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 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Vouxis Prime is a world where the entire population is dedicated to making giant skyscraper-size statues.

...that's a new one on me. Cast metal, or carved from stone?

Tank Shock.

The old rule that said, if you run over a unit in your tank / APC that moves twice as fast, said unit is moved out of the way.

If only the real world worked that way...

 KidCthulhu wrote:
I love the absurdities of the AdMech. Especially one bit of fluff about thousands of cyborg troopers dying in a bloody war of attrition to reclaim an STC template... for a self-heating crock pot.

The joy here, for me, isn’t that they spent thousands if not millions of lives for a crockpot. Rather, they did it for the STC, without knowing what it was for, and still treat it as a major victory For Science!

But just think of how much a morale boost those crock pots will give to the front lines.

Now, if only the front lines had anything decent to put in said pots.

Son, 200 soldiers died for that Ration Pack you best enjoy it!

 Dysartes wrote:
...that's a new one on me. Cast metal, or carved from stone?

Stone. Endless statues. Whole population lives underground to hide form a Ork v Tyranid war that ravaged the surface.

Harlequins. Killer-clown-elves from outer space.

Thunderwolf-Cavalry.

Foul Blightspawn. Just look at that model. He somehow cooks something up in his own belly, pumps it through his backpack to then throw it on enemies.

Chainswords are totally ridiculous when you think about it

Definitely the scale.

Things like hive cities, level after level after level of populations that would be a huge city in the modern day, never seeing the sky, and in the depths entire emergent civilisations in the long-forgotten detritus.
Or even just aboard spaceships, generations of crew forming their own cultures amongst a city-sized population in the void.
Administratum complexes that are miles upon miles of labyrinthine archives and offices, with literally warring factions fighting over paper and ink for their bureaucracies.

I like the whole science, understanding and technology has transformed into mysticism, ritual and religious dogma.

Instruction manuals are holy texts, software and operating systems are "machine spirits", standard operating procedures and routine maintenance are sacred rites and rituals! I Love it!

Its like the humans worshiping the atomic bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes turned up to 11.

Voss wrote:

-Guardsman- wrote:

Vatsetis wrote:
Sure because XXI century Catholic fanatism has a lot more nuance than its XVI century counterpart...

The only difference is that nowdays they dont control the state apparatus like in the early modern age or in the IOM.

Why do the most realistic elements of the lore seem "absurd" to you?... please just read the newspapers.

The machine cult and "praying to the machine spirits" are definitely absurd, though.

They aren't particularly. Most people have no idea how tech works.
20th century cartoons had jokes about magic gnomes living in refrigerators and switching the light on and off manually when the door was opened/closed for a reason. Cargo cults were very much a thing.
'Percussive maintenance' is a fervent belief in the here and now.

And tech priest rituals have literally been described in archaic terms but amounted to 'spray WD40, yell obscenities, and turn the power off and on again' (apply holy unguents, implore the machine spirit, strike the rune of activation).

The original superstitions about gremlins also aren't too far from the Machine Spirit line of thinking, when you consider it.

Gert wrote:Son, 200 soldiers died for that Ration Pack you best enjoy it!

Now that's comedy!!!!!


For me the Mechanicus as a whole does it.

Land's Raider & Speeder. Funny how the dude with Land in their name found the STCs...

The plug/unplug, turn on/off, sensually massage the two spherical control sticks while saying it's a good boy startup checklist.

The fact that there can be 2 diametrically opposed factions on whether the motive force is the Omnissiah or a 3rd thing.

TITANS!!!!! nuff said

It's as if Spacely Sprockets & Cogswell Cogs took up believing that their own way of transferring energy mechanically and will kill eachother for thinking otherwise.

On a non Mechanicus note, Obi-Wan Sherlock Cloussaeu
Gorkamorka

Absurdity I like:-

The monstrous, wilful inefficiency of the entire Imperium. The shear boggling scale of putting massive effort into doing something pointless, like cataloguing reports from a star system that went nova millennia ago. The pointlessly large scale.

What punctures my suspension of disbelief? When they get the numbers too LOW.

A Hive world has a population that big, and has no ecosystem so you have to import food? Fair enough. You can only recycle so much, eventually entropy will get you - no system can be 100% efficient. But you only have one spaceport (For good, grimdark reasons) which is relatively speaking quite small (A mile across)? How are you going to get that much food down from orbit? How many ships bound from Agri worlds are arriving in orbit PER HOUR to keep up with that level of demand? And they lowball these numbers every time.

No! Give me MORE LUNACY. A freighter crash in Orbit? The Space Ever Given manages to get lodged in the Eye of Selene? Millions die of starvation. Not instantly, of course. Most will be killed by the Cannibal Riots, giving rise to numerous additional corpse grinder cults. A warp storm that cuts your hive off from the wider Imperium for a month? Tens of billions dead.

Why have we ended up with Imperial Guard regiments with numbers in the thousands? It used to be a percentage of PDF. Sure, a Ratling world might raise a regiment of a couple of hundred. A regiment from Necromunda should be millions strong, with accompanying logistics.

Then half of it should get lost in the warp.

If you're going for silly numbers, commit!

 Graphite wrote:
Why have we ended up with Imperial Guard regiments with numbers in the thousands? It used to be a percentage of PDF. Sure, a Ratling world might raise a regiment of a couple of hundred. A regiment from Necromunda should be millions strong, with accompanying logistics.

Regimental strength was based upon the capacities of transport ships.

A world with a higher population will produce more regiments, as opposed to larger regiments.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
Why have we ended up with Imperial Guard regiments with numbers in the thousands? It used to be a percentage of PDF. Sure, a Ratling world might raise a regiment of a couple of hundred. A regiment from Necromunda should be millions strong, with accompanying logistics.

Regimental strength was based upon the capacities of transport ships.

A world with a higher population will produce more regiments, as opposed to larger regiments.

I was fairly sure that 1 mustering used to equal 1 regiment in Rogue Trader, giving rise to Administratum Induced Hilarity, where some clerk has decided that 3 regiments should be sufficient for planetary conquest, but unfortunately doesn't realise that due to the population size of the mustering worlds this equates to 4000 troops, while also sending a 2 million strong Necromundan regiment on a peacekeeping mission to a feral world where they suddenly treble the population. And massively reduce the level of peace.

For the "Galaxy Troop Ship", White Dwarf 140 they mention "The tens of thousands of troops carried by the galaxy" and then go on to say that this represents about 4 regiments each with a strength of 2000-6000, so the 6000 a regiment number has been around for a while. But that's still a ship carrying north of 20,000 troops, of about light cruiser size.

I suspect, given that upgunning a Lunar class cruiser to an Armageddon class battlecruiser adds 2000 crew to run the turrets and change the power couplings, crew space is not at a premium on Imperial ships. Having a couple of really big transports with a couple of hundred thousand aboard doesn't seem unreasonable (and might actually be a sensible number of soldiers to have a war).

A WW2 army group had a strength of 400,000 to 1,000,000. The Allies had SIX of these. By the 6,000 per regiment, 1 regiment per ship logic, that's 6,000 regiments and 6,000 warp capable craft. For a war which in 40k terms should be regarded as "local squabble". Given time dilation, none of these will arrive at even approximately the same time.

See what I mean? They get these numbers low every time. Give me massive troop transports running the gauntlet of defence lasers. Hundreds of thousands of troops vapourised before making planetfall. Go properly all in on the crazy.

guys let's not derail this thread with "sci-fi authors are gak at numbers" please

Attack bikes, probably the most useless form of combat vehicle ever yet numerous species across the galaxy seem to have developed them for their armies

mrFickle wrote:
Attack bikes, probably the most useless form of combat vehicle ever yet numerous species across the galaxy seem to have developed them for their armies

Could you elaborate on this?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrianDavion wrote:
guys let's not derail this thread with "sci-fi authors are gak at numbers" please

Well its quite annoying and in 40k it creates a huge level of cognitive disonance.

Bikes are generally horrendous off road, and are horrendous when trying to navigate around a complex battlefield with obstacles.
And if you're trying to hit something with assault rifles nailed to your bike? Not a chance.

You are kidding... Right... In WW2 many armies had motocicle troops including sidecars with machibeguns that could be fired while mounted.

Vatsetis wrote:
You are kidding... Right... In WW2 many armies had motocicle troops including sidecars with machibeguns that could be fired while mounted.

This is correct, but they did not use said motorcycles in off-road/cross-country combat

Not accurately while moving, not offroad accurately, and almost always as escorts for staff cars, i.e. not what Astartes use bikes for.

Yeah those bikes were not combat units. They were used for recon, messaging, and escorting.

Jeeps were pretty much the same thing and used for pretty much the same roles, although did lean a little more towards front line combat due to their greater offroad capacity.

I remember in one novel a White Scars biker used a demolisher cannon shell crater to get a sick jump and shoot down an enemy aircraft with his bolters. That moment was a little suspect!

 Duskweaver wrote:
Titans. The whole concept of bipedal war machines the size of skyscrapers, when you could just have mounted the same weapons on a big tank chassis, is completely stupid and impractical. But also awesome. 40K wouldn't be 40K without them.

My personal take on Titans is that they were designed, originally, as propaganda show weapons for a repressive totalitarian regime and were never actually intended to be engaging in any kind of 'even' war - the designers believed the Void Shield generators and collossal city-leveling weapons mounted on the titans to be so invulnerable, so impossibly powerful, and that any exchange of firepower with a titan involved would be so lopsided that they could essentially be built as towering impractical collossi with no fear of ever having to deal with anything that would test the flaws in the two-legged design.

and of course, the designers never believed that imperial titans would ever end up fighting OTHER imperial titans - hence the hasty retrofits and designs of weapons like harpoons and claws for warhounds to drag down larger titans after the horus heresy began.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Vatsetis wrote:
You are kidding... Right... In WW2 many armies had motocicle troops including sidecars with machibeguns that could be fired while mounted.

"Could be fired while mounted" is not the same as "were regularly fired while mounted."

German motorcycle troops essentially never engaged in actual combat while mounted on such an exposed platform. If a machine gun was ever fired from a motorcycle, it was being fired wildly an an attempt to keep enemies' heads down while the motorcycle driver frantically tried to drive away.

In an actual planned offensive, the motorcycle troops dismounted a safe distance from where the enemy was believed to be, and the motorcycle troops fought on foot, like sane people. Because of course they did.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
my favorite little consistent 40k idiosyncrasy is that primarily because of the way sprues and models were originally designed, nearly every melee unit is wildly hip-firing a sidearm in their non-dominant hand WHILE theyre attempting to wield a melee weapon...which is often one of the aforementioned hilariously bonkers "chainsaws but with a rapier grip, you know, for when you want to get into a fething sword duel with a fething chainsaw"

I love imagining a space marine and a chaos space marine charging at one another, firing their handheld grenade launchers wildly with absolutely no way to control where the shots go because theyre running and not bracing at all (ain't no way either of them is concentrating on anything besides keeping the running chainsaw they're holding AWAY from their legs, left hand or face), all the bolt pistol shots miss completely because of course they do, and then they clash their two chainsword blades together to have an epic star wars sword-pushy-teeth-gritty moment that we all know is so important when fighting, and ZIP!

Both of them spin around comically as the two running chainsaw blades fling them both off in opposite directions, spinning their arms and desperately trying not to cut their own limbs off while making Wooaaah-OOoooAAh-OOHHhh noises like the three stooges.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Basically every piece of 40k media ever just makes the assumption that a chainsword only operates like a chainsaw does from the instant that it contacts unarmored flesh until it has finished chopping through said flesh, and at all other moments in time a chainsword works just like a regular sword - the whirring, spinning, apparently indestructible chain exerts absolutely no forces on the wielder or any other object that it touches UNLESS that object is something it can chew epically through while splatterizing it.

I now broadly how WWII recon motorcicle troops fought... Obviously not how they are depicted in marine media.

But that dosent mean that the attack bike is one of the "absurdities" of the setting... It just at the level of a Leman Russ and the like (a cartoonish take on an actual historical weapon system) ... Its something quite mundane compared to the "Monty Pithon" burocracy, Mechanicis Religion, Green Hooligans and the like...

Vatsetis wrote:
I now broadly how WWII recon motorcicle troops fought... Obviously not how they are depicted in marine media.

But that dosent mean that the attack bike is one of the "absurdities" of the setting... It just at the level of a Leman Russ and the like (a cartoonish take on an actual historical weapon system) ... Its something quite mundane compared to the "Monty Pithon" burocracy, Mechanicis Religion, Green Hooligans and the like...

While true, the leman russ aside from the cartoonishly hilariously large barrel at least somewhat looks like an old-style WW1 tank, while an attack bike resembles absolutely nothing more than those little 'big wheel' plastic bicycles that basically everybody had as a kid with the hollow plastic chunky wheels

The bikes are one of those cases where I wish things were even more absurd. Forget the bikes, give me space marine heavy cavalry riding on super horses in power barding!

 Tiennos wrote:
The bikes are one of those cases where I wish things were even more absurd. Forget the bikes, give me space marine heavy cavalry riding on super horses in power barding!

Like the Space Wolves' Thunderwolves...

Space Wolves have a lot of 40k-brand absurdity.

.

 Tiennos wrote:
The bikes are one of those cases where I wish things were even more absurd. Forget the bikes, give me space marine heavy cavalry riding on super horses in power barding!

Yep, the transformation of SM into orks havent got far enough yet... Hope that by 12 edition Astartes and Greenskins can share a common codex.

Vatsetis wrote:

 Tiennos wrote:
The bikes are one of those cases where I wish things were even more absurd. Forget the bikes, give me space marine heavy cavalry riding on super horses in power barding!

Yep, the transformation of SM into orks havent got far enough yet... Hope that by 12 edition Astartes and Greenskins can share a common codex.

Primaris on Squigs would sell like hotcakes