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As its more interseting to the thread at this point, when is it appropriate to glass a planet?

What limited or unlimited world ending measures might be applied and when?

I'd suggest that even if all you wanted was a planets mineral wealth(adimantium mines, maguffin crystals), its still cheaper to throw millions of guardsman at it and leave a breathable atmosphere for the penal legions/serviotors to work in- rather than set the atmosphere on fire and have to provide your miners with spacesuits and imported oxygen.

Just personally I'm not brought on mineral wealth of planets, rare resources is fine, but minerals? That's what asteroids are made out of. They're not exactly rare.

I'd think you'd use the planet for it's ability to easily support a large population of potential soldiers and workers. Therefore, the investment of millions or even of soldier's lives will always be worth it, because that world will send millions of soldiers to fight for the imperium, and support a population of billions of workers until it is taken over by other forces.

Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.

 OldMate wrote:

Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.

Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 OldMate wrote:

Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.

Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.

True, but at the same time don't forget the Imperium is a multi-layered beast. Whilst as an entity and empire it doesn't mind hundreds of years; you can bet those who are alive at the time do care about timescales and cost. Even the super-long lived with life extending medical support would rather that they could earn profit from their newly conquered world rather than have to wait centuries before its terraformed (with the risk of warp storms, trade disruption and moving trade lines and all that which could make a prize into a burden). When the costs are either vast Exterminatus or cheap guard I suspect most would rather send in the guard and have a faster profiting potential from a captured world rather than all the requisition forms and approvals and more forms that likely have to be filled in before you can get the order slip to request a terraformer.

I'd say Chaos infestation where resettlement or even the ground was would endanger the Imperium, Tyranid /geenestealer infestation, Ork world or system that's too powerful to allow to continue existing and too time or resource draining to fight?

Kayback wrote:
I'd say Chaos infestation where resettlement or even the ground was would endanger the Imperium, Tyranid /geenestealer infestation, Ork world or system that's too powerful to allow to continue existing and too time or resource draining to fight?

Yeah I'd have to agree, but geanestealers lead to nids and nids leave the planet, and leave it stripped of life and resources. So that's not something you'd glass, it's something you'd ignore.


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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 OldMate wrote:

Having this be delayed by having to wait a century or two for the mechanicus to make it inhabitable again before you can populate it? Well that might be a wait you can't afford.

Do we have a rough in-universe estimate on the time it takes to terraform a world? Because a couple of centuries is nothing to the Imperium in terms of timescale. You'll probably find there's an IG regiment that has been sitting in a transport somewhere for 500 years waiting to find out where they are being dispatched to and have been having families amongst themselves and the crew of the ship to keep the regiment at strength, training the next generation for the time when they will be called upon to fight in the name of the Emperor.

Said regiment was it an error that is apparently so common in universe? If so just like the countless worlds/regiments/orphaned puppies that starved because some scribe here or other forgot a 0 or decided to roll this page up and smoke it becasue their life sucks and hopefully the ink is toxic, strategically if you take a planet you want it productive as soon as possible.
I can see it taking ages to a populate a planet due to an error. But Intention and error are not the same beast.


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Also there is more room for timely errors and downright refusal if the red robed boys do have to come in and terraform the thing, better to throw guardsmen at it till it's yours and request a few million migrants. Who will augment and raise families with the the surviving guardsmen.

roboemperor wrote:
I think some of you are not understanding what orbital bombardment is.

It is something worse than a rain of nuclear hellfire. It is worse than a thousand ICBMs.

I do understand anti-air or anti-space defense. Britain and the US had extreme difficulty combating germans via endless bombing in WWII so it is conceivably do-able. But these were conventional ordinances not nuclear. There is not a chance in hell anything can defend against a nuclear missile or a nuclear bomber.

So in WH40K's impossible science, their orbital bombardment is worse than a rain of 1000 nukes. So the only way they can stop that is if they have someway of surviving said rain of WMDs and hitting back. Someone mentioned planet-wide shields?

And you don't need boots on the ground to coordinate icbms. So why would you need boots on the ground to coordinate something even more destructive than icbms?

Orbital bombardment is a tool, and when it is necessary they use it, but different problems require different tools.

Everything is relative. A barren rock of a planet with little population on it is likely not even worth the energy spent to blast it from space.

A teeming world with massive infrastructure and a massive population producing tons of war machinery becomes a big target. But you can bet such a world would be heavily protected. Void shields, its own huge number of defense force, space station bases, maybe even its own defense fleet.

Spaceships that can fight are not exactly an infinite resource. Large battleships and battle barges are even more rare. You want to take on a heavily defended planet, you will need an entire fleet. And even then, it may not be totally suppressed.

A huge planet has the entire planet in which to build upon. A spaceship has only enough space to fill out the capacity of its hull. If a spaceship voidshield can cover its entire hull and is say toughness 7 (arbitary number). Imagine how powerful a planetary voidshield that covers miles upon miles of land can be, It could easily be a toughness 10 in comparision.

A nova cannon on a spaceship is powerful yes. But imagine how many such nova cannons you can fit into a planet. And you can easily scale up to super nova cannons and such.

An undefended barren planet isn't even worth the energy to blast it into bits. But the "capital" of the imperium ... you can bet that would be the most heavily defended planet of the imperium. So, trying to take that out even if you have achieved some sort of local space superiority is not such a simple thing. Remember the siege of Terra ?

Horus had achieved space superiority over Terra. But he still had to crack it open by landing troops. The void shields of Terra were simply too strong for him to just blast it into bits from space.

Read "Starship Troopers". There are some great quotes justifying the Mobile Infantry.

In the novel 1984, it was said that "The object of torture is torture."

In 40k all too often the object of war is war. Period.

Many in the 40k universe want war and combat, up close and personal, as an end unto itself.

Orks. Can you imagine an ork mekboy or painboy inventing a weapon or virus that would wipe out all opposition on the planet while leaving the resources intact for the taking? Thrakka would throw him thru the nearest airlock, or weak spot in the hull, on just the nearest part of the hull period.

Thrakka knows the orks need combat in and of itself, period..

Likewise the Necron Maynarkh dynasty needs to kill, to massacre, to slaughter. Personally, directly, as close, painful and bloody as possible. During their infamous Orphean war, they attack a major imperial world en masse, established beacheads and began expanding. They forced imperial defenders to fall back. Had the point of the war been conquest they would have followed and destroyed the retreating and regrouping forces. They did not do so. They began a total extermination of every imperial civillian they found in the areas they'd taken. They stopped their advance to slaughter simply for the sake of slaughtering rather than pursue a legitimate military campaign. To the decayed and degenerate Maynark killing was not a means to an end, it was an end. So bitter, warped and degenerate they were after their long sleet and infection by the flayer virus, perhaps in a slow burning form, that to them war was about slaughtering and milling, nothing else.

So in 40k the point of land combat often is land combat, bloody, up close and personal killing. Writ large.

Also how well do you thin the imperium would hold up if suddenly there was no enemies pressing it's borders for a century or even a few decades?


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It is geared to fighting enemies within and without, without enemies it will wage war within.

 greyknight12 wrote:
Read "Starship Troopers". There are some great quotes justifying the Mobile Infantry.

Yup

Also illusive enemies must be hunted down, contacted, closed with, and slain in close combat, no amount of bombardment, or gunfire will harm a target it hasn't hit. Close with them and make sure you've made the kill. Be it with gunfire, grenades, bayonet or sword.

 OldMate wrote:
Also how well do you thin the imperium would hold up if suddenly there was no enemies pressing it's borders for a century or even a few decades?


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It is geared to fighting enemies within and without, without enemies it will wage war within.

The vast majority of the Imperium's conflicts are actually against other humans. Be they non-Imperial or Rebels. So not much would change other than it could actually focus on internal strife a little more.

Anyway, the Imperium could just lie and say they still have external enemies. Its not like their citizens are in any position to find out if its true or not. Most Imperial planets are actually peaceful and don't see any real conflict other than occasional civil unrest.

I think the OP also underestimates the sheer size of a planet, they are big, and the space around them is even bigger. Unless you're cracking the planet open with some kind of ludicrous-cannon, targeting its entire surface is going to either take an enormous amount of time, or an enormous amount of ships to hit it all - not to mention the amount of ordnance you would need to do so. Which makes it largely impractical.

Ans as many have said, the planet is the objective, rendering it useless generally defeats the purpose of turning up in the first place. Sure if all you want to kill is one big city, you can glass the thing - but if you actually want to use it yourself for anything later, not terribly helpful in the long run, and once you've blasted it to nothing, you now have to build up defenses very quickly against counter attack - or fresh attack from someone else who wants the planet!

What is the point of land combat?

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Hard to do that from orbit.

The US carpet bombed Vietnam for years and never managed to dislodge the Cong, and that was a much smaller area. Afghanistan the same.

Unless you dropped bombs that literally covered the surface of the planet - the earth has a surface area of 510.1 million km² -, you aren't guaranteed to hit everyone.

And as has been shown previously, the imperium isn't as exterminatus-happy as internet memes describe

 Grey Templar wrote:

 OldMate wrote:
Also how well do you thin the imperium would hold up if suddenly there was no enemies pressing it's borders for a century or even a few decades?


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It is geared to fighting enemies within and without, without enemies it will wage war within.

The vast majority of the Imperium's conflicts are actually against other humans. Be they non-Imperial or Rebels. So not much would change other than it could actually focus on internal strife a little more.

Anyway, the Imperium could just lie and say they still have external enemies. Its not like their citizens are in any position to find out if its true or not. Most Imperial planets are actually peaceful and don't see any real conflict other than occasional civil unrest.

Initially I'd actually be less worried about the general population, but having things like space marine chapters that do their own thing without oversight, and whose sole purpose is war, and then sitting around idle, well without enemies to keep them busy they're just going to feud and then that's going to drag in other arms. Same with the different arms of the mechanicus and inquisition, structurally the imperrium is unsound, without external pressure or chaos uprising it's going to crumble, and astartes know a chaos uprising from a non chaos uprising and will likely not appreciate being lied to by the inquisition. When these structures start to feud the populations will in places take sides at first, and then eventually become disillusioned and then finally uprise.


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TLDR: The Imperium needs constant war and persistent outside threats to stop an internal collapse/ major internal conflict.

I'm sure the Space Marines would easily be retasked to deal with Rebellions. Again, they're going to spend most of their time fighting rebellious humans and that's not going to change even if the Imperium "Wins". Same with the Inquisition. They are already partially tasked with defending against rebellion and heresy(which doesn't have to be Chaos heresy), it'd be a simple matter to move all Ordo Malleus and Xeno Inquisitors to the Ordo Hereticus. Most Inquisitors don't even specialize anyway.

Yes, the Imperium will be constantly fighting against its own entropy, but it would hardly become intolerable if external threats disappeared. The Imperium can get away with lying to its population about aliens if the aliens all get destroyed because there is no way for the average citizen to find out about the lie. There is no intergalactic internet, most planets won't even have a local internet, and the few people who do space travel were again more likely to run into human pirates than alien ones. Aliens were already a vague nebulous threat to human security anyway from a psychological standpoint as most humans would never encounter one.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I'm sure the Space Marines would easily be retasked to deal with Rebellions. Again, they're going to spend most of their time fighting rebellious humans and that's not going to change even if the Imperium "Wins". Same with the Inquisition. They are already partially tasked with defending against rebellion and heresy(which doesn't have to be Chaos heresy), it'd be a simple matter to move all Ordo Malleus and Xeno Inquisitors to the Ordo Hereticus. Most Inquisitors don't even specialize anyway.

Yes, the Imperium will be constantly fighting against its own entropy, but it would hardly become intolerable if external threats disappeared. The Imperium can get away with lying to its population about aliens if the aliens all get destroyed because there is no way for the average citizen to find out about the lie. There is no intergalactic internet, most planets won't even have a local internet, and the few people who do space travel were again more likely to run into human pirates than alien ones. Aliens were already a vague nebulous threat to human security anyway from a psychological standpoint as most humans would never encounter one.

Are you sure you wanted to post that in the "Why land combat" threat, not in the "assume the imperium would win, what then" threat?

Hmm, I was replying to Oldmate. But now I see this is in this thread and not that thread for some reason.

Apologies for getting sidetracked Grey Crusader.

Back on subject I think the price and value of naval assets also is a big factor here. I imagine a lot of the fleet's activities in the immediate vicinity of the planet they're going to be very defensive.
Especially if there's an enemy fleet present, but even without, a strike from a concealed orbital defence weapon is capable of bringing down a ship which would a bigger blow than losing an entire army group on the planet's surface.

Firstly in most cases I imagine your fleet would be protecting your reinforcement convoys and forces planetside from the enemy fleet's bombarent, because they are presumably still controlling planetary shielding network. And simultaneously trying to trap and kill the enemy defence fleet outside the curtain of orbital defence weapon range, and also patrolling and keeping an eye out for enemy reinforcement. So I suspect you'd need a rare superiority in fleet strength to be able to overwhelm the enemy orbital defence network.
Even then this is a high priority op, because you'd be stripping entire sectors of heavy fleet assets.

I think with or without fleet superiority, if you want to conquer a hive planet or a forge world, even if you are capable of turning the whole planet into molten slack, it probably doesn't really advance your purpose most of the time, and will generally even defeat it.
"ooh, our industrial assets suffer a 10% loss in productivity, due to urban unrest. Let's just blow everything to smithereens, that wiill teach em"

And yeah, there have been cases when exterminatus was declared on a whole planet. But those were exceptions of historical dimension. "Mankind" is capable of nuking cities since the mid 20th century. It still doesn't happen on a regular basis, and not every county sheriff can order a nuke, just because the local ruffians give his deputies a hard time.

 AuntHerbert wrote:
I think with or without fleet superiority, if you want to conquer a hive planet or a forge world, even if you are capable of turning the whole planet into molten slack, it probably doesn't really advance your purpose most of the time, and will generally even defeat it.
"ooh, our industrial assets suffer a 10% loss in productivity, due to urban unrest. Let's just blow everything to smithereens, that wiill teach em"

And yeah, there have been cases when exterminatus was declared on a whole planet. But those were exceptions of historical dimension. "Mankind" is capable of nuking cities since the mid 20th century. It still doesn't happen on a regular basis, and not every county sheriff can order a nuke, just because the local ruffians give his deputies a hard time.

Exterminatus is not the answer, its the question.

Because when you want to recapture a Hive World that contains an important STC, I am sure the Ad Mech is going to allow you to nuke it from orbit and not instantly cause all your life support to shut down.

Saying that the Taros Campaign should have been easily winnable with the use of fleet and aeronautics assets, by landing troops to secure one water production facility at the start, and bombing the rest so the Tau and traitors just all die of dehydration.


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Instead of marching around the desert in the heat of the day with limited water, which is just dumb.


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So there is cases where nuking sites would be very handy, where there is definative target of high value.


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But that goes without saying.

 OldMate wrote:
Saying that the Taros Campaign should have been easily winnable with the use of fleet and aeronautics assets, by landing troops to secure one water production facility at the start, and bombing the rest so the Tau and traitors just all die of dehydration.


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Instead of marching around the desert in the heat of the day with limited water, which is just dumb.


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So there is cases where nuking sites would be very handy, where there is definative target of high value.


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But that goes without saying.

In the Taros campaign, the Imperials did not have space superiority as the Tau had a fleet in the system as well. Also Taros had a ground to space defense network of missile silos. A direct attack and landing against the main city or the other facilities was ruled out on account of these being the most heavily defended areas, and the Guard transports too vulnerable while descending from orbit, with a hit transport falling out of the sky resulting in the total loss of a large chunk of the already limited Taros campaign forces. If this had happened, the Taros campaign might have ended in an Imperial defeat even more quickly.

One could argue whether they should have taken the risk anyway instead of settling for the more cautious option of landing out in the desert (though not the "deep" desert). Even then there was one missile silo site that had to be taken out by Marine ground assault as it had survived 30 minutes of orbital bombardment.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
The same point it's ALWAYS had.

Aircraft and space bombardments cannot hold territory or assets. They can help you take it, but to HOLD it, you need boots and asses on the ground.

Nuking from orbit is fine if you want to deny assets to the enemy, but if you want to keep it intact, you need to send the meatboys in.

Neutron bomb?

It's a good idea, but from what I understand they don't cover a very big area and hardened structures still offer reasonable protection. Like you'd have to carpet bomb a whole area, and even then that might not do it, and the are might still be contaminated with radiation.

And maybe they're more expensive than Guardsmen, who knows. I like the idea that they are occasionally deployed though.

I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.

Martel732 wrote:

I think the capture stuff objective is overblown. In most cases, it would be easiest to mass driver from orbit and just rebuild. Kills the game theme, I know, but the game theme is already incredibly stupid.

Why is it easier to rebuild?
It's far easier and cheaper to drop cheap troops and cheap munitions - of which the Imperium has copious amounts - onto the land and recapture installations as intact as possible. Some facilities are going to be hard to rebuild, the plans for how to build them might even be within the facility so if you bomb it to the stone age you don't even know how to rebuild it. There are unique technologies out there which are beyond the Imperiums ability to re-create to say nothing of captured Xenotech.

There's also a cost factor; its not just the cost of rebuilding, its rebuilding on a nuclear wasteland where you have to factor in additional costs for protective equipment for your operators and machines so that they don't break down in the environment. Ontop of that you've got to pay for all that ordinance that you've just bombarded the world with - that's a huge amount of weaponary and specialist firepower you've just thrown away to recapture a world that you've got to then spend a fortune rebuilding. With the fact that local food and water is likely gone/contaminated so now you've got to import everything. No functional mines, no functional production, no functional life support. You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field because you're going to spend the same resources and you've got thousands upon thousands of years (or extreme high cost cleaning gear) until the world is "clean" of nuclear fallout.

 Overread wrote:
You might as well have invested into an abandoned moon or asteroid field

Exactly this!

If stuff would be so easy to replace, why bother conquering it in the first place. Unless the universe in 40k is very very different from our own, there is no shortage of barren rocks to build on, and wasting resources just to create one more is just stupid.