Tyran wrote:
There is no small enough splinter fleet for us, a single Hive Ship is enough to nomnom our planet.

 raiden wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
There is no small enough splinter fleet for us, a single Hive Ship is enough to nomnom our planet.

I'd disagree, but eh.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And even then that would only give us an actual -chance-

 Tyran wrote:
Tau, IoM, and some Necrons are the only choices that will let us surrender and be incorporated into their empires.

Everyone else is slavery, genocide or worse.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Tau, IoM, and some Necrons are the only choices that will let us surrender and be incorporated into their empires.

Everyone else is slavery, genocide or worse.

There's also Chaos, although that fate would probably be worse.

 Tyran wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Tau, IoM, and some Necrons are the only choices that will let us surrender and be incorporated into their empires.

Everyone else is slavery, genocide or worse.

There's also Chaos, although that fate would probably be worse.

Chaos is included on the "slavery, genocide or worse" depending on their mood.

Anfauglir wrote:How the hell are Orks winning by such a large margin!? So I guess the majority of voters are assuming that the "modern military" from the topic title are a bunch of totally bat- insane, suicidal dummies? Oh, okay. I guess that makes sense.

Now, assuming that the "modern military" actually want to, you know, have any chance of surviving the encounter, the only logical, reasonable choice is, of course, Tau.

Tyran wrote:Tau, IoM, and some Necrons are the only choices that will let us surrender and be incorporated into their empires.

Everyone else is slavery, genocide or worse.

 Enigwolf wrote:
Why?

The title of the topic is "most want to fight", rather than "most want to negotiate with", and so I think most people took it as negotiation and surrender being out of the question.

 Anfauglir wrote:

 Enigwolf wrote:
Why?

Because choosing Orks is suicide. Obviously. Choosing Tau is not. Again, obviously. I still live in a world where the most logical assumption is that the "modern military" want at least a chance of surviving the fight, even if they can't win. You?

 Anfauglir wrote:

The title of the topic is "most want to fight", rather than "most want to negotiate with", and so I think most people took it as negotiation and surrender being out of the question.

Even if negotiation is out of the question, the correct answer is still Tau. Why? Because all the other factions will appear to the "modern military", by comparison, as completely insane, genocidal psychopaths with utterly unstoppable and uncompromising tactics in warfare - extreme ones with little regard for casualties and/or collateral damage. The Orks being particularly abhorrent in this regard. The Tau, however, a) have at least a recognisable attitude to "civilised" warfare with regards to unacceptable losses and the like. And b), negotiation would never be totally out of the question. They will offer peace terms, pummel us for a while, request surrender, pummel us some more, and so on and so forth.

 Enigwolf wrote:
Because our weapons and armor are completely ineffective against the Tau. A lasgun, a laser rifle, is AP5, and can't even penetrate Tau armor. Think about how ineffective a 5.56 round would be.

SilverSaint wrote:

 Enigwolf wrote:
Because our weapons and armor are completely ineffective against the Tau. A lasgun, a laser rifle, is AP5, and can't even penetrate Tau armor. Think about how ineffective a 5.56 round would be.

I mean in 40K lore science doesn't work so that may be true, but in reality 5.56 would probably wreck armor that works against lasers. Power armor would also equally get wrecked by explosives, heavier rounds, and even enough 5.56. Most likely a space marine chapter sent to conquer Earth for the purpose of living here would have a sweet alpha on some country then get simply destroyed by even smaller countries armies due to numbers and how science actually works.

 2BlackJack1 wrote:
In a pure fight, tau would be out of the question, that tech is scary. But if the question is an all out war, would you rather fight someone who would want to make a truce, or one that would go to the last man, crawling after you with one arm left and pure, unadulterated single mindedness brutality, and then produce spores to remake another army that is ready for annuvah' go. Orks would be terrifying to fight in a face to face battle. Luckily we could bomb the gap out of them with artillery, but they could loot our vehicles and gear and when they do get close, things will not be good for us.

 Enigwolf wrote:
I'm Army. Let's use a hypothetical scenario where we're fighting to the death, because that's what this topic is, not about which race we can barter a peace treaty with.

I'd rather fight the Orks than the Tau... [snip]

I don't think the author of the thread was interested in who we could negotiate with. I think he was more interested in seeing what we realistically thought we had the most fighting chance against.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
That is not true. Armour in 40k is made of materials that do not even exist in reality, so there is no possible way of telling whether any of our weapons could penetrate it.
Also, Space Marines don't work like that. They would deploy from orbit and take out one country's military and infrastructure in a surprise assault, get back into orbit and pick the next country where they would repeat the process.

 Kain wrote:
The Necrons open up by starting up the Sun in a massive solar storm that wipes away the entire population of Earth on the dayside of the planet, then sends a message that crashes any technology that receives it. Then they come down and wipe out what little of us are left after our civilization implodes.

In a first war of armageddon scale Chaos incursion; half of the world's combined militaries goes insane and devotes itself to Khorne before Angron and the world eaters even set foot on the planet. Nurglites would leave most of the planet dead of plagues that no science can cure before the plague marines and cultists even set foot on the planet, and by then there's nothing left to resist the oncoming of the plaguefather. Slaanesh is probably going to corrupt a vast deal of everyone as artists, pleasure seekers, perfectionists, and more keep on falling to Slaanesh's embrace until Governments start getting as fascist as possible to prevent more people from falling into Slaanesh's grip; then the Emperor's children come in with cultists and daemons and its much too late. Tzeentch is just going to corrupt every politician and scientist he can get before his forces set foot, and I'd bet a lot of nations would just surrender to the thread of Tzeentch's forces without even offering a fight.

How much damage an Ork WAAAGH! does depends on its size, a hundreds of millions or billions/tens of billions strong WAAAGH like at Armageddon sweeps aside human civilization with ease, while smaller ones in the thousands would be more of a nuisance and ones in the millions to tens of millions would be devastating but not quite civilization ending.

As for the Tyranids, a quote from Warseer.

Let's take your Royal Marines. Nay, let's take the combined might of Her Majesty's Armed Forces. All ~400,000 of them. They are defending their home from an invasion of inconsolable foes that will not bargain or reason with them, giving them an incalculable morale boost. They are on their home turf, they know the lay of the land, logistics are not stretched but at their best.

Now, 'realistically' this isn't a far cry from your average 40k invasion. Most worlds seem to have all the vital things worth guarding clustered within an area the size of Belgium (or the UK in this case). Excluding of course the key to victory which is located somewhere entirely else for the sake of plot. Here, that's Northern Ireland (but there's no deus ex machina waiting there for the Brits). Consequently, as far as the royal defenders of the crown are concerned, the rest of the world but their island may as well be one endless ocean.

So the Brits are ready, their defenses prepared. A storm cloud gathers overhead... Long before any actual fighting begins, key officers, political figures, media icons, and those just plain unlucky enough to get in the way are butchered by assassins literally invisible to any current sensors or the human eye. The only warning of these lethal lictors are dogs barking after a directionless pheromone trail. Guard dogs are quickly stationed everywhere of importance as an early warning system, attached to even individual trooper squads. But the damage is already done.

Around the same time, the clouds break overhead. Soldiers squirm, fidget, and scream as any exposed inch of skin is slowly dissolved over a period of hours by toxins in the air. Their lungs hemorrhage and collapse over a period of days. NBC suits are quickly issued and worn, but it is largely too late for those already infected or affected. No cure can be found against the rapidly mutating phage cells... at least not in time. Simultaneously, corrosive acids rapidly eat through aircraft and armored vehicles alike--the roofs of hangars not prepared to stand up against anything more than rain. Only vehicles housed in hardened underground hangars are safe. But the general infrastructure above them lies in ruins, everything from roads and telephone lines to shallowly buried waste pipes.

That's the first week. For the sake of argument, we'll pretend only 10% of the British soldiers, armored pieces, and vehicles are taken out of commission before countermeasures are employed. The material loss isn't the important thing, it's the blow to morale. How would the average soldier feel after being told that he can't call in air support because of inclement weather, after watching some of his friends die in agony with their flesh sloughing off before a shot is even fired, knowing that there weren't nearly enough NBC suits to go around so his civilian family members and friends are more likely dead than alive, and with public works out of commission, no way of checking for sure?

No, of course he's not going to run away. Where would he even run to? That's not the meaning of discipline; desertion or breaking and running are merely the worst-case-scenario possibilities.

Finally, a chance to go face to face with the enemy. Huge cloud banks roll in from the sea, blotting out the sky and the light. But this is no cloud--this a million (literally) gargoyles attacking but 1 of Britain's defense posts. Shoot up and you can't miss... but at the same time viscous living maggots fall from the sky like rain, too numerous to take cover from outside. They splat into body armor and flak vest alike, before wriggling their way under each soldier's uniform to the weak point around the armpits and burrowing through the flesh and painfully thrashing and chewing their way to the target's nervous system--resulting in paralyzation and more commonly, death. Individual gargoyles swoop low and fast into the garrison, beheading troopers with their scything tails faster than a body can pivot and track them, or belching bio-plasma from their mouths that chews through the side of an IFV's roof in seconds.

As ever, the Brits adapt quickly with redeployed forces, submunition-equipped SAMs, air-bursting rockets and mortars. Even though the garrison suffers crippling casualties, the million gargoyles are killed in a day. A kill ratio more than worthy of such a well-trained and equipped military.

But the Brits can't cheer for long, because they haven't really repelled the first wave. Mere hours after the first, another million gargoyles attack an installation further north up the cost. Hours after that another million attacks still farther south down the coast. For days this goes on. Days that turn into weeks. The Gargoyles were never meant to take and hold anything. They're merely a scouting force, feeding precious tactical data to the Hive Mind before their meaningless lives are cut short, testing England's defenses.

The men can barely sleep with the Hive Mind so close; a constant buzzing disrupts their dreams, and a pressure builds between their eyes into a migraine during the day. In the night, bunkers spotted out by the gargoyles are penetrated by 4 and 5-meter long Raveners burrowing up from underground, twisting writhing serpents whose thoraxes burst open like a frag grenade in the enclosed close quarters, their six bladed limbs a blur as they scythe through flesh and body armor alike.

Skittering hordes of gaunts equal in number to the gargoyles begin their own assaults. Here the individual soldier's attention begins to waver. With the battlenet a constant drone of barked orders and frantic questions, does he shoot at the inexorably approaching gaunts down the hill, or at the gargoyles who just lifted his squad sergeant into the air kicking and screaming?

By the end of the first month, fixed positions become mandatory as they only safeguard against those flying monsters and the still-toxic atmosphere; the bunkers ravener-proofed with seismographs and buried mines. Making yourself like a rock is the only way to withstand such endless numbers. The "home turf" advantage is meaningless now, as the accelerated growth of local flora changes the landscape into something unrecognizable, blocks lines of sight & fire, and shields heat signatures. The enemy has complete air-superiority by now. Even with careful limitations on the duration Britain's fighters and bombers are aloft and constant maintenance, the planes are brought down by gargoyles sucked into their engines' intake valves, or by massive Harridans and Harpies the size of planes but not warm enough to lock onto with heat seekers before they burst forth from the fog rippling off the jungles below into the cold northern air and grapple each plane to the ground.

And then the real assaults begin, led by 3-meter tall Warriors and floating brain-bags that carve through tanks with War of the Worlds-style death rays. Spores fall in an endless barrage of artillery, making even a mad dash from one bunker to the next unconnected by underground tunnels a near-suicidal proposition. The average foe at this stage has carapace too thick to be penetrated by LA80s while their heads have three sets of compound eyes and accompanying antennae to root out royal marines hidden or lying in wait.

Falling back is necessary. Shrink the vulnerable supply lines, concentrate the defenses in the capital. Few are left now. Only the most bad-ass emotionally bereft sociopathic trained killers survive. Every soldier left replaces their automatic rifles for automatic grenade launchers. There is no longer any point in saving equipment for 'specialists' and no expense is spared.

Challenger tanks defend every street with withering fire from behind hastily erected sandbag and steel berms. AA guns crown every roof, keeping gargoyles out of the hair of the soldiers below. Blind-firing artillery create a virtual wall of death around the city's perimeter to prevent the gaunts and warriors, and other gribblies from getting in. Bridges are blown and buildings strategically sapped and collapsed to form critical choke points. Mines, C4, and trip-wires are laid in abundance.

NOW.

YOU are next to a Challenger defending one of the city's intersections. Things seem to be going well according to the 'net. You're keeping the little ones bottled at the far end of the street.

But then everything changes in a thunderous clap that leaves you shell-shocked, disoriented, and deaf. A spore pod larger than any you've seen yet has landed on the Challenger, crushing it flat into the pavement... and rising up out of the spore's leathery exterior is a titanic monster the size of a small building. Instinctively, you fire a 40mm grenade round into its chest, with absolutely no effect.

Now what? You're on the opposite side of the thing from your squad mates. Behind you the gaunts and warriors are bounding up the alley unchecked. What do you do as it leans towards you? If you're creative enough, you might think to try shooting a round into its gaping mouth as it opens to swallow you whole. If you have the hand-eye coordination, you might try shooting the joint of the arm scything toward you and bisecting it. You could try rolling between its legs and dashing for your friends. You could retreat into the storefront next to you and climb to a higher level, where you might have a better vantage point.

No matter what you choose, you're dead. You were dead no matter what from the beginning. Its long reach and surprising agility allow it to carve through you or crush you in a fraction of a second. But how did you die? Did you get a last shot off? Did it count? Probably not. You could've, but you didn't. You failed to make your death meaningful.

That is the breakdown in discipline. That's what sells your life short when you could have been worth more.

 raiden wrote:
One, in situations of theory such as this you must allow for fictional material. You can't say "it just doesn't work" here's the thing. IIRC laser rifles are not much stronger than a stubber (or in some cases weaker) the reason they are used is threefold-

Accuracy- laser rifles have little kick, they are more accurate than conventional rifles.

Munition- one battery pack for a laser rifle lasts an extremely long time. Its much easier to mass produce them, and they are much more ammo sufficient.

Range- being a laser, its going to go straight for over a mile, depending on fluff it can still prove deadly at that range.

I support this in that in any guard fluff I read, higher upnguardsmen prefer to use more conventional weapons over the rifle.


Sorry, greenskins are tough, but I'd wager any modern day machine gun would tear through then. (After all, most today can go clean through 2 inches of reinforced steel)

Not to mention a 50 cal. Would devastate them even a nob. (Working on an assumption of a 50 cal most likely equating a heavy bolter or more)

Greenskins are not good at fighting. In every fluff on them except ghazzy they are killed in the hundreds and only win from numbers.

A small waaagh would not have the psychic energy, nor the scrap and meks to have stomoas and gargants etc. At least not for a while.

 raiden wrote:
Im not sure what fluff you are reading... But any fluff I've read about lasguns have the beams burning a home the size of the beam through a human. No exploding...

Yeah, a warboss is damn scary, especially a big one with enough psychic energy behind them due to their waaaagh. But an average ork boy? Three hits from a 50 cal would probably end them, they might not die immediately, but if one round hits their heads is a golf ball sized hole+ they will fight for a bit more, but that'd be it. Nobs depend, some of the bigger ones may prove resistant enough to even a 50cal, or more with eavy armor.

Warboss/= regular boyz.

Maybe you should do some reading?

 raiden wrote:

Sorry, greenskins are tough, but I'd wager any modern day machine gun would tear through then. (After all, most today can go clean through 2 inches of reinforced steel)

Not to mention a 50 cal. Would devastate them even a nob. (Working on an assumption of a 50 cal most likely equating a heavy bolter or more)

Greenskins are not good at fighting.

 raiden wrote:
Im not sure what fluff you are reading... But any fluff I've read about lasguns have the beams burning a home the size of the beam through a human. No exploding...

Yeah, a warboss is damn scary, especially a big one with enough psychic energy behind them due to their waaaagh. But an average ork boy? Three hits from a 50 cal would probably end them, they might not die immediately, but if one round hits their heads is a golf ball sized hole+ they will fight for a bit more, but that'd be it. Nobs depend, some of the bigger ones may prove resistant enough to even a 50cal, or more with eavy armor.

Warboss/= regular boyz.

Maybe you should do some reading?