Muh spess mareehns

>Muh spess mareehns
>muh chaosh spess mareehns
>muh Orks
>muh Imperial Army
>muh Tau Mecha
>muh Titans

boo fucking hoo, lets get some real talk going, the greatest force in the 40k Galaxy is the Imperial Navy, it's the most important part of the entire Imperium. No space marines, no sororitas, no grey knights.
They are all not worth SHIT without the Imperial Navy, fuck all your ground battles, they are peanuts compared to whats happening in space.

If Space Marines win a hundred battles on ground, but are stuck on the planet because the Chaos Navy has their ships burning, they aren't worth SHIT. Thats why abbadon keeps failing, not because of the loyal space marines, or because he doesn't have hands, but because the Imperial Navy keeps pushing his shit back into the galactic asshole he calls home.

Just saying. while you are playing war on the Ground, the brave Captains and Admirals of the Navy keep your planet save.

>orbital superiority is very important

No shit Sherlock

bumping with an Ork.

Play Battlefield Gothic then.

Incidentally I never understood how in a sci-fi setting with warp/hyperspace drive territories are supposed to "hold the line".

I mean what tactical use is Cadia besides simple territory? Why can't the traitor fleets just warp right into the Segmentum Solar?

The only setting I can really remember giving an explanation to this (and I'm not saying it's the only one) was Halo, where the answer was basically "we can't 'hold the line' we just have to keep the locations of our worlds secret".

But everybody knows where Terra is, it's where that giant warp-light is emanating from!

>Because X relies on Y, Y isn't worth shit
And the Imperial Navy isn't worth shit without the Administratum, the Navis Nobilite, Adeptus Mechanicus and the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.

So which one of those should we base this thread about?
Or should we just call it a day and have an Adeptus Terra thread?

>You warp right onto terras doorstep

>A few days later reinforcements warp into the sol system from the other Imperial holdings nearby

Due to ancient Necron tech that almost nobody knows about, Cadian Gate is the only safe route in and out of the Eye of Terror. There are other, smaller ways out, but they are very unstable and/or dangerous.

You see, without a stable way large parts of the fleet can be destroyed or delayed, or thrown off course, or be unable to jump at all. And most of the Eye works like a supernatural border, with no way at all in or out.

Also, you cannot just enter warp and drop out anywhere. The further you go constantly in the Warp the greater the less accurate is the exit and the bigger the warp fuckery with time. If you would stay in the Warp for months ship-time, you would arrive 500 light years off course, 300 years too late.

tl;dr - u need a stable exit from the warp and u need to make stops often

Chaos has to keep their gods happy.
Imperium does it for theological, nationalistic and economic reasons (sort of).
Orks like a good krumpin.
Tau wanna expand their Greater Good idea.
Eldar dont care much about planets as long as theres nothing of interest.
Necrons reconquer their old realms.
Tyranids have to eat.

Thats pretty much it, I guess.
Also, to give you a reason to buy tiny plastic figures.

>I mean what tactical use is Cadia besides simple territory?
The Eye of Terror has a ton of warpstorms surrounding it, the Cadian Gate (centred, naturally, on Cadia, and actually thanks to Necron pylons on the planet) is the region of space that is relatively calm - it forms a path out into the wider Imperium, and thus a choke point.

You could, theoretically, go through the Gate without passing through realspace at all, but you won't be undetected, so you'd have forces ready for you when you arrive, and forces following to bite you on the ass.

A lot of other settings with wormholes, hyperspace gates and what have you make travelling through these similarly choke-pointable spaces where a line can be held much, much faster, and basically necessary for a military campaign

Space Marines (including. Grey Knights) fight in space all the time, and have their own ships - it's in the name.

Also void shields and anti-orbital weapons do exist, orbital superiority won't win you a war unless your definition of winning includes destroying the planet.
Most of the time people don't want to destroy the planet, even in 40k

I can think of several reasons instantly, using Terra as the example homeworld.
1. If you take your time eating up worlds before jumping to Terra Terra, there will be less worlds to call levies in the finale, so less renforcements.
2. If you go for the fringe territories, the resistance will be weaker, where the millitary will flip their shit if you jump to Terra.
3. Your warp drive has limited range and/or fuel, so even if you try to jump to Terra ASAP it'll still look like a playthrough of No Man's Sky.
4. Your warp drive takes a while to charge so if you ever bite off more than you can chew you'll have to do your impession of FTL as you try to nope out of there, and jumping to Terra is the iggest bite you can take.
5. Terra is very dependant on other worlds, so by eating up territory you can siege Terra by proxy and take out other enemy planets with the same army.

logistics, even for chaos

>Just saying. while you are playing war on the Ground, the brave Captains and Admirals of the Navy keep your planet save.
You do realize space marines are the guys boarding the enemy capitol ships and blowing them up, right. They're also the guys charging into space hulks to divert them, because they are essentially impossible to shift with conventional firepower.

navy's gr8, but they're still only one part of the greater whole

Yeah welcome to GW, 40k is absolutely retarded.

>Not just warping directly to Terra, even with suicide ships

>Not just bombarding every single planet from orbit.

I guess you just have to buy the models and spend a fortune on a shitty game!

1. Obvious b8 m8

2. I think everybody had pretty good logistical explanations. I mean yeah you COULD just warp strait to your enemy's capital if you have the capabilties, but you're likely going to have your shit pushed in before you can blink. Especially if your enemies can detect incoming warp signatures.

And as for just exterminatusing every planet, even you, troll, should recognize why that's a terrible idea.

chaos cant exterminates because then khorne pulls his support for you killing everyone just with big weapons instead of doing it in person

Its not obvious bate just because you cant give a reasonable answer.

Explain why the fuck would ANY faction fight on planetary surfaces when they can just bomb the shit out of planets.

What the fuck does chaos care for trying to conquer planets? Why not bomb them? Why dont Orks blow up planets and then invade them? Why dont Tau rekt planets and then terraform them again?

chaos needs the souls on those worlds
orks want a good scrape
tau don't really have the spare resources for that

Because there are valuable resources on planets.

Chaos: because Chaos either - wants a good fight, wants slaves, wants daemon worlds to live on, or wants plundered tech,

Orks: orks don't care about "efficiency", they want a fun-ass fight

Tau: I imagine with the Tau empire's budding power they'd rather not waste shittons of lives and resources on terraforming planets they could have just captured and refurbished on a more minor scale.

The life of a imperial soldiers is worth less than imperial infrastructure, if we are talking about a "normal" rebellion it would be good to recapture big factories,mines etc without to much damage.

There are "situations" where bombing them into oblivion is totally fine. That being said in many cases a world might be retaken without the need for a complete rebuild. That is simply put good. Mostly talking about the Imperium here.

Dark Eldar, Chaos, Orks etc. all have good reaosons not to "glass" every planet they find.

Isn't there some giant wall of destruction where the Astronomicon meets the Eye in the Warp? I think I remember reading about that somewhere.

Over the last 2 months I've been building and painting an enforcer class system control ship. I'll be entering it into a painting competition in a few days

you might be talking about the psychic wards the emperor put up that Magnus smashed to pieces

What do you need think

Almost looks like something out of Half-Life.

Maybe but I don't think so.

the coloring reminds me of the tau

We are reading science/logic too much into space opera in this thread. I think the fun of 40k is that it's needlessly epic Napoleonic Spehss Metal WWII

If we go by pure logic then

>Not taking big can of Chef Emprahdee and propelling it to 8 trillion light years through enemy worlds to annihilate them with kinetic force

I'm just more curios from an overall sci-fi perspective. I want to know how "territory" works when you have hyperdrives. So far it seems to be mostly about logistics. Of course, that still leaves a lot of room for questions.

Totally I was basing the color scheme off the battlefleet Armageddon

There can be several reasons that I can think of right off the bat.

1) Encircled: If you warp directly into the middle of enemy held territory, you are surrounded by reinforcements, so even if you win you are gonna get your ass whooped soon.

2) FTL travel has inherent danger in many settings. I'll use Star Wars as an example, because 40k has been used plenty of times already. In SW, hyperdrives are usable to go anywhere, but if you don't stick to a charted and safe route, you might get atomized during your journey. This leads to chokepoints where the enemy can build up defenses, because if you don't go that way who knows what'll happen to your fleet.

3) You can't always glass a planet because of resources, personell, etc. Or you aren't a genocidal maniac that wants to kill millions to billions of civilians along with the military force on the planet. However this is Veeky Forums so most people here would just hit the "genocide nao" button.

>Encircled
This reminds of something. How did hyperspace travel work in the Foundation universe?
I remember there was a general whose tactic was to capture the outer planets, thus encircling the core ones.

Technically it would be "ensphered"

Remember when the Necrons did that shit and jumped directly to Mars, and actually touched the ground. Even they got fukt and phased out. And that was without using warp drives- thus undetected. Warp drives/jumps are shit. Cron fleet tech trumps i swear, but even they cant do it.. Yet.

Of course not. If all the Necrons woke up and got their tech back up and running they'd probably be able to take the galaxy.

>>Not just warping directly to Terra, even with suicide ships
i you try to make a warp jump inside the eye of terror you are going to be fucked, or just emerge in a completely different place far away from your destination
>>Not just bombarding every single planet from orbit.
"lets kill all the people who have emotions and feed our gods"

But how does that work in a setting where you CANNOT afford to allow the enemy to make planetfall? Like if the Tyranids were capable of the jumps that warp-drives pull, or Yog-Sothoth suddenly appeared in the Sol System (Lovecraft lite). Do you just have to focus on keeping your planet locations secret?

That is a cool word and you deserve those double dubs.

Usually the limitations of hyperdrives are helpful there - be it star wars's gravity wells, honorverse's hyper limits, etc.

In one of the few settings I can think of where unlimited teleport/hyperdrives exist and this comes up, territory is defined as both the area you can block teleports in (somewhat energy intensive, usually well-settled star systems. Was also proven to be beatable if you use a stupid amount of power) and the area you can seed with FTL-communication-equipped drones linked to your response: the area where you can detect intrusion fast enough to get there and kill it (or run away)

Yeah no shit it's about logistics. The same reason the US is the global military power that jt is is because of it's naval bases. It's able to project it's forces all over the world. Modern warfare is all about projection.

fuck army
post NAVY

How much energy do you need to go FTL? In special relativity it is infinite. With Alcubirrine drives, you needed from the mass of Jupiter to more mass there's in the observable universe. Further methods can be involved to reduce energy but travelling FTL is not easy.

The Warp isn't as friendly as hyperspace. There's litteral storms inside it that can tear starships apart unless navigated properly and carefully. That means there are routes that are clear to move through, and the Eye of Terror and Cadia is one such route into the realspace.

"plasma reactors" in 40k seem to be low grade fusion systems. They can easily be about 20% of a ship's volume (can't be sure for mass) given the size of those engine sections.

FTL in 40k is a very specific dimension though (the warp is basically the astral plane), so it's not as though you're going FTL in realspace. You just open up a portal to magic land (no really) and aren't too certain if you'll pop out in the right place or the right time in a few months.

The only other close analogue for FTL would be R-Type's d26 (the dimension one travels to go between times or dimensions), but the Warp has the advantage of only having local hostile conditions to deal with as opposed to being infested with timelord-bullshit that eats warp gods.

The 40k fluff does at least nod to this. The Imperium is not a single contiguous block but a million worlds scattered across the billions of systems of the galaxy. Even within settled systems vast areas can be completely unexplored and new threats can emerge seemingly from nowhere.
So controlling territory mostly means having enough forces to control near space and important resources on the ground and being able to yell for help when something the PDF can't handle comes along

>Warping directly into the Sol System

Good luck with that.
Probably the most fortified system in the galaxy the BTFOs even Necron fleets. They have multiple Deathstars and fleets out of their asses.

>when something the PDF can't handle comes along
Are there any examples of the PDF repelling an attacking force in fluff?

I'd argue both the navy and the IG both vastly outstrip space marines in strength and importance.

The average space marine is way better then the average human, this is true. bigger, tougher, stronger, all that.

But is he way tougher then the average Ork? not really.


when battles can involve literally billions of soldiers, a few thousand or so each with the strength of 10 men actually doesn't really amount to much.


without the navy and IG to do the heavy lifting, the space marines would be wiped out in a few years, easily overwhelmed. as the lore says, they are a scalpel, elite teams for small missions where you can't send in 100 million guys.


But overall? SPESS MEREENS don't win wars.

And if all the supermodels in the world wanted to give me a blowjob my life would have worth...

Never gonna happen.

A single clan should be able to overcome most anything, if we actually use the fluff.


the Necron have tech that even outstrips the Eldar, and all of it is designed solely to kill shit. the average necron scrub should be able to solo a space marine.


these are the guys who took on the ancients, orks and eldar all at the same time and were winning. their cryptechs are described as being able to play with the very fundemental forces of the universe


Yet somehow humans who've not updated their tech in 10,000 years can handle them on a regular basis? I can understand if it was like massive billions of man fleets coming out and overwhelming them with sheer numbers, but it doesn't seem to be.

it's BS

No, because the only reason why you ever hear about a conflict is because the PDF didn't kill it. Nobody reads a story about the PDF flawlessly beating back the enemy.

Honestly as much as people make Pokemon jokes, I find it wonderfully intimidating that the necrons are perhaps the only factions (bar maaaaaybe humanity) to have personally KILLED their gods.

The Necrons killed the physical realm's version of the Chaos Gods, and also had technology that was going to literally close the warp forever

yet somehow they lose to SPESS MEREENS who's been using the same tech for 10,000 years

ITT: nobody knows Void Shields are a thing

The Void Shields on Terra were said to be able to hold against ANY Orbital Bombardment. And indeed, they held against Horus, Big E had to shut them down in order to TP to the Vengeful Spirit.

>boo fucking hoo

You realize that doesn't make sense in context, right? Are you an ESL or just stupid?

Hey now don't lie.

They updated their armor once or twice.

Yes, tech left over from the Dark Age of Technology, one of the few if only factions that probably could've stood up to a unified Necron empire.

Ok, no one has been able to answer this. If I was to travel to one side of the galaxy to the other, assuming that I do not take pit-stops, using the safest routes. How long will this trip take me?

>Also void shields and anti-orbital weapons do exist, orbital superiority won't win you a war
This, also most of the weaponry employed by the battleships is often described as way too inaccurate for pinpoint bombardement, reducing the tactical merit

Considering that guardsmen, as well as their chaos counterparts, are often seen as even more disposable than the ammunitions they use, drowning your enemy in corpses seems like the most logical approach

depends on the warp and the ship's speed

one of the reason GKs are so efficient is that their cruisers and battleships are the fastest amongst all SMs and extra-warded against the warp for ease of transit in warp currents

the answer to your question varies from "tomorrow morning" to "forever"

It could even be 10 years ago

>But is he way tougher then the average Ork? not really.

Considering Space Marines are usually depicted as being able to take out at least a view Orks by themselves, I'd argue they are.

This is part of why the Legions were able to conquer and why Chapters still arguably can, a Space Marine can kill numerous enemy soldiers before being taken down.

>the average necron scrub should be able to solo a space marine.

The Necron Warrior's disadvantage is that for all their technology they're slow to react and possibly locked in to what they can think to do.

A space marine (in lore) can usually eat through hordes of boyz. A nob is usually reserved for a more epic mono-a-mono fight. Warbosses are usually the primary marine-killers, and usually require a captain or some shit to take down.

Anyone wonder how the Imperial Navy would look if lets say the Horus Heresy never happened and like the Imperium became really powerful and rivaled the Golden Age of Technology?

Like would they have escorts the size of the Phalanx and have galactic sized super fortresses to fight off entire Tyranid swarms en-masse?