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The Imperium of Men have used Exterminatus on Tyranids, Tau, Necron and Chaos. But never Orks. Why? It is clearly mentioned that Exterminatus completely eradicates all Ork spore, fully preventing re-infestation. Also, Ork worlds are extremely crowded, so blowing one up could kill hundreds of billions easily which is more than what 10 whole Space Marine chapters could outfight.

Name one Ork world that has received Exterminatus if you disagree.

I'm quite sure they have. It's much more interesting however for GW to tell you a story about heroics fighting millions of Orks than how the Imperium blew them to kingdom come by exterminatus.

It might also be that Ork space is not very highly valued (the planets they settle on are of little strategic significance) or that there are simply too many Orks to launch a proper exterminatus. Or perhaps its because Orks tend to attack rather than defend and when the head or the WAAAAGGGHHH! has been killed they devolve and fight amongst themselves, becoming much easier targets for the Imperium.

Because as a strategy to combat a race with no known origin it's ultimately self defeating.

Think about it.

Say you have 2 million planets. 600 get attacked. So you exterminated them, Next wave of Orks avoids those planets. Bye bye more planets. Next wave avoids all those planets, to se and repeat until you destroy Terra. Plus what kind of message does it send ? Get invaded get exterminated?

Plus Exterminatus is survivable, if marines can survive then Orks can. Regular humans cannot.

With the other races you mention the planet reaches a point of no return or knowledge of that race needs to be tightly controlled. Orks are Orks. Imperium can rebuild.

Many Rulebooks fluff sections mention that Imperiums methods of scour worlds of life are in the end not very effective and most sprout new life sooner of later. Life finds a way and dying mankind isn't powerful enough anymore overcome other beings' will to live - part of the grimdarkness, you see.

Doubly so with the Orks, since those buggers are very tough and your either blowing up world they have attacked, or trying to invade orkspace, which is an excercise in futility without atleast a few legions of Space Marines, since their made to fight and win.

Also remember that the our galaxy has, like, 400 billion stars - and Orks rule most of it, so Imperium with its supply of weapons from a million worlds just isn't enough to make a notable dent in Orkdom.

 TwilightSparkles wrote:
Regular humans cannot.

False, there were survivors in Redemption Corps after an Exterminatus was declared on the main character planet.

Pure speculation here, but... it only takes a single piece of Ork fungus to survive in an underground cavern after the attack, and a few years later the planet is probably fully repopulated with Orks. It probably isn't worth the effort of going in to hostile territory to do this on random planets.

also another thing to consider, extermiantus LOSES THE PLANET. and life supporting worlds aren't THAT common, life may be cheap life supporting worlds ain't.

A few thoughts

1) Remember Orks don't really care about strategic value, resources, etc... in the same way many other races do. Orks want a FIGHT! So if you blow up the worlds with orks on those worlds have nothing on them to interest orks any more. So all you do is move the ork invasion problem along unless you can strike nearly every infested world in on massive coordinated strike. Otherwise you're just playing "whack-a-ork" with planets

2) Orks are odd in that they are both totally disorganised rabble who will infight and yet also capable of massive organised strikes. Essentially they seem to operate like a pressure system. The more pressure you put on them the more numerous they become and the more they unify behind a big boss and WAAARGH!
So if you apply too much pressure you get a LOT back. It's like a boiling kettle. If you plug the nozzle it will eventually explode. Orks are one of the biggest threats IF they unify and organise. Therefore part of the reason you might prefer to destabilize (kill bosses) and fight them rather than obliterate is that you're suffering in the long run to avoid a massive defeat due to ork unification.

3) As said the worlds might just be wastelands that are not considered high value; exterminating all life on a world is a big thing and renders it rather useless - even if it recovers its a VERY long time off.

4) The Imperium doesn't care about you. They can throw millions of Guard at Orks and not worry about the casualties. Therefore if retaking a world and keeping it functional can be done they'd rather do that and lose billions of Guard than exterminate the world and render it useless.

5) Currently Orks are fighting a lot of Tyranids. Considering that Tyranid Hive Fleet incursions have done massive damage to core and key Imperial worlds its likely more a benefit to leave the two races fighting each other rather than retake worlds from the Orks only to hit a wall of Tyranid Fleets that honestly don't care and likely find it all the easier that you've just stripped the worlds of any defence and thus made them easy picking and feasting for Hive ships. In fact you could defeat the Orks and suddenly have a vast bloated swarm of Tyranid that is even worse to deal with!

6) Cost and production - exterminatus weapons are likely expensive and require rare materials to produce. There might also be ancient limits and quotas on how many can be made at once within the Imperium bureaucracy that prevent them just stockpiling them up.

Exterminate Orks? Might as well try snuffing out all the stars in the galaxy. Both are equally near impossible feats.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Exterminate Orks? Might as well try snuffing out all the stars in the galaxy. Both are equally near impossible feats.

Tyranids are rumoured to have done it at least once if not more times!

Even if they call in Exteminatus on every Ork-infested world there will be more, whereas every world and system lost is a huge blow to the Imperium.

Name one Ork world that has received Exterminatus if you disagree.

Ullanor. At least - one was ordered by the high lords, and the Imperium at large believes it happened, but iadmittedly in fact it was never carried out because [shenanigans]

bibotot wrote:
The Imperium of Men have used Exterminatus on Tyranids, Tau, Necron and Chaos. But never Orks. Why? It is clearly mentioned that Exterminatus completely eradicates all Ork spore, fully preventing re-infestation. Also, Ork worlds are extremely crowded, so blowing one up could kill hundreds of billions easily which is more than what 10 whole Space Marine chapters could outfight.

Name one Ork world that has received Exterminatus if you disagree.

Their forces are busy defending the galaxy, they can't just use up battleships to clean planets that aren't an immediate threat. Even if there were just a million ork worlds, do you know how long that would take to exterminatus them all. It'd take a month just to count to a million and there are probably more like a billion ork planets, which would take 31 years just to count to, people normaly don't grasp just how big these numbers are. Also they enhabit many earth-like worlds, too precious just to exterminatus, then there are the worlds that take over a planet, those humans and infrastructure are valuable.

Exterminatus is fairly rare, far less common than many 40k memes make it seem. Assuming a world can be taken or defended by conventional means the IOM will endeavor to do so. Additionally, having some ork presence on a planet is not the worst thing in the world. Gives the troops some combat experience and they are one of the few enemies that isn't trying to trick or corrupt humanity, they just want a straight fight.

I've said it once, I'll say it again.

1. Only specific ships are capable of conducting exterminatus.
2. You need full space superiority to CONDUCT exterminatus. - You couldn't have bombed Ullanor
3. You need to clear major land to space defenses to conduct exterminatus - You couldn't have bombed Ullanor
4. The munitions to conduct exterminatus are rare, and expensive. Its cheaper to throw a fleets worth of guardsmen and leman russes at the problem.
5. You need specific authority to conduct an exterminatus.

Its rare, and rightfully so. Conducting it is a really, really big deal. It completely annihilates much of anything on the surface that might be of value, and for a galactic scale empire, resources are always in demand, and facilities are too ancient or misunderstood to be rampantly destroyed...

 iGuy91 wrote:
I've said it once, I'll say it again.

1. Only specific ships are capable of conducting exterminatus.
2. You need full space superiority to CONDUCT exterminatus. - You couldn't have bombed Ullanor
3. You need to clear major land to space defenses to conduct exterminatus - You couldn't have bombed Ullanor
4. The munitions to conduct exterminatus are rare, and expensive. Its cheaper to throw a fleets worth of guardsmen and leman russes at the problem.
5. You need specific authority to conduct an exterminatus.

Its rare, and rightfully so. Conducting it is a really, really big deal. It completely annihilates much of anything on the surface that might be of value, and for a galactic scale empire, resources are always in demand, and facilities are too ancient or misunderstood to be rampantly destroyed...

1: any ship that has torpedoes can fire virus bombs or cyclonic torpedoes, alternatively the virus payload can be carried down to a planet and set off manually.

2: any ship can nip in and fire it’s payload and nip out, high risk high reward.

3: as above, clearing a small lane is all that is needed

4: such weapons are relatively rare, the loss of a planet is much worse than the loss of the payload, only specific people are authorised to use such tactics, captains, chapter masters, inquisitors and the high lords, possibly certain ad mech too, but it must be justified to avoid ramifications.

5: as above.

Yep it’s a big deal.

It makes sense to not Exterminatus and world infested with Orks. Orks can grow back from spores left behind. Nuking the planet just clears the way for fresh Orks, rather than allowing the current rabble of Ork fight it out amongst themselves, get bored and move on.

-

So you've got an Ork problem and you're thinking Exterminatus. But won't they just come back you ask?

That's just it with Orks! They do keep coming back! You fight em and they get stronger. So you stop fighting them, whack the top Ork and they quickly turn to backstabbing. So your system is safe from Orks. Only trouble is you've got to keep whacking em or they'll just come back. Eventually though, one Ork will get so tough from all the beatings, you'll have to go whack em real hard, or else you might lose another planet to Orks. All it takes is one spore, so you can't let them land on your agri-worlds and shrines. Maybe you have to cut your losses and hit the Virus Bomb button and say goodbye to the old Chapter Homeworld. That's gonna be a morale booster. So maybe you throw a few more billion men at the problem, but are you really getting anywhere? At best all you can hope for is to go back to when it was just one planet and a few Warbosses. Maybe you can hold that balance again for a little while? So you don't call for Exterminatus and try for a mass battle, maybe you call another Chapter in to help. Meanwhile back on Calypso 5, an asteroid with a rocket engine bolted onto it just crash landed and Grots are spilling out... So now you've got yourself an Ork problem.

You should have called for Exterminatus.

In Robute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar it is heavily implied that this is normally the default response for overrun worlds of no strategic value. The only reason they don't at first is because Guilliman thinks there might be something valuable on it.

A lot of planets with ORKS on them aren’t fully covered in or controlled by ORKS. Not all ORKS are in waaaghs or empires.