is defeatist and would have seen the Imperium crumble to dust millennia ago. The Imperium (as an organisation) may be ancient, corrupt, ineffective, ignorant and superstitious, but it has got staying power!

The Imperium exists as much as an idea as it does as a government. Part of the social and feudal contract with Imperial Commanders is that in return for tithes and obeying Imperial laws, they get the protection of the Imperium. If word spreads that this protection is a total lie and they are destroyed at the first opportunity without any attempt at actually helping them, then it will trigger widespread rebellion and secession. Even though the Imperium is a harsh regime, it still must meet some minimum expectations from its subjects for it to still exist.

Similarly the Imperium is interlinked economically. Indiscriminate destruction of production and resource facilities (people being a resource as well) can create cascading effects negatively impairing the military capabilities of other worlds or organizations. It is easy to destroy infrastructure. More difficult to build or rebuild, especially given the kind of ignorance and rote repetition that pervades much of the Imperium.

This is true on a certain level and not so true on other levels. The Imperium is loosely based on Dark Age/Medieval feudal society. The occasional example is necessary to keep the rest in line. You don't burn all towns down, but occasionally doing it, or doing it to places that refuse terms would be acceptable practice.

If you do run 1 million worlds, and can live/exist on planets that shouldn't support life, then obliterating a few cities or even 1000 planets is a drop in the bucket and helps toe the line.

However, that doesn't negate orbital support. Orbital support does not have to level cities or waste continents. A drone missile can take out a building, or a tank, or whatever localized target you need. It is also cheaper and easier than the fighter craft which needs all of the ground support staff and logistics to get it going. Similarly, having deployable satellites or munitions from a battleship or gun boat could potentially be cheaper than needing to utilize lots of air cover if you want to provide pure ground support. No need to setup the air base, ferry in planes, men, ground crew, food, fuel, parts, etc. if you can launch something from space to get the same effect.

Not that it negates the need for airpower, but it doesn't have to be all or nothing or even ludicrously expensive. The AC130 isn't meant to level a city, but it does a damn good job of leveling an enemy advance. It isn't so expensive that it is never used.

It costs a lot to have a logistical supply line for the 'hordes of bodies' to throw at something. All of those lasguns add up in cost. This is why the Soviets would often arm only one out of 5 or 6 guys. They couldn't afford to equip all of the troopers, so the rest of the guys would get a clip of ammo to pick up the rifle after the first guy died to fight. In the end it cost them ~25 million people during the war. Yet they still had to build tanks, planes, artillery, etc and field them. The concept that a single missile is so expensive it doesn't get used or produced in quantity is ludicrous when you talk about the amount of troops that had to be armed, equipped, fed, housed, medically supported, transported, etc. Yes, expensive enough that it isn't used like candy, but no on life is so cheap we cannot risk a single orbital support vessel for help. Plus, if you are saying the IG can go through ~25 million guys to die on every world, it suddenly isn't a case of life is so cheap, life suddenly starts getting very expensive. Casualty rates that high all of the time would get ludicrously impossible to replace for a realm in perpetual war.

Did you seriously just state that Enemy at the gates spouted piece of "LolRussians" propaganda as fact? The Soviet Army only had serious supply issues with getting guns to it's soldiers in the very early stages of world war 2, and afterwards the Soviet Army actually had a fairly grotesque materiel advantage over the Axis. I'm sorry, this is off topic but I cannot allow that to go unpunished, not after Relic released it's motherland bashing piece of garbage in CoH 2 which spouted virtually all the same lies propagated by Enemy at the Gates.

This is just really my berserk button. My apologies.

If you do run 1 million worlds, and can live/exist on planets that shouldn't support life, then obliterating a few cities or even 1000 planets is a drop in the bucket and helps toe the line.

Unless that one planet you're going to blow up is the one planet in your Imperium that produces some widget that allows your plasma guns to fire, your spaceships to fly or your power armor to operate.

Worlds in the Imperium are often very precious things, and a trillion lives can be spent in saving it, because you can *always* get more people.

 Kain wrote:

 Maniac_nmt wrote:

Iracundus wrote:
From Gavin Thorpe on 25/04/2006:

Picture yourself as an Imperial Commander. You've got a world to rule, tithes to raise, Imperial Guard regiments to recruit and the Inquisition and the Arbites are sniffing around for even the slightest hint that you're a traitor. Why would you bother with any of this if you believed that should your planet actually be attacked, the Imperium would just use you as bait-and-switch fodder? The Imperium is nothing if not a mutual-defence pact between a million human worlds. They make every effort to save other worlds in recognition that those same worlds will reciprocate one day if the worst happens. Destroy that, and you destroy the Imperium.

Life is cheap in the 41st millennium, planets are not. The Imperium can afford to wage a war for a thousand years and spend fifty billion lives to do it, to protect a world if it means that a thousand and one years later it's still theirs and churning out the weapons, mulchburgers or whatever. A planet that falls is not lost – it can always be retaken by crusade at a later time. A planet destroyed is permanently gone, never to be part of the Imperium again. To talk of sacrificing whole worlds to kill what really amounts to a handful of the Imperium's enemies is defeatist and would have seen the Imperium crumble to dust millennia ago. The Imperium (as an organisation) may be ancient, corrupt, ineffective, ignorant and superstitious, but it has got staying power!

The Imperium exists as much as an idea as it does as a government. Part of the social and feudal contract with Imperial Commanders is that in return for tithes and obeying Imperial laws, they get the protection of the Imperium. If word spreads that this protection is a total lie and they are destroyed at the first opportunity without any attempt at actually helping them, then it will trigger widespread rebellion and secession. Even though the Imperium is a harsh regime, it still must meet some minimum expectations from its subjects for it to still exist.

Similarly the Imperium is interlinked economically. Indiscriminate destruction of production and resource facilities (people being a resource as well) can create cascading effects negatively impairing the military capabilities of other worlds or organizations. It is easy to destroy infrastructure. More difficult to build or rebuild, especially given the kind of ignorance and rote repetition that pervades much of the Imperium.

This is true on a certain level and not so true on other levels. The Imperium is loosely based on Dark Age/Medieval feudal society. The occasional example is necessary to keep the rest in line. You don't burn all towns down, but occasionally doing it, or doing it to places that refuse terms would be acceptable practice.

If you do run 1 million worlds, and can live/exist on planets that shouldn't support life, then obliterating a few cities or even 1000 planets is a drop in the bucket and helps toe the line.

However, that doesn't negate orbital support. Orbital support does not have to level cities or waste continents. A drone missile can take out a building, or a tank, or whatever localized target you need. It is also cheaper and easier than the fighter craft which needs all of the ground support staff and logistics to get it going. Similarly, having deployable satellites or munitions from a battleship or gun boat could potentially be cheaper than needing to utilize lots of air cover if you want to provide pure ground support. No need to setup the air base, ferry in planes, men, ground crew, food, fuel, parts, etc. if you can launch something from space to get the same effect.

Not that it negates the need for airpower, but it doesn't have to be all or nothing or even ludicrously expensive. The AC130 isn't meant to level a city, but it does a damn good job of leveling an enemy advance. It isn't so expensive that it is never used.

It costs a lot to have a logistical supply line for the 'hordes of bodies' to throw at something. All of those lasguns add up in cost. This is why the Soviets would often arm only one out of 5 or 6 guys. They couldn't afford to equip all of the troopers, so the rest of the guys would get a clip of ammo to pick up the rifle after the first guy died to fight. In the end it cost them ~25 million people during the war. Yet they still had to build tanks, planes, artillery, etc and field them. The concept that a single missile is so expensive it doesn't get used or produced in quantity is ludicrous when you talk about the amount of troops that had to be armed, equipped, fed, housed, medically supported, transported, etc. Yes, expensive enough that it isn't used like candy, but no on life is so cheap we cannot risk a single orbital support vessel for help. Plus, if you are saying the IG can go through ~25 million guys to die on every world, it suddenly isn't a case of life is so cheap, life suddenly starts getting very expensive. Casualty rates that high all of the time would get ludicrously impossible to replace for a realm in perpetual war.

Did you seriously just state that Enemy at the gates spouted piece of "LolRussians" propaganda as fact? The Soviet Army only had serious supply issues with getting guns to it's soldiers in the very early stages of world war 2, and afterwards the Soviet Army actually had a fairly grotesque materiel advantage over the Axis. I'm sorry, this is off topic but I cannot allow that to go unpunished, not after Relic released it's motherland bashing piece of garbage in CoH 2 which spouted virtually all the same lies propagated by Enemy at the Gates.

This is just really my berserk button. My apologies.

Actually, that's from a Russian supported historical exhibit that toured the US about, oh, 13-15 years back. They talked about the glorious nature of their people fighting with no supplies for the early part of the war (I didn't say the whole war, you really are an over reactionary person you know that right, time to lay off the caffeine). I hadn't even thought of CoD. It was actually a pretty good exhibit.

It still underlines, guns are cheap, lots of guns are not cheap. Trillions of guns even less cheap. It takes ammo, factories, food for those factories, food for those troops, etc. It isn't intrinsically just the cost of the rifle itself.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So, using some rough approximations merely as an illustration (because 40k would work a little different, but just to illustrate):

Say a M-16 costs $800 (lowest figure I could find, several sites quoted about $2000 a rifle). Now, the figure tossed out most recently was One Trillion. At $800 per rifle that is $800 Trillion dollars.

We'll also lowball the cost of an aircraft carrier, to be fair. That's $4.6 billion dollars.

That makes the aircraft carrier roughly equivalent to 0.000575% the cost of the rifles.


Now, cost alone isn't the only factor, of course, but you can perhaps start to see what I'm getting at. Orbital support isn't so ludicrously expensive that the Imperium would never field it vs the cost of the men you say the Imperium would happily sacrifice in it's place.

So, using some rough approximations merely as an illustration (because 40k would work a little different, but just to illustrate):

Say a M-16 costs $800 (lowest figure I could find, several sites quoted about $2000 a rifle). Now, the figure tossed out most recently was One Trillion. At $800 per rifle that is $800 Trillion dollars.

We'll also lowball the cost of an aircraft carrier, to be fair. That's $4.6 billion dollars.

That makes the aircraft carrier roughly equivalent to 0.000575% the cost of the rifles.


Now, cost alone isn't the only factor, of course, but you can perhaps start to see what I'm getting at. Orbital support isn't so ludicrously expensive that the Imperium would never field it vs the cost of the men you say the Imperium would happily sacrifice in it's place.

I agree with your core point, but I have a few points of disagreement.

Most of my issue is with scale, if you're going with warhammer 40k scale with the guns you'd need to go warhammer 40k scale with the carriers too.

A Nimitz, for example, is 332 m long, 76 m wide, 11 m tall and has a mass of 101,604 tonnes.
Whereas an Avenger-Class Grand Cruiser is 7500 m long, 1800 m wide and has a mass of 40,000,000 tonnes.

Since we don't have the draft for the Grand Cruiser we can only compare the mass of these 2 vessels. When we run the numbers we find that the Grand Cruiser is 393.6 times the mass of the Carrier. This means we can roughly substitute in about 393 Carriers for the Equivalent capital ship in 40k

My other issue is that the lasgun is stated to be dirt cheap and to me, that sounds exactly like the ak-47 which costs $250 or so to make. Since I used the Nimitz as my carrier i'll use it's manufacturing cost of $4.5 billion.

Now 3 trillion ak-47's cost $750 trillion and 393 carriers cost $1,768.5 billion or $1.8 trillion which comes to the ships being about 00.24% the cost of the guns.

One thing to note is that while the guns cost much more each gun is very easy to replace whereas the Cruiser would obviously require many years to replace. When we talk about the Imperials not wanting to risk their ships it's similar to the big battleships in WW2. They were very rarely used in large conflicts because they simply represented too much money, individually, to warrant risking.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another thing of note is I'm not saying they will never risk it, it's just not super high on the priority list and so, happens infrequently.

 laginess wrote:

So, using some rough approximations merely as an illustration (because 40k would work a little different, but just to illustrate):

Say a M-16 costs $800 (lowest figure I could find, several sites quoted about $2000 a rifle). Now, the figure tossed out most recently was One Trillion. At $800 per rifle that is $800 Trillion dollars.

We'll also lowball the cost of an aircraft carrier, to be fair. That's $4.6 billion dollars.

That makes the aircraft carrier roughly equivalent to 0.000575% the cost of the rifles.


Now, cost alone isn't the only factor, of course, but you can perhaps start to see what I'm getting at. Orbital support isn't so ludicrously expensive that the Imperium would never field it vs the cost of the men you say the Imperium would happily sacrifice in it's place.

I agree with your core point, but I have a few points of disagreement.

Most of my issue is with scale, if you're going with warhammer 40k scale with the guns you'd need to go warhammer 40k scale with the carriers too.

A Nimitz, for example, is 332 m long, 76 m wide, 11 m tall and has a mass of 101,604 tonnes.
Whereas an Avenger-Class Grand Cruiser is 7500 m long, 1800 m wide and has a mass of 40,000,000 tonnes.

Since we don't have the draft for the Grand Cruiser we can only compare the mass of these 2 vessels. When we run the numbers we find that the Grand Cruiser is 393.6 times the mass of the Carrier. This means we can roughly substitute in about 393 Carriers for the Equivalent capital ship in 40k

My other issue is that the lasgun is stated to be dirt cheap and to me, that sounds exactly like the ak-47 which costs $250 or so to make. Since I used the Nimitz as my carrier i'll use it's manufacturing cost of $4.5 billion.

Now 3 trillion ak-47's cost $750 trillion and 393 carriers cost $1,768.5 billion or $1.8 trillion which comes to the ships being about 00.24% the cost of the guns.

One thing to note is that while the guns cost much more each gun is very easy to replace whereas the Cruiser would obviously require many years to replace. When we talk about the Imperials not wanting to risk their ships it's similar to the big battleships in WW2. They were very rarely used in large conflicts because they simply represented too much money, individually, to warrant risking.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another thing of note is I'm not saying they will never risk it, it's just not super high on the priority list and so, happens infrequently.

I don't disagree with time to produce vs risk, it's all a factor. However, you don't need a carrier per say to provide orbital support. A few gun boats with purpose designated munitions would be great, deployable satellites, etc. If you drop one trillion guys on a campaign and don't care, that's ~20 years to replace that loss eventually. Casualty levels on that order sound great for grim darkness, but you cannot sustain it.

I've read multiple reports that Japan was willing to sacrifice between 1.5 to 3 million of it's own people in massive land waves to stop a land invasion of Japan. That wasn't sustainable, and they knew it. What it would do, or so they thought, was make victory so unpalatable (low ball estimates are ~500,000 US casualties) that they could sue for something other than total surrender.

What is the typical hive world population (I don't know, I'm asking)? Now, these are known for being massively more populated than most worlds. If I say, 10 trillion people, how many of those are fighting grade material?

Can the IG send 10k guys to their death? Sure, it reads well for fans and to make it 'grim dark', but a million or even a trillion? When that becomes regular or common place all bets are off. Worlds won't follow, whole sectors of space would be able to rebel easily and successfully, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is, yes, soldiers are easily replaceable to the imperium, to a point. They can throw bodies at a problem, or many problems, but at some level since a human still takes ~18 terran years to develop into soldier material, eventually loosing the population of China in every planetary conflict takes it's toll, and refusing to risk all assets to take out that artillery emplacement or battleship becomes a loosing scenario.

In short, I think we're saying similar things, just approaching it from different sides (I'm not one of the nuke it from orbit in all situations crowd. I'm the logical application of force where necessary crowd). I'm just advocating perhaps a 'forward air observer' for the IG or Tau or Eldar or Necrons or whoever (Marines already have it in terms of table top mechanics to some extent).

The Imperium is estimated to have over a quadrillion people at minimum. At normal birth rates, you could literally lose the earth's entire historical population every day and the amount of people reaching military age every day would outweigh any loss by a significant margin. For higher end calculations of Imperial population, you could literally piss away trillions of people on a daily basis and not even notice the dip in population.

Alrighty I see what you're getting at here, and I do agree. Also the typical hive world has roughly 100 billion residents though that number can vary wildly. Also hive world represent roughly 1/30th of the Imperium's worlds. This gives us a rough pop of 3.3 quadrillion so even a 10% fighting force of that is a very silly number (330 trillion).

Though upon looking at things (admittedly on lexicanum) I found that while the imperial guard doesn't have any direct air support that's because the imperial navy covers that. They actually have various sizes of air support craft for different roles, we just don't see them much in our normal play.

So it's not to say that the Imperium sends wave after wave of men at the enemy until they reach their kill limit (like Zapp Brannigan) but they have the duties of support split between different wings of the imperial military. It's entirely possible, and likely, they send destroyers to deal with large threats planetside while they have fighters, bombers and gunships directly support ground troops. In the end though it's still to facilitate the ground troops successfully capturing their objectives.

What is the typical hive world population (I don't know, I'm asking)? Now, these are known for being massively more populated than most worlds. If I say, 10 trillion people, how many of those are fighting grade material?

Anywhere from several billion to hundreds of billions, depending on the planet.

How many are fighting grade? Probably 80%+ if you wanted to mobilize the entire planet. The only ones who would not be viable are the very, very old, the very, very infirm and the very, very young.

Otherwise? Children as young as 8 can carry a lasgun, as can adults as old as 65, maybe even 70 (assuming anyone on a Hive World lives that long).

 Psienesis wrote:

What is the typical hive world population (I don't know, I'm asking)? Now, these are known for being massively more populated than most worlds. If I say, 10 trillion people, how many of those are fighting grade material?

Anywhere from several billion to hundreds of billions, depending on the planet.

How many are fighting grade? Probably 80%+ if you wanted to mobilize the entire planet. The only ones who would not be viable are the very, very old, the very, very infirm and the very, very young.

Otherwise? Children as young as 8 can carry a lasgun, as can adults as old as 65, maybe even 70 (assuming anyone on a Hive World lives that long).

Secondary edit, misread hive and forge worlds. My mistake. There are at least 3 hundred billion worlds, the others seem to be around 10s of billions. So a quadrillion is possible I suppose. It would still require incredibly huge populations on non hive worlds, far beyond what fluff would indicate, but possible to hit one quadrillion.

However, at least one source I found states 10s of trillions for total galaxy wide population, which seems more likely.

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Human

The Imperium is, give or take, a million worlds. Most planets in the galaxy are Ork worlds.

Also, realize that GW has no sense of scale. Any time they quote planetary populations, you gotta add a couple zeros.

Otherwise, the entire Cadia System has less people than the United States.

What is interesting is that even if the average population was only around the same as modern day earth(1 million worlds with 7 billion people each) you'd still have a crazy amount of people available to be in the IG even with a tiny population growth rate.

7 billion x 1% growth rate(ludicrously low birth rate) x 1 million worlds = 70,000,000,000,000 new people each year. That's ten thousand times the population of Earth today.

You could lose up to 70 trillion guardsmen a year and not effect your population. And that's only with an average planetary population of 7 billion people, which is really nothing close to what the maximum would be.

Life is not only cheap in the Imperium, its coming out of their ears. Give them all lasguns and retake any damn planet you choose. Choke the enemy in bodies. They will run out of ammunition long before you run out of bodies.



But naturally the Imperium's average population has to be greater than modern day Earth.

Lets say there's an average of a trillion people per planet.

1 trillion x 1% X 1 million worlds = 10,000,000,000,000,000. 10 quadrillion right there, with only an average of 1 trillion people per planet and a 1% growth rate.

Have a larger rate of growth and you could easily get into the Quintillions.


Of course we should recognize that GW could have originally been using the Long Scale names for their numbers. In Long Scale, what is called a Trillion is actually our modern Quintillion(10^18)

So if GW publications are saying mankind numbers in the countless Trillions, they may actually mean countless Quintillions by our measurements.

A billion under Long Scale is actually a Trillion(10^12). So a planet with a stated population of 32 billion might actually be 32 trillion instead.

Well, that's not entirely accurate. I mean, most of the worlds in the Imperium are classified as "Imperial Worlds" which makes them more or less analogs to modern-day Earth. There's a fair number of Hive Worlds and Forge Worlds, which have huge populations, but then you also have Death Worlds, Feral Worlds, Agri Worlds, Shrine Worlds, Paradise Worlds and Cemetery Worlds that have *significantly* lower populations (sometimes not even reaching the low thousands).

 Psienesis wrote:
Well, that's not entirely accurate. I mean, most of the worlds in the Imperium are classified as "Imperial Worlds" which makes them more or less analogs to modern-day Earth. There's a fair number of Hive Worlds and Forge Worlds, which have huge populations, but then you also have Death Worlds, Feral Worlds, Agri Worlds, Shrine Worlds, Paradise Worlds and Cemetery Worlds that have *significantly* lower populations (sometimes not even reaching the low thousands).

Modern day Earth would fall into the 'hive world' classification for population size, and these are few and far between (in terms of scale, not necessarily land mass coverage). Clearly 1 million worlds of 1 billion is wrong.

I would postulate, and I could be entirely wrong, that adding zeros would be wrong. Given that what we get in fluff is supposed to be pseudo legendary, humanity has a long history of vastly over inflating numbers in terms of military sizes.

Xerxes is said to have led 1 million men into Greece, when in reality this was probably only 100,000 to 150,000. Which in and of itself is a staggeringly ridiculous number for that time period. However, given that is not even a remotely isolated case (but is the norm for many classical up until fairly modern times), it would be a fair assumption to assume that 40k also 'bloats' numbers somewhat.

The rulebook says untold billions if I remember right. 10 Trillion would pretty well do it from that perspective, and that would be much more in keeping with the massively vast ammount of worlds that are probably not even at 100 million people, let alone all the ones below 1 million people.

One billion is 10 to the 9th power. One Trillion is 10 to the 12th, so 1000 millions. That is an incredible step change even if it doesn't sound like that much. A quadrillion is 10^15, which is a million billions, which could be done, but hard to justify given what few numbers we know. So, for my book, based on known numbers, and guessing those are probably already inflated, 10-20 Trillion people sounds about right spread across the Imperium.

A million really wouldn't have been out of the question.

The Persian Empire was really big, one of the largest ever.

100-150 thousand really would have just been an average army for ancient times. Check out numbers for various Roman era battles. You'll find armies numbering in the 200-500 thousand, and thats from areas that wer enot part of unified empires just loose coalitions. A unified empire wouldn't have any trouble getting larger numbers.

The caveat is that that's just how many soldiers there are. Its not a count of the professional standing army, which would have been significantly smaller. Maybe only 20-30% of the total number, the rest would be either mercenaries or conscripts given weapons, some basic training, and some light armor if they were lucky.

 Maniac_nmt wrote:

So, using some rough approximations merely as an illustration (because 40k would work a little different, but just to illustrate):
Say a M-16 costs $800 (lowest figure I could find, several sites quoted about $2000 a rifle). Now, the figure tossed out most recently was One Trillion. At $800 per rifle that is $800 Trillion dollars.
We'll also lowball the cost of an aircraft carrier, to be fair. That's $4.6 billion dollars.
That makes the aircraft carrier roughly equivalent to 0.000575% the cost of the rifles.


Now, cost alone isn't the only factor, of course, but you can perhaps start to see what I'm getting at. Orbital support isn't so ludicrously expensive that the Imperium would never field it vs the cost of the men you say the Imperium would happily sacrifice in it's place.

Where are these numbers coming from? An aircraft carrier is not nearly large enough to represent a interstellar warship capable of supporting ground operations. The ships in 40k are much much much bigger.

Also a trillion men would find it nearly impossible to feed themselves if deployed. It is likely they would need orbital support just to supply themselves and then significant fleet would be required to protect those supply lines.

I dont buy that any force could be deployed without orbital support, but then both sides of the battle cannot have it at the same time.

In short most battles in 40k probably are one side sitting in space after a short naval battle bombarding the other side into submission. Naval power being far more important than land power. But you will still need to deploy land power, else you be forced to completely destroy every planet that will not bow to your bombardment. Your land forces must be credible, such that once they are deployed they do not need the naval power there to baby them(if they did, that naval power would be tied up for too long assisting the land power and be spread to thin to do what it is supposed to do, counter enemy naval power)

On some theaters of war in 40k there would be decisive land on land combat. There would be some objective that needs capturing or there would be some circumstances preventing naval power from engaging with sufficient force to be a factor.
These land on land battle, special cases that they are, is what we play with Warhammer 40k. If you want naval battle, play Battlefleet Gothic, which gives you a much better idea of how most of the battles in 40k would play out.
If you want naval vs land battle, assemble as many ultramarines as you can on a tournament table. On the next table over put the planet killer. First turn the planet killer destorys the ultramarine tournament table, game over. Next play the exact same mission again but switch armies with your opponent. See if you can do any better than he did. (fun game ay?)

Even then, remember. Military power is used almost only when there are lopsided odds. You dont go into battle with a plan, hey I think this guy is just about as powerful as me, perhaps ill invade/attack him. There is a 50% chance i'll win. Battles are almost always initiated when one side has a clear advantage (either by the side with the advantage, knowing they will win or by the weaker side, knowing it will only get worse if they dont pull some luck now)

The idea that two armies of approximately the same size would come to a planet and fight each other is silly. 2000 points vs 2000 points would never happen, but in 10,000 years on a million different planets it might happen once or twice just by accident. That is what we play because it is fun.

I would postulate, and I could be entirely wrong, that adding zeros would be wrong. Given that what we get in fluff is supposed to be pseudo legendary, humanity has a long history of vastly over inflating numbers in terms of military sizes

The entire Cadian system, not just the planet, the *system* is said to have 260 million people in it.

That's it.

260 million people on 5 planets to defend the Cadian Gate at the entrance/exit to the Eye of Terror.

That cannot possibly be right.

 Grey Templar wrote:
A million really wouldn't have been out of the question.

The Persian Empire was really big, one of the largest ever.

100-150 thousand really would have just been an average army for ancient times. Check out numbers for various Roman era battles. You'll find armies numbering in the 200-500 thousand, and thats from areas that wer enot part of unified empires just loose coalitions. A unified empire wouldn't have any trouble getting larger numbers.

The caveat is that that's just how many soldiers there are. Its not a count of the professional standing army, which would have been significantly smaller. Maybe only 20-30% of the total number, the rest would be either mercenaries or conscripts given weapons, some basic training, and some light armor if they were lucky.

100,000 was indeed vast for an army in ancient times. It would be difficult to feed and supply even an army of 30,000 in ancient times. An empire, like Rome, Persia or China could have had numerous armies that totaled 150 thousand all marching towards a general destination but they might never actually all meet up together. If they did, it would likely only be for one day, one battle before they would have to disperse to feed themselves.

In premodern times the largest battles were all naval battles. Lepanto and Salamis in the mediterrainian and Red Cliffs in China. In a naval battle ships from a vast supporting region can all assemble, coming together to make one huge army that can meet another large army.

Even in the napoleonic wars, where you had armies of many hundreds of thousands they often were moving in smaller army groups or cores who would coordinate together to keep fresh troops in battle, arrive all at the same place at the same time at important junctions and cities, and otherwise keep themselves apart so as to feed themselves. Army cores numbered in the tens of thousands. Even the Grande Army that invaded russia(400-600k) was broken up into many parts to make it easier to supply. Of course they could not really supply it fully as we all know how that ended.

The US civil war and the Franco Prussian war proved how much technology had changed. With a railroad you could have much larger armies and not worry too much about feeding them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Psienesis wrote:

I would postulate, and I could be entirely wrong, that adding zeros would be wrong. Given that what we get in fluff is supposed to be pseudo legendary, humanity has a long history of vastly over inflating numbers in terms of military sizes

The entire Cadian system, not just the planet, the *system* is said to have 260 million people in it.

That's it.

260 million people on 5 planets to defend the Cadian Gate at the entrance/exit to the Eye of Terror.

That cannot possibly be right.

and 1000 space marines, super human they might be would not be able to do jack even against todays earth. There are just too dam many people.

GW has a dumb sense of scale.

 Exergy wrote:

 Maniac_nmt wrote:

So, using some rough approximations merely as an illustration (because 40k would work a little different, but just to illustrate):
Say a M-16 costs $800 (lowest figure I could find, several sites quoted about $2000 a rifle). Now, the figure tossed out most recently was One Trillion. At $800 per rifle that is $800 Trillion dollars.
We'll also lowball the cost of an aircraft carrier, to be fair. That's $4.6 billion dollars.
That makes the aircraft carrier roughly equivalent to 0.000575% the cost of the rifles.


Now, cost alone isn't the only factor, of course, but you can perhaps start to see what I'm getting at. Orbital support isn't so ludicrously expensive that the Imperium would never field it vs the cost of the men you say the Imperium would happily sacrifice in it's place.

Where are these numbers coming from? An aircraft carrier is not nearly large enough to represent a interstellar warship capable of supporting ground operations. The ships in 40k are much much much bigger.

Also a trillion men would find it nearly impossible to feed themselves if deployed. It is likely they would need orbital support just to supply themselves and then significant fleet would be required to protect those supply lines.

I dont buy that any force could be deployed without orbital support, but then both sides of the battle cannot have it at the same time.

In short most battles in 40k probably are one side sitting in space after a short naval battle bombarding the other side into submission. Naval power being far more important than land power. But you will still need to deploy land power, else you be forced to completely destroy every planet that will not bow to your bombardment. Your land forces must be credible, such that once they are deployed they do not need the naval power there to baby them(if they did, that naval power would be tied up for too long assisting the land power and be spread to thin to do what it is supposed to do, counter enemy naval power)

On some theaters of war in 40k there would be decisive land on land combat. There would be some objective that needs capturing or there would be some circumstances preventing naval power from engaging with sufficient force to be a factor.
These land on land battle, special cases that they are, is what we play with Warhammer 40k. If you want naval battle, play Battlefleet Gothic, which gives you a much better idea of how most of the battles in 40k would play out.
If you want naval vs land battle, assemble as many ultramarines as you can on a tournament table. On the next table over put the planet killer. First turn the planet killer destorys the ultramarine tournament table, game over. Next play the exact same mission again but switch armies with your opponent. See if you can do any better than he did. (fun game ay?)

Even then, remember. Military power is used almost only when there are lopsided odds. You dont go into battle with a plan, hey I think this guy is just about as powerful as me, perhaps ill invade/attack him. There is a 50% chance i'll win. Battles are almost always initiated when one side has a clear advantage (either by the side with the advantage, knowing they will win or by the weaker side, knowing it will only get worse if they dont pull some luck now)

The idea that two armies of approximately the same size would come to a planet and fight each other is silly. 2000 points vs 2000 points would never happen, but in 10,000 years on a million different planets it might happen once or twice just by accident. That is what we play because it is fun.

Actually, you are making a lot of my points. I was going off what some were perporting the numbers as. An aircraft carrier sized ship currently houses a crew in the multiple thousands. Yes 40k is bigger, but even extrapolating as someone else did, it pointed to the fact the cost of the starship vs the number of men being suggested would still make the carrier chump change in comparison.

I used a carrier to simulate a 'small' gun boat meant merely for supporting fire. I'm not looking for a naval battle, or naval on land battle. I'm merely saying orbital support wouldn't be so ludicrously expensive and hard to replace as to not be in use, you cannot drop that many guys into one ao, and that it wouldn't require a massive orbital bombardment designed to kill everything to support troops.

Space Marine Chapter Masters and the Grey Knights (at least the old codex, I don't have the new) could take various forms of orbital bombardment that were merely large blast templates. These would be your cruise missile off a b2 or battleship support for ground troops. Meant to hit that artillery that is killing your guys from 12 miles away or that titan that defys the laws of physics that is about to stomp on you.

40k is a lot of hyperbole, but even that has it's limits (feeding a trillion men would require a logistical chain so complex and huge you could spam even 40k battleships at a foe and not loose sleep over it, forget the disease that would acrue with such a massive body...phew, continent sized latrines...).

 Exergy wrote:
If you destroy billions of lives to get at one then billions of people on other worlds(there friends/family/people near them) will start to rebel. Imagine if the US nuked iran. Not only would the US have a million iranian americans in the US to contend with but all of the iranians in other countries as well.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: 40k is not the real world. Genocide in the real world is a horrifying crime that unites the entire rest of the world against you. Genocide in 40k is the default plan. You don't care how many people you nuke because you're going to execute all of them for heresy anyway once you win the war. Any "civilian" not killed in the war is just one more person your extermination camps have to deal with. The only reason not to nuke a rebelling city is because you want to take the infrastructure intact so that once you've exterminated all the current inhabitants you can move your own people in and turn it into a productive planet. And of course if it's a xenos planet, or the heretics have defiled the buildings, you're going to burn it to the ground and start over anyway, so you might as well nuke the whole thing and kill two birds with one stone.

There's also the fact that there's no "news" in the Imperium that is not state-controlled, and the vast, vast, *VAST* majority of people will never, ever leave the planet on which they were born.

If the Imperium decides to eradicate the population of an entire world via virus bombing... the next system over may never, ever know of it.

There are some Imperial worlds, after all, that have absolutely no means of space travel produced locally. They are at medieval or maybe even steam power levels of technology... once a century, or once a millennia, a space ship arrives to collect its tithe, and then flies away, never to be seen again by any one currently living on the planet, unto five, ten or a hundred generations.

These worlds might even share a system with a Hive World, and never know it. If that Hive World were put to death by the Imperium, the people of this backwards rock will never, ever know that their neighbors have all been slain.