How are Titans a problem in Warhammer 40k?

>>Attain orbital supremacy.
The ground war isn't going to just stop while you're doing that.

Orbital fire has a hit/miss of as much as a grid square. One little fuck-up and you nuke your own forces. Besides, the titan might be standing in/on/near ground/assets you want as intact as possible.

>hit a building sized target
>from orbit
>with guns that use volley fire tactics to pepper the general area of a 10km target

Accurate orbital bombardment needs a spotter on the ground. And then there's the question of titan shields, etc.

No, what you want is one or two tanks and just shoot them in the dick cannon.

Orbital bombardment is so inaccurate that it is only good for either nuking the entire planet or a city sized target.
You would have to saturate a city sized area to try and hit a titan which still has a void shield and can probably survive some hits.

To hit anything with more or less accuracy you have to get down to low orbit. And in low orbit other defence installations can counter your ship very effectively. Things like defence lasers exist for a reason afterall.

alien auxiliaries, too.
:'(

Praise. The. Emperor.

That's a Chaos Titan, you filth.

Keep in mind Ad Mech titans are known to be somewhat impractical, but they are basically war avatars of the Omnimessiah, so deploying them is a semi holy thing too. Basically the Ad Mech saying "look at all the fucks we give, it is none"

I miss those days too, but superheavy fliers aren't great for toy sales (i.e. no one wants to use coffee table sized manta flyers to take on Imperial Knights, etc.)

Big centerpiece models sell, and for Tau that's going to be mech's.

Besides, fluff wise, the Tau probably have not faced the heaviest of Imperial Titans. Or in mass.

That was the T'au's gameplan until FW realized that selling giant mechs to the mech faction was surefire $$$.

I think the Stormsurge and Riptide variants look fine though. Especially dig the Y'varha.

In case you haven't noticed, 40k is one of the dumbest settings known to man.
Why the fuck do people keep asking questions about 40k fluff? Just accept irlt as it is, at best you are going to get completely contradictory statements from the books anyway

This is bait right?

>Hey remember when the tau used to defeat big dumb titans by using much cheaper and less comically impractical purpose-built aircraft?

Like all those impractically built giant aircraft that are just asking to get shot down by fighters and all those ground base anti-aircraft lasers, or have their airbases get bombed or vaporized by orbital strikes?

Another smug "air power solves everything" post about how your paper covers his rock without acknowledging the existence of scissors.

Stormsurge should have been quadrupedal.

Literally everything bad about the design ceases to be bad if you make it a 4-legged weapons platform.

Can't you tell that's an Iron Warriors skull on the front of the titan?

Newcrons. They've dipped below NPC-tier, now they don't even rank as a solo threat.

Depends on what you mean by worse.

The stormsurge is pretty bad, m8.

Riptides okay, even if it should be a vehicle. Why it's not I'll never know, the fact that it's a monster is monumentally retarded.

If I remember right that Titan picture is from an old Dark Heresy campaign book where the acolytes investigate a haunted mansion that turns out to be a chaos infested Titan that's buried into the planet.

If you ask me, the Stormsurge should have been a tank.

Generally speaking, most battles in the 40k-verse should very much be decided in space. However, BFG does not, and never will, sell as well as 40k, so that's the scale that the fluff will focus on. Titans are closer to 40k scale than BFG scale, so they'll get a little more attention.

Then again, 40k is not really a setting that's meant to be taken seriously to begin with, and only has been treated "seriously" recently by reluctant writers who realize that 14-year-olds without a sense of irony make up the largest money spending block in the 40k consumer-base.

I think you mean the Iron Warriors have a titan skull on their heraldry.

>anti-aircraft lasers
I was just thinking about this ironically, no faction has anti-aircraft laser systems at least on tabletop, the Orks actually have the most technological anti-air funny enough with weaponized tractor beams.

> no faction has anti-aircraft laser systems

Uh, Eldar Firestorms?

Honestly never heard of those before, is it an Anti-Air turret mounted on a Fire Prism?

You've got Icarus Lascannon arrays for Imperium.

The problem there is that Space Battles take a fucklong time in 40k. Have you SEEN those guns being HAND RELOADED?
My basic metric is it's something like this:

Each Game of 40k is a single Engage Action in Epic, Each game of Epic is a single turn of Battlefleet Gothic.
That's why Space Ships only deploy troops and bombard from orbit once per game.

Also, planetary defences can harm ships that get too close and they CAN be shielded against orbital bombardment. Plus not every ship can do orbital bombardment all that well. They have a hard enough time hitting things that AREN'T obscured by the atmosphere.
With precision anyway.

Plus sometimes even though you secure those orbitals, you can't be everywhere at once, so not everywhere can get orbital support, and you don't want to completely ruin the planet because the ONE PLACE that 40k is actually realistic is in the ratio of Habitable to Non-Habitable worlds in the galaxy.

Some of them have their own teleporters/warp drives.

They're basically an AA Falcon. Forgeworld did some conversion kits for them way back when, but they're principally seen in Epic as the Eldar default AA platform.

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Firestorm

How do you think they get on the ground? From orbit.

Is it just me, or have more recent 40k campaigns been including a lot more Space Marines and Titans and Mechanicus stuff, but overall less Imperial Guard, Sisters, or other things?

Lucius teleports their titans, the other forge worlds send them down in pieces and then assemble them.

No, you're correct.

Most important battles in 40K should be between starships.

>>Attain orbital supremacy.
You say that like its nothing.

Most important battles in 40K are between starships.

The fighting men are usually doing something to facilitate their space ships (disabling anti-orbital platforms/guns, sabotaging enemy ships/shields, etc), not the other way around.

>no faction has anti-aircraft laser systems at least on tabletop
>Sabre platform w/ Lascannons
>Icarus Lascannon (single and quad mounted)
>Lascannon Mortis(-Contemptor) Dreadnought
>Deredeo dreadnought w/ Arachnus Heavy Lascannon

Hmm...

>>Attain orbital supremacy.

They force you to obtain orbital supremacy.

...

Like all those impractically built giant titnas that are just asking to get shot down by high power weapony and all those ground base anti-titan weapons, or have them get bobmed or vaporized by orbital strikes?

Another smug "titan power solves everything" post about how your paper covers his rock without acknowledging the existence of scissors.

Tau killing Titans with aircraft sounds kind of stupid when you remember that neither the Imperium or Chaos seemingly have that ability. At the very least you would think the former would have the option.

I still don't understand these "40k shouldn't be taken seriously" posts because they never seem to be trying to make a sensible point. Do you mean that 40k somehow shouldn't try to portray war? If so, I'm pretty sure the idea of portraying battles happened sometime after Rogue Trader. If you mean that GW shouldn't come up with explanations to things, I'm pretty sure all they come up with are faux explanations that aren't really explanations because they're based on technology that doesn't exist.

Isn't that kind of weird, considering that the Imperial Guard's job especially is to act as the dogfaces and the footsloggers? You don't have to even bring them up much beyond padding, it's just that having really specialized forces in the fore is really weird.

It's one crazy fucker doing it, in fluff. He stole funds to do his prototypes, it worked, now they let him have some proper funding.

Mostly they still do kill Titans with airpower, but occasionally they send in that guy's big suits.

>Riptides okay, even if it should be a vehicle. Why it's not I'll never know, the fact that it's a monster is monumentally retarded.
Are you an edition behind?

Or just regurgitating shit you heard?

This.

Oftentimes the Imperium of mankind is either on the defense own worlds they consider mission-critical to protect due to their natural resources or what have you, OR they're on the offense trying to retake worlds like that from xenos or chaos or chaos forces.

The greater Imperium itself really doesn't throw a lot of forces at a world unless it's something super important like a hive world or forgeworld or something that produces needed goods. Often everything else falls to the PDF Garrison forces or local Imperial Guard to protect. So usually you won't be saying Titans unless it's to taken and hold valuable infrastructure or delete it so the enemy can't have it.

Tiger Sharks are still around. FW is remaking one.
Heavy Railguns, a pair of them.

>a reasonable and informative post

I'll be damned

>what is a void shield

Imperium and chaos are stupid, this is canon. They build titans as part of their galactic dick-waving competition. The Tau then fielding specialist weapons to sidestep the whole stupid game was what summed them up as a faction.

>day 33434.5

>user discovered that his game is about SPESS MARINES and everything else exists to job hard

There were Titan drop pods in one of the early Horus heresy books IIRC, don't know if they're still around in 40k

Isn't that how the badguys tend to ship the Robeasts in Voltron?

Riptides have the monster keyword. It feels stupid to have my poison weapons wound the giant robot of 4s.

Not gamebreaking or anything, just stupid.

Rogue Trader more-or-less agrees with you.

The Tau have proven that titans can be brought down with air power. See the text below.

>There were murmurs of assent. Many turned into cries of awe and confusion as the drone-camera hologram panned back. Behind the serried ranks of gue’la troopers strode immense, broad-shouldered war engines with gigantic cannons in place of arms. They were crude effigies built in mockery of the noble battlesuit, colossi born of a race that respected only brute strength.

>‘These bipedal war engines are classified by their owners as “god-machines”,’ said Farsight. ‘They may appear indomitable at first glance, but already one has been neutralised by precision strike from the Manta missile destroyers of the illustrious Admiral Li’mau Teng.’

>In the holograms behind Farsight, a burning goliath toppled onto the indigo wasteland outside Via’mesh’la. The bright fires of its demise threw the commander into silhouette.

>‘A warrior who wears his strength openly is easily countered,’ quoted Commander Starflame from the midst of the audience.

>‘Just so,’ said Farsight. ‘And though six of these behemoths are inbound upon our cities, they are predictable. It is not these engines of war the fire caste must seek to counter, but the gue’ron’sha, those warriors the humans call Space Marines, whose strikes are sudden and powerful. Their insertion craft are simple enough, but mercilessly effective. Though it pains me to say it, these Space Marines are experts in the application of pure force at a single point.’

Any factions that has a competent air force would render titans useless.

You'd think that titans would have more AA systems.

>Easily missed
We managed to land a drone on Mars at the equivalent of a hole in one from 200 million km using 80's era tech. A direct fire beam weapon won't even have to deal with orbital mechanics.

>attain orbital supremacy
if you have that, then victory is assured titans or no

even the allies took 3 years to wrest air supremacy from the nazis, and it was an incredibly hard won battle, despite the huge disparity between US and german industrial base, so you cant just say "orbital supremacy" and have that happen

and the instances when you want a titan, a huge bloody stalemate where you need as much firepower and toughness concentrated into a single point, would probably be closer to orbital parity, where neithet side has control of the skies
and a titan isnt going alone, in any case, if a titan is the key to breaking through, you will want maximum ground and air escorts specifically to keep the enemy from blasting it

Laser broadsides are fairly rare, actually.

Unless you're suggesting that they fire LANCES at the planet? That requires that the titan isn't close to anything you care about.

Back in the DAoT there were Castigator-class Titans whose weapons and void shields were so powerful, they could brawl with starships in orbit.

The only certainty in 40k is that ALL the factions are fucking retarded.

While one track minds and lack of tactics might make sense for Nids, or the majority of Orks, it doesn't for pretty much anyone else.

But noone learns, everyone just stays at the same stagnant tech level using the same stagnant tactics.

There are some rare exceptions to this in the fluff and in novels and short stories of varied canonical standing.

End of the day though, on the table every faction is frozen in time mentally.

>Titan Skull for Heraldry

Shit, have I been overlooking this the whole time, or is user making shit up?

Raises IW up a peg if so.

Was the IW symbol meant to be a titan skull, or just a stylistic coincidence?

Well, assuming you ignore the recent fluff. Upgrading to Primaris and Hovertanks is not a small thing.

The Titan in OP's pic is Dies Irae, a Chaos Titan from one of the Titan novels.

Anyone wish there was larger macro scale war machines and stuff to really populate the titan-war scale conflict?

Like all those mammoth moving bases, floating continents, orbital fortresses, gargantuan mobile churches, arcane ordanitus or walking cities for the titans to fight over and alongside.

And 40k scale combat consists of massive boarding parties fighting ON the platforms and inside said war machines?

I like to think of it as a setting where everyone has figured out what works for them, and have learned to stick to it.

The reason this is stupid is that every other race has just as much air power as Tau. For that reason, Titans are not unsupported, they usually have air assets of their own nearby. Not to mention that Tau Manta's are huge targets that the Titan itself could rather easily hit, and Titan weapons are far more powerful than those on a Manta.

That's not the Dies Irae, it's a normal loyalist Imperator Titan.

The Dies Irae was the most famous Titan of all time and the first Titan to turn traitor with Horus. It was in every major action and fought on Terra in the final battles.

>The reason this is stupid is that every other race has just as much air power as Tau. For that reason

Hahahaha....no. Only the Tau mastered air superiority.

>But noone learns, everyone just stays at the same stagnant tech level using the same stagnant tactics
That is easily explained for all of them
Imperium
>need STC's to get new designs so technology stagnation is gonna happen
Eldar
>dying race with no major way to innovate just using what they have
Necrons
>already at the end of the tech tree there is no where for them to go tech wise

>mastered air superiority
>slammed to the ground by an ork traiktor beam, a weapon powered by the angry screaming of a bunch of overgrown green children
Lmao :^)

So Tau players are sad that their guys aren't the objecitvely best, good guys who are the best at everything every time, the only ones with common sense and protected by plot armor? how sad. Oh btw, why doesn't Nurgle ever affect Tau equipment? You know the rot, the viruses and so on?

It's a coincidence. It is just a skull.