A report on Ork Settlements

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**CaptainRavenclaw**

Report to Ordos Exploratus General Magellan

My Lord, it is with gratitude I thank thee for your inspired leadership. After the disaster that was my last exploration and report of the tau colony I thought that you would have turned me into a servitor so I may continue my service to you. How was I, your humble servant, to know that the Tau were not to be trusted. I truly believed that telling them the location of the fleet would have had no consequence. Thankfully the mighty Astartes were able to destroy all the Tau and their colony, with only the loss of half a company of the emperors finest.

So when you sent me to this Ork infested planet I was sure to do a thorough and discreet survey, and I trust you will find the results to be fascinating.

Orks are truly savages. Were it not for the fact that they are constantly at war amongst themselves they surely would have discovered me. Indeed of the 500 servo skulls that I started out with I am down to a trusty 15, the remaining 485 are decorating the newest warlords battlewagon. My mission was to discover the occurring trends of Ork settlements, growth/migration patterns, population caps, structural weaknesses in town planning. My discoveries have been nothing short of groundbreaking.

Orks are savages. They will live in a shack until it burns down or gets driven over, and then will sleep on a rock. Nothing is of fabric importance to them unless another Ork states a desire to own it. Then it is more a battle of superiority rather than ownership. More likely a theiving grot will come and take the item, while the Orks are fighting over it. There is little or no pattern to their settlements. Where there is a warlord who is on the ascendancy a township/shanty will grow around him. It is hard to discern where the building material comes from, it appears and then disappears quite quickly, with a trukk becoming a house, turning into a workshop and then growing lets and turning into a walker within a week. Very little is set in stone, actually stone is largely ignored by Orks. It is the Iron, tin, ferrite and other hard metals that Orks seem to fabricate with. Whereas other xenos would aspire to make a stronger lighter metal alloy, orks will simply place more layers of all kinds of metal onto a structure or vehicle. There is little science to it at all. Indeed how an Ork fort stays standing is a mystery to me despite all my years in the adeptus archeotectus service.

It would appear that a single well placed hammer blow would be enough to see an ork fabrication crashing to the ground. I did see this happen not two lunar cycles ago when a grot rebellion saw the fort of Warlord Buzzkamec topple to the ground. However the Warlord has since built a new fort out of grot-skins [which would appear to be quite weather proof].
Adversely, there are occasions where strikes, even from heavy caliber weaponry will not penetrate the armour of vehicles/buildings, and even if it does, it simply leaves holes and does no damage while passing through.

The Stompas and Gargants that you told me to watch out for are near completion now. The Orks have no planning or sequence to their building approach. The grotesquely large kannon on one stompa was loaded and fired before the frame of the stompa was completed, destroying both the stompa that was holding it, and the rival meks workshop it was aiming at. This setback seemed like nothing to the orks however, providing hours of entertainment which seemed to make them work even faster. The only negative I've observed is the vast number of orks and grots who would appear to be utterly and completely stone deaf, their rudimentary ears being deafened by gunfire and industrial tools. These Orks are particularly dangerous to have working around fuel and ammo dumps, ignoring shouted warnings and generally causing explosions.

There seems no easier way to destroy these Ork settlements than the planetary bombardment that you mentioned before sending me here. A few low orbit strikes should be enough to shatter all that is built so far, and deplete the workforce and leadership of its resources. I trust you were joking when you suggested leaving me here to observe the bombardment from the planets surface. Of course you are renowned for your jest, and that Tau incident was a mere accident on my part. It could have happened to anyone...

So in closing my lord, I trust that you will arrange off planet transport for me, the skiff you gave me to travel here had fuel only for a one way trip,

yours most humbly,

Explorator Basil