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How do!

So here’s a proper chin wag type thread, dealing with what-ifs.

As we know, Terra is the seat of The Imperium. It’s where The Emperor lives. It’s where the High Lords rule from. Not only is it the most heavily defended planet within The Imperium (and therefore likely, but not definitely) the most heavily defended planet in the known Galaxy.

It’s the lynchpin that if you want to defeat The Imperium, sooner or later you need to conquer Terra - and indeed the Sol System.

Horus of course came perilously close, with forces from the absolute apex of mankind’s might. Even outnumbering the defenders, Terra still managed to stand, albeit at horrific and permanent cost. But before anyone thinks “just bide your time and assemble a force of similar size”, keep in mind that the Heresy really didn’t last all that long in the grand scheme of things. And had things not gone a bit wrong for Horus, would’ve been even shorter. But since then? The Imperium has had 10,000 years to rebuild and reinforce.

So even if a directly comparable in terms of numbers force attacked, it wouldn’t be a simple repeat of the Siege of Terra.

There are also other factors which limit how much weight I think we can put on a direct Heresy vs Now comparison. Not least of which is Mars isn’t currently in Traitorous hands.

But let’s say someone tried it? Do you think anyone really has the resources and organisation to pull it off. If so, how? What are your counter arguments? Would it only ever be a pyrrhic victory?

All those questions and more can be explored……now.

It can only ever be a pyrrhic victory if whoever is attacking Terra kills the Emperor. Upon his death, the Golden Throne goes nuclear and a colossal Warp Rift opens in the Sol System with the centre being where Terra was. Any fleets and armies are stripped from existence, their souls the first morsels for the brand new God that emerges from the cataclysm.

Apart from that, I'm sure some faction could do it. It just hinges entirely on that faction being utterly united in the goal, which as we all know doesn't happen very much for very long.

Only if you’ve committed your entire force though?

One example against it that immediately springs to mind would be a Hive Fleet. Yes it would remove any remnant of said Hive Fleet from the board - but that wouldn’t mean others aren’t left lurking, meaning the victory wasn’t pyrrhic for the Hive Mind?

Yes of course - as witnessed by the numerous civil wars overt and covert amongst the high lords.

Winner gets to be new regent/high lords. Or do you mean alien race, or human faction that doesn't want to have the Emperor still in place?

Who actually wants to take Terra though?

Most of humanity's adversaries would be happy enough with either glassing it or making Sol go nova.

Orks would enjoy the fight, but it would need to be an awfully big waaaargh.

Nids might want the extensive snacky cakes enough to invade.

Fair point!

The latter.

No. It's a fortress world filled with the Imperium's most fanatical loyalists and it has no value other than those fanatics. A conquering enemy would get nothing of direct value. No resources, no infrastructure, no slave population, only a bunch of useless temples and city-sized office buildings that would probably be reduced to rubble anyway as every inhabitant fights to the death. Its sole value to the attacker would be denying it to the Imperium and that can be accomplished without conquering it. Destroy the planet from space, move on to the next target.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gert wrote:
It can only ever be a pyrrhic victory if whoever is attacking Terra kills the Emperor. Upon his death, the Golden Throne goes nuclear and a colossal Warp Rift opens in the Sol System with the centre being where Terra was. Any fleets and armies are stripped from existence, their souls the first morsels for the brand new God that emerges from the cataclysm.

Apart from that, I'm sure some faction could do it. It just hinges entirely on that faction being utterly united in the goal, which as we all know doesn't happen very much for very long.

Assuming that theory is correct.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Only if you’ve committed your entire force though?

One example against it that immediately springs to mind would be a Hive Fleet. Yes it would remove any remnant of said Hive Fleet from the board - but that wouldn’t mean others aren’t left lurking, meaning the victory wasn’t pyrrhic for the Hive Mind?

It depends I would say. The size of the Hive Fleet required to take the Sol System would be immense and the losses would be massive. The Hive Mind would likely destroy the Emperor, at which point all the Biomass that was in the Sol System gets destroyed when reality and unreality collide.
Other Hive Fleets would survive for sure but the lack of feeding and the resulting psychic backlash might do serious damage to other Hive Fleets elsewhere in the Galaxy. We also then have to look at the end result of such an invasion. The Emperor is "dead" for reals this time (barring ascension to actual godhood) and what happens then? Does humanity struggle on or go collectively insane and embark on one last galaxy-wide murder spree to get revenge? Do the Dark Gods massively increase in power at the death of billions of souls instantaneously alongside the death of their great enemy? The Great Rift would undoubtedly be effected in some way as well either expanding or shrinking away from Terra.
I think any way this gets cut it's a net loss for the Imperium and whoever/whatever it was that invaded Terra.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Aecus Decimus wrote:
Assuming that theory is correct.

The device built into the Golden Throne isn't a theory though. The god stuff is theory sure but the massive psychic explosion? That's all fact.

I mean, you have 2-3 legions of Astartes, (Iron Fists, Minotaurs, and the Crimson Fists?) not to mention the entire 10k Custodes, Sisters of Silence, Sisters of Battle convents, several legions of Ad-Mech with Titans ranging from Imperators, to the super secret Psyker Titans, Oh, about a billion Guard and PDF, and entire three battle groups of Naval might, and the small number of GK living over on Titan, not to mention the stuff in and around Mars.

But yeah, any force capable of getting through all of that and then actually killing the Emperor would likely then be annihilated by the legions of demons pouring into real space, currently being held back by the Golden Throne. I mean, in the Custodes book, the Astronomicon goes dark for like a few days, and the entire planet is infested with Blood thirsters and Blood letters.

Yeah, didn't the last great WAAAH make it onto terra? Also, the Halequins made it into the throne room. Thats about as close as anyone has come in the last 10k years right?

There are actually only two proper "garrisons" of Astartes on Terra.
The first is the Imperial Fists aboard the Phalanx, nominally the 3rd Company known as the Sentinels of Terra. However, they aren't actually on permanent assignment as the Phalanx is still the flagship and Fortress Monastery of the Chapter.
The second is the honour guard of Space Wolves assigned to protect the scions of the Navigator House Belisarius.
Many Guard Regiments, half of the Legio Custodes, the Convent Prioris of the Sororitas, Knights from House Taranis, two Warhounds from the Legio Ignatum, and the various militant forces of Imperial offices of the Inquisition or Assasinorum are present, however.

The Orks made it to Terra because the Imperium had decided to stop being militant for a given time. Fleets were left to decay and resources weren't dedicated to mass expansions of the Guard, Navy, or Astartes. The Imperium suffered because the High Lords became more concerned with political ambitions and personal gain than expanding or even defending the Imperium in any major capacity. The bottom line was upheld and that was good enough for the High Lords.
As for the Troupe of Harlequins, they cheated and used magic portals.

 Gert wrote:

It depends I would say. The size of the Hive Fleet required to take the Sol System would be immense and the losses would be massive. The Hive Mind would likely destroy the Emperor, at which point all the Biomass that was in the Sol System gets destroyed when reality and unreality collide.

Not necessarily, we know sufficiently strong (Hive Fleet Kronos) shadow in the warp can beat the warp out of realspace, so a Hive Fleet large enough to take the Sol System can probably beat the resulting warp rift into submission too.

And that's assuming the Tyranids do not also drain the Emperor in the process like the Doom of Malant'ai did to an Eldar Infinity Circuit.

EDIT: [Nevermind, just a repeat of what has been said above. Should've read the whole thread.]

Yeah seems like both the Tyranids and the Necrons have ways of severely mitigating the event of a psychic blast. Though I don't know when the Golden Throne became a giant psyker bomb.

It's safe to say that even in a "huge warp blast" that both the Necrons and Tyranids would have tremendous amounts of remaining assets. Tyranids in particular are still arriving from outside the galaxy. Orks fall into a similar category of being so numerous and so quick-to-reproduce that they'd still be around in force.

 Tyran wrote:
Not necessarily, we know sufficiently strong (Hive Fleet Kronos) shadow in the warp can beat the warp out of realspace, so a Hive Fleet large enough to take the Sol System can probably beat the resulting warp rift into submission too.

And that's assuming the Tyranids do not also drain the Emperor in the process like the Doom of Malant'ai did to an Eldar Infinity Circuit.

The issue with this scenario is that power levels depend on what source you're looking at.
If we take the first issue of the Emperor, how powerful is he post-Heresy? At first, it just seemed that he could telepathically communicate with humans but at the end of the Plague Wars, he directly intervenes in reality by damaging Nurgles Cauldron and the Garden of Nurgle by empowering a Militant-Apostle and Guilliman. It is also that same Apostle's belief that the Great Rift is actually empowering the Emperor, just as it is causing the mass awakening of Psychic individuals across the galaxy. It opens up a lot more questions as to just how powerful the Emperor has become since he was interred into the Throne.
But what about the Tyranids? How strong is the Shadow in the Warp? Can the Hive Mind reproduce the Doom of Malant'ai or was it a one-off thing?
The only thing that is 100% a sure thing is that if the Emperor dies, Terra gets destroyed. The Talisman of Seven Hammers is a dead man's switch designed to deny the Throneworld to Horus if he succeeded during the Heresy. What would happen now after 10k years of Psychic buildup on the Emperor's part is guesswork but its unlikely to be very nice for anyone in the immediate vicinity i.e. Sol.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

It’s the lynchpin that if you want to defeat The Imperium, sooner or later you need to conquer Terra - and indeed the Sol System.

The real thing is that you don't need to defeat Terra by invading it. If you simply barricaded it off in proper siege-like fashion, it'd be in real trouble. To my knowledge Terra has to rely on outside supply for food, and it's got population in the hundreds of billions? Things will get dire soon.

But say they can solve the food problem (through some horrible means, most likely). What happens if the Black Ships can't continuously refresh the Golden Throne/Astronomicon with fresh psykers? The astronomicon fails? The Emperor dies of psychic starvation? It doesn't look good.

 Gert wrote:

The issue with this scenario is that power levels depend on what source you're looking at.
If we take the first issue of the Emperor, how powerful is he post-Heresy? At first, it just seemed that he could telepathically communicate with humans but at the end of the Plague Wars, he directly intervenes in reality by damaging Nurgles Cauldron and the Garden of Nurgle by empowering a Militant-Apostle and Guilliman. It is also that same Apostle's belief that the Great Rift is actually empowering the Emperor, just as it is causing the mass awakening of Psychic individuals across the galaxy. It opens up a lot more questions as to just how powerful the Emperor has become since he was interred into the Throne.

To quote Vegetta: power levels are bs.

As you noted they are inconsistent depending on the source, so you could justify whatever you want according to what narrative you want to sell.

But what about the Tyranids? How strong is the Shadow in the Warp? Can the Hive Mind reproduce the Doom of Malant'ai or was it a one-off thing?

The Shadow in the Warp is an engineered effect, so its strength depends on the resources and designs of the Hive Mind. A greater and denser synaptic web means a more powerful Shadow, moreover Tyranids are able to trade reach for potency by concentrating and focusing it, which has proven effective when fighting warp spawned entities like Daemons.

As for reproducing the Doom of Malant'ai, that's the whole point of the Neurothrope.

 Tyran wrote:

As for reproducing the Doom of Malant'ai, that's the whole point of the Neurothrope.

That was my feeling of the Neurothrope too, but how explicit is that? I'll have to fetch my book. . .

Doom of Malant’ai May still be out there though. After all, to determine what Nids were responsible you either need to survive, or find specific evidence like a dead Craftworld.

No point attacking terra, it would be a victory just to decimate the rest of the imperium and let humans retreat back into their fortress and eat themselves.

But for the question in hand, and assuming that there isn’t a deadman’s trigger the. I don’t see why not, if you can get close enough to terra surely some virus bombs would do the job. The outer defences in the solar system are to prevent anyone getting that close and the only ones that did were Horus’s lot and they wanted to take terra not destroy it.

But 40K has plenty of planet killer weapons that don’t require boots on the ground.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

It’s the lynchpin that if you want to defeat The Imperium, sooner or later you need to conquer Terra - and indeed the Sol System.

This is extremely not true. Terra has been so thoroughly depleted of natural resources that it is completely dependent upon the rest of the galaxy for resources. It was in fact Abaddon's plan after he expanded the rift in he galaxy and made Warp travel even more perilous to close down all the major places the Imperium could send ships to the wider Imperium so that he could then slowly starve Terra out and let it die a slow death. This is detailed in the first Watchers of the Throne novel, The Emperor's Legion.

Thing is…who has the resources to create an effective embargo? Sure the Rift will Be having an impact, but how do you stop the other half of The Imperium supplying Terra?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Thing is…who has the resources to create an effective embargo? Sure the Rift will Be having an impact, but how do you stop the other half of The Imperium supplying Terra?

By killing the transports in local space. Wherever they're coming from the supplies eventually have to get to Terra and if there's a blockade force in orbit the transports are going to take horrific losses trying to get through. And yeah, with enough support you can break the blockade, but at what cost? How many other planets will have to be stripped of their defenses and sacrificed to keep those supply lines open?

It's probably not worth it though, except as deliberate bait to draw in those forces. Destroy the local defense fleet, send a sacrificial force to destroy the planet. Tau/Necrons/etc could even use a drone-operated planet killer so that no actual lives are lost when the self destruct activates.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Thing is…who has the resources to create an effective embargo? Sure the Rift will Be having an impact, but how do you stop the other half of The Imperium supplying Terra?

Tyranids for sure, if they decided to make it a mission. Their fleets are huge, and the sort of territory they can cover at once is incredibly vast. Their warp shadow phenomena also aids in making their territorry harder to navigate in, partially by just driving atropaths and navigators insane.

Aecus Decimus wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Thing is…who has the resources to create an effective embargo? Sure the Rift will Be having an impact, but how do you stop the other half of The Imperium supplying Terra?

By killing the transports in local space. Wherever they're coming from the supplies eventually have to get to Terra and if there's a blockade force in orbit the transports are going to take horrific losses trying to get through. And yeah, with enough support you can break the blockade, but at what cost? How many other planets will have to be stripped of their defenses and sacrificed to keep those supply lines open?

It's probably not worth it though, except as deliberate bait to draw in those forces. Destroy the local defense fleet, send a sacrificial force to destroy the planet. Tau/Necrons/etc could even use a drone-operated planet killer so that no actual lives are lost when the self destruct activates.

Well, the trouble there is how do you maintain your blockade (that’s the word I should’ve used, not embargo). The Madeville points are relatively set. And the Sol System is hardly short on ships. Whilst I don’t think we can be certain, I’d argue it would make sense they’re not exactly untested in battle.

Yes diverting further forces to relieve Terra would by a comital of finite forces - however vast they might be. But this is Terra. It’s still gonna take a lot of your own resources to get the blockade in place, so you yourself may be left unable to take advantage of reduced defences elsewhere.

Why would one want to conquer Terra? The implication is that if the Imperium's capital falls and the Emperor dies, something happens.

But what? All those humans don't just disappear.

The question also raises scores of other questions, like how did the assault force get there? Where did it come from? What happened to all the Imperial forces in the way?

The answers to those questions will determine the answer to the OP. If a power had risen that wiped out every Imperial battlefleet and battle barge, then Terra would be small beans.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And the Sol System is hardly short on ships. Whilst I don’t think we can be certain, I’d argue it would make sense they’re not exactly untested in battle.

The assumption in any scenario is that the invasion force is capable of destroying the defending fleet. If you can't even manage that you have zero chance of a successful attack.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Why would one want to conquer Terra? The implication is that if the Imperium's capital falls and the Emperor dies, something happens.

But what? All those humans don't just disappear.

All the humans don't dissapear, true. But interstellar navigation becomes a lot harder because the astronomicon is lost. Humans have a rough go of it in that case.

Honest curiosity question: If the Nids are this big terrible threat to all life and matter, why hasn't anyone but the Imperium actually been scared of them? The demon wave in Dev of Baal didn't seem particularly threatened or even annoyed by the hive fleet. Something the size of the Shadow in the Warp would surely have attracted the attention of one of the fallen primarchs, if not Abbadon directly. Also, the Orks, ever looking for a strong and worthy fight, seem bored by the Nids. Even the Necrons don't seem to care.

Are the hive fleets really as big and bad as the imperial fears let on? If the Necrons, who have the power to literally delete stars, aren't bothered by them, why is Humanity?

All of that is nonsense. The Orks literally had a temporary heaven where they went and fought Leviathan at Octarius. The Imperium has cancelled entire wars against other species because of the Tyranids. And most of all the Silent King returned to the galaxy to lead the Necrons because he found the Tyranids in deep space

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
If the Necrons, who have the power to literally delete stars, aren't bothered by them, why is Humanity?

Highlighted the important part. Tyranids are a huge threat if you're a faction with an average technology base somewhere around 1940 and sheer manpower as your only real asset. Tyranids are quite capable of handling primitive Imperial forces, especially the PDF garbage that is the only defense for most planets, and their ability to turn the fallen from both sides into more troops negates the Imperium's biggest advantage. For an advanced faction who cares if some angry animals are hungry. They have no ranged firepower, no armor against heavy weapons, and no real plan besides mass wave attacks. Put up some automated sentry guns, call in artillery strikes, and no more Tyranid problem.

Most orks aren't all that interested because there's nothing to loot and no victory to be won. Fight the Imperium and you get cool loot and you can laugh as they cry about all their losses. Fight Tyranids and even if you win you get nothing. It's like punching a brick wall, win or lose it's pointless and there's no fun in it. But even then some do fight Tyranids.