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 Wyzilla wrote:

locarno24 wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Lance Batteries are designed to penetrate shields, they literally exist to knock down the shields on enemy warships.

Given the size of warships in 40k, ground installations with shields tend to be fitted with shields scavenged off warships.

They really don't. Planetary fortifications, and anti-orbit defence lasers, are something even 40k capital ships have to be scared of. See Only War and Siege of Vraks, where even a Dark Angels Battle Barge daren't poke its nose over the horizon for fear of it being shot off.

Except all you have to do is fire kinetic weapons at significant range that the planet can't even target you, meanwhile the projectiles from say a Macrocannon barrage were calculated to have the planet crash into them.

...but when the accurate range is within planetary defences, and you still don't have reliable kill. Pods/THs/Teleport is used to deploy marines near orbital defence installations and to destroy them within.

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

locarno24 wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Lance Batteries are designed to penetrate shields, they literally exist to knock down the shields on enemy warships.

Given the size of warships in 40k, ground installations with shields tend to be fitted with shields scavenged off warships.

They really don't. Planetary fortifications, and anti-orbit defence lasers, are something even 40k capital ships have to be scared of. See Only War and Siege of Vraks, where even a Dark Angels Battle Barge daren't poke its nose over the horizon for fear of it being shot off.

Except all you have to do is fire kinetic weapons at significant range that the planet can't even target you, meanwhile the projectiles from say a Macrocannon barrage were calculated to have the planet crash into them.

...but when the accurate range is within planetary defences, and you still don't have reliable kill. Pods/THs/Teleport is used to deploy marines near orbital defence installations and to destroy them within.

With 40K firepower, you don't have to worry about there being any survivors. You have worry whether or not you just caused an extinction level event and broke the planetary ecosystem permanently.

 Wyzilla wrote:


With 40K firepower, you don't have to worry about there being any survivors. You have worry whether or not you just caused an extinction level event and broke the planetary ecosystem permanently.

This might seem a silly question, but why would they wanna do that? I mean disregarding the loss of sentient life altogether, planets are still commodities. Maybe you can mine it after you've done that, but you sure can't get any cheeseburgers anymore. No salads either, though they're probably not exporting those. Cause you know... salad.

In any case, though, wouldn't exterminatus or anything else liable to cause extinction level damage to a planet be absolutely last resort? The Imperium may have a million worlds, but even one planet is worth incredible sums of money right?

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:

...but when the accurate range is within planetary defences, and you still don't have reliable kill. Pods/THs/Teleport is used to deploy marines near orbital defence installations and to destroy them within.

With 40K firepower, you don't have to worry about there being any survivors. You have worry whether or not you just caused an extinction level event and broke the planetary ecosystem permanently.

It's sensible that orbital defence facilities are hardened againts any and all non-exterminatus class Orbit to Ground weaponry, so even if you would hit even remotely close, the facility itself would survive.

You also have to worry about not causing too much collateral damage, ie. Infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, pretty much anything that's vital to ground operations/planetary assault.

 Phyrekzhogos wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:


With 40K firepower, you don't have to worry about there being any survivors. You have worry whether or not you just caused an extinction level event and broke the planetary ecosystem permanently.

This might seem a silly question, but why would they wanna do that? I mean disregarding the loss of sentient life altogether, planets are still commodities. Maybe you can mine it after you've done that, but you sure can't get any cheeseburgers anymore. No salads either, though they're probably not exporting those. Cause you know... salad.

In any case, though, wouldn't exterminatus or anything else liable to cause extinction level damage to a planet be absolutely last resort? The Imperium may have a million worlds, but even one planet is worth incredible sums of money right?

The Imperium already builds ships that generate self-sustaining ecosystems on them by [i]accident.[/] If the Imperium was intelligent, they would simply abandon planets and make world-ships. Food is provided by GMO's grown en masse, meat grown via stem cells, and soylent green. Water is either made by element forges (aka fusion) or harvested from planets and endlessly recycled.Housing is provided by Hab Blocks built into the ship. Power is generating by multiple fusion reactors, with the fuel being harvested from Nebulae. The ships never need to stop to resupply, and never stop moving.

40k ground to orbit weapons are almost to a degree tech relics, the oldest are high iriplaceable.

Too valuable just to glass the site off hand.

 Wyzilla wrote:

If the Imperium was intelligent, they would simply abandon planets and make world-ships. Food is provided by GMO's grown en masse, meat grown via stem cells, and soylent green. Water is either made by element forges (aka fusion) or harvested from planets and endlessly recycled.Housing is provided by Hab Blocks built into the ship. Power is generating by multiple fusion reactors, with the fuel being harvested from Nebulae. The ships never need to stop to resupply, and never stop moving.

So, poor quality Craftworlds then?

Torquar wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

If the Imperium was intelligent, they would simply abandon planets and make world-ships. Food is provided by GMO's grown en masse, meat grown via stem cells, and soylent green. Water is either made by element forges (aka fusion) or harvested from planets and endlessly recycled.Housing is provided by Hab Blocks built into the ship. Power is generating by multiple fusion reactors, with the fuel being harvested from Nebulae. The ships never need to stop to resupply, and never stop moving.

So, poor quality Craftworlds then?

Better actually, because Craftworlds have to remain still and suck energy up from stars. The Imperial counterpart meanwhile could just fly through a nebulae and scoop up hydrogen to power the reactor.and remain mobile. Which means it can't be jumped by Tyrnaids like Iyanden.

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Very few battles in 40k are written with any sort of realism in mind. Marines will fly half a dozen Thunderhawks onto worlds with thousands of interceptor aircraft and tens of thousands of AA weapons, and never have to do more than jink around a bit. Drop pods will fall onto entrenched positions with sheets of AA fire filling the sky and never once ever be hit.

Stuff happens in 40k because the writers write it that way, not really due to any reflection of the capabilities and methods and equipment used by the various factions.

We have the stats on many 40k vehicles. With a Thunderhawk's speed, basically anything fighter introduced since the late 1950's could intercept and destroy one. Auto-tracking ground defenses would have zero problems destroying a Thunderhawk, but they never do. It's just the nature of 40k.

Ya know, if 40k wanted to be sensible, Terminators being teleported to destroy air defenses would be the most reasonable first strike option.

The bigger problem then is "how do the Terminators know where the AA batteries are" and "there may be several hundred different AA sites within range of the landing zone that all those terminators have to engage and destroy".

 Vaktathi wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Very few battles in 40k are written with any sort of realism in mind. Marines will fly half a dozen Thunderhawks onto worlds with thousands of interceptor aircraft and tens of thousands of AA weapons, and never have to do more than jink around a bit. Drop pods will fall onto entrenched positions with sheets of AA fire filling the sky and never once ever be hit.

Stuff happens in 40k because the writers write it that way, not really due to any reflection of the capabilities and methods and equipment used by the various factions.

We have the stats on many 40k vehicles. With a Thunderhawk's speed, basically anything fighter introduced since the late 1950's could intercept and destroy one. Auto-tracking ground defenses would have zero problems destroying a Thunderhawk, but they never do. It's just the nature of 40k.

Ya know, if 40k wanted to be sensible, Terminators being teleported to destroy air defenses would be the most reasonable first strike option.

The bigger problem then is "how do the Terminators know where the AA batteries are" and "there may be several hundred different AA sites within range of the landing zone that all those terminators have to engage and destroy".

They wouldn't be going after single emplacements. They would monitor the vox-traffic and deploy to destroy their central command.

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:
They wouldn't be going after single emplacements. They would monitor the vox-traffic and deploy to destroy their central command.

Why bother with the marines then? Just drop a tactical nuke on the central command and send in the guardsmen to occupy the rubble. And of course this plan is based on the assumption that there is a single point of failure for the AA network and the individual emplacements can't be transferred to local control if anything happens to the highest levels of the chain of command. Well-run armies don't instantly collapse if a single leader is killed.

Computron wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Then why bother with the marines at all? If you're just going to kill everything with the kind of orbital bombardment required to destroy armored missile silos then it's not like a few bolter shells are going to contribute very much. Just replace the drop pods with more nukes.

Labs, workshops, artifacts that the IOM wants intact, maybe the HQ is too far below ground to hit and confirmation is needed of the kill.
IOM likely wants to save as much infrastructure, tech and even people as possible, they can't use exterminatus everytime or they'll weaken themselves too much.

Yes, but if you're trying to save fragile stuff on the ground then you can't use an orbital bombardment to take out the AA defenses. The point is that once you're throwing enough firepower at a ground target to knock out 1950s-era AA missiles (the kind used to shoot down incoming ICBMs) you're already obliterating everything within a rather large radius of the target. So you have one of two situations:

1) You're willing to destroy everything with an orbital bombardment, in which case marines are redundant because a few bolter shots are 0.000000000000000000000000000001% of the damage you've already caused.

2) You aren't willing to destroy everything with an orbital bombardment, in which case the drop pod assault will be slaughtered by AA defenses and you'll have to sacrifice entire chapters of marines for a small chance at getting a squad or two all the way to the ground.

Fortunately for the space marines virtually everyone in 40k is stuck at less than 1950s-era technology, so they rarely have to worry about anything shooting down their drop pods.

I think it's mentioned in fluff that Drop Pods can't be properly tracked by AA. At least I remember reading it somewhere but I can't quite remember the exact source. Might have been a passage in a codex or from one of the HH novels. Anyone know the fluff that mentions this?

Oh and I don't mean they can't be shot down, just that they are impossible to target properly because of the speed of their descent, which is why most of them make it to the surface safely. In the FW books about the Dropsite Massacre, it's mentioned that some of the loyalist drop pods are shot down but most of them make it through, even with the heaviest AA fire they have ever faced. That's what I mean.

 EngulfedObject wrote:
I think it's mentioned in fluff that Drop Pods can't be tracked by AA. At least I remember reading it somewhere but I can't quite remember the exact source. Might have been a passage in a codex or from one of the HH novels. Anyone know the fluff that mentions this?

It's mentioned, but it's stupid. We could hit (as in direct hit, not just a proximity nuke) incoming ICBMs in the 1950s. The only reason anyone has a hard time dealing with drop pods is that they're limited to using WWII-era hand-operated AA guns at best.

 Peregrine wrote:
It's mentioned, but it's stupid. We could hit (as in direct hit, not just a proximity nuke) incoming ICBMs in the 1950s. The only reason anyone has a hard time dealing with drop pods is that they're limited to using WWII-era hand-operated AA guns at best.

Well yea, I'm not sure how plausible it is with real life explanations, just the way it is in universe.

They can't just launch drop pods assaults whenever though. In Unremembered Empire, there's an accidental launch of DA drop pods and the void shields of the city have to be lowered for them to survive the drop.

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Very few battles in 40k are written with any sort of realism in mind. Marines will fly half a dozen Thunderhawks onto worlds with thousands of interceptor aircraft and tens of thousands of AA weapons, and never have to do more than jink around a bit. Drop pods will fall onto entrenched positions with sheets of AA fire filling the sky and never once ever be hit.

Stuff happens in 40k because the writers write it that way, not really due to any reflection of the capabilities and methods and equipment used by the various factions.

We have the stats on many 40k vehicles. With a Thunderhawk's speed, basically anything fighter introduced since the late 1950's could intercept and destroy one. Auto-tracking ground defenses would have zero problems destroying a Thunderhawk, but they never do. It's just the nature of 40k.

Ya know, if 40k wanted to be sensible, Terminators being teleported to destroy air defenses would be the most reasonable first strike option.

The bigger problem then is "how do the Terminators know where the AA batteries are" and "there may be several hundred different AA sites within range of the landing zone that all those terminators have to engage and destroy".

They wouldn't be going after single emplacements. They would monitor the vox-traffic and deploy to destroy their central command.

Well, that has issues for a few reasons. First, communication is likely to be relatively short ranged, not something you can monitor from orbit. It may even be hardwired, so unless you get a tap on the line it would be impossible to listen in. They're also not at all likely to be directly contacting any sort of central command, and even if they were, how exactly are they going to know where that central command is?

Peregrine wrote:
Why bother with the marines then? Just drop a tactical nuke on the central command and send in the guardsmen to occupy the rubble. And of course this plan is based on the assumption that there is a single point of failure for the AA network and the individual emplacements can't be transferred to local control if anything happens to the highest levels of the chain of command. Well-run armies don't instantly collapse if a single leader is killed.

But the central command is also the hub of the communications network, passing target data to firing units.

Peregrine wrote:
Fortunately for the space marines virtually everyone in 40k is stuck at less than 1950s-era technology, so they rarely have to worry about anything shooting down their drop pods.

Generalization. Technology is way beyond anything made in 50's.

Peregrine wrote:
You aren't willing to destroy everything with an orbital bombardment, in which case the drop pod assault will be slaughtered by AA defenses and you'll have to sacrifice entire chapters of marines for a small chance at getting a squad or two all the way to the ground.

Drop Pods are difficult to shoot down, even with computerized fire control.

Peregrine wrote:

 EngulfedObject wrote:
I think it's mentioned in fluff that Drop Pods can't be tracked by AA. At least I remember reading it somewhere but I can't quite remember the exact source. Might have been a passage in a codex or from one of the HH novels. Anyone know the fluff that mentions this?

It's mentioned, but it's stupid. We could hit (as in direct hit, not just a proximity nuke) incoming ICBMs in the 1950s. The only reason anyone has a hard time dealing with drop pods is that they're limited to using WWII-era hand-operated AA guns at best.

Are you comparing Drop Pods to ICBM's? Lol.

Drop Pods are unpredictable, small and extremely fast crafts. IF you hit it somehow, it is also well armoured.

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:
But the central command is also the hub of the communications network, passing target data to firing units.

Only if the person designing the network is really stupid. Yes, there will probably be a central radar/control/etc hub for multiple AA sites in the immediate area, but not for hundreds of them. There will obviously be a level of the chain of command that has authority over all of the hundreds of sites in the network, but if that link in the chain is destroyed then local commanders would take over their own AA sites and continue fighting. In a sensibly-designed military you aren't going to have a single point of failure where killing one HQ is enough to shut down an entire network of hundreds of AA sites spread across an entire region.

Generalization. Technology is way beyond anything made in 50's.

Not really, at least for the ground forces that we see in 40k. Imperial armies are WWI and WWII era real-world armies with some extra skulls and giant shoulder pads. Modern weapons like drones, guided missiles, etc, are virtually nonexistent.

Drop Pods are difficult to shoot down, even with computerized fire control.

And, again, we could hit incoming ICBM warheads (the equivalent of a drop pod in speed, but a much smaller target) in the 1950s. Drop pods are only difficult to shoot down because hardly anyone in 40k has AA defenses beyond WWII-era flak guns.

Drop Pods are unpredictable, small and extremely fast crafts. IF you hit it somehow, it is also well armoured.

They aren't unpredictable because they have little or no ability to maneuver, and they're slower than an incoming ICBM because they have to deliver their contents intact. And who cares about their armor, their own speed makes it easy to destroy them with a collision, and if that doesn't do it a direct hit from a nuclear SAM should kill one just fine.

 Peregrine wrote:
Only if the person designing the network is really stupid. Yes, there will probably be a central radar/control/etc hub for multiple AA sites in the immediate area, but not for hundreds of them. There will obviously be a level of the chain of command that has authority over all of the hundreds of sites in the network, but if that link in the chain is destroyed then local commanders would take over their own AA sites and continue fighting. In a sensibly-designed military you aren't going to have a single point of failure where killing one HQ is enough to shut down an entire network of hundreds of AA sites spread across an entire region.

Chain of command is pretty useless if the comms are jammed/disrupted/destroyed.

 Peregrine wrote:
Not really, at least for the ground forces that we see in 40k. Imperial armies are WWI and WWII era real-world armies with some extra skulls and giant shoulder pads. Modern weapons like drones, guided missiles, etc, are virtually nonexistent.

Skystrike, Hellfury & Hellstrike missiles are guided. I'm sure that drones are used, we just don't have had any examples.

 Peregrine wrote:
And, again, we could hit incoming ICBM warheads (the equivalent of a drop pod in speed, but a much smaller target) in the 1950s. Drop pods are only difficult to shoot down because hardly anyone in 40k has AA defenses beyond WWII-era flak guns.

Shooting DPs would be like trying to shoot down MIRV's. EXTREMELY difficult.

 Peregrine wrote:
They aren't unpredictable because they have little or no ability to maneuver, and they're slower than an incoming ICBM because they have to deliver their contents intact. And who cares about their armor, their own speed makes it easy to destroy them with a collision, and if that doesn't do it a direct hit from a nuclear SAM should kill one just fine.

Drop Pods ARE maneuverable (guided more like). That's why they are used for pin-point assaults. DPs fall at terminal velocity, and once they reach low altitude (below radar) retro-thrusters fire up to slow down before hitting the ground.

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:
Chain of command is pretty useless if the comms are jammed/disrupted/destroyed.

Oh, so no we're also giving space marines a magic "remove all communications" button? If they can just turn off all communication with "jamming" then why bother sending a space marine assault down to kill the HQ for the AA network? Just jam the whole thing from orbit.

Skystrike, Hellfury & Hellstrike missiles are guided.

And yet they magically disappear whenever there's air combat, and the primary weapon is always some kind of gun. Contrast this with even modern-era air combat which is mostly resolved with a missile exchange from far outside visual range. So we can conclude that the Imperium's guided missiles are, at best, equivalent to US Vietnam-era missiles that barely functioned and often forced US pilots into dogfighting with their guns.

Meanwhile if we look at ground combat we don't see the equivalent of modern anti-tank missiles. Sure, they get "missile launchers" that function like WWII-era unguided rockets with a smaller chance of killing a tank. But they don't have modern "fire and forget" top-attack missiles that will consistently kill a tank with a single shot.

I'm sure that drones are used, we just don't have had any examples.

So if we have no evidence for them, despite modern drones being so thoroughly integrated into the military that it would be almost impossible to write a modern-era story without including them, why are we going to assume that they exist?

 Peregrine wrote:
Shooting DPs would be like trying to shoot down MIRV's. EXTREMELY difficult.

No, shooting down MIRVs is trivially easy. We did it in the 1950s (with direct contact hits, not proximity nukes), and the only reason we didn't keep doing it was that we signed a treaty that severely limited anti-missile defenses.

Drop Pods ARE maneuverable (guided more like). That's why they are used for pin-point assaults.

There's a difference between making subtle course corrections to fine-tune your impact point and making high-g maneuvers sufficient to dodge an incoming SAM. This is the reason that even "guided" ICBMs are still a trivially easy target for an interceptor missile.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Finlandiaperkele wrote:
Chain of command is pretty useless if the comms are jammed/disrupted/destroyed.

Oh, so no we're also giving space marines a magic "remove all communications" button? If they can just turn off all communication with "jamming" then why bother sending a space marine assault down to kill the HQ for the AA network? Just jam the whole thing from orbit.

Nope. Space Marines are more primitive than that, they remove communications by blowing up antennae.

Skystrike, Hellfury & Hellstrike missiles are guided.

And yet they magically disappear whenever there's air combat, and the primary weapon is always some kind of gun. Contrast this with even modern-era air combat which is mostly resolved with a missile exchange from far outside visual range. So we can conclude that the Imperium's guided missiles are, at best, equivalent to US Vietnam-era missiles that barely functioned and often forced US pilots into dogfighting with their guns.

Meanwhile if we look at ground combat we don't see the equivalent of modern anti-tank missiles. Sure, they get "missile launchers" that function like WWII-era unguided rockets with a smaller chance of killing a tank. But they don't have modern "fire and forget" top-attack missiles that will consistently kill a tank with a single shot.

Lore and gameplay backs Peregrine on this one. Skystrike missiles are barely guided, Hellfuries and Hellstrikes are dumbfire. In Aeronautica Imperialis the Imperium and the Orks are the only armies that use large disposable missiles at all, the Eldar and the Tau have magazines of smaller but equivalently-powerful missiles and Chaos sticks to their swarms of autocannon-equipped planes.

I'm sure that drones are used, we just don't have had any examples.

So if we have no evidence for them, despite modern drones being so thoroughly integrated into the military that it would be almost impossible to write a modern-era story without including them, why are we going to assume that they exist?

The Tau use technologically-based AI drones that wouldn't be out of place in a modern/hard sci-fi setting, nobody else does. The Imperium has pretty strict rules about AI that would prevent autonomous drones and remote-piloted drones are limited by Imperial communications technology, which isn't all that reliable.

 Peregrine wrote:
Shooting DPs would be like trying to shoot down MIRV's. EXTREMELY difficult.

No, shooting down MIRVs is trivially easy. We did it in the 1950s (with direct contact hits, not proximity nukes), and the only reason we didn't keep doing it was that we signed a treaty that severely limited anti-missile defenses.

Drop Pods ARE maneuverable (guided more like). That's why they are used for pin-point assaults.

There's a difference between making subtle course corrections to fine-tune your impact point and making high-g maneuvers sufficient to dodge an incoming SAM. This is the reason that even "guided" ICBMs are still a trivially easy target for an interceptor missile.

Drop Pods aren't equipped to dodge missiles, they figure that if they set them up to be as fast as possible and relatively hard to spot they can beat the reaction time of the gunners on the ground because as we've already established there are almost no computer-controlled weapon systems in Warhammer.

I'd figure that the Pods have a Active Protection system of some sort combined with a gak-ton of counter measures, in order to prevent missiles from gaining a clear lock and to shoot down those that do.

RaptorusRex wrote:
I'd figure that the Pods have a Active Protection system of some sort combined with a gak-ton of counter measures, in order to prevent missiles from gaining a clear lock and to shoot down those that do.

I tend to go with this idea. In general I like to assume that pretty much every battlefield is filled with countermeasures designed to disrupt the more sophisticated targeting systems. Precise orbital strikes as well as cruise missile (or equivalent) attacks tend to need someone to paint the target in some manner. Some technology can bypass most of these countermeasures but it's prohibitively hard and expensive to manufacture. Additional disclaimer; this is my own personal headcanon.

The problem is there's zero fluff to support any such supposition regarding drop pod defenses. GW's sum explanation of their survivability is "they're really fast". There's nothing on the model to indicate any sort of active defenses or countermeasure capabilities either.

While such would make them much more realistic, there's just nothing to support the existence of such things. At least as far as I can recall.

 Vaktathi wrote:
The problem is there's zero fluff to support any such supposition regarding drop pod defenses. GW's sum explanation of their survivability is "they're really fast". There's nothing on the model to indicate any sort of active defenses or countermeasure capabilities either.

While such would make them much more realistic, there's just nothing to support the existence of such things. At least as far as I can recall.

The most popular model is still the space marine, a figure that apparently has no hips and whose neck is broken to fit in a terminator suit..
I would take with a grain of salt the accuracy of the model compared to how such a thing might exist in the reality of the setting.

When it comes to drop pods, I just figured they took the Halo/Starship troopers approach:

Drop a bunch of chaff as well as a bunch of decoy pods that serve as resupply points/weapons caches/ammo dumps.

And that's ignoring the deathstorm pods that are launched wity regular pods.

The better writers actually though have great grasps for how war works. I know someone mentioned it but Storm of Iron's invasion was well planned. Essentially it started with a saturated bombardment of an entire starport area (with obvious AA). Then they dropped unmanned drop pods with gun turrets in them in order to clear out the troops. THEN they dropped their drop pods on this singular star port.

What people tend to forget is that the 40k universe Space Marines on the 28mm tabletop is not what they are supposed to be. In most novels, BFG, and Epic 40,000 - space marines were accurately represented as what they are - elite quick specialist forces used to cut off the head of an army and run hit and run tactics (now it varies per chapter... e.g. imperial fists are better at preparing/defending a siege.... but still). In BFG - Space marine vessels were quick, well armed, and short ranged. Essentially you came in quickly, bombarded them with bombardment cannons, and then boarded them, and then ran away . Epic 40,000 was an even greater example. If you had a gunline space marine army.... or a 40k equivalent of a space marine army you would get wrecked. Epic SM armies had great use of thunderhawk support coupled with Whirlwind batteries coupled with rhinos going quickly to objectives.

Aforementioned novel (storm of iron) notwithstanding - there are other great examples of this. Essentially you kinetic/bombard very specific local targets (for example since I live in NJ, the SAM silos in NJ and NY). Then you drop unmanned pods full of turrets to clear out local population and expend the AA. When the smoke clears is when you drop the Space Marine.

I know you mentioned WWII but I think you mentioned the wrong part of WWII. This is not WWII tech rather WWII techniques (blitzkrieg comes to mind).

By the way - you also forget how small the drop pod is, and how quick its entry into the atmosphere is. Sure a SAM missile could get it, but its unlikely.

Who can say whether the AA emplacements capable of hitting a drop pod (or thunderhawk) would even hurt it, I suspect that with AV 12 (or whatever a thunderhawk has) they could withstand pretty much any type of 1950s type weaponry.

How about teleporting? Cant really stop that at all, but having a drone trained to see the warp distortions could just lob a few grenades into the incoming squad. Food for thought.

 Peregrine wrote:

Computron wrote:
That's why they deploy via drop pods moving at ballistic speeds. They don't leave stuff in the air for long enough to worry about most AA.

Nonsense. You can easily shoot down incoming ballistic missiles (by direct hits, not just proximity nukes) with 1950s technology, which should make a drop pod assault into a well-defended target a suicide mission. Space marines are just lucky that pretty much everyone they fight is stuck at a WWII (or worse) level of technology and doesn't know how to make a decent SAM network. A drop pod assault on an alternate-universe US/USSR with no treaty limitations on anti-missile weapons would involve sacrificing several entire chapters to maybe have a chance of landing a squad or two.

I've always imagined that the ECM persistent throughout all battlefields in the 41 millenium is at OMG levels. Where any sort of electronic, non organic sensor is going to be corrupted, blinded, or possessed by Larry, the IT demon. That is why almost everything except tube artillery is LOS and fighters do work only WVR.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Bluefalcon23 wrote:
Who can say whether the AA emplacements capable of hitting a drop pod (or thunderhawk) would even hurt it, I suspect that with AV 12 (or whatever a thunderhawk has) they could withstand pretty much any type of 1950s type weaponry.

How about teleporting? Cant really stop that at all, but having a drone trained to see the warp distortions could just lob a few grenades into the incoming squad. Food for thought.

You're talking about the armor of a drop pod withstanding a 40 foot long exploding telephone pole moving at three and a half times the speed of sound. I don't like those odds, actually. Or if you go for a kinetic intercept, a hardened metal telephone pole impaling the side of this thing at whatever closing speed would be, I'm assuming well into the hypersonic regime, like Mach 10-12. And it has to shrug it off so well that all the systems still work perfectly. We lost Columbia when like four tiles got shifted out of alignment by a piece of ice dropped about 30 feet. So I don't think that a drop pod could survive a SAM hit, actually.

Columbia - at least the tiles in question - were made of pretty fragile stuff in terms of kinetic impact, though.

Thermal re-entry and the ability to take physical impacts are two different things.

Admittedly, at suborbital speeds, even a glancing blow is a humungous kinetic impact, but then we've no means of comparing damage tolerance of a drop pod to modern armour; a railgun shell, for example, has a 1/6 chance of bouncing off.

Antimissile defences are not quite as mature as described. Antimissile defences existed (Nike is the one which actually achieved a 'hit') back in the 60s, but whilst they were for ballistic missiles, I'm not aware of them ever being used against ICBM-speed targets - an ICBM is significantly faster than a theatre-scale ballistic missile (the sort of thing you'd see lobbed from Cuba or firing back and forth across Germany).

Given the number of times the Ground-Based Interceptor, which has the advantages of modern sensors and computational power, has frickin' missed in trials, I suggest it's not as easy as suggested.


Ultimately, 40k is a setting with only a nodding acquaintance with physics anyway. I had a discussion along these lines with John French just after he'd finished the Tallarn stuff - yes, the sensible thing to do is to fire pre-plotted bombardments from the edge of the system - and you can, at least with virus weapons when you want to destroy, not take, the planet. But, all tactical rationality out the window, it's not as awesome as two suburb-sized warships blazing away broadside to broadside Macragge's Honour fashion. Star Wars is no different; given turreted lasers and decent fire control, the Battle of Coruscant scene should barely have had one warship within easy visual range of a second. But that would have been dull.

Actually now that I did a bit of research - I do not think a SAM sight has a chance to take out a drop pod. What you guys are thinking is that the SAM missile takes out the drop pod with a direct hit (the 40ft long exploding telephone pole). However, upon some research it seems that the missile works very much in the same way as fragmentary wound. It explodes in the vicinity of the missile in order to detonate it safely in the atmosphere. Essentially what a sam missile would do is detect the drop pod as a foreign (enemy) projectile, it would calculate the trajectory, and it would launch along the "same line." It would then explode in near proximity to the drop pod in order to try to detonate it - herein lies the problem.

You would be relying on the drop pod being penetrated by the shrapnel of the missile... which would be quite substantial... but still it would have a hard time. What makes it even more unlikely is that if the SAM missile does not directly hit (as it is not suppose to) the drop pod would be traveling too fast for the shrapnel to do significant damage. The drop pod essentially breaks the sound barrier, much like a missile does, but the missile just needs one shrapnel piece to penetrate the explosive inside, where as the drop pod... meh.

Now the awesome thing is that some missiles can track missiles, in case the incoming missiles changes trajectory. This could come in handy if the drop pod machine spirit changes its retro thrusters to burn itself into a different trajectory, but again, the problem arises is that the missile is exploding to basically explode another missile, not to kill it outright.

Now that I think about it... its kinda like that game missile defense haha. Only difference is that those aren't missiles.. but the angels of death..... 0_0