Will GW ever make airpower not irrelevant in 40k? It should be the most important thing

>Nigga, air dominance is still key to any successful military engagement barring occupation (even then it helps).

No it isn't.

Air dominance is certainly something that helps A LOT, but is most definitely not critical in achieving military victory unless your military victories begin and end with "kill everything that moves, collateral damage be damned".

Being able to actually take and hold land via infantry (or people in general) is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than any amount of air power.

>Kill everything that moves, collateral damage be damned.
You do know this is 40k right?

>barring occupation
without occupation you haven't won anything

If the fighter bombers brought as much money as the troops and transports, then yes, because its a higher profit for the amount of plastic used.

Air domination becomes a lot less relevant when you have the tech to give every two-bit infantryman squad an effective antiaircraft weaponry. Nothing says "fuck you" quite as well as some random bozo downing your multibillion dollar airplane.

I kinda would like an AI vidya

>without occupation you haven't won anything
Tell that to the Orks. As far as they're concerned, if you krump the other git, you win all the things Then again, Ork win-lose logic works on the basis that its literally impossible for them to lose...

You've got 50/50 chance that they either occupy a conquered world or just zog off to the next fight after killing everything that moves on the planet. Of course, there will be countless Orkoid spores scattered across the planet that will give rise to a whole new batch of Orks, but that's not exactly the same as 'occupying' a territory.

>You do know this is 40k right?

In which case, air power is even more irrelevant when you can just slag the surface from orbit.

>Then again, Ork win-lose logic works on the basis that its literally impossible for them to lose...
I believe the Ork lose condition is failing to find anybody interesting to fight.

This.

Also air strategy is defined by the fact that air is the highest thing in the sky. In 40k, it isn’t anymore. Imperial aircraft can operate from the ground all the way to sub-orbital levels, but there’s something even higher than that. While I’m not privy to how exactly this would change air-combat’s role in planetary strategy, I’m certain the change constitutes a significant upheaval of modern warfare strategy.

I’m turning your thread into a discussion of air strategy when orbital strategy is a thing. No buts.

Except the US wasn't. Between that and artillery they crushed the NVA every time they crossed the border, swatted the Viet Kong every time they stuck their heads out of their holes, and bombed the North Vietnamese hard enough that they made peace after a president with some balls took over and let them attack.

You still need intermediary vehicles and air vehicles make sense. Aircraft would be more fuel efficient than planetary crafts and spaceships require more basic necessities before it can even think about being made for combat.

>The USA was winning
ah yes, all those blokes being evacuated from saigon sure felt like winning.

Imagine how bad we would've got it had we NOT had millions of tons of napalm and bombs dropped on Vietnam every week.

You can't deploy or keep supplied infantry or armor in the field without air cover enough to at least contest the skies. If the enemy established total air superiority you can't move or supply field forces and are totally incapable of resisting even a much smaller ground force.

If you lose control of the air your best move is to abandon all armor, artillery and strategic locations, disperse your forces and begin asymmetrical warfare. Your second best move is to lay down arms and see if the winners are hiring when they take your surrender.

All but a dozen of those were South Vietnamese. Everyone but the embassy staff had been gone two years.

The US had been out of the war for years at the fall of Saigon. The only way to say the US lost is if you define 'victory' as 'propping up a weak and corrupt South Vietnam forever'.

>not critical
When you want to give the enemy free rein to strike at any component of your force when and where they want to, sure. Even if you have a large modern IADS you're still handing strategic and tactical initiative over to the enemy.
Also what this guy said

>Will GW ever make airpower not irrelevant in 40k? It should be the most important thing
>the most important thing
>air power mattering that much in a setting where there are now orbital warships in space, laser weapons that can easily knock out even supersonic aircraft from the ground unlike any modern infantry-portable surface-to-air weapons, and fucking psychic powers that can do shit like predict the future, summon daemons, and envelop entire planets in storms and shit
Yeah, no. Not even close.

Because armor in 40k is either fast enough to dodge air-dropped bombs (Eldar, Dark Eldar) or tough enough to withstand air-dropped bombs (Imperium, Orks).

IRL all armor in the ground is neither fast enough nor tough enough to withstand air-dropped bombs of any variety, which is why modern AA is all MANPADS.

>or tough enough to withstand air-dropped bombs (Imperium, Orks).
This is patently false, neither of those factions have very tough armour. In fact getting and maintaining air control was a MASSIVE part of the war for Armageddon.

>The only way to say the US lost is if you define 'victory' as 'propping up a weak and corrupt South Vietnam forever'.
Seen a lot of this glib revisionism this days
>w-w-we didn't lose, we just didn't win!

GW is not about realism, even within their 40K universe. They are about selling rulebooks and miniatures.

If they decide to release an airpower codex and a bunch of new miniatures, it might well become more relevant, as they simply make the rules better so people want to buy the miniatures, hoping it will help their chances in their games.

I don't know about 40k, but in the real world, it's always good to have a variety of tools so you can deal with a variety of threats effeciently.

Aircraft are still going to be inordinately useful even after the development of more capable space based systems due to sheer cost alone. Especially considering the fact that most conflicts are going to take place in/around planets anyway because that's where most people live and where the good shit is.

Also, since they operate closer to the ground, aircraft are likely to provide superior fidelity/accuracy compared to space based spying/fire support. It's just easier to make out and hit specific targets from a couple kilometers away as opposed to hundreds/thousands.

The nature of planetary ASAT systems is also a concern. If you have big lasers that can hit stuff from orbit, it's possible to have big lasers that can hit stuff in orbit from the ground and is a lot better at hiding than you are in space. Parking a smaller number of big spacecraft in orbit long enough to do work just might not be effective compared to fielding a larger number of aircraft that can more easily evade defenses. And if you lose some, we go back to the cheapness thing.

>The only way to say the US lost is if you define 'victory' as 'propping up a weak and corrupt South Vietnam forever'.

Yes, that was the goal of the conflict. The US didn't wage a war *just* to kill X number of Vietnamese people. It was supposed to keep South Korea as nominally free and democratic nation and force the North Vietnamese to stop trying to annex it.

War is undertaken in pursuit of political goals, and when your war fails to achieve those goals, you've failed. You've lost.

This is why so many hypothetical war scenarios are shitty. They look only at how many units X units can take out in a given scenario with no actual consideration for why/how people actually engage in armed conflict.

If you're telling me in the latest edition Airpower is dead I might start playing again... even though my army is aparently trash tier still.

No, because fuck you, that's not why people play 40k. Go play Air War.

We shouldn't even have aircraft in a 28mm game. Leave it for Epic.

There's always the greater good, user.

"Air power" in the modern sense is roughly equivalent to CAS in 40k - the real high ground is orbital combat, which is hugely important to wars in 40k but rarely to individual battles.

A lot of IRL airpower's advantages are also null in 40k, where AA weapons and defences are highly numerous - armour and defensive technology in general has largely caught back up to parity with weapons

>North Vietnam had the backing off two major countries
>still couldn't do anything until the guy they 'beat' had been gone two years and stopped giving money to South Vietnam
>years later your economy is mostly making stuff for the guys you supposedly beat
North Vietnam lost, both in the short term and the long term.

It achieved its primary war goal of unifying with South Vietnam under a north-led communist government. That is victory in the strictest definition.

Any degree of realism in an interstellar sci fi story would have precision orbital strikes as first, second, last, and planned for the next, engagement.
There's just no real way to block a rod from god.

>There's just no real way to block a rod from god.

Any basic bitch IADS built after 1980 or so can do it. Rods from god are a meme weapon - ICBMs, except with less precision & survivability, and more cost.

>burgerclap_prejudices.jpg

You can't keep air power in the skies if enemy tanks or infantry are parked on your runways. Air war is premised on the hope that your runways are far enough away no land forces can get there.

Airplanes themselves are secondary to missiles, particularly nuclear missiles. In the present day, the US maintains such a stock because plane-dropped smart bombs are the sweet spot for medium-size wars once a decade, the US' most likely kind of conflict.

For a total war, or a regional power, missiles come first as a force-in-being. Aircraft are more for aerial interception.

>modern AA is all MANPADS

What is S300, S400, S500, Patriot, Iron Dome, CAMM, Standard...

FTFY: there's no way to block a laser.

The primary constraints on lasers are aperture size and cooling mass. Planets (and space stations) beat spaceships at both. They also beat spaceships for armor, the only realistic defense against lasers.

Only more cost to a land based nation. A space based nation has most of their resources in space.
Also
>less precise
Oh boo hoo you can't hit a specific fly on the moon of jupiter. You can still get as precise as single rooms in a building.

>You can still get as precise as single rooms in a building.

Reentry creates a sensor-blocking plasma sheath and turbulence. The rod can neither see, nor receive transmissions from outside sensors. So you need good INS to get down to several hundred meters CEP; otherwise it's minute of city.

>Only more cost to a land based nation. A space based nation has most of their resources in space.

No, more cost period. A nuclear weapon has less mass per damage. If you're comparing kinetics to kinetics, an ICBM trajectory (from the 1960s!) is more efficient than the ~10km/s of reaction mass you need to deorbit a rod. It's also stealthier (with suppressed trajectories or terminal maneuvers which rods are too unstable to use) and harder to intercept.

Nuclear weapons are hardly precise.

>Nuclear weapons are hardly precise.

They weren't using "precise" in the "area of effect" sense, but rather in the sense that you can reliably get the projectile right where it needs to go on a regular basis.

A nuke may take out the city, but guidance systems are as such that you can pretty much decide what room inside a building that bomb actually detonates in with some degree of reliability.

Meanwhile, dropping high velocity weapons from space is going to result in a lot of damage too, but your chances of hitting the CITY you're aiming at, much less the same block, much less the same building is waaaaaaaaaaay smaller due to all the forces involved. Unless you spend a hell of a lot more money.

And when we're talking about actual blast radius/destructive force, you can make nuclear weapons with far less destructive comparable to conventional bombs and missiles. It's expensive/excessive, but it can be done.

Similarly, one could make a space based kinetic energy system and only give it the destructive power of a conventional munition, but it'd be expensive/excessive.

Both nuclear weapons and space based weapons are too expensive to be employed in anything outside of strategic attacks. Only the atmospheric bomb/missile is going to be way cheaper, way more accurate, and generally harder to track/intercept.

The only reason for using the space based attacks is because you already have a space craft in orbit doing something else and might as well take pot shots at strategic targets while you're up there because you don't have any friendly forces on the ground to deliver the aforementioned atmospheric weapons.

It's called Warhammer 40,000, not Dogfight 40,000.

Yeah, what 40k really needs is less of a focus on the the infantry and more big vehicle models.

Is this the same logic which dictates that a small band of peons with automatic weapons can't challenge a nuclear superpower?

And now they're the capitalist's bitches. By any definition, they lost.

Roman empire isn't around anymore so that means Hannibal won the war :^)

Patriotic burgerfag here, just admit Vietnam was a loss and move on. We should've never been fighting the war in the first place.

40k isn't about planes

>Air Forces

Space Forces should be the most important thing.

I wonder if anyone bludgeoned an opponent with a Manta yet

>The only way to say the US lost is if you define 'victory' as 'propping up a weak and corrupt South Vietnam forever'.

The US didn't achieve their operational goals, so yes, they lost.

It's like how people contend that "the South could never have won the Civil War! They didn't have the manpower or materiel to take the North!"

But it was never about taking the North. The South "winning" would have been putting up enough of a fight and being enough of a trade nuisance that Britain and/or France stepped in to bring both parties to the table.

War is always taken to achieve a certain goal, and that goal is almost never "pile body upon body". If you fail to achieve the goal your political masters set, you've lost.

Because air force have things better to do than involve themselves in skirmishes. It only makes sense in larger battles with thousands of soldiers, tanks, artillery, and transports.

I'm assuming there's some reality where that analogy made sense.

They legitimately are.

>Basically every 40k army has aircraft
>Aircraft are super good
>Forgeworld made an entire game about air combat
>GW made 3 different stormcloud attack boxed games about air combat
>But air power is irrelevant!

Navy controls air and space crafts.

The same reality of the other poster.

That would require rage, and nobody with a Manta has ever raged, because they never lose.

>Next question.
Do those chainswords have protection? Or is everyone going raw?

The U.S. lost. We invaded, then we left, and they still had their country.

The South could never have won because King Cotton didn't exist. People that argue Britain would have intervened are fucking idiots of the highest order, because they don't know Britain was easily self-sufficient without a single ball of southern cotton. Britain was never, ever coming to save them, nor were they ever legitimizing the CSA diplomatically.

Flyers that are just titan-sized chainswords with multiple thrusters attached to them when

By that definition, the US has lost every single war that involved a modern country, or nay, any real country that's not "hur dur indigenous tribe with a patch of land", including the civil war, because last time I checked, America has NEVER cannibalized an actual established country.

This isn't the fucking history books with Persia and Alexander the Great pubstomping the entire globe and assimilating lands like some kind of pre-historic slate Borg.

>bombed the North Vietnamese hard enough that they made peace after a president with some balls took over and let them attack
The U.S. were the ones who wanted peace, not the North Vietnamese. The North Vietnamese didn't give af about the bombings, they signed the peace deal so that the U.S. would leave.
U.S. were just trying to save face by having a peace deal signed when in reality they knew it was a hopeless war with no way of winning and they just needed the piece of paper signed so they could pull their troops out and forget the whole thing.

The U.S. signed the deal, then pulled out and buried its head in the sand, taking no action when the peace deal was completely ignored by the North Vietnamese.

Fireforce tho

>You can't keep air power in the skies if enemy tanks or infantry are parked on your runways. Air war is premised on the hope that your runways are far enough away no land forces can get there.

How is your army so inept that they left their airfield undefended?

>Airplanes themselves are secondary to missiles, particularly nuclear missiles.
If we're annihilating everything sure.

>missiles come first as a force-in-being. Aircraft are more for aerial interception.

What if I told you that the missiles were attacked to the aircraft? Also missiles aren't perfect as they can be misguided and fly off in the wrong direction. Cruise missiles blow up a target but they might destroy something not vital to the mission. Airstrikes are relatively more precise than a far away missile, especially when the plane itself is carrying a couple missiles.