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 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.

Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.

Not good enough, no.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.

Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.

When they also have capacity to redirect their plummet? Yes, especially in the background.

Also keep in mind that the most common places Drop Pods might deploy against are (former) Imperial Worlds, and Ork worlds, because those are simply the most numerous inhabitants of the Galaxy.

Orks of course favour sheer volume of firepower and rarely, if ever, really bother to aim AA guns properly. Imperial Worlds? No real need for Astartes proof defences as such. So whilst it’s perfectly possible to create AA stuff which could reliably track Drop Pods? Few places would really need them.

 TheBestBucketHead wrote:
Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.

Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.

Well "realism" is a little funky for 40k because huge defense lasers are also on the menu for defenses. But my quick math gives 12,000÷60÷60=3.33 kilometers per second. If a ship launches Pods from 120km up, that's about 40 seconds of time to react. So IRL something has to aquire the target, launch and intercept in less 40 seconds. And the time-to-intercept depend heavily on the distance required to travel, obviously. If there's 100 km between the launch site and the point of intercept, that missile has got to be faaaast.

In 40k, defense lasers that can shoot at orbiting spacecraft are totally a thing. So then that's more of a tracking thing to get a Pod. It's unclear to me how good infrared tracking is during the daytime when theres this big ball of burning plasma in the sky, the sun. I also don't know how high up a Pod starts to heat up from the atmosphere (which can change from planet to planet). Like it could be that the first third of the distance travelled the pod is invisible to detection, in which case the opposition has 25 seconfs to react, rather than 40.

And this is all without potential countermrasures from the assaulting side, such as decoys, bombardment etc, that could make things more tricky for the ground forces. One idea would be to just airbusrt a bunch of nukes in the sky ahead of the pods to temporarily blind any IR sensors and have the pods pop in just afterwards under cover of blinding light and radiation. Another thing to do is to launch pods from waaaaay out so any initial acceleration is to even harder to detect, and there's no Pod IR signature possible until it hits the atmosphere.

Historically, ICBMs were "tossed" from around the globe. The missile would only fire for a short while, and then the warhead would drift in from a huge parabolic but predictable arc. Defensive silos would get calculations based on the lauch direction and acceleration, and then know roughly where the nuke was aiming, and then counter-launch accordingly. But the whole trip from Russia to the US for example would take 20-30 minutes, iirc.

Then missiles started carrying up to 10 independently targetable warheads, which complicated things. And now modern Hypersonics are potentially further disrupting that, but I'm not really up to snuff on it.

#notanexpert. Happy to be wrong and get more info.

Could some one please give a short version of the drop pod debate? ... It seems interesting but convoluted.

Thanks.

Vatsetis wrote:
Could some one please give a short version of the drop pod debate? ... It seems interesting but convoluted.

Thanks.

Canonically Drop Pods are said to be too fast to intercept/shoot down in most cases, and Pods play a critical role in making Marines effective even at low numbers.

Some people think the idea that they can't be intercepted is silly, and question why pods are a useful asset in the first place. "Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.

When it comes to taking terrain, yes. If we're talking about destroying something, that is different.

 Bobthehero wrote:
When it comes to taking terrain, yes. If we're talking about destroying something, that is different.

Well, sorta. For 40k sometimes a target is behind a shield, and the best way might be to stealth infiltrate on the ground and do a commando raid to blow it up.

And sometimes that target has enough AAA defenses that a direct pod assault will fail, and other solutions are needed.

 Bobthehero wrote:
And sometimes that target has enough AAA defenses that a direct pod assault will fail, and other solutions are needed.

Correct, but it appears to be fairly rare in 40k. I think there's a stealth Pod too, that's for bypassing detection altogether.

 Insectum7 wrote:
"Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.

And that argument is primarily collateral damage. In the real world we don't fight wars of genocide (unless you're Russian), and we have to at least pretend to care about civilian casualties. If an enemy HQ is next to a school full of children then we don't just carpet-bomb the entire area to guarantee a kill, we send in infantry to kill the enemy soldiers without hurting the kids. But in 40k a school full of children within the blast radius is a bonus because now you don't have to use a second bomb to kill the filthy xenos/heretics and destroy their indoctrination center, you can score a two-for-one. If we fought real wars like the Imperium does we'd have a lot less infantry, special forces would be virtually nonexistent, and we'd have a lot more nukes.

Also, remember that 40k has infantry even without space marines. The question is not whether infantry have a role, it's whether the Imperium needs super-elite infantry that each cost at least as much as an entire regiment of normal humans.

Sometimes to land enough troops and supplies for the Guard you need to capture the Space Port. You can't bomb the defenders of the Space Port from space because you need the Space Port. You can't bring enough Guard to bear because you need the Space Port to do so. But with Marines you can secure the Space Port by either dropping on the Space Port, or landing them near it and then taking it.

Marines are the Royal Marine Commandos of 40k.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
"Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.

And that argument is primarily collateral damage.

Which remains a valid argument in 40K, where factories/spacecraft/bunkers or other infrastructure might be preserved. Also the brain eating intel, or artifact nabbing assault team.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Which remains a valid argument in 40K, where factories/spacecraft/bunkers or other infrastructure might be preserved.

Except that marines are brutal shock troops that use grenade launchers as basic rifles and are best countered by anti-tank weapons. Expecting anything to remain intact after a marine fight is highly optimistic. And also, remember that a single space marine is worth way more than an entire factory. If the attacking marine force suffers a single casualty then the Imperium has lost value compared to just blowing it all up from orbit.

Also the brain eating intel

Which is not canon.

or artifact nabbing assault team.

This might be one of the few scenarios where marines can be useful, but at what cost? Is a recovered artifact worth more than the loss of an entire planet as a result of creating a squad of space marines to recover it instead of a thousand full regiments of guardsmen to win the war around that artifact?

This all goes back to the fundamental problem of numbers. Increase the number of marines by several orders of magnitude, to be elite units but so few in number that there are more Imperial worlds than space marines, and your scenarios make sense.

We can also look to more modern military issues, and see where Astartes would help.

Let’s look to Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare, hide and seek in cave systems. Yep. Astartes would be ideal. Tight environs reduces the enemy’s capacity to bring to bear enough firepower to drop a Marine. And labyrinthine caves are less of a problem, because Astartes don’t need sleep, so 24 hours a day they’re a-hunting’ you down.

 Bobthehero wrote:
How do you locate those C&C centers? Get a teleport lock on? This is what I mean, people just assume things will just *work* for Space Marines

I think Astartes are very powerful within their niche, but I don't think that means they are invulnerable or unstoppable or that there are no countermeasures. Clearly they can be defeated, as the large list of defeats in the lore shows.

What we are pushing back against is the idea marines are useless... which they clearly are not, as the large list of victories also shows. There is a wide space between useless and unstoppable.

Having said that, it is definitely difficult to counter marines at their chosen specialty of orbital assaults, with the example you shared being one of the rarer examples of marines being completely shut down unless they want to take horrific casualties.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We can also look to more modern military issues, and see where Astartes would help.

Let’s look to Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare, hide and seek in cave systems. Yep. Astartes would be ideal. Tight environs reduces the enemy’s capacity to bring to bear enough firepower to drop a Marine. And labyrinthine caves are less of a problem, because Astartes don’t need sleep, so 24 hours a day they’re a-hunting’ you down.

Except it's all a bunch of worthless caves. Nuke it from orbit and move on, if there are some civilians mixed in with the enemy then that just means fewer civilians to have to round up for the extermination camps.

You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.

Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
"Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.

And that argument is primarily collateral damage. In the real world we don't fight wars of genocide (unless you're Russian), and we have to at least pretend to care about civilian casualties. If an enemy HQ is next to a school full of children then we don't just carpet-bomb the entire area to guarantee a kill, we send in infantry to kill the enemy soldiers without hurting the kids. But in 40k a school full of children within the blast radius is a bonus because now you don't have to use a second bomb to kill the filthy xenos/heretics and destroy their indoctrination center, you can score a two-for-one. If we fought real wars like the Imperium does we'd have a lot less infantry, special forces would be virtually nonexistent, and we'd have a lot more nukes.

Also, remember that 40k has infantry even without space marines. The question is not whether infantry have a role, it's whether the Imperium needs super-elite infantry that each cost at least as much as an entire regiment of normal humans.

The Imperium cannot, or really struggles to replace a lot of its tech, including the production lines that produce it, so they do generally avoid flattening them as much as possible. Imperial architecture seems to be very tough, but that just makes it better cover from the perspective of using orbital artillery against it.

Having said that, artillery does not guarantee a kill against fortifications or even just tough civilian infrastructure. WWI showed that, with defences surviving intact against enormous conventional firepower, WWII showed it again, with even civilian buildings forming reasonable cover against heavy artillery. A stone bank survived being near the centre of the blast at Hiroshima, IIRC, and protected its occupants. Wars since have reinforced this- I don't think the US forces in Vietnam were particularly caring about collateral damage when they were carpet-bombing a neighbouring neutral country (people still die from lingering munitions). Modern nuclear bunkers would require a direct nuclear hit to take out, and even then, I doubt it would be guaranteed.

Now add shielding of a kind we know to be able to resist the scale of artillery found on warships (void shields), and artillery alone is not a reliable way to remove an entrenched opponent, but also destroys the valuable infrastructure the Imperium would like to reoccupy. Exterminatus grade weaponry can be used to totally destroy the planet, but this also means a total loss of the planet as a useful territory (and we know virus bombs alone are not sufficient to dig out prepared defenders, as Istvaan 3 and Tallarn demonstrate).

I am not sure why you think marines using small arms is going to destroy a structure as thoroughly as the guns on a 5km warship..? Boltguns fire explosive rounds, but they don't have a massive blast radius and function more like powerful bullets. There will be damage, but the structural integrity and function of an installation will be unlikely to be harmed unless the marines or defenders are trying to harm it.

Also, the gaining intel from eating brains thing is absolutely canon, and has been for >30 years. One of the marine implants is explicitly for this purpose, and the initiation rites for many chapters involve eating corpses after this stage of implantation to celebrate and test the new skill.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.

Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.

That would require an absurd level of firepower, to destroy an entire cave system. Modern day nukes would likely struggle to, er, blow up mountains. Rock is pretty hard to blow up. 40k easily has the tech for some rebels to hermetically seal off deep portions of the cave to prevent them dying from the overpressure or the O2 beimg sucked out.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Creation_of_a_Space_Marine#Omophagea

The implant in question.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

Also the brain eating intel

Which is not canon.

It's totally canon. Read about the Omophagea implant https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Creation_of_a_Space_Marine In the novel Space Marine (later republished as soemthing else, though I forget) Marines learn how to pilot a titan by eating the fresh brains of the former occupants.

 Haighus wrote:
Modern nuclear bunkers would require a direct nuclear hit to take out, and even then, I doubt it would be guaranteed.

Fortunately a mere nuke is trivial compared to 40k weapons. There are direct canon quotes that starship weapons are capable of destroying entire continents with a single salvo. The only possible issue is collateral damage, not a shortage of firepower. https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/frggzr/naval_combat_range_and_firepower/

Now add shielding of a kind we know to be able to resist the scale of artillery found on warships (void shields)

If the fortification has so much shielding over such a wide area that it can survive a continent-destroying broadside from an orbiting warship then what exactly are marines going to do against it? Even titan weapons can't breach that level of shielding.

There will be damage, but the structural integrity and function of an installation will be unlikely to be harmed unless the marines or defenders are trying to harm it.

The concrete structure of a bunker may still be intact, the delicate computer systems are unlikely to survive marines firing automatic RPG launchers everywhere (on top of their heavy weapons). And nobody cares if you capture the concrete shell of a building when everything of value inside it is lost.

Also, the gaining intel from eating brains thing is absolutely canon, and has been for >30 years. One of the marine implants is explicitly for this purpose, and the initiation rites for many chapters involve eating corpses after this stage of implantation to celebrate and test the new skill.

It's stupid as hell and relies on GW having no idea how brains actually work. The only sensible thing to do is to reject it as non-canon nonsense.

That would require an absurd level of firepower, to destroy an entire cave system. Modern day nukes would likely struggle to, er, blow up mountains. Rock is pretty hard to blow up. 40k easily has the tech for some rebels to hermetically seal off deep portions of the cave to prevent them dying from the overpressure or the O2 beimg sucked out.

Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface; torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.
-Nemesis

or

A mighty Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser with powerful reactors and heavy armour in sloping facets of adamantine and ceramite scores of metres thick, the vessel carried a weight of armament and ordnance that could reduce a continent to ruins with a single salvo.
-Black Crusade

A mere cave is no issue at all.

Aecus Decimus wrote:


It's stupid as hell and relies on GW having no idea how brains actually work. The only sensible thing to do is to reject it as non-canon nonsense.

Pretty sure other settings have done brain eating for knowledge long before. I bet there's more than one Dr Who foe who does it; Starship Troopers has it as a massive major plot point (which is probably what influenced GW getting the idea).

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.

Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.

If you can win the fight without irradiating your agri-world that feeds 100 billion souls on the nearby forge world, and win it quickly without disrupting farming production, then do that.

If you can board and disable rebel-held defense platforms so they can be returned to loyal service befote the next Ork Waagh shows up, then do that.

If you can board and disable an otherwise invulnerable-to-the-forces-at-hand Tyranid vessel while it's still dormant, then do that.

 Insectum7 wrote:
If you can win the fight without irradiating your agri-world that feeds 100 billion souls on the nearby forge world, and win it quickly without disrupting farming production, then do that.

But how exactly is this scenario happening? If the enemy is concentrated in a single place than a lance strike from orbit can kill them all with minimal disruption, as even annihilating everything in a hundred mile radius would be a very minimal impact on an agri-world as a whole. Spending the resources required to create and support the marines on more farming capacity would do more to feed the forge world than would be lost in the orbital bombardment. And if the enemy is so numerous and spread out that destroying them from orbit would have a meaningful impact on production then space marines are irrelevant, they can't kill enough enemies to matter before they run out of ammunition.

If you can board and disable rebel-held defense platforms so they can be returned to loyal service befote the next Ork Waagh shows up, then do that.

Assuming you can do it without the rebels setting off the dead man's switch nukes as the marines take the platforms, and assuming the marines don't cause sufficient damage to destroy the platforms while firing RPGs/plasma guns/etc inside them. And again, there's the question of resources. A single marine is worth more than all of the platforms, so instead of making and supporting the marine just build more gun platforms to replace the ones you have to destroy.

If you can board and disable an otherwise invulnerable-to-the-forces-at-hand Tyranid vessel while it's still dormant, then do that.

What scenario is there where marines armed with man-portable weapons can destroy a Tyranid ship but the warship carrying them can't? Now there isn't even the collateral damage argument to worry about.

Scions are also a thing, likely far cheaper and much more numerous than Marines, if the need for special forces-type guys is present, without spending so much on them, resources wise.

I think one stumbling block people have is the divide between the Imperium as a whole and the Imperium at the local level.

As a whole the Imperium likely does not "care" about most worlds. Sure Forge Worlds and key systems etc.. are important, but many worlds are just unimportant to the greater whole. They can be lost or gained and its an administration blip - that heck might get lost in the sea of paperwork.

Even defensive fleets brought in from outside might have little regard or connection to the worlds they are fighting on.



However this doesn't mean that, at the local level, no one cares. Nor does it mean that the Imperium will always just throw away worlds at a whim. Heck the one time they have done that to try and starve a hive fleet the guy in charge of the operation was ex-communicated and declared a traitor (I think) and certainly the policy has never been tried again.

The Imperium can be and is wasteful and insane; but it is not those things with impunity.


So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.

 Overread wrote:
So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.

But that still doesn't make sense. A bunker is trivially easy for a slave labor gang to build in a day or two max, using only the most common of resources. There's no way it makes practical sense for the Imperium to invest vast resources in creating space marines to save a few hours of common slave labor and some bags of concrete. And if even a single space marine is killed in the attack that loss will be millions of times more than the value of the bunker that was saved by not just obliterating it from orbit.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Overread wrote:
So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.

But that still doesn't make sense. A bunker is trivially easy for a slave labor gang to build in a day or two max, using only the most common of resources. There's no way it makes practical sense for the Imperium to invest vast resources in creating space marines to save a few hours of common slave labor and some bags of concrete. And if even a single space marine is killed in the attack that loss will be millions of times more than the value of the bunker that was saved by not just obliterating it from orbit.

I mean if its a day or two bit of concrete and slave labour, hitting it with orbital bombardment is also an insane waste of resources. That kind of bunker doesn't NEED the entire mountain side turned to slag by orbital weapons.
It doesn't need marines either, that bunker is being taken by guardsmen.


The kind of bunker you teleport Terminators into is a fortified bunker. Probably multiple layers and designed to withstand major artillery fire and bombardment. The kind of thing that's built with metal and to a higher standard. Something that's possibly closer to what some might consider a fortress (though fortress tends to imply something above ground whilst a bunker kind of suggests something more below or at ground level etc... at least in casual use of the terms).

 Overread wrote:
The kind of bunker you teleport Terminators into is a fortified bunker. Probably multiple layers and designed to withstand major artillery fire and bombardment. The kind of thing that's built with metal and to a higher standard. Something that's possibly closer to what some might consider a fortress (though fortress tends to imply something above ground whilst a bunker kind of suggests something more below or at ground level etc... at least in casual use of the terms).

But the point is still the same: the marines are more valuable than the bunker, and any losses will more than outweigh the gain from not having to replace the bunker.

This, again, goes back to the root of the problem: there are too few marines. If marines were 2-3x as good as storm troopers at 4-5x the cost and 10-20% of the total numbers all of these scenarios would make sense. But when there is less than one marine per world in the Imperium, half their gear is sacred and irreplaceable relics of a forgotten age, and vast amounts of resources go into making and supporting them it stops making sense. With canon numbers "blow it up from orbit" is the answer in virtually every scenario and in the few edge cases where marines would be the best tool for the job and justify their cost they're probably off crusading on the other side of the galaxy and unavailable anyway.

The marines are more valuable than the bunker. However the Marines are also likely go in, win and not die. So you get the bunker and the marines.


Also if the Imperium adopted a policy of just obliterating everything from orbit the Chaos and Xenos forces would adapt to just letting the Imperium destroy itself. They'd always keep themselves active in populated areas and such. Ergo if the Imperium's policy was total orbital obliteration the enemy would just use that against them every time. Chaos would have no problem sacrificing a few cultists to see the Imperium destroy its own defensive installations, bunkers, factories, civilian populations and more.

Not to mention the moral impact of such tactics would likely see local system and regional power bodies openly deny any kind of incursion or invasion until it was way too late so that their worlds weren't pepper potted with huge orbital holes by the Imperial Navy. Heck some might even turn their own guns on the Navy ships to try and protect what they've got.



Marines are a valuable resource, but the Imperium isn't playing an RPG game where they can afford to keep all their one time consumable items until the end-game boss. They are more prepared to use the Marines in combat even if it puts them at risk.

Heck I suspect some chapters might even go insane or rebel if they were refused combat.