How large is the entire tyranid fleet? Any upper or lower estimates?

How large is the entire tyranid fleet? Any upper or lower estimates?

Estimate is near "BY THE MACHINE GOD"

???

Countably Infinite

Behemoth.

user word of god is that the tyranids have devoured twelve (12) entire galxies, most are likely small but the last was Andromeda, a galaxy slightly larger than the Milky Way. In any event a race as absurdly efficient as the tyranids has resources that are basically infinite. Most of their forces are in the form of yet-to-be spawned bugs but their standing army is effectively innumerable and outrageously widespread. FFS they’re attacking the galaxy from multiple angles.

A single fleet is probably trillions of organisms, they can easily devour whole systems and deplete them of ammunition. The entire Tyranid fleet is without quantifiable numbers, they probably several galaxies worth of organisms since they have essentially surrounded our galaxy so its very likely they are coming from different neighboring galaxies.

How the fuck can they enter the Milky Way galaxy from a completely different angle to the rest of the hive fleets coming from the Andromeda Galaxy? That means it would have had to set off millions of years before the other hive fleets, dip below the galactic plane and skim along the underside before going up. It makes no fucking sense. Even then it's not like it would take the Imperium by surprise, it must take thousands of years to absorb and trvel between large areas of the galaxy. and how cold they even know Earth was there? It would take hundreds of thousands or millions of years to send scouts from one galaxy to another, scout it out, travel back to Andromeda and prepare and despatch the hive fleets. Humanity would have been apes at best.

Tyrannic lifeforms seeded the galaxy long ago

As many as each book requires.

They only need to send scouts, no need for them to return. Genestealers could be in the galaxy for hundreds of thousands of years, sending a psychic signal and just waiting for teh hive fleets to arrive. Besides its not like the Tyranids are simply going to wait after they've cleaned a galaxy, they probably were waiting or already travelling the space between galaxies when the first signals were heard.

I remember a quote saying that if every imperial citizen was armed, and every weapon in the Imperium was used, and they all fired off into the Tyranid swarm and each hit was a kill shot, that still wouldn’t be enough to stop them

Very big.

It’s big

>Tyranids consumed 13 galaxy's worth of biomass
>At most 0.03% of that biomass is humans
>Assuming this total to sentient biomass ratio is the average across inhabited planets across the universe and that the average consumed galaxy is the size of ours
>This gives entire Tyranid species 433 times more biomass than is made up of all the sentient species in the galaxy

>A human weighs about 80 kg
>A Tyranid warrior weighs 1200 kg
>The Tyranids can in theory field about 29 Tyranid warriors for every single Human, Ork, Eldar, Tau, and every other sentient being in the galaxy
>Alternatively they can field about 173 hormagaunts for every sentient being in the galaxy

havn't the 'nids practically already won?

I mean it's not like GW is moving the plot but if it was moved

Yeah, I think the "setting filled with uber extreme alien menaces" thing has bitten them in the butt. The tyranids are a certain doom to the entire galaxy; even if every sentient thing in the galaxy united against it, it would probably be hopeless.
The tyranids arrived at the milky way already fully adapted to inter-stellar warfare, that means they already btfo many advanced space faring civilizations along the dozen or so galaxies that they conquered.
Just the scope of a force capable of attacking an entire galaxy from multiple angles is something too overwhelming. GW would need to pull off some really retarded shit to advance the story in any way that doesn't end on every fucking faction getting buttfucked by tyranids. But then, pulling retarded shit is exactly GW's alley, isn't it.

Retreating into the webway would be the only way to survive.

>user word of god is that the tyranids have devoured twelve (12) entire galxies, most are likely small but the last was Andromeda, a galaxy slightly larger than the Milky Way. In any event a race as absurdly efficient as the tyranids has resources that are basically infinite. Most of their forces are in the form of yet-to-be spawned bugs but their standing army is effectively innumerable and outrageously widespread. FFS they’re attacking the galaxy from multiple angles.

and yet they are still just a minor footnote of threat in the 40k universe...

Tyranids have FTL, the delay wouldn't be so long.


Plus purely my speculation, but we know their FTL involves the gravity of the target system, but doesn't work within in. Presumably fleets outside a Galaxy can harness the whole galaxy's gravity for their FTL and go significantly faster still in intergalactic space.

Necrons, the necrons are the only ones capable of pulling a hyper destructive fleet out of their ass. Little to no biomass available, the question becomes why would the Necrontyr even bother, when they can just sit back and let the swarm kill everything and climb out of their tombs after they leave. Unless the Hive mind fucks with the Necrons in the same way it fucks with Chaos.

The inevitability of Tyranid victory while part of their thing isn't necessarily absolute.

Hypothetically if the main fleet is spread out enough and only trickles into the galaxy in smaller, defeatable waves they could be beaten by a massive cooperative effort of the milkyways inhabitants.
Alternatively if the Tyranid race as a whole spreads out to attack multiple galaxies at once, akin to how kraken and leviathan attack multiple planets at once. Then only a part of their totaly power is devoted to this galaxy and can more feasibly be defeated. Though presumably the fleets here woukd have some way of calling for reinforments if it seems needed, which may well be what Tiamets beacon is for.

>That means it would have had to set off millions of years before the other hive fleets

Not really, since they are able to FTL. It's possible some hive fleets were going past the galaxy when they either noticed their error and corrected or some beacon attracted them. A beacon such as the Astronomican. Seeing that Genestealer cults when grown to a decent size start to emit a psychic signal that draws hive fleets towards them, it's very possible a strong psychic signal such as the Astronomican can also attract them.

>"The ancient might of the Craftworlds. The unstoppable fury of the Imperium. The nightmarish power of Chaos. All of these pale in significance in the face of the Tyranids, extragalactic predators with numbers enough to consume the universe and the psychic might to make the gods tremble."

carnac, please.

A decent amount of necrons want to return to fleshy bodies and are looking into potentially "downloading" into some alien race, if the tyranids eat everyone that obviously can't be done.

Besides that purely specualtively, tyranids are known to eat and use metals and other minerals. They potentially may loop back around in a galaxy to harvest all the minerals from all planets after the inhabiting civilizations have been defeated. This would mean they'll eventually be trying to eat tomb worlds.

They don't have FTL speed, the ships are reasonably slow and have to lock onto genestealer cults to accurately reach a planet

So in a few hundred years they've just zipped deep into the galaxy with no FTL?

They can still move fast just not FTL speed

Yeah they do, they don't use the warp. But they use their Narvhal hiveships to do shenanigans with gravity and bend spacetime for FTL that sounds kinda like the alcubierre drive

The galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Some of the hive fleets have made it almost to the galactic center. How do you pass tens of thousands of light years in a few hundred years without FTL?

They don't need genestealer cults to get to planets, they're useful for identifying life bearing worlds. But not the only way.
Hive fleets also use Vanguard droneships as scouts and use spectroscopy on stars to pick those likely to have lifebearing planets.

So do the forces of chaos worry about tyranids at all? Like the primarchs got the hate boner for the imperium and all, but do they wanna see the universe be bug chow?

I'm pretty sure that the iron warriors and imperial fists teamed up against the beast but I might be wrong

They have FTL via Narvhals. Admittedly they don't work within the system they're traveling to, so once they hit the neighbourhood they slow down considerably.

4 who

Reminder: Lucius out-attritioned the Bugs. We stilm have a chance

I mean when you get to that level of sci-fi fiction to start including multiple, multiple galaxies, when do you reach a point where it's like "Oh hey yeah look at that there's a race so old and advanced that they can obliterate a galaxy with the push of a button and oh whoops would you look at that where did all the tyranids go?"

Simple your ship just has to be equipped with a plot reactor

Thats where you go full retard.
Just stop now.

Don't the tyranids consume whatever organic matter they find on the target planet for resources? How does an army that relies on supply chains out-attrition an army that can just consume everything on the fly?
Also good luck winning an attrition war against an army that has a dozen galaxies worth of resources.

Make them spend more resources than they get. Deny them resources, hurt their chain of command (shoot the big bastards), etc.

Spam servitors and hide underground. Recycle servitor parts when they die. They won in the end

He's right though.
Near all in 40k doesn't make sense by their own parameters.

Nids swarm over a tomb world, Necrons don't wake up. Necron metals absorbed into the swarm. Necronids are born.

Got a source for this?

if tyranids consume necron living metal its not staying intact.

5e rulebook, tyranid fluff pages, "The barren husks of a dozen galaxies lie in their wake."

GW writters cannot into numbers at all. So you can go anywhere between five thousand kilometers to gazillion lightyears.

Enough that its shifting to begin coming towards us changed the light profile we could observe from distant galaxies around the milky way.

Far as i know thats the most definitive thing thats been said in fluff.

Slightly less than the number of Orks.

The tyranids that get through are the ones who get through the ork meat grinder.

Get bloodthirsters to eat more hive fleets.

Necrons.

No, Nids are controlled by The Outsider, he is literally the hivemind, both have an unending hunger, Tyranid swarms are always near tomb worlds, the goal is for the tyranids to find a C'tan for the Outside to consume. This is why Necrons hate them. In one of the Necron codicies it is literally stated that an 'unknown anomoly' lies at the end of the Nid swarm and is thought to be a C'tan.

Outsider being behind the tyranids is pure fan speculation.

The unknown anomoly in thay necron codex is a Dyson sphere that hive fleet leviathan appears to be avoiding. Whats inside the sphere is never specified. It being linked to the outsider is also purely fan speculation.

That pic has no sense, the gravity pull of that shit would destroy the galaxy

What, and get raped by the Dark Eldar?

And? there were more. bullets shot than people on Earth in the first gulf war, are you implying Irak is unstoppable?

Iron warriors and a single Fists Exemplar cruiser.

Only if its "solid"
Rather imagine it as a visual representation of the travel path of the fleet.
The wide area representing interwoven paths and the tendrils the paths of smaller vanguards, the rest eventually pathing the gaps.

Why are the Tyranids wasting time in a tin-pot galaxy in the middle of nowhere? They should go hunting to the Virgo cluster.

I fucking hate 40k.

because they got unintentionally attracted here by a psychic beacon activated during the horus heresy

I guess they usually hunt galaxies whose biomass naturally produces a similarly powerful psychic signal, but then again we don't really know if this artificial signal generator was built by tyranids scout organisms anyway

we just don't know

Reminder, Tyranids can delete chaos and close off rifts, and Kronos is just the first step in their war against chaos

Nope, the codexes say that the Tyranids SPECIFICALLY are a lesser threat than Chaos. A throwaway line by some intern on the community site does not trump codexes or novels.

Heck, even the Tyranids codex doesn't claim that the Tyranids are the greatest threat to the galaxy, instead going into how threatening the Tyranids consider Chaos.

Maybe thats the ultimate goal. This galaxy is just a pitstop along the way.

All the images of hive fleets attacking the milky way make it look as if the total mass of tyranids attacking the imperium surpasses the mass of the milky way itself

See

It was the Pharos beacon being used by Guilly that attracted them. Some loyalist Iron Warrior used it to blow up a bunch of traitors attacking the mountain it was on.

That's just a fancy way to say "There are more Tyranids than Humans".

>There are more Tyranids than bullets
ftfy

fortunately the glorious imperial guard fields lasguns

sorry, carnac, you are wrong as usual

then why are you in this thread?

>a galaxy slightly larger than the Milky Way

It's two and a half times larger than the Milky Way, user; about 250,000 lightyears across and containing as many as ONE TRILLION stars (compare/contrast the Milky Way, estimated at between 200-400 billion). It's the largest galaxy in our local group.

Numbers or mass? Not sure if there's any official estimates. I believe the closest you'll get is that the more serious, less dogmatic folk in the Imperium are pretty sure the only way to beat them is to give everything capable of holding a gun as many guns as they can hold (and that's EVERYTHING, not just humans), and then pray to the God-Emperor that they can inflict 100-to-1 casualties on the Tyrannids.

>Why are the Tyranids wasting time in a tin-pot galaxy in the middle of nowhere?

It could easily be on the way to wherever they're going. Alternatively, they just go where there's food. Their only goal is to make more Tyrannids whenever possible. Asking why the Tyrannids are stopping off at the Milky Way is like asking an ant colony why it's wasting its time on a fallen sandwich when there's an entire picnic just a few extra feet away. The ant colony will get to the picnic in a bit. But in the meantime? Sandwich.

Also, don't undersell the Milky Way. Again, our galaxy is the second largest in our local group, at 100,000 lightyears across and somewhere between 200-400 billion stars. And while there are larger galaxies, the Milky Way is still much larger than average.

(Sol gets similarly undersold in sci-fi. Yes, there are larger stars than our own sun...but Sol is still in the upper 10 percent of solar masses in the Milky Way. It's HUGE compared to the average star, which is a humble red dwarf)

As many as the plot demands

user I dont think you get it.
Theyve already been there.

The fuck are you on "nids have no ftl"?
The fuck are narvhals then?

Because the Virgo cluster is already full of Orkz.

>people ignoring that hive fleets prey on each other
>people ignoring that the 'nids are supposedly fleeing from another alien race, making them space gypsies

>my space bugs are dinosaurs too
>they ate 12 whole galaxies
>they can super evolve to do anything and beat anything
>they have super guns that can kill you the best
>thay have super claws that can kill you the BESTER
>they have super psykers that also can shoot the best spells, but they also stop all other psykers from doing any spells at all lmao
>they also have the best sneaky cult guys who do super spies even better than chaos cults (fuck gayoss lmao)
>they have infinity plus one bugs in their super fleets
>they're so strong they can kill everyone else on their own
>nobody knows what their motivation is or where they come from they just kill u rawr >:3

A beacon activated during the Heresy got their attention. Using a human body as an analogy for the swarm, the galaxy is facing a brush of its cheek as to turns to see what that signal was.

all of this powerlevel wankery will never change the fact that neither non-genestealer nids nor daemons will ever be compelling or entertaining antagonists

t. ork

that's basically all faction fluff.

Tau:
>the super best at science
>all the other brainlets can't compete
>who uses swords lmao?!
>except when they're awesome robot samurai, then it's cool to use swords!

Imperium:
>the guard are the BEST with the MOST DUDES and BEST TANKS
>the stormtroopers and inquisition are the BEST OF THE BEST with BETTER DUDES and BEST OF THE BEST TANKS
>space marines are the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST, GENE-FORGED BY THEIR SUPER-COOL PRIMARCHS
>Primaris are the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST AND THEY'RE BASICALLY PRIMARCHS
>(gray knights are also really cool and they're ALL PSYKERS and only 1 in 1000000 recruits survive!)
>Custodes are the BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST and they're sometimes even BETTER than Primarchs!

Eldar:
>muh ancient race
>muh superior grace and agility
>muh technology
>stupid monkeigh brainlets

Chaos:
>IMMORTAL UNENDING LEGIONS OF DAEMONS POWERED BY YOUR OWN EMOTIONS XD!
>KILLING US ONLY MAKES US STRONGER!
>ABADDON'S DAD SUCKED!

Orks:
>dakka
>choppa
>gork
>mork
>even if we die we win

Necrons:
>tfw finished science
>tfw no dick
>still better than those fleshbags

Simple, they started near here and our just passing through. The war in heaven, the horus heresy, the harrowing and many other absurdly energy-intensive happenings might have put some cherries on top but realistically they're just hopping from galaxy to galaxy.

What freaks me out is that the space between galaxies is said to be filled to the brim with all manner of gibbering eldritch warp-born horrors that make the chaos gods look like toddlers. And tyranids, an intensely psychic race, have crossed the gulfs multiple times.

Well technically that's true. They just got done chewing on Andromeda, and eleven other galaxies besides. It's very possible that the total mass of tyranids in the universe > total mass of the Milky Way.

Nah, we got the codexes. The Tyranids are inferior than Chaps. Heck, even the Devastation of Baal novel outright states that Chaos is greater than the Nids.

>tyranids can hyper-stripmine an entire planet in less than a month
>processing so much organic and inorganic mas that the planet's size is visibly reduced

Sisters
>Be like marines but weaker
>No fancy toys
>Supposedly incorruptible but get shit on in every other faction book
>Can make miracles, that are exactly like psy powers exept it takes a shitton of people instead of a single psyker
...
>Burn shit really good

At least their fluff hasn't gotten ridiculously overpowered, I guess.

They're also smoking hot battle nuns with white hair and no chastity vow

>all dat sisterly love

But they all have motivations aside from
>i ate u lol
And have weaknesses. Tau suck in melee and have bad warp travel, guard are disposable and have poor morale, orks can't aim and are dumb as fuck, eldar are lightly armored, chaos is constantly infighting, space marines are limited in numbers, imperium is a bureaucratic mess, deldar are constantly being drained and have no psykers, necrons overlords are all insane and also have no psykers.

Tryanids have no weaknesses. They aren't even weak to chaos anymore, what's next an adaptation that lets them eat necrons? One of the key points in their fluff is that they can destroy every other faction single handedly.

And they're fucking boring. All of them are just bugs. The many guard regiments, craftwords, chapters, warbands, etc all have different aesthetics, inspirations, motivations, doctrines, special characters and units specific to them.

Nids are just nids, they're all interchangeable mindless bugs. Basically every hive fleet is just a recolor. The models are samey. There aren't many alternate looks or heads, no hive fleet models that look extra giger or extra dino or extra insect.

There's a limited number of shapes the bugs come in. Mawlocs are giant raveners, exocrines are giant pyrovores. The heads are identical for the most part. Just look at this guy's head, it's basically the same as a gaunt's head, which is basically the same as a half dozen other heads. Could you imagine if the only space marine helmet was the stock tactical helmet, or if tau battlesuits had the same heads as firewarriors? Why does the exocrine even have a head like that? Why not a bundle of eyes for long range targetting, why does it have an angry dinosaur mouth?

It just seems lazy, especially when armies with even fewer kits have more diveristy. Both Dark Eldar and Ad Mech have far fewer kits, but a way bigger variety.

It's easier to avoid mind fuckery when you don't have a mind to fuck.

Literally a fuckhuge mind

For a second I thought that thumbnail was a Tyranid sprouting a giant thumbs-up.

An abstract mind that can separate itself. Much harder to fuck thana physical one.

It seems logistically sound is what it sounds.
You know what it would be like if all the marines had the same helmet?
Cheaper and more unform.

wasn't there a thread where anons calculated the trajectory and origins of the tyranids based on the point of entry of the milky way and the relative distances of the closest 12 galaxies?

You're kinda right, orkz have the best charisma and present an awesome mix of alien threat and relatable humour to create a good parallel with a protagonist, but a well written tyranid antagonist is a silent enough mirror for the protagonist to best have introspection against, you've got to admit.

>40k
>realistic
>logistically sound

>all that tantric sex
it doesn't fuel slaanesh if it follows a systematic approach.

I appreciate the effort on their part, but since GW can't into numbers, it won't yield any result.

Upper limit:
>40k writers have no sense of scale.

Lower limit:
>40 writers can't do math.