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 Desubot wrote:
Would flying to the nearest asteroid belt and nudging some extinction class rocks into the planets path be considered orbital bombardment?

Rocks are NOT ‘free’, citizen.

Firstly, you must manoeuvre the Emperor’s naval vessel within the asteroid belt, almost assuredly sustaining damage to the Emperor’s ship’s paint from micrometeoroids, while expending the Emperor’s fuel.

Then the Tech Priests must inspect the rock in question to ascertain its worthiness to do the Emperor’s bidding. Should it pass muster, the Emperor’s Servitors must use the Emperor’s auto-scrapers and melta-cutters to prepare the potential ordinance for movement. Finally, the Tech Priests finished, the Emperor’s officers may begin manoeuvring the Emperor’s warship to abut the asteroid at the prepared face (expending yet more of the Emperor’s fuel), and then begin boosting the stone towards the offensive planet.

After a few days of expending a prodigious amount of the Emperor’s fuel to accelerate the asteroid into an orbit more fitting to the Emperor’s desires, the Emperor’s ship may then return to the planet via superluminous warp travel and await the arrival of the stone, still many weeks (or months) away.

After twiddling away the Emperor’s time and eating the Emperor’s food in the wasteful pursuit of making sure that the Emperor’s enemies do not launch a deflection mission, they may finally watch the ordinance impact the planet (assuming that the Emperor’s ship does not need to attempt any last-minute course correction upon the rock, using yet more of the Emperor’s fuel).


Given a typical (class Bravo-CVII) system, we have the following:

Two months, O&M, Titan class warship: 4.2 Million Imperials

Two months, rations, crew of same: 0.2 MI

Two months, Tech Priest pastor: 1.7 MI

Two months, Servitor parish: 0.3 MI

Paint, Titan class warship: 2.5 MI

Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.9 MI

Total: 9.8 MI


Contrasted with the following:

5 warheads, magna-melta: 2.5 MI

One day, O&M, Titan class warship: 0.3 MI

One day, rations, crew of same: 0.0 MI

Dihydrogen peroxide fuel: 0.1 MI

Total: 2.9 MI


Given the same result with under one third of the cost, the Emperor will have saved a massive amount of His most sacred money and almost a full month of time, during which His warship may be bombarding an entirely different planet.

The Emperor, through this – His Office of Imperial Outlays – hereby orders you to attend one (1) week of therapeutic accountancy training/penance. Please report to Areicon IV, Imperial City, Administratum Building CXXI, Room 1456, where you are to sit in the BLUE chair.


For the Emperor,

Bursarius Tenathis,

Purser Level XI,

Imperial Office of Outlays.

(from WD 227)

Exalted. That was, perhaps, the best use of that article I've seen in a long time.

Same here. Praise this glorious post.

@BrianDavion
Nice, exalted. I will also see about reporting for my reorientation.

@Thread
This thread is pretty crazy. The SM are so low numbered that you could not even put a single marine with every major faction leader. You better believe any faction leader would gather multiple Lv4 mages each of who could tear a marine apart with their mind. You cannot subjugate anything if you cannot occupy and put at least 1 trusted individual in charge of it.

The elves being burned to the ground is pretty goofy as most of their lords has easy access to ward saves. Coming down and killing any one prince would be pretty difficult and if that leader is Teclis and he sees your drop pod or gak coming at him it is definitely going to be crushed/zapped/etc. with minimal effort.

An entire chapter could have some hope of it as they might have enough people to capture, hold, and indoctrinate the humans and therefore capture the planet over the course of decades with massive human armies.

The grey knights would be awesome if psykers can use magick. A whole chapter of magick users, ouch.

Or a single chapter master with the unlimited resources of the IoM behind him to simply bribe WHFB forces might be able to do it.

Even with orbital bombardment the daemons of chaos and ork infestation would require exterminatus not subjugation.

I keep hearing "100 marines" but you are forgetting the captain, chaplain, librarian, 2 tech marines, dreadnought, 3 thawks, 10 rhinos, landraider and 2 predators, and even thats under strength for a company. the captain is never without his own command squad, there are on average 3 dreadnoughts per company, there are also a retinue of servitors for each vehicle in the armory, plus whatever pilots and drivers for the vehicles. Im not siding with the marines, i for one think they should just weaken the keslivite border and let chaos take them all then exterminate the thing. they have no chance outside destroying the planet from earth, but for those who DO believe they have a chance take the fullness of the company into account. Theres more than 100 men, the drivers for the vehicles are full battle-brothers too why cannot they fight? plus, the landraider crew doesnt even need to be in it and it could stop an ork WAAAGGGGHHH for christs sake. Take things into account besides just the line infantry. all in all? id say an easy 150 full battle brothers (including drivers and dreadnoughts). now its not a big difference but every little bit helps eh?

 ansacs wrote:
@BrianDavion
Nice, exalted. I will also see about reporting for my reorientation.

@Thread
This thread is pretty crazy. The SM are so low numbered that you could not even put a single marine with every major faction leader. You better believe any faction leader would gather multiple Lv4 mages each of who could tear a marine apart with their mind. You cannot subjugate anything if you cannot occupy and put at least 1 trusted individual in charge of it.

The elves being burned to the ground is pretty goofy as most of their lords has easy access to ward saves. Coming down and killing any one prince would be pretty difficult and if that leader is Teclis and he sees your drop pod or gak coming at him it is definitely going to be crushed/zapped/etc. with minimal effort.

An entire chapter could have some hope of it as they might have enough people to capture, hold, and indoctrinate the humans and therefore capture the planet over the course of decades with massive human armies.

The grey knights would be awesome if psykers can use magick. A whole chapter of magick users, ouch.

Or a single chapter master with the unlimited resources of the IoM behind him to simply bribe WHFB forces might be able to do it.

Even with orbital bombardment the daemons of chaos and ork infestation would require exterminatus not subjugation.

To be fair, a hundred legionnaires of the Damned could do this fairly easily.

I would actually say that an entire company could do the job, but only if it were some of the Chaos legions that were used. Word Bearers would have an easy time of forming a massive, planet-consuming cult out of the throngs of ignorant peasants. Night Lords would play their trademark shadow games and bring the larger population centers to heel out of sheer wanton terror before taking over a place and using the populace as an army. Alpha Legion pretty much the same but with more subtlety.

Black Legion would run straight into the Ork homelands 13 separate times and get wiped out to a man.

 bossfearless wrote:
I would actually say that an entire company could do the job, but only if it were some of the Chaos legions that were used. Word Bearers would have an easy time of forming a massive, planet-consuming cult out of the throngs of ignorant peasants. Night Lords would play their trademark shadow games and bring the larger population centers to heel out of sheer wanton terror before taking over a place and using the populace as an army. Alpha Legion pretty much the same but with more subtlety.

Black Legion would run straight into the Ork homelands 13 separate times and get wiped out to a man.

Then of course there's Chaos mutations, where one out of a hundred (maybe even more) may just be straight-up invincible or completely regenerative.

Er, the Warhammer fantasy planet already has Chaos on it. Hell, it's probably more chaos-corrupted than most worlds in the WH40k galaxy that isn't already inside the warp (huge entire chunks of the place are practically one with the warp). So the warhammer fantasy plant already has cults out of the trongs of ignorant peasants, already deals with sheer wanton terror on a regular basis, and already has to deal with chaos mutations where one out of a hundred (maybe even more) may just be straight-up invincible or completely regenerative. Yet they're still kickin' and surviving.

The only reason why a Chaos marine group would have more success than a loyalist marine group is because they could hook up with and bolster the chaos forces already present on the planet for some fun chaos team-up power. If they instead try to conquer those chaos powers instead of team up with them, they aren't going to be nearly as successful (especially if we're including Chaos Daemons, who are probably literally the same chaos daemons that are causing so much trouble in the WH40k universe now that it's been semi-canonized in that Draigo short story that the two share the same warp. What hope does a single company of marines, chaos or otherwise, have fighting against a planet that has Skarbrand, Fateweaver, AND Khugath on it?)

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:


Can you source that they are equally powerful in both universes?

And no, game mechanics certainly do not count.

Because if Daemonettes can tear up Terminator armour but have problems with a knight's plate armour, I suspect something is fishy.

Daemonettes don't have problems tearing through a knight's plate armor. Terminator armor is the 40K equivalent to Full Plate (where PA is regular Plate Mail, and Carapace is a suit of Plate-and-mail, or half-plate).

Also, Daemonettes are taking greater pleasure in peeling someone out of platemail than they would just straight kill-punching them.

Anfauglir wrote:
You're welcome. And don't think for one second that I'll hesitate to furnish you with continued gifts of wisdom and advice for as long as your posts cry out for more help.

Keep me updated whenever you post something with Wisdom in it. I can wait. Someday, you will provide what you promised. Am sure.

Psienesis wrote:Just going to post this link here:

http://www.demographia.com/dm-lon31.htm

... and point out that the population of London exceeded 1 million people in the 19th century, and numbered 40-50K in the 14th century.

That's just 1 city, and fairly equivalent to Altdorf. You'd also want to look at the other Old World cities and their real-world inspirations (Prague, Venice, Copenhagen, Moscow, etc) and the era in which they exist in the Old World (some cities, for example, are more Renaissance than others). This will help determine a rough idea of the population available and the numbers of soldiers that can be levied.

In the end, though, the Space Marines are f*cked. They don't pack enough fuel or ammo to deal with the Old World.

Basically Altdorf is a mid-european city. Not a city of a centralized Island...
Knowing GW's Maps and sense of scale, I don't trust them to pick the era you are thinking of.
They had planets filled with billions of humans and IG recruted "a million". Wouldn't bet their take on warhammer recrutement is better.



How about finally someone putting the numbers from GW-publications of Warhammer Fantasy into this thread ?
For Example: how many swords could Sigmar call upon ? Answer : ???

The key word is pacify.

Marines don't capture ground, hold territory or engage in meat grinder battles (that's what the IG is for).
I reckon a series of surgical strikes, targeting leadership and major threats would be enough to pacify the world. In particular, Humans and Ogres would quickly be cowed by a seemingly unbeatable enemy striking and retreating.
As such, I feel the major threats exist as Chaos Daemons, Slann Priests, Orcs, and possibly very powerful Vampires. These forces would need exterminating, and the diversity and numbers makes it a tough fight.
One Company might be able to pacify the Warhammer world, but it would be close- two would undoubtedly succeed.

You know that taking out the leaders of Warhammer don't stop the most powerful of citizens (that is, PCs) from taking action, right? In fact, that is more like the catalyst of a bunch of multi-career PCs rolling up, taking stock of the situation, and then whipping out some Mastery 4 magics, or Old Slaan Crystal Weapons (like lasguns, but worse) and putting the hurt on some Space Marines.

 CadianXV wrote:

I reckon a series of surgical strikes, targeting leadership and major threats would be enough to pacify the world.

I think you greatly underestimate just how much leadership (including back-up leaders that would be more than happy to take the current leaders' places) exists in the Warhammer world and just how STRONG (both physically, in terms of awareness, intellectually, and in some cases, magically) a lot of those leaders and their retinues ARE. Heck, in terms of numbers alone 100 or so space marines would probably be out of ammunition by the time they only got done with a fraction of the leadership, assuming they somehow weren't killed in the process.

The Warhammer Fantasy world is almost (almost. Not quite) as grimdark as WH40k, and its denizons have adapted to match. They have proper security precautions and military strategies in place to deal with worse case scenarios (of which many beings on the planet, such as Dark Elves or Chaos, are on par with a team of stealthy marines in terms of the havoc they could do).

Furthermore, there are a ton of factions out there that won't give a gak about their leadership taken out and will fight to the end. Skaven (good luck finding enough ammo to take out that), ogres (they don't even have leadership in the first place), Tomb Kings, Chaos, Dwarves (once you piss them off, they'll never be pacified until every last one is dead), elves and Bretonians (their leadership in some cases are their GODS. Take that out and you can bet the rest of the elves will fight to the last elf and the Brets to the last knight), etc.

About the only leader you might create a turmoil with if you kill him is Emperor Franz, and that's assuming you can get past his huge ass dragon, griffon, and genius intellect first. Even then, congrats. You still have like, 12 factions left to go.

(as an aside, I don't think marines would be satisfied with just pacifying the Warhammer world anyways. For all those filthy non-human xenos on it like those skaven and elves, complete 100% extermination is the only option for a loyal servant of the Emperor)

There are more Skaven in the Old World than there are stars in the night sky.

And they are small, and live in small places...

... and carry flamethrowers that make you grow tentacles and flaming skull heads and/or degenerate into Chaos Spawn.

They also have plague-bombs, as if they were Nurglites, excepting they aren't, they serve the Horned Rat.

 1hadhq wrote:
Keep me updated whenever you post something with Wisdom in it. I can wait. Someday, you will provide what you promised. Am sure.

As much as I enjoy our playful jousting, it's less cute without any actual effort to counter my arguments with your own. Seeing as your posts have dwindled in the latter to leave only to former behind, I think we can now agree that your position is dead in the water, yes? Okay, good.

Basically Altdorf is a mid-european city. Not a city of a centralized Island...
Knowing GW's Maps and sense of scale, I don't trust them to pick the era you are thinking of.

Not sure where you're going with this. We don't need to "trust" GW to pick an era as we already know what eras (roughly) inspire which factions and the bottom line remains the same; one company against multiple civilisations is a no-brainer. The Marines fail. Hard.

How about finally someone putting the numbers from GW-publications of Warhammer Fantasy into this thread ?
For Example: how many swords could Sigmar call upon ? Answer : ???

Why? We already have all the numerical information we need from the OP. It's a full Astartes battle company... against an entire world. Again, it's a no-brainer.

 CadianXV wrote:
The key word is pacify.

Marines don't capture ground, hold territory or engage in meat grinder battles (that's what the IG is for).

It's funny that you identify pacify as the key word, and then fail to grasp what it would actually mean, and take, to accomplish said pacification on a global scale. Without following up any martial victory with significant, lasting measures - for example capturing and holding key ground/territory, the complete subjugation and continuous, simultaneous policing of every single kingdom, lair, province, governing body and any remaining militaries of the various factions and civilisations across the entire planet - they aren't going to pacify squat. Oh yeah, and that's after they've somehow destroyed those factions that simply would not accept attempts at pacification (that's most of them, by the way). So that means engaging in battles. Big ones. Lots of them. Good luck with that.

I reckon a series of surgical strikes, targeting leadership and major threats would be enough to pacify the world.

Again, that failure to grasp what world-wide pacification would actually require rears its ugly head again. Surgical strikes against leadership followed by retreat would do two things; one, have the factions nominate new leaders, and two, make any attempts at pacification even more impossible in the face of the resultant chaos as the power vacuums are filled.

 Anfauglir wrote:

I think we can now agree that your position is dead in the water, yes? Okay, good.

Why should I ?

See I don't try too hard to be serious if a thread is filled with "because magik" , because "numbers we don't give a source but trust me" etc.

 Anfauglir wrote:

How about finally someone putting the numbers from GW-publications of Warhammer Fantasy into this thread ?
For Example: how many swords could Sigmar call upon ? Answer : ???

Why? We already have all the numerical information we need from the OP. It's a full Astartes battle company... against an entire world. Again, it's a no-brainer.

You ask why?

1+1=2
This thread:
100 vs ??? = ???

So NO, without numbers for both ( whfb part and wh40k part ) it is not a "No brainer"; it is rather a debate without using a brain.
( disclaimer: yes I know vs threads aren't worth spending too much time on. )

Games workshop: 1 Marine per world is enough ( wh 40k ). Planets in 40k have populations in billions. So 100 Marines are ?
Maybe whfb and wh40k aren't operating on the same system?

The Space Marines are outnumbered, several million times over, by one army that carries equipment on par with their own.

This would be the clans of the Skaven, which pack warp-fire weapons that give not a single feth about power armor or space-age super-metals, because the Warp does not give a feth about such things.

So you hose a Marine down with a Warp-Fire thrower, and if it doesn't immediately kill him, it mutates him into Chaos Spawn. Or his armor gains malignant sentience and eats him. Or it turns his boltgun into a fistful of sausages or flowers. Or it turns his eyeballs into an assload of flies. Or any one of a thousand other options of Chaos Mutations from Warhammer Fantasy.

Did I mention that there are millions of Skaven? Because there are. They live (and breed and populate) like rats. Because they are.

Send the world eaters!! They would relish in the opportunity of that much hand to hand, and using magic on them would just spur them on :p

But for the question one company would make a huge dent but I doubt it would destroy the whole population

I highly doubt that the highly defended factions like the Dwarves or Elves could be 'strategically hit' by said Space Marines in any way. You would have to grind your way throught he Dwarven tunnels to reach their leadership if you choose to do that kind of attack. And I'd love to see the Space Marines simply 'Drop Pod' into the very magically defended isle of the elves without having more than a serious setback before even hitting the ground.

My answer is no. Space Marines are, in a simple sense, not able to pacify an entire planet with any kind of technology nor the 'Old World' from Fantasy. Those that say so, are just terrible writers and/or fanboys/fangirls.

EXTERMINATUS
Consider the planet pacified.

Pacify? Certainly. Wipe out all sentient species on the planet while keeping all natural formations and resources intact? No. If you want to pacify the fantasy world, all you'll need are several dozen strategic strikes to subdue or neutralize the human and abhuman population. Other faction's though, it'll take both that and a hundred major ground advances to destroy resistance, and then after that, months to exterminate them.

Problem is 100 SM can't really do advances nor can they really exterminate them. It just can't be done. Heck, even the Human race wouldn't be the easiet to destroy. The best you could do is destroy the Empire by killing their lord. But there are many wanting to take claim, and that requires ignoring his possible invuln save not to mention defenses and fething magical creatures and mages. Abhumans, depends. Beastmen. I personally can't see them being organized enough to really fall apart by just killing one lord. But exterminating orks? Exterminating Ratling? Exterminating the forces of chaos? Ha! Good luck with that . Simply put, 100 marines can't do it. They can't pacify the world. Nor would they. Logically, they would promptly go EXTERMINATUS on the planet cause, simply put, it is too messed up.

The funny thing is that if they did take out the human leadership it is highly likely the next time they bothered looking the human empire would be the vampire++ empire.

The only faction that taking out the top leadership would cripple them is the tomb kings who purposely do not have easy replacements for their "necromancers".

Even the humans has several layers of lords who are used to working together against common threats and could lead the vast majority of the empire in a fight or call upon enough Lv4 mages to pelt a space ship with meteors.

Well, what about an entire Legion, including Primarch, assuming this is pre-Heresy? Could the Luna Wolves lead by Horus or Thousand Sons lead by Magnus accomplish this?

 Retrogamer0001 wrote:
Well, what about an entire Legion, including Primarch, assuming this is pre-Heresy? Could the Luna Wolves lead by Horus or Thousand Sons lead by Magnus accomplish this?

Yes.
The librarians would seek out and kill the wisardone by one, and then wverythin else is killed by 1000 terminators and 9000 power armoured marines.

Mcfloonoo wrote:

 Retrogamer0001 wrote:
Well, what about an entire Legion, including Primarch, assuming this is pre-Heresy? Could the Luna Wolves lead by Horus or Thousand Sons lead by Magnus accomplish this?

Yes.
The librarians would seek out and kill the wisardone by one, and then wverythin else is killed by 1000 terminators and 9000 power armoured marines.

I tend to agree, especially with a Primarch like Magnus who could annihilate countless foes with minimal effort. It would be really, really cool to see the World Eaters lead by Angron fighting millions of Orks ...

Assuming lobby learn Magick. Definitely. Unfortunately due to mass exposure to chaos taint the horus Heresy would start up.

An entire legion could probably do it, if only because that'd be a lot of friggin' space marines (assuming one of the larger legions)

....that said, it'd still take a while to hunt down and destroy all those xenos. I highly doubt the Emperor would be very pleased with using an entire friggin' legion for that long for one planet.

If the Great Crusade or Imperium hypothetically did come across the Warhammer world, I imagine they'd either instigate Exterminatus or they'd run an investigation into why Chaos is so interested in the planet that it'd invest multiple daemon princes and greater daemons on the thing. ....likely leading up to an exterminatus (that said, given how invested the chaos gods are in the planet, I imagine Chaos would run their own counter-strategies to prevent that from happening)