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In a universe where there are torpedoes capable of destroying entire planets why was the planet killer made, surely chaos has to possess those same torpedoes and bombs the imperials do and two, if this is the case why was the planet killer so feared if every other ship had these missiles?

Torpedos can be shot down. Beams of energy cannot.
Perhaps there are defenses that provide near/total invulnerability to planet killing topedos.

I thought the idea was that normal exterminatus requires sustained bombardment and careful preparations, and can be stopped by shielding, which means space superiority is necessary. Planet Killer bypassed this by just sniping planets like Ork marksmen at an Apothecary party.

Then came Gathering Storm and who even knows anymore.

There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

You block out the sun kill all life at the cost of so,e gas. Land on it place a thruster on it ( not hard in 40k) and boom done. Find one big enough and you actually might be able to break the planet in half.

Some ships they mention are bigger then small planets. Hell If they where being really evil they could park in the way of the sun and block out all natural light from the planet for months while they laid seige and starved them. Or release al their waste and exhaust on the planet and poison them lol.

OgreChubbs wrote:
There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

You block out the sun kill all life at the cost of so,e gas. Land on it place a thruster on it ( not hard in 40k) and boom done. Find one big enough and you actually might be able to break the planet in half.

Some ships they mention are bigger then small planets. Hell If they where being really evil they could park in the way of the sun and block out all natural light from the planet for months while they laid seige and starved them. Or release al their waste and exhaust on the planet and poison them lol.

All those methods would not work against a defensed planet. An asteriod would approach a planet a a relatively slow speed and easily be intercepted. Cutting off the light from a planet would require something truly massive and a lot of time. Just taking away the sun for a day wouldnt even kill the plant life. A month might kill all plant life but would not nessisarily kill the people. Blockading as such would invite an enemy force to come and break the blockade.

OgreChubbs wrote:
There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

Yes! A reason to post this:

 Nerak wrote:

OgreChubbs wrote:
There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

Yes! A reason to post this:

]

deleted the I I img so not page flood. I still think the loss of life, ammo, development of ammo transfer of it, ammo of the weapons used in compliance used in combat would be nearly double that of chucking a asteroid you would not need to travel with it would be close at hand. Also you would need to retrain people to have them take their place of those that died and the meds used to heal them and so on.

Also I consider myself a bunk and chuck type of person. All games all strats I ever used where always the same. Take land secure a supply line, protect the front line at all costs then pot shot their weaknesses while you wait for them to attack or show any weakness.

Once a weakness is shown bombard it as best you can incase it is a trap to pull your hand. Then hold the line even longer til they come to you.

This is how I always play and think. Make them come to you, fortify and bombard. With the least cost of life ( on your side). Make them surrender then let them starve for a few more months to insure it is not a trap to break the front line. The less combat able planet dwellers left the better Once the combat vets are starved or dead take over the planet supply food by destroying all local fona and flora so they depend on you and with in 1 generation total servitude with very miniature loss of life. All people who fought against you and the upper class get removed and boom done and done. 2 to three months and the planet is yours.

OgreChubbs wrote:

 Nerak wrote:

OgreChubbs wrote:
There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

Yes! A reason to post this:

]

deleted the I I img so not page flood. I still think the loss of life, ammo, development of ammo transfer of it, ammo of the weapons used in compliance used in combat would be nearly double that of chucking a asteroid you would not need to travel with it would be close at hand. Also you would need to retrain people to have them take their place of those that died and the meds used to heal them and so on.

Also I consider myself a bunk and chuck type of person. All games all strats I ever used where always the same. Take land secure a supply line, protect the front line at all costs then pot shot their weaknesses while you wait for them to attack or show any weakness.

Once a weakness is shown bombard it as best you can incase it is a trap to pull your hand. Then hold the line even longer til they come to you.

This is how I always play and think. Make them come to you, fortify and bombard. With the least cost of life ( on your side). Make them surrender then let them starve for a few more months to insure it is not a trap to break the front line. The less combat able planet dwellers left the better Once the combat vets are starved or dead take over the planet supply food by destroying all local fona and flora so they depend on you and with in 1 generation total servitude with very miniature loss of life. All people who fought against you and the upper class get removed and boom done and done. 2 to three months and the planet is yours.

Takes too long, you'd have already drawn attention from one of the hungry factions(Nids, Genestrealers, Chaos) and now no one makes it out of the system. Just smack the planet with it's own moon like the ironhands did to the world eaters.

usmcmidn wrote:
In a universe where there are torpedoes capable of destroying entire planets why was the planet killer made, surely chaos has to possess those same torpedoes and bombs the imperials do and two, if this is the case why was the planet killer so feared if every other ship had these missiles?

Imperial Exeterminatus renders planets uninhabitable. It doesn't actually destroy the entire planet. The Planet Killer does.

See below quote from the BFG rulebook:

All had heard of Exterminatus with fusion torpedoes, virus bombs and mass drivers, but to know the enemy had the ability to destroy an entire planet, not just all the life on it, must have been the most chilling thought that any naval crewman had ever faced.
p. 96, BFG rulebook

I always suspected Abby wanted the ability to kill a C'Tan if the need arose.

Don't fear Abbadon's planet killer. It will fail just like all of his other plans to take over the imperium.

A planet that goes through typical exterminatus, whilst a lifeless rock, is an intact rock all the same, and whilst incredibly expensive, the mechanicum has the means to terror form it if required to repopulate. The planet killer does not leave a lifeless intact rock, it creates an asteroid field.

WoM spoilers!

Dialed down the planet killer also poses a impressive forward array to blast apart even heaviest battleships and battle barges etc...

So it could potently be a potential anti ship death ray...

 jhe90 wrote:
Dialed down the planet killer also poses a impressive forward array to blast apart even heaviest battleships and battle barges etc...

So it could potently be a potential anti ship death ray...

It's got speed too. It can pop out of the warp far outside the defense guns of even the most heavily fortified planet. Fire off it's canon, destroying the planet and half the ships trying to defense the planet. Then it can pop back into the warp before any of the still alive defender ships can come after it.

It's potential as a raider seems unparalleled.

Line ships generally have a very poor ability to do sustainable damage to a planet from orbit, even a battleship of over 5km long is going to have trouble doing much more than token damage in a small zone, simply because mosts planet dwarf even the largest spaceship.

 Exergy wrote:

 jhe90 wrote:
Dialed down the planet killer also poses a impressive forward array to blast apart even heaviest battleships and battle barges etc...

So it could potently be a potential anti ship death ray...

It's got speed too. It can pop out of the warp far outside the defense guns of even the most heavily fortified planet. Fire off it's canon, destroying the planet and half the ships trying to defense the planet. Then it can pop back into the warp before any of the still alive defender ships can come after it.

It's potential as a raider seems unparalleled.

It doesn't jump out of the warp and just one shot planets, it has to bombard them for a while, it just is capable of bombarding it into dust in a reasonable amount of time and by itself. Off the top of my head, I think it was the 12 to 13 hours or so to take out a planet. It may also be 2 or 3 hours. The only other time I remember in the fluff a planet being blasted apart by ships was Caliban, and that was a whole fleet and there is no actual time reference stated for how long it took as far as I'm aware.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:

 Exergy wrote:

 jhe90 wrote:
Dialed down the planet killer also poses a impressive forward array to blast apart even heaviest battleships and battle barges etc...

So it could potently be a potential anti ship death ray...

It's got speed too. It can pop out of the warp far outside the defense guns of even the most heavily fortified planet. Fire off it's canon, destroying the planet and half the ships trying to defense the planet. Then it can pop back into the warp before any of the still alive defender ships can come after it.

It's potential as a raider seems unparalleled.

It doesn't jump out of the warp and just one shot planets, it has to bombard them for a while, it just is capable of bombarding it into dust in a reasonable amount of time and by itself. Off the top of my head, I think it was the 12 to 13 hours or so to take out a planet. It may also be 2 or 3 hours. The only other time I remember in the fluff a planet being blasted apart by ships was Caliban, and that was a whole fleet and there is no actual time reference stated for how long it took as far as I'm aware.

The only time scale mentioned that I can find is for Savaven, the first planet destroyed. It says it was completely destroyed in less than an hour. Given the ponderous speeds of ships in 40k, that is really fast.

I may have to go searching for an ancient White Dwarf to back up my claims. All I wanted to make sure was that people know it isn't a one shot planet killer, it doesn't work like the Death Star, it's a prolonged bombardment.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
I may have to go searching for an ancient White Dwarf to back up my claims. All I wanted to make sure was that people know it isn't a one shot planet killer, it doesn't work like the Death Star, it's a prolonged bombardment.

It might not be ala Death Star. It is still the fastest way humans seem to have of destroying planets.

 Exergy wrote:

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
I may have to go searching for an ancient White Dwarf to back up my claims. All I wanted to make sure was that people know it isn't a one shot planet killer, it doesn't work like the Death Star, it's a prolonged bombardment.

It might not be ala Death Star. It is still the fastest way humans seem to have of destroying planets.

I don't disagree with that, I was more making reference to the claim above that it can drop out of the warp, nuke a planet and then get going again fast is wrong. And it's lack of manoeuvrability in that sense is actually why/how it got destroyed the first time.

 Robbert Ambrose wrote:
Line ships generally have a very poor ability to do sustainable damage to a planet from orbit, even a battleship of over 5km long is going to have trouble doing much more than token damage in a small zone, simply because mosts planet dwarf even the largest spaceship.

There are multiple sources that state a battleship or heavy cruiser can pretty much glass a continent with a couple of broadsides. BFG gives vanilla torpedoes firepower in the range of tens or hundreds of gigatons of TNT. I'd call that more than token damage.

The Planet Killer obviously dwarfs that kind of firepower, but let's not pretend it's rare for 40k ships to be able to sterilize a planet.

Maybe it's feared for this reason:

In a battle between an attacking ship and a similar ship defending a planet, if the attacking ship shoots a torpedo at the planet!s surface and the ship defending the planet intercepts the shot with a projectile of their own, then both ships are down a shot and the planet is unharmed. If the attacking ship fires a torpedo and the planet's shields absorb the attack, then the attacker is down a shot and the planet is unharmed anyway. Here, the resources of the defending ships and planet are added together to determine how much the planet can take, vs the attackers just having what they brought aboard as their resources.

However, with a Blackstone Fortress attacking the planet and a conventional vessel defending, then if the Fortress fires a beam at the planet then as Exergy theorized then the shot can't be intercepted by the defending vessel and assuming that planetary shields don't block infinite stuff the Fortress can just fire again without expenditure of resources. Now in a war of attrition the Blackstone Fortress has to be destroyed or it will eventually win, as it can attack without expending ammo.

It's not as flashy or as scary as other theories, but it is a practical consideration.

Looking at what we know of BFG
It is clear that there are offensive and defense systems. A cruiser is made so it can take the same amount of punishment it puts out. All it's firepower wailing on another crusier wont really do any damage. 2 cruisers though will, the first cruiser breaks down the defenses and then the second cruiser does damage. It's the same with battleships. A single battleship can usually take it's own firepower.

It might be possible for a cruiser to easily destroy an undefended planet, but one with any defenses could either shrug off the damage or cripple the cruiser as it tried to get close enough to deploy extermatus.
A cruiser can either use torpedos to nuke the planet or it's firepower batteries.
Torpedos can be shot down pretty easily if that is all that is incoming.
A defensed planet could just keep shooting down a cruisers torpedos until it ran out of ammo.

Firepower: plasma cannons, lasers, short ranged nukes, and all sorts of guns is usually short ranged, and the effect of it is reduced by range. So to use firepower to glass a planet the cruiser is going to have to get close.
A defended planet could destroy a cruiser as it tried to get close enough to use firepower.

The planet killer doesn't suffer these limitations. It's range is greater than most weapons. It does enough damage to overcome any defenses eventually.

From the old GW Armageddon 3 website archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20010820235454/www.armageddon3.com/English/Campaign/BFG/BFGmap.html

we can see the defenses of each hive on Armageddon comprised at least 4 air bases, 8 missile silos, and 8 laser silos. That kind of firepower would be enough to shred your average Imperial frigate, and even your average cruiser, if they tried to bombard the hive. Even if one takes Armageddon to be a more heavily defended than usual hive world, it still gives a rough gauge of the defenses a typical hive might have, which still is likely to overpower most spaceships.

So in other words, in 40K, ground based defense installations can pack equal or superior firepower to an orbiting starship, and if point values are any indicator, at a lower cost too.

 Ashiraya wrote:
I thought the idea was that normal exterminatus requires sustained bombardment and careful preparations, and can be stopped by shielding, which means space superiority is necessary. Planet Killer bypassed this by just sniping planets like Ork marksmen at an Apothecary party.

Then came Gathering Storm and who even knows anymore.

Just to add sustenance to this, Take the Missile used by the Mechanicus during the second war of Agrellan against the Tau. Granted that the northern hemisphere of the planet being volatile made this worse, but that action turned not only the planet but the space around it into a giant firestorm. it even explicitly states that those within the shields erected by the earth caste were safe. Those outside, not so much...

 Nerak wrote:

OgreChubbs wrote:
There is not even a reason to have missle to kill a planet. You could literally kill a planet by grabbing a asteroid and chucking it at the planet.

Yes! A reason to post this:

Is this official? They use H2O2 as fuel?

 mondo80 wrote:


Is this official? They use H2O2 as fuel?

Apparently the titan class warships do. Perhaps they have some other way of getting energy out of it, as H2O2 is not very powerful stuff.

 Exergy wrote:

 mondo80 wrote:


Is this official? They use H2O2 as fuel?

Apparently the titan class warships do. Perhaps they have some other way of getting energy out of it, as H2O2 is not very powerful stuff.

Probably just a cover for the Imperial Navy's hair care days.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:


There are multiple sources that state a battleship or heavy cruiser can pretty much glass a continent with a couple of broadsides. BFG gives vanilla torpedoes firepower in the range of tens or hundreds of gigatons of TNT. I'd call that more than token damage.

It's simply a matter of math, spaceships, are tiny compared to most planets, Continents are at least tens of thousand square kilometers large, then we haven't even spoke of issue of athmopsheric conditions, distance, targeting, loss. of force etc. So yeah, you get the idea.