I know there have been lots of threads on this in the past, but I am a new fag (so, if you have an archived thread, just linking that would be fine), and I am wondering just how gloriously overpowered 40K is compared to other sci fi/space universes like Star Wars, Dune, Mass Effect, etc.
Bonus points for a picking another universe that is obscure to compare.
A single Xeelee nightfighter could probably solo all of 40k
I haven't heard of this, can you tell me some about the universe?
The first rule of 40k vs is: kill yourself, mongrel.
More powerful than those three you listed. Exterminatus is a Death Star on the regular.
But less powerful than 'wacko comic book stuff', you know? Whoever can twizzle reality around their fingers and such.
But of course, a lot of stuff works on plot armor, so...
The Xeelee Sequence
The Xeelee are a race of sentient space-time defects that become sentient in the first 10^-1000 seconds after the big bang.
They are the undisputed masters of baryonic matter, who use galaxies as the building blocks of their grettest creation, the Ring (called the Great Atractor by humans).
Humans think the Xeelee are trying to destroy the universe, but they are actually making a scape hatch, to get alway from the Photino Birds, a race even more powerful and numerous than the Xeelee.
The Xeelee trapped thenselves on a stable timeloop, where at the heat dead of the universe they would back to the big bang to uplift thenselves.
The common xeelee ship is the nightfighter, it can cross the entire universe from a side to the other in a few months, and is armed with a Starbreaker (a weapon with scaling power output that ranges from "boil eggs" all the way to "tear starts in pieces". It also has "create solar systems" somewhere in the middle).
It's made of spacetime distortions and it's wings are made of blackholes. Can survive a eruption of a magnetar (one of the most destructive events in the entire universe) mostly undamaged.
All Xeelee ships are also time machines.
Don't let my description fool you, it's a rather good series (the xeelee are not protagonists, they are just doing their own thing and everyone else (who is less advanced than them) gets caught in the middle and needs to deal with it. The story is about the humans dealing with it, btw)
The question is: Why don't they do something better with all that POWAH?
Well, damn, this is just on a whole other scale than most other universes.
Thanks for the briefing.
In the end they saved all other forms of baryonic life with them, when they fleed the universe.
What else they could have done?
the Dust must Flow
They could have done it FASTER with all their fancy time-magic. Please. Lazy louts making us sit through their 'story'.
I guess so, altrough they were fighting agains guys who had the same tech and who were trying to stop them.
They're my go to answer for "who could beat X" simply due to the sheer scale
caveat:
not the Voidyani, but the actual Endless. crazy motherfuckers
The Endless were crap.
They didn't know how to follow through with anything, and their second game is exactly the same as their first. Filth.
Just looking at this map, how close are these planets in terms of up-down 3D? Or do planets cluster closely? How does ship combat occur in 3D? Why would formations be relevant if there's no sense of direction?
> 40K
> Star Trek
> Star Wars
> X-Com
> Halo Combat Evolved
> Mass Effect
in 40K the massive numbers accorded to armies, hive colonies, and the kinds of weapons they use id say it still is near the top of the popular list. The fights are real nasty, the ships are big and the macrobatteries every ship has can destroy the surface of a planet like an asteroid hit.
the aliens from X-Com games have plasma weapons and explosive with so much firepower its like pitching anybody else against star trek phasers, but their ships generally suck in the grand scheme of things. Compared to Halo the X-Com plasma tech is like automatic plasma grenade dispensers.
Star Wars and Halo CE technology is generally about the same... the Forerunners might have a step ahead of them but in Star Wars everybody in the galaxy has this shit. While in Halo only the best shit the Covenant has would qualify.
There's alot of fun stuff about Mass Effect but the energy weapons from Halo, including the ship based energy weapons are all much stronger. Plus their FTL drives in mass effect suck to the point of not even being in the ship, like stargates its things they rely on externally.
People will debate about the 2&3rd placement but id say they're relatively equal. Star trek stuff doesnt often have as much firepower, and its true their FTL drives suck to some degree (though the lowered speed is a plot element). But what the ships lack in strength or grandeur they make up with for with efficiency and precision. Phasers and all the similar energy weapons are like EMP cannons on top of causing nasty damage (thats the kinda thing that can disable an entire star destroyer). 9/10 times they target someone's weapons array and fry all their controls before they are able to get a single shot off, and the ranges involved are obscene. Plus the Borg would just take whatever anybody else had and use it themselves.
But still id put 40K at the top of the list, due to #SheerNumbers.
> Star Trek
I think another good example of why the ships tend to be a little underpowered in that setting is just because of what they can do, with sensors and other kinds of untyped energy field manipulators, they dont need big ships.
Then of course if anybody did care they could build big things. V'Ger was twice the size of a retribution class ship and the power it fielded was astronomical, and it was completely automated.
> X-Com
Any veteran of the X-Com games will also remind you that weapons fire was only a third of the battle.
The Mind Controlling shit the aliens did could ruin an entire mission by shutting down your best soldiers or having them shoot each other.
Even in star wars with the force powers there wasnt much of that going on, but force powers are like a weapon too.
but yeah the weapons were heinously effective
> big plasma gun can 1-shot someone wearing power armor on a lucky hit, but the weapon is autofiring too
> blaster launcher projectiles cause explosive damage tanamount to a Hellfire Missile and can navigate around up to nine 90 degree corners. The ammunition weighs 4 pounds each and only takes up as much inventory space as a Handgun. This is about the Toppest Kek of man-portable weapons in virtually any setting.
> chryssalids are instant kill infection monstrosities like The Thing. Except you produce progeny within seconds. And they're not entirely weak either.
The part where men invent a drive better than the Xeelee's, and then forget about it, abandon innovation and start scavenging Xeelee leftovers like all the other species is so sad.
Literally happens in real life.
Plenty of medical advances were stifled in favor of dogmatic adherence to Galen, even if they worked.
Even just before modern Evidence Based Medicine, working/nonworking took a backseat to prestige and dogma.
pls repsomd
I don't know enough to comment on it, but, check em.
The Milky Way is about 100 000 light years wide, but only 1000~2000 thick. So, at the scale that map is on, the Z axis is about irrelevant.
Wouldn't ships in space for combat be spherical with gunports in all directions rather than typical water boats?
Wouldn't ships in space combat not need fucking prows and thousands of whipped slaves to load their guns manally?
Seek not the logic in 40k for it leads only to damnation. Embrace the cool, let it flow through you, and you will find fun.
In 40k, IN craft are long and narrow with a heavily armored prow because their preferred fighting style is to plow right into formations while tanking fire then unload both broadsides at (relatively) close range. Their skinny profile presents the smallest possible surface to incoming fire while closing to their most effective range.
It's also a good design in reality, because a sphere needs a shitload of redundant large engines to move effectively compared to one optimized drive and a bunch of maneuvering thrusters. Further, when traveling through space at hide speeds, blueshifting of cosmic rays and impacts of atoms on the fore of the craft results in a significant radiation risk to crew, requiring a thick layer of shielding in the direction of travel. The IN's overarmored prow designs serve the same purpose.
40k generally beats most universes, and that's assuming that it's just the Imperium fighting the enemy, the combined might of 40k allied together is actually a pretty high tier in my opinion. If it's just Imperium versus a group then it's more of a coin toss. I think that Starfleet beats 40k because Star Trek has a shit tone of retarded stuff that is frankly overpowered bullshit. So I think they have the edge of 40k. Being able to fight while going FTL is a pretty huge thing. And Startrek ships are actually really powerful they just tend not to be run optimal for combat and Starfleet tends not to know how to fight. Really no-one in the Star Trek seems to know how to conduct a war, but then again when you have the power level they have and fucking matter creation devises then fuck it you can be as stupid as you want.
But more on topic 40k beats most universes but I feel that Star Trek is one of the only main universes it loses too, because Starfleet is basically Silver Age Superman. They get powers as they need them and they are bullshit and overpowered but people forget about them next episode.
>Star trek stuff doesnt often have as much firepower,
The Dominion War era standard-issue Federation phaser rifle had a dialable output that went up to eight gigatonnes.
Probably not actually. Sphere presents too large a cross section, and actually makes it hard to fit everything in without wasting space.
Downstreamers. They are even more powerful than The Xeelee.
(OP)
The God Emperor and his Great Crusade fleet from just before the Ullanor Crusade vs Manticore and it's allies at maximum strength, with Honor herself in command. Who wins?
I never understood why the 40k universe is always flat.
Yes, I get that this is a 2d representation, but Purgatory and Belis Corona look really close on this map but in actuality could be as far apart as Ultima Macharia and Es-Thea. Now I don't follow lore outside what people tell me as I crush them with my BA. On to the point, if they were really far apart why then put them in the same region? it would be spheroid and have more than just four regions.
Unless it is canon that space marines have no concept of Y in space (on planets it's different? i guess)
>spees mahrine can see ground, therefore up and down is possible.
>there is no ground in space, therefore up and down impossible. To say otherwise is heresy!
>one chunk of one corner of one spiral arm of the galaxy
>the Great Crusade
Even Weber's Sue is proppa fucked. This is a post-Shaman ultra-psyker that can mind control entire sectors at the helm of a force that counts multiple Primarchs, the bulk of their legions, the massed war machines of Legio Titanicus, and myriad and sundry lesser forces. Against this you throw what, a few thousand fragile tubes full of x-ray missiles? The fleet would laugh off the pitiful assault and tear apart the attackers. Manticore couldn't possibly win, unless they magically multiplied to cover the rest of the galaxy.
Hmmm, quite. OK..let's give Emps an adversary worthy of this fleet Ian Banks' Culture. Now what?
see
Also
>it would be spheroid
I don't think a discus approximates a spheroid sufficiently. You do know the shape of the galaxy you inhabit, right?
>tfw you will never see one of the X land on the Emprah
Unless warp fuckery is involved.
40K > Star Wars (no force)
40K > Dune
40K < Mass Effect
If warp fuckery is involved then it's a walkover for 40K
Unless the Culture has a defense against psykers they'd lose hard.
Fun fact: the guy who invented aspirin also invented heroin, and thought the former was a complete failure. He eventually died of a stroke.
You left out the part where humanity builds an even more absurdly genocidal grim-dark space empire than all of 40k including Necrons and Chaos could ever even think trying to be called the Interim Coalition of governance that went on a genocidal rampage across the galaxy killing every single possible alien race including bacteria just because it could pose a potential threat.
They then run into a Xelee outpost in the black hole in the middle of the Galaxy and spend tens of thousands of years trying to kill it while the Xelee barely give a fuck. The Coalition humans are basically 40k Mechanicus and Administorum on steroids. They have vast armies of vat grown child soldiers birthed on the front lines with accelerated growth and bio-engineering and send them into battle when they are like 8 years old and approximately 30 billion die every day while advancing like one meter forward for thousands of years.
Humanity was so fucking intent on killing the Xelee in the Milky Way Galaxy and it didn't even know what their motives were after millenia humans eventually defeat the Xelee in the Milky Way then immediately collapsed in a civil war and murder each other, then after millennia they unify again more powerful than ever and wage multi-galactic level war on the Xelee (who still don't give a fuck) launching neutron stars at the them and shiet and wiping out and strip mining entire galaxies after a while the Xelee actually noticed this fucking nuisance and wiped humanity out in a couple of seconds preserving only select survivors and earth and telling them that they can be saved by going into another universe
Now we know what the Tyranids are running from.
How bout all those universes vs. Tom Bombadil?
Stupid sexy book cover characters?
>the tyranids are running from the flood
than what the fuck are the flood running from?
sly marbo
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