Tau face an actual threat for once

>this level of Tau wankery
By the emperor...

This is bait

>No, you'll just give them a starter Ctan shard like a metal professor Oak
I need art of Trazyn in a stolen labcoat asking a group of Tau if they're girls or boys.

Realistically speaking the Tau get crushed by literally anything. Their small empire and lack of FTL means that without GW being over backwards to cover the ass of their second favorite faction, the Tau would be extinct.

They are protected by the great P'laut Au'mor.

It sounds like actual tau fluff.

ALright, let's make it interesting. How about tau on the offensive? How does an expansion fleet do against:

>cadia
>Armageddon
>prospero back during the Heresy
>Iyanden Craftworld before the tyranids
>terra
>Octaria
>Ultramar
>cryptus system/Baal

T'au are shit and should never even be in the game.

Fuck off you weeb fish fags.

>unironically believing an empire that is massively insignificant on the grand scale of the universe could take on a chaos incursion larger than the Heresy

Probably get fucked. The fleet is their entire force, and being unable to warp jump, reinforcements arrive too late to support.

Tau too op, even after hard nerf.

>tfw the Tau took 14 super-fortress hive cities manned by untold numbers of defenders in just a day

>show starving men food
>shocked when they follow said food instead of remaining in their squalid lives of oppression
Gue'vesa rules fucking when GW?

>show starving men food
So the Tau brought enough food to feed hundreds of billions of densely packed people?
Even Chaos cultists aren't that gullible.

This will never not fucking make me mad

Considering they can have billions in their own cities living comfy lives?
Yes.

Hey remember that time the imperium tried to use sheer manpower to smash the t'au and got crushed so hard that even the players try to rephrase it as 'n-no we just weren't trying! We were just messing with you!'? Remember that time this happened fucking twice? And remember how even after this they still go 'but if the imperium actually TRIED, you know?'

>the tau didn't believe Imperial reports on the size of hive worlds
>they still not only brought enough food to feed a world, not just enough to feed a world they vastly underestimated the population of until they got there but 14 worlds.

Welcome to tau fluff, enjoy your stay.
Next episode: space marines getting ambushed by tanks.
the food thing was an allegory of sorts, given they did take 14 hive cities and relocate the humans into their Sept worlds in one day

You know, in many settings, fans would call bullshit on bad writing like this much quicker.
But because GW pits fans against each other by forcing people to pick factions, it seems we become way more likely to defend bad fluff about our own faction because it pisses other faction fans off.
It's like if the career of the Patriots were the result of somebody writing the NFL chronicles or something.

Honestly, Hive population has never impressed me, and underestimates what can you actually do. Despite the whole million world thing, Warhammer is still small in terms of scale just like most fiction. Yes, I've just called Warhammer unambitious but most of science fiction is guilty of the same thing. A Dyson Swarm orbiting a sun could have a quadrillion people. This is not as unrealistic as you think nor is particularly high tech: Just a bunch of habitats orbiting the sun. Even the Imperium could have it as scavanged tech as it is, with vacuum tubes next to quantum supercomputer, could do it. A single Dyson Swarm could have more population than if you inhabited every single planet in thee galaxy. A billion-strong force would be considered a small deployment by a Dyson civilisation.

Only Necrons are at that level of tech, having 'finished' science effectively, and they're few in number for obvious reasons

Read again. You don't need particularly high tech to make a Dyson Swarm. You know what's a Dyson Swarm? It's just this:

16 km (9.9 mi) in diameter, with a target population of 20,000 to 30,000 people. No fancy tech, just orbital colonies over and over and over again. There's nothing impossible about this.

Even the population of Terra is too low. It should have a half a trillion, living comfortably (not even crowded), if it not were for the ridiculous continent-sized Imperial Palace, all the mega-monuments, and general inefficiency of the Imperium.

Tau were in a losing battle until they were Deus ex machinaed by farsight intervention when tau space travel take months if not years to arrive

And the writers not knowing anything about scale

Tau would get BTFO by any real force like you listed. Thats why they only ever face literal who's or something designed to job to them.

The majority of the Tau forces were elsewhere in the system. The undermanned Tau were caught offguard by the sudden arrival of an Imperial force that large. It would havet aken 82 days for Tau reinforcements to arrive. It was a doable battle even without Farsight coming.

And Tau were losing ground not being the Imperials were fighting good but because the Imperial ridiculous numbers. The book establishes that Imperial commands are utterly incompetent. The Cadian High General was punished and executed and his second in command was abandoned to die.

I think we all do. Hell if I was a better drawfag I'd do it.

>mfw tau have Ultramarine levels of plot armour at this point

>Surprised when a race who equips every basic trooper with a better version of their enemy's rarest and most powerful weapons is capable of beating said enemy.

But honestly a lot of the things in fluff are just down because the writers don't do enough fucking research. So should the Tau have been able to defeat 14 hive citys? Yes it's not that fucking hard. Just get a coin (Or a tungsten shell about as big as a dreadnought just to be sure.) and fire it out a mass driver at a planet and wham. Bye bye hive city.

Question. Did you even read how the Tau took over the hive cities. You don't seem to know the context which makes you incredibly dumb.

>indominus crusade
Depends, it wasn't one solid force, but if it's the main thrust lead by Guilliman then the Tau only survive because there are more important targets

>blood crusade that attacked Octarius
Tau get massively outnumbered, overwhelmed and fucked. Pretty much every major Khorne character was there

>black crusade
Tau get BLACKED

>Ghaz
You mean the fleet of 5 million teleporting ships? Ghaz has already shit all over the Tau, if he's leading his main force there, they are utterly rekt

>cryptus tendril
Wiped out with zero chance of winning, there are simply too many of them

>morty
morty is a dumbass so the tau could probably actually fight this one off

>Magnus
Tau get shit on by warp fuckery

>mecharius
Not a complete retard like the guys leading the Damocles crusade

Haha. When 10th edition comes around with new fluff the Tau will expand on thew galactic map by 3x or more in area size and put them on the gate sof Ultramar.

Mark my words. I might not be alive to see it, but by the Greater Good some young Tau fan will live to see them conquer the map and in Warhammer 41k the Tau will be at the apex of their great crusade before the fall.

It might take decades in real life and out but someday the Tau will be the most powerful enemies in the settings.

I might live to see the 6-10th spheres of expansion, but beyond that I can only imagine.

youtube.com/watch?v=PN_CP4SuoTU

I wasn't talking about how they ACTUALLY took out the hive cities on this one certain occasion. Tha takes place in the sewpah speckle Age of Groaningfan. I was giving an example that they, and every other major fucking race in the damn fucking setting. Can do to defeat 14 Hive Cities. You dumb fuck.

Now can the Tau actually take the population of 14 hive cities and scoot off with them? Yes Its called fucking mind control gas delivered by drone and Gue'la agents into the cities air systems. Or maybe less likely the humans find out that they are probably about to imminently get slaughtered by a bunch of giant chain axe wieldng mad men screaming "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" So the Imp civvies are going. "Hey I don't want to die and these little grey men are saying that they'll evacuate us. I don't know about you but I think I'll go with them."

Could the Tau do it in whatever dumb fuck way they are canonically supposed to have done it? Fuck no.

>TFW THE PATRIOTS ARE THE IRL ULTRAMARINES

>Brady is sicarius

Damocles Gulf Crusade was the Imperium's 'Nam.

>W-we could have won, we just played too nice
>Muh greatest military machine in the galaxy
>Chaos helped the Tau!
>Damn diplomats at home stabbed us in the back with their 'muh pointless meatgrinder', 'muh greater Tyranid threat'
>Filthy hippies don't got no stomach for dying in droves for the emperor

> IF it wasn't for Farsight deus ex machina!
> WE set da gulf on fire we won
> Tau can't do any of that in the lore.

Tau seems to be causing IoM fan ptsd.

youtube.com/watch?v=fJylpzDO6YI

For reference, this is the force I meant by magnus' forces. On top of this scary ass force, the laws of physics themselves are being screwed with. They conquered several systems pretty handily, and would likely do the same to the Tau

it is literally no worse than any other faction's wankery, but it's not yours so it triggers you.

Jesus Christ that would destroy most anything. Where the fuck did that happen?

Can the Empire actually act like it would? You know... Push the Big Red Button? or just drop rods of the god emperor on their head? rather then deal with 'weeboo space magic'

I remember in the lead up to mont'ka with leaks showing rosters that there was "no way" the Tau could win against it. :)

This will be swept aside easily.

The bigger and more important the battle the easier the win lol. Tau loses some minor fights though. So if they did "lose" this it was all a part of a grand super kauyon to lure them into a trap in which they will be annihilated and then 24 burgle planets unxorrupted in a day. Kekek.

That was a weird move.
>huh, ayy lmaos that want to eat us
>okay let's go there instead, just leave a shit ton of men behind who honestly gives a fuck about chattel that we can easily recover in another world?

>iontide
>marker drones
Doesn't seem accurate.

Ultimately, the problem is that the Tau Empire is too small to lose a major war and still survive. The solution to tau-wank is, ironically, to make the Tau Empire bigger.

You know, I thought that that would be exactly what the Admech would do if the faction rivalry there ever got a campaign book. Admech now have the Tau tech samples they want and they don't give a fuck about planets.

The way the Tau defences are organised (central Sept systems with large fleets, everywhere else lightly defended, AFAIK) they could pop into system, fire a spread of cyclonics or virus bombs at the planet then leave before the rather slow Tau fleet can get anywhere near them. There's about two-thirds of the Tau empire gone, and if they feinted a major landing on an outer planet they might be able to draw the fleets of one Sept World away and ice them too, since they don't need to slog through the Tau fleets, just get one of their outrageously tough ships into torp range.

If the Sept worlds are not self-sufficient (if their pop is billions per city at the Tau levels of comfort, it seems likely they aren't) the Admech can siege them and harass with hit-and-run attacks from warpspace, and if not they'll have to do things the hard way and just grind through them. Their tech is good enough but the Admech can fairly easily throw tens of billions at a fight like this, since their logistics are pretty much unmatched with Magos and noospheric communication.

Tau may be able to fight well one on one, or even one on a hundred but there's a snowball's chance in hell they can meet the Admech in a meatgrinder and win when one Forge World is approaching Kardashev II. Lucius is a planetary Dyson Sphere around a massive central reactor, nearly all make extensive use of power relay satellites and Anvillus made enough Land Raiders and vehicle lascannon to supply the whole Imperium.

Makes me wonder why the Tau chose that strategy when their fleets are far slower strategically than anyone elses, it seems like it would be relatively simple to outmanoeuvre even if it does fit their "holding ground is worthless" strategy.

Holy shit no, the tau would BARELY scrape by MAYBE, in some of these sceanrios, most of these would wreck the entire tau empire

I dunno 500 billion is quite a few people, that's 71 times as many people as there are currently on earth. Even if each town and city increased population density by three times, they'd have to increase every town and city size by 23 times to fit that many, its doable and people would fit but its not like its a small number

>Implying we'll ever lose
Accept it, Gue'la. We're the future.

>The way the Tau defences are organised (central Sept systems with large fleets, everywhere else lightly defended, AFAIK) they could pop into system, fire a spread of cyclonics or virus bombs at the planet then leave before the rather slow Tau fleet can get anywhere near them. There's about two-thirds of the Tau empire gone, and if they feinted a major landing on an outer planet they might be able to draw the fleets of one Sept World away and ice them too, since they don't need to slog through the Tau fleets, just get one of their outrageously tough ships into torp range.

Dude, Mont'ka says that the Imperium learned the hard way that Tau orbital defences are no joke. Furthermore, Tau fleets have regularly outpaced and outmaneuvered the Imperial fleets. In fact, the Tau hit and run tactics against Imperial holdings across the gulf crippled the ability of the Imperials to respond to the Tau expansion

What you trying to do is take what the Tau are good at and make it what the Imperials are good at when historically the Imperials are awful at these things.

>tens of billions

A single coalition Tau fleet has 100 billion Tau on it. Those admech numbers are too few.

This. Tau have always had faster ships than IoM. Tau orbital defences are super potent and it's easy for them to set up huge space defenders stations quickly which are heavily automated.

>Tau orbital defences are no joke
So every one of their tiny worlds has sufficiently badass orbital defences to stop a missile coming from any possible angle? Sure, I can see how that would be problematic for a mass troop landing, but not a bombardment of hundreds of torpedoes on one small sector of the planet. Also, wasn't Mont'Ka on the planet that was a massive dust storm that greatly hindered deployment anyway? Not normal conditions.

When have they been outmaneuvering and outrunning Imperial ships at FTL? I recall nothing like that and in fact slow ships being pretty much their defining space war thing.

>Numbers
For one thing, that was probably pulled from multiple Septs, and the tens of billions of Skittles are just from one FW, as well as only one aspect of the Admech military. There's also the Legio Cybernetica, the Titans, the Myrmidax, the Ordo Reductor and the Divisio Genetor, who'd all be helping, and all they need to do is clear enough ground to set up a Cyclonic on the planet somewhere or disable enough orbital defences to fire one. They don't need to Ground War that much.

>Tau have always had faster ships than IoM.
Um, WHAT? I thought they had those skim drives that meant they could only do short hops through the Warp, thus slowing their journeys down immensely?

>Tau have always had faster ships than IoM.

Not faster. Most manoeuvrable, led by talented and skilled admirals, and have a homefield advantage.

The hyper densely packed cluster of stars the Tau live in almost nullifies the advantages of Warp travel.

>So every one of their tiny worlds has sufficiently badass orbital defences to stop a missile coming from any possible angle?

All the major them.

And the Tau have listening posts all over the Empire that will alarm them of incoming fleets. The Imperial fleets will be shot at orbital defences and beset by the Tau fleets before they can launch a single missile.

>Also, wasn't Mont'Ka on the planet that was a massive dust storm that greatly hindered deployment anyway?

No, it was the Tau orbital defences that hindered the Imperial deployment and required marine help to disable.

>When have they been outmaneuvering and outrunning Imperial ships at FTL?

All the damn time. It's basically in nearly all Tau sourcebooks. Hyper dense Cluster of Stars. Tau drives work just fine in and out of systems, Imperial warp drives must materialise out of systems and then slog it using propulsion drives since materialising inside a system runs the risk of having their ships screwed by the gravity forces

>For one thing, that was probably pulled from multiple Septs, and the tens of billions of Skittles are just from one FW, as well as only one aspect of the Admech military. There's also the Legio Cybernetica, the Titans, the Myrmidax, the Ordo Reductor and the Divisio Genetor, who'd all be helping, and all they need to do is clear enough ground to set up a Cyclonic on the planet somewhere or disable enough orbital defences to fire one.

Bring them on. The Tau have canonically eliminated hundreds of billions of IG (supported by marines and other elements of the Imperium) in singular conflicts.

major ones*

none probably.

Tau were a mistake.

Major ones*

Here is the text.

>As Shadowsun passed into the Imperium's interior he encountered ever greater resistance, and she saw that to overextend her forces would deplete the momentum of the attack. Instead of crashing headlong into well-defended planets, she split her fleets, scattering them to a dozen headings. Each began a devastating series of hit-and-run attacks against which the Imperium could mount no effective counter.

-6th ED Tau codex

>Though the initial clash upon Prefectia had grown intense, the battle for control of the surrounding worlds had barely begun. Bypassing Voltoris as they forged on through the Imperium, the Tau fleets took battle to Doth, Delinquence and Carradon, making inroads into Imperial territory so quickly that the Imperial Navy and the Astra Militarum found them nigh impossible to stop.

-Kauyon

Tau fleets are faster at action and more organised. A sign of great admiralship unseen by any in the setting.

>The Imperial fleets will be shot at orbital defences and beset by the Tau fleets before they can launch a single missile.

Except that's kinda physically impossible. They just need to warp in, immediately launch thousands of missiles at the planet then leave, and the missiles can then shut down drives to avoid being intercepted. Tau munitions, last I checked, did not have interplanetary range because the fleet over Agrellan was not being shot at, and are almost certainly not FTL. One expendable missile hits the planet, Tau are done. If none hit the planet, come back and do it again, not hard.

>Hyper Dense Cluster of Stars
Wait, Tau drives are also Warp drives, just they only work very briefly to skim the warp. How do they work in systems?
Still, either way no stars are closely packed to prevent the Imperial ships making a clean getaway, they're still far enough apart that they can easily point their ships in a straight line and fuck off.

>canonically eliminated hundreds of billions of IG
Except Skitarii are far better than IG. In the same book they were killing the "hundreds of billions", the Skitarii were kicking their asses, grabbing tech and then teleporting out to orbit safely. All they'd have to do is do that, except they have no need to go anywhere near any Tau.
Teleport down to some random wilderness, plant a Cyclonic warhead or virus bomb, warp out. Can Tau patrol literally the entire surface of every planet at all times?

This shows that yes, they are capable of outfighting the Imperial Navy in battle due to effective organisation, but at no point do either of them say that they're particularly fast. Space is huge, almost no force in the setting has an effective counter to hit-and-run save the Shadow in the Warp, given all you need to do is warp out in literally any direction and chill in black space to rearm.

And to be fair, we haven't actually seen a Baskilion Astra

fleet actually fight anything, they are a few degrees better than the mainline navy due to having actually good tech and commanders.

This is the Tau blitzing lightly-defended planets, landing troops, fucking things up and leaving, doesn't matter that your ships are slow when nobody can realistically chase anything through warpspace anyway.

>Except that's kinda physically impossible. They just need to warp in, immediately launch thousands of missiles at the planet then leave,

They don't Warp in inside systems. They Warp it outside of systems. Allowing the Tau to spot them and react. As they head into Tau space, they will be beset by Tau defences and fleets.

>Wait, Tau drives are also Warp drives, just they only work very briefly to skim the warp. How do they work in systems?

For fuck sake, Tau drives do not even touch the Warp. Tau drives skim the void between reality and the Warp.

>Still, either way no stars are closely packed to prevent the Imperial ships making a clean getaway,

They need to march out of the system to engage the Warp drives safely. Warping for the Imperium is not an easy task.

>Except Skitarii are far better than IG. In the same book they were killing the "hundreds of billions", the Skitarii were kicking their asses, grabbing tech and then teleporting out to orbit safely.

The Admech were one element of a huge crusade. The Tau have defeated millions of Admech forces before recently in the Farsight novel.

>This shows that yes, they are capable of outfighting the Imperial Navy in battle due to effective organisation, but at no point do either of them say that they're particularly fast.

The text isn't about outfighting. It's about reaching and attacking planetary targets before the Imperial fleets can react and respond. The Tau ran circles around the Imperial fleet while it stop helpless.

Friendly reminder that the only reason Tau '''''win''''' is because one single proper loss would wipe them off the map.

Also stop responding to Carnac.

>Entering into the warp, even in the most calm and calculated conditions possible, was still a feat that was rife with peril. There were reasons Imperial law dictated that jumps occur only at designated points in planetary systems. Even the most flawless translation into the Sea of Souls was a horrifying cataclysm, as reality was torn open to admit the departing vessel into the beyond. Emergency warp translations were nearly always absolutely ruinous to the space around them. An emergency warp translation conducted in the centre of a void battle was nothing short of apocalyptic.

-LotDM : Deathwatch

I am shocked that Imperialfag think that Warp travel is easy and doesn't have a set of rules. Now where was the other quote.

Except America could have won Vietnam. If you pay attention to military history the Tet Offensive actually broke the back of the NVA as they shattered their logistics in a suicidal bluff. We fell for the bluff instead of calling it.

Or y'know, we could have just bombed them till extermination.

They don't need to go into the system, just pop in as close as possible, fire then immediately leave. No risk, not guaranteed success but they can keep doing it. Even if they can't engage the Tau fleet, and they may well be able to just outshoot it given the Iron Revenant went toe-to-toe with the Planet Killer for a while, they can dodge round it without needing to get mass-locked.

>Farsight novel

Oh no, millions of Skittles, whatever shall we do about that? Rebuild them in a few weeks, that's what. Still, you didn't actually ask why we can't just teleport into the planets at a pass. Even if we have to lose a ship to do it, we have others and there are considerably less Sept worlds in the Tau empire than escort ships in the average Forge fleet.

For that matter, they could just pull a Calth on the Tau. Remove the warp drive safety and suicide-jump the ship into the planet at the speed of light like the Word Bearers did with the Campanile against the Ultramarine fleet and Calth orbital stations. Boom, planet's gone, or at least there's a big convenient hole in the orbital defences to fire torpedoes into.

>The text isn't about outfighting

All it says about the battle is that the Navy couldn't respond to the Tau fleets. It takes weeks to get anywhere even with NORMAL warp travel, that's not rare and leaves plenty of time to launch an invasion of a world comprehensive enough to cripple it. In all likelihood no ship combat actually took place, as soon as the Navy showed up the Tau could just leave.

Er, YEAH? It says that LAW dictates that only designated jump points are used, not that it is impossible to jump in and out in reasonable time. Hell, that's an emergency warp away from a void battle, so it explicitly SAYS that the kind of action I am proposing is possible with an Imperial ship. Fucking up surrounding space is no big deal when it's an enemy system.

I think usaboo are the new wehraboo.

You yard right above you he says that warp drives can't enter gravity wells. Also tau ships are retconned away from warp drives. They work more like Star Trek ones now and thus can appear closer to the planet than IoM warp drives.

Every fucking year at least one damn IoM fag who doesn't know the lore insists upon popping out of space next to a planet and exterminatusing every problem away.

They can't enter gravity wells and warp out alive, sure. They can throw a mass of gravity-mangled dead ship at a planet at the speed of light, though, given it happened at Calth.

And hell, they don't even need warp travel given they just accelerated the ship up to max sublight in ten seconds and rammed everything. I have already said, they don't need to enter the gravity well to fire cyclonics, they just warp in at the edge, fire a spread and then warp out again, over and over until the Tau miss one of the thousands of missiles coasting through space silently.

I'm hoping for some major shake ups in the Tau fluff.

>Crazy shit which the Ethereals wanted to hide from the Tau comes pouring out of the Warp
>Farsight swoops in and saves the day with his plot armor, redeeming himself in the eyes of Shadowsun and any other Tau
>Usurps the yoke of the Ethereals manipulation and leads the Tau in a new era of Greater Good that doesn't require mind control
>WS 3+ Melee Suits and Fusion Blades

It'll never happen, but it's fun to dream.

>through space silently.

There's no stealth in space. Unless you have Eldar or Necron toys, they will see you.

The whole thing raises many issues. If the Tau can reach near-lightspeed without fancy tech like a warp drive, it would mean that they could build RKV.

True. No true stealth, anyway, although given asteroids exist you could blow one of those up to create a bunch of shrapnel to launch the missiles through, at which point they become indistinguishable if not actively using engines.

I did mention they'd probably shoot most of them down if any Tau ships were present, but they only need to miss one and most Tau worlds don't exactly have an entire Tau fleet sitting in orbit to help play hunt-the-metal-rock.

And this. If like you say, the Tau have all these unbeatable drive capabilities, why aren't they using this trick on Nids, Orks or the Imperium? Doesn't get less effective when they're using it.

>Forge World is approaching Kardashev II

You have NO idea of how the Kardashev scale actually works. Not a single empire in all of fiction, barring Dyson Sphere, is Kardashev II. A single Dyson Sphere would wipe out the Imperium of Man, The Empire of Star Wars, Dune without problem. And no, Kardashev III is not having a colony in every planet. Kardashev III is having a Dyson Sphere in every single star in the galaxy.

>They don't need to go into the system, just pop in as close as possible, fire then immediately leave.

It takes days for anything to cross a system. The Tau will spot it. Their systems if full of listening posts.

>Oh no, millions of Skittles, whatever shall we do about that? Rebuild them in a few weeks

The Tau melted them by causing the planet's lava to burst up. There is nothing to rebuilt.

>Still, you didn't actually ask why we can't just teleport into the planets at a pass. Even if we have to lose a ship to do it, we have others and there are considerably less Sept worlds in the Tau empire than escort ships in the average Forge fleet.

Dude, the Tau will detect the teleport energy and hone on it before they can arm the bomb.

>For that matter, they could just pull a Calth on the Tau. Remove the warp drive safety and suicide-jump the ship into the planet at the speed of light like the Word Bearers did with the Campanile against the Ultramarine fleet and Calth orbital stations. Boom, planet's gone, or at least there's a big convenient hole in the orbital defences to fire torpedoes into.

Dude, the Orks during the War of Dakka did that. Farsight eventually managed to fight them off.

>All it says about the battle is that the Navy couldn't respond to the Tau fleets. It takes weeks to get anywhere even with NORMAL warp travel, that's not rare and leaves plenty of time to launch an invasion of a world comprehensive enough to cripple it. In all likelihood no ship combat actually took place, as soon as the Navy showed up the Tau could just leave.

The Tau took the planets and fortified them them doe.

>not that it is impossible to jump in and out in reasonable time.

Reasonable dangerous. I swear to go I got a quote stashed somewhere but I cannot find it ARGH!

All of fiction is a bit strong, there. The Culture has them explicitly mentioned, for one.

Still, my point was that Forge Worlds are about as close as possible short of Necron tech. Approaching K2, not actually at it. They're past K1 thanks to Lucius and their solar collectors, and they are on other planets in their solar systems. I was slightly exaggerating.

If the Tau were to face a real threat on the scale that the IoM faces, it would utterly crush them. But that's the point. And not just for the Tau, every faction, barring arguably the IoM, Orks, and Tyranids wouldn't survive if faced with many of the threats that other factions deal with.

For instance, look at the Commander Farsight business, if that had happened on a craftworld it's be something that the Eldar might not be able to handle. Farsight is pissy at the ethereals, either due to the sword's influence or because he now knows dangerous artefacts exist. But because of how Chaos and corruption work a human or eldar getting that sword would most likely corrupt the wielder completely. Eldar's most established general finds a corrupted chaos sword and disobeys orders using it to fight off a superior horde? He'd be a corrupted champion of Khaine or Slaanesh cutting a warpath back to the craftworlds before you could say "oh, shit."

They are not approaching K2 at all. At most the entire Imperium is 1.6 - 1.8. Our galaxy is an enormous place with billions of stars and doubtless billions of potentially habitable planets. Yet a single Dyson Sphere/Swarm contains as much living space as all those planets combined.

>It takes days for anything to cross a system. The Tau will spot it. Their systems if full of listening posts.

There would be a whole bunch of missiles, for one, and it's not like their countermeasures would be any faster. Listening posts are only so good when you're hunting for tiny objects in among a load of asteroids.

>melted

I didn't mean LITERALLY picking up the Skittles and repairing them, they just pressgang another load of dudes from a Hive World, or clone them, and ram more implants through their skulls.

>teleport.

Detect, sure. Home in on and destroy in the few seconds to a minute it takes to open the box and noospherically transmit the code, or even just instantly set off the bomb if you don't mind losing LITERALLY ONE MAN, no chance in hell. The Admech aren't cartoon villains, they won't conveniently leave a 24 hour timer on the arming mechanism to be nice.

>War of Dakka

How did he fight off the ships slamming into planets at relativistic speeds? You can't exactly stab them, and blowing them up just means you have a cloud of debris smashing into the planet at roughly the same speeds.

I admit I was somewhat ignorant of the numbers involved in each one, but after a quick google and some maths I will admit you're right there. Admech Forge Worlds are certainly at K1, though, which is about as high as it gets in this setting unless you've got dimensional fuckery like Chaos.

Just deploy some of these new spooky chadmarines to plant virus bombs on every mayor Blueberry planet, then set them all off and give Nurgle a stiffy so hard Slaneesh would be jealous.

Blueberries wont do shit in the galaxy, deal with it jerking with your "power suits" and "drones"

> Muh real threat. Guess the IoM was never a real threat then and never will be.

Every time the Tau win and expand people starting chirping those excuses. Tau are going to rule the galaxy. Tau are the Skaven that no one thought were a real threat.

>Guess the IoM was never a real threat then and never will be
Partially right on the first point, dead wrong on the second. The IoM severely underestimated the military might of the Tau in the Damocles Crusade and as such did not seek to muster the might that would be required to stomp out the Tau threat until they could no longer afford to muster the required might due to a Chaos incursion AND an Ork Waaagh.

Actually, the Inquisitor assigned to the first Damocles Crusade said that crusade was large enough to put fear in the heart of a tyrant of the Maelstorm.

Tau have faced actual threats already. They were just contained.

The Necrons completely erased all life on a Tau planet already. IIRC, the Necrons were so successful the Tau don't even know it was a Necron attack.

And the Dark Eldar kidnapped IIRC 6000 Tau from another planet, turned them into cyborgs, and then used those cyborgs to KILL OFF EVERY OTHER TAU on the planet. And it actually worked.

>The Necrons completely erased all life on a Tau planet already. IIRC, the Necrons were so successful the Tau don't even know it was a Necron attack.

Actually, the Necron won against the Necrons and conquered an asteroid field from them in the second sphere. They are currently engaged in a air war with the Necrons for the control of the ocean planet of Blackfathom.

The Tau won*

Reminder that as long as the Tau have faced the enemy before, they flawlessly know how to defeat them and will win 100% of the time. Tau beat gorgon so they would easily handle the cryptus tendril. And they beat the Damocles crusade so nothing the imperium could throw at them could beat them. Tau also beat the Necrons once so Necrons are fucked. Tau basically won the whole setting

>Except America could have won Vietnam. If you pay attention to military history the Tet Offensive actually broke the back of the NVA as they shattered their logistics in a suicidal bluff. We fell for the bluff instead of calling it.

A common claim. Of course the Vietcong suffered several 'back breaking' losses and got back to put up a fight. That's the very nature of guerilla movements, they don't just go away.

>Or y'know, we could have just bombed them till extermination.

In which case the US would still have lost, as it would show the world that everything the various communist propaganda machines said about America was true, alienating the entire world form the US and ending any ambitions of establishing an international bulwark against Soviet influence. Getting into Nazi levels of atrocities is not a wise long term strategy when you want to establish yourself as the good alternative to communism.

>A common claim. Of course the Vietcong suffered several 'back breaking' losses and got back to put up a fight. That's the very nature of guerilla movements, they don't just go away.
Those losses were not sustained. The NVA got a gamble on the Tet Offensive that the Americans wouldn't stick around with the already pissed off voters back home likely going to unseat politicians unless they pulled out. That's the problem of trying to fight a war as a democracy where the public is allowed to know what's going on in said war.

>In which case the US would still have lost, as it would show the world that everything the various communist propaganda machines said about America was true, alienating the entire world form the US and ending any ambitions of establishing an international bulwark against Soviet influence. Getting into Nazi levels of atrocities is not a wise long term strategy when you want to establish yourself as the good alternative to communism.
America already committed an absurd amount of atrocities including borderline/full genocide. Killing off say, 20% or more of the north Vietnamese population isn't anything new as we already did that to the North Koreans. Ultimately the only thing that matters is that you win.