Reminder that the Siege of Vraks and the Ullanor Crusade had less combatants than World War 1. Isn't one of 40k's selling points is supposed to be about how epic and grand its scale is?
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What are the numbers?
you cant shit on Alan Blighs magnum opus frick off numbertards
Alan Bligh is a sad fat frick and overrated badb was even worse these pseudo historical campaigns are embarrassingly tryhard and get numbers wrong
So does history.
it was Warwick Kinrade you tards the man was in Star Wars and survived working with noted midget-killer Ricky Gervais, show some respect
Imperium casualties over the course of the war were 14 million guard; that is indeed fewer than the 60 million men under arms in WW1, but more than the 9 million dead in that war, where casualty rates were 14% of overall mobilization; casualties for the Vraks traitors were 100% (except those that fled, like the Alpaca Legion warband of like 20 dudes), about 5.3 million
assuming the Imperium's casualty rate was commensurate to the WW1 overall casualties (which were mostly high from trench attrition warfare, as with Vraks) then that 14 million casualty figure would imply overall mobilization of about 100 million guard with the dug-in traitors taking casualties about 95% lower, despite being total
>assuming the Imperium's casualty rate was commensurate to the WW1 overall casualties
These are Kriegers we are talking about here, they fight until they die, none of this rotational bs or calling it quits because they lost a limb (they can get cheap bionics if needed)
100 million seems pretty high, they should have been able to crush 8 million cultists with that
40k writers don't can't write numbers, just add zeros until it makes sense
Remember how there were a around one million marines (a thousand thousand-strong chapters) before Primaris were a thing? That's about equivalent to two Current Year+8 US Armies...but they're spread across an entire galaxy with countless planets with countless billions of souls. Space Marines should be so rare as to be mythical and the loss of a single squad should be a catastrophe.
On another point, consider how for all their flashy ray guns the majority of infantry still wield sharp bits of metal that do just as much damage as said super-guns? A Space Marine can be stabbed to death relatively easily by a few guardsmen with fricking bayonets.
Or you could just ignore the dumb numbers and focus on the cool stuff blowing up.
The "1,000 chapters of 1,000 strong" was just the initial split up during the horus heresy, there's been quite a few more founding since then that have made more chapters. And the chapter's only having 1000 marines doesn't include, scouts, neophytes, serfs, support elements (chaplains, librarians, techmarines, etc.), nor chapter level command (chapter master, his personal aides and guard) and chapters will often just ignore this limit or fine loopholes for it like the template who have the strength of several chapters because space marines can recruit as many as they want when on crusade.
Scouts are explicitly the tenth company. Command elements differ by chapter but are often first company.
Scouts in the 10th company and part of the chapter but they are not part of the 1,000 restriction as they aren't full fledged marines. I think the Sargeants might count but I'm fuzzy on that.
Reminder that superheavy imperial tanks like the baneblade have less armor thickness than WW2/cold war era tanks.
The funniest thing is them putting in-universe specifications in lore books which made most imperial tanks (including space marines) completely inferior to most stuff produced after 1943. Also their 28mm scale for the miniatures and vehicles often didn't make sense, space marines that didn't fit through hatches, guard tanks whose cannons which could not be loaded and/or sponson weapons that had to be crewed by pixiies if the in-universe operation is to be followed.
Why do you still reference a non canon book? GW stopped printing it and knew their mistake
>Why do you still reference a non canon book? GW stopped printing it and knew their mistake
if it was canon once, then they stopped mentioning it without giving a replacement, its still de facto canon.
No it’s not
Then show me replacement numbers, a character quote saying these figures are inaccurate, an author quote to a similar effect, or a loremaster quote to that effect.
It’s not canon frick off
>were back to this again
We have a general. Several. Use them.
>less armor thickness
Made from fakeuim so doesn't matter. Remember the metal and concrete alloy in the walking coffins?
>muh materials
They list the equivalent in steel. It's underlined for you and you still can't read.
Yeah and it doesn't specify in what regard dumbass. Different kinds of munitions can effect the realitive armour thickness of a tank's armour, that's why the wikipedia entry for Abrams lists a bunch of thicknesses against different munitions. An Abrams doesn't have just 1,300-1,600 mm of steel on it's front plate.
It's comparing the front from both of them
And what's the RHA of an Abrams armour against a Lascannon genius?
Probably the same, as modern tank armour is supposed to resist shaped charge rounds and RPGs
Directed energy and HEAT couldn't be more different
why not? Both are a superheated lance with frick you energy
Because HEAT is a projectile and a Lazer, isn't.
Given that ceramite was made by British nerds as a reference to chobham, probably pretty good. Hell, considering that the Vanquisher is one level of obfuscation away from being a Rheinmetall L/44 mounted in an LR chassis and it’s one of the better anti tank variants, I’d bet decent money on a modern tank even against two or three LRs.
>We have a general. Several. Use them.
No anon is right, our /40kg/ threads are literally (and not in the tortured meme use of the word, I mean literally) 24/7 affairs.
Generals are a blight upon the face of /tg/, and their use should be discouraged. Most of them move so fast as to be unusable, and more interesting discussion comes from rando threads like this one.
>I'm just going to ignore the fact they're made of completely different materials
In the case of the Land Raider, is worth remembering that it hasn't a bunch of big ammo shells inside ready to explode, and the space marine crew would be wearing power armour resistant to shrapnel. Its "front armour" is also basically a ramp.
>conventional steel
I don't care
I REALLY don't care
Nah, going by tables most forces in 40k should be smaller and wearing sprue grey uniforms
What’s with the Alan bligh hate?
>Isn't one of 40k's selling points is supposed to be about how epic and grand its scale is?
No. The galaxy is so big in order to ensure there is room for Your Dudes to have a conflict on a multi-system scale without it being weird or mattering at all.
Your dudes is shitty fan fiction stop trying to skirt the issue here
The population of vraks was less than three million. And making everything in 40k such grand scale with immense consequences is turning it into capeshit; campaigns, no matter the results, amount to very little in the face of thousands of years and the scale of the Imperium. Quickly falling into myth and ignorance, the only traces left are old data logs, ruins, stories, and incomplete historical accounts of questionable validity. The deeds of your homosexual heroes amount to nothing when the planet just falls again in a few millenia.
Vraks was supposed to be a major conflict, it involved titans, space marine chapters, daemons and chaos space marines.
It lasted 17 years but the casualties were tiny.
>Vraks was supposed to be a major conflict
massive is a relative term in 40k
>Vraks was supposed to be a major conflict
It was a battle over single planet with a single fortress, it was a very minor conflict.
Again it was a 17 year long war involving titan legions, demons and space marine chapters/legions.
The lack of scale is simply the writers frick up, they obviously intended it to be a large scale engagement, but it isn't.
It was a 17 year long siege of one very small portion of one world. It gets outsized importance among the community because of the detail that has been provided about it. There's wars on the scale of Vraks going on regularly, Vraks was just particularly horrific and well suited to Imperial Armor.
I just find it funny how much of this is resolved if you accept that the WW1 tank with a WW2 turret strapped on top is actually just as trash as it looks to be.
It was an absolutely massive fortress meant to fortify the entire planet.
And again it involved space marins chapters, space marine legions, demons and titan legions.
All of these are indesputably supposed to be rare and reserved for conflicts of some significance/make a conflict significant due to their presence.
>It was an absolutely massive fortress meant to fortify the entire planet.
Yeah, a fortress the size of a city. It was a siege. The death korps took control of the vast majority of the world uncontested. This is in the fluff.
>And again it involved space marins chapters, space marine legions, demons and titan legions.
Those are force multipliers. Having a titan present doesn't mean that another million men must come along or the titan's presence is invalid. Same with space marines.
The funniest part is the massive bottleneck of warp travel is also a limitation on how many soldiers can be present at any given battle. It's what makes space marines so useful. If getting even 100 soldiers plus their equipment to a world is a big ask, then it pays to make those 100 soldiers as useful as possible.
>The death korps took control of the vast majority of the world uncontested.
Yea and they were expecting to fight for it, but the vraksians retreated to a single fortress to hold out.
>Those are force multipliers
Lmao you clearly can't address these points.
Why does having space marines and titans on a world mean that there must be tens of millions of guardsmen present as well? You keep saying this like it's meaningful.
Because one thing is extremely rare and valuable, the other is extremely common and disposable.
Just the fact that they summoned demons on this world would have made it a big deal.
Space Marines and Titans get deployed where they potentially have the most value. In this case, neither deployed until Chaos deployed their own Marines and Titans first
And the Imperium has enough marines and titans that there are probably thousands of engagements ongoing at any given time where one or both are present
>So a million guardsmen is a big ask
It is not, that is a pretty standard Guard invasion force
Gereon didn't involve billions
The Guard showed up at a gate before the Titans had a chance to knock it down. They probably should have done something smarter while waiting for the gates to blow, but that would involve many different officers coordinating on the fly, and orders reaching their units after a number of intermediary officers have died
>It is not, that is a pretty standard Guard invasion force
Right, and the fact that the Imperium can do that on the regular is what makes it the #1 Great Power in the setting.
>Chaos is deploying titans and marines and demons but its totally not a major conflict
A minor conflict would only involve guard.
Its just bad writing. Cope.
>actually the lore says that this pretty typical and small in the scale scale of 40k
>NO THIS HAS TO BE A MAJOR BATTLE FOR MY POINT TO MATTER SO IT'S A MAJOR BATTLE
Minor and major are relative
Wars on the scale of Siege of Vraks happens all the time in the Imperium
Space Marines and Titans got involved since Chaos Space Marines, Chaos Titans and daemons where involved
But the Imperium could send several million Guard to retake a secessionist planet without Marines or Titans if there was no targets worthy of their time
Or they could send a single Chapter of Marines unsupported to a minor colony where Chaos Space Marines are believed to be operating
If you count the number of worlds where the Imperium has at least a minor presence, you would probably get a lot more than a million, but hundreds of millions is probably pushing it. This isn't Star Wars. Warp travel is too difficult to maintain large numbers of minor colonies.
Also, like pretty much everyone else has been saying, nearly every GW source ever on the topic has said the number of Space Marine Chapters is ballpark 1000
It was described as important to the Scarus Sector and perhaps the wider Segmentum (if a wide range of other conditions were meant). You could say the same thing about a number of other worlds in that sector, whether it be the hive and forge worlds that actually make the weapons, or the agri-worlds that fed them, or sector capital and subsector capitals that coordinate everything, etc. I am sure the stuff stockpiled at Vraks got replaced after a few years.
>It was an absolutely massive fortress meant to fortify the entire planet.
No it was single fortress meant to protect a stockpile of weapons the rest of the planet was useless wasteland.
>And again it involved space marins chapters, space marine legions, demons and titan legions.
Titan legions are notable I'll give you that, but any conflict that CSM show up to SM are going to show up to no matter how small or important
All of these are indesputably supposed to be rare and reserved for conflicts of some significance/make a conflict significant due to their presence.
Titans are typically saved for large scale or important battles but that doesn't mean that they only appear for those battles. If some general or leader of a battlegroup gets the opportunity to receive titan support he's not going to go "nah save it for later. This battle hasn't reached an arbitrary size for me to use them yet."
Also space marines, while few number, aren't rare on the battlefield. Anything that goes above what a PDF could handle could see an SM presence. This goes up to almost 100% if any CSM show up.
Space marines are rare and theres not a single mention of vraks being too minor to warrant titans.
Not to mention the immense danger and significance of shit being manifested from the warp.
Just admit the fricking obvious aspie.
>Space marines are rare
yeah rare as in the average person probably won't see them not rare as in most battles don't include some of them literally nothing in the lore reinforces the idea that It's rare for spacemarines to show up to anything above the PDF level.
>not a single mention of vraks being too minor to warrant titans
Yeah if you actually read what the frick said instead of vomiting words like a troglodyte I already addressed this. No battle that requires actual military action is too small for titans to assist in if they're available.
>Not to mention the immense danger and significance of shit being manifested from the warp.
This is true for any conflict with chaos, so a majority of the battles the imperium fights.
>Just admit the fricking obvious aspect
If you had more than two brain cells you'd be able to put two things together and think of your analysis and opinions but so far all you can do is regurgitate the same brain dead takes from every other lorelet who saw a meme about how 40k makes no sense on reddit.
>yeah rare as in the average person probably won't see them not rare as in most battles don't include some of them literally nothing in the lore reinforces the idea that It's rare for spacemarines to show up to anything above the PDF level.
there are a million Space Marines for a million worlds.
Yeah and do you think there's a battle going on every world constantly? Or even 10% of those? The galaxy is a big place and most of it is garbage backwaters not worth fighting over not to mention how few are even populated.
yea there's battles going on on a ridiculously high percentage of planets and about as many on non-Imperial worlds. That's kind of the premise of the setting
Oh okay so yeah you just don't actually know anything about the setting besides surface level memes on reddit thanks for clarifying.
Vraks only had titans deployed after chaos reinforcements arrived. It was done in desperation.
The marines were called by the inquisitor sent to investigate why the war was going poorly. They just mop up and chase the csm off the planet. And they are incredibly rare, there's ~1million marines in the Imperium. Most people only know them in myth if at all.
>there's ~1million marines in the Imperium
This only true for how many there were immediately following the horus heresy. Since then there's been 26 foundings that each created an unknown amount of new chapters. I think it might be implied that the second one (which is when thee legions got split into 1,000 chapters of 1,000 marines) was the largest but I not 100% on that.
There were probably a lot less than a million directly following the HH. The one million number is meant to be the rough amount of Imperial marines active in 40k and there's no indication to the contrary.
The fluff says there's roughly 1000 chapters most of whom are codex compliant with roughly 1000 space marines. Which means there's roughly one thousand space marines. And Space Marine codices usually elaborate that regardless of how many there actually are, it's unlikely there are more Space Marines than worlds in the Imperium.
Space Marines are supposed to be as powerful as they are rare, but because they're the posterboys, they don't feel rare, and as a consequence of their prominence, they also are wildly inconsistent in their power level.
>Which means there's roughly one thousand space marines
I obviously meant one million.
>The fluff says there's roughly 1000 chapters most of whom are codex compliant with roughly 1000 space marines.
That just sounds like in universe propaganda. With the amount of foundings since there are that's less than 40 chapters a founding despite some foundings having more chapters than that named expressly in the lore, not to mention the ones from them that aren't expressly mentioned. There's also several loop goes in the codex that "compliant chapters" frequently make use of case in point the black templars that are actually at 5x the recommended codex strength.
>That just sounds like in universe propaganda
Well that's what the fluff says, idk what to tell you. And the codices have been very consistent about it. Here's 9e.
>There's also several loop goes in the codex that "compliant chapters" frequently make use of case in point the black templars that are actually at 5x the recommended codex strength.
It also accounts for that, noting many chapters will be understrength.
But even going off that passage it says that no one knows how many chapters there are. And as for "less marines than imperial worlds" is that total worlds in imperial space or worlds large enough to have an imperial governor? If It's the latter sure then they're probably less than a few million but if it's the former that could be hundreds of millions.
> And as for "less marines than imperial worlds" is that total worlds in imperial space or worlds large enough to have an imperial governor?
Really homie. Just write it off as in-universe propaganda if you want to instead of splitting hairs. If they wanted to split hairs about it they would have. The Imperium is an "Empire of more than a million worlds" and there's roughly one million space marines spread across roughly one thousand chapters of one thousand marines. The numbers are vague and ambiguous to allow for homebrews so that even if GW managed to name 1000 chapters there'd still be wiggle room; not so you can argue that there's actually a million billion of the bastards.
>That just sounds like in-universe propaganda.
yes anon, you headcanon is totally more valid than what's been consistently published in every marine codex for decades.
Truly a thread, this one
It was a citadel with a space port that housed the government surrounded by orbital defenses. The rest of the planet was undefended, they just landed their ships on Vraks and built a railroad to the citadel.
>Again it was a 17 year long war
No it was 17 year long siege, that's a footnote to a more than 20,000 year long war. In 40k's scale this is smaller and less relevant to setting than any individual in WW2 just because someone writes about something doesn't suddenly mean it's important in setting.
Subhuman moron
This is dumbest fricking point to bring up. Vraks was a barren planet that only had one fortress complex on it's surface. The imperium spent almost twice the lives as the soviet union did over the entirety of WW2 to take a single fortress that they then abandoned anyways.
Just going "number bigger" is the lowest IQ take you could possibly have and isn' even correct. The only numbers we now for a fact is how many guardsmen died(14m) and how many civilians died(8m) chaos had at minimum 5 million losses but is likely higher as the CSM warbands that were part of the fighting had sizable forces of cultists. And that's not even considering the losses in space as each side had a small fleet or warships accompanying them.
So in total, around the same amount of casualties as the entirety of world war 2 completely wasted on an ultimately meaningless battle.
>The imperium spent almost twice the lives as the soviet union did over the entirety of WW2
No they didn't.
Soviet union lost roughly 8.6 mill, the imperium lost 14 mill just in the guard.
post models
nta, but you clearly don't know what RHA is.
Those numbers in the old FW books were just stupidly low.
RPG playing secondary who wants the setting to make internal sense here. Consider how difficult it is to move supplies through the warp. Bringing a few hundred thousand men, tanks, artillery, shells, food, water, etc to a new planet is really fricking hard. Most Imperial Guard operations look more like the Russian invasion of Ukraine than WW1. Meanwhile local PDFs can easily number in the millions. They will absolutely attempt to throw bodies at a problem until it goes away. Then there’s the xenos, orks and tyranids can both regularly field millions even during attacks.
So how do the elitist factions deal with it? Orbital bombardment helps a lot. If you don’t have city grade force fields you are at risk of getting turned to glass any time the enemy has void superiority, and if the enemy is landing on your planet they probably have void superiority. So you fall back to the few parts of the world that can be defended, and you get… sieges like Vraks. Space marines and eldar go even farther and aim for very limited goals that can be accomplished quickly and violently. 100 marines can’t take a world but they can do a drop pod assault on the warlord’s head and gut him like a pig.
The Land Raider was detailed with statistics in the old Imperial Armor books and it had less armor than a Sherman in material equivalent to steel.
There's all kinds of absurdities if you look at 40k from a factual lense and try to compare it to real things. It's not a hard sci fi setting. It doesn't even have verisimilitude. And it never had that. Asking 40k to follow a logical flow of information and keep things internally consistent isn't ever going to work out in your favor.
It's weird, because the dudes who wrote the Imperial Armour books were treadheads, so I don't get how they could understimate so bad the numbers to WW2 levels.
What about the alternative? They knew exactly what they were doing and the WW1 look alike with riveted armor that is built by priests who are following blueprints they don’t understand is actually just not that good?
They build giant multikilometer starships, so the material science of tank armour shouldn't be a mystery for them.
I could accept IG vehicles being mass produced shit for plebs, but a SM Land Laider is a very different thing much more valuable, as is its cargo of marines from a economic/efficiency PoV.
I agree the Land Raider being paper by modern standards is not good.
Yeah, maybe they had access to bad information or maybe they just didn't use any of that information when making the numbers up and said "yeah 200mm of steel equivalent protection sounds like a lot" or they thought the 200mm would be like 200mm of their sci fi super material which they could just say is better than any kind of weapon we have now.
But that also begs the question about the kinds of engagement ranges these models are taking part in. 24" of range for like a bolter isn't really far when you consider that's like 4 turns of movement the operator. And each turn should only be a few minutes. I don't think GW has ever given us a scale of time for a round. And rightly so. An advanced weapon like a bolter ought to have a few kilometers of range, right? We've already got machine guns that can place accurate fire from that kind of distance, and we're arriving at man portable SMART guns with steadycam arms able to provide enough control that a SAW can be fired one-handed. If this tech keeps up, we're going to see power armored soldiers able to place pinpoint accurate .50bmg from kilometers away while being invulnerable to small arms fire.
40k was never a realistic setting and asking it to be is like asking lord of the rings to do hema with aragorn's longsword. Frick outta here with that nerd shit.
>24" of range for like a bolter isn't really far when you consider that's like 4 turns of movement the operator.
It's almost like expressions of gameplay aren't expressions of lore. A guard character typically has 3-4 times the amount of wounds as a aguardmans that doesn't mean in lore they somehow can just take more bullets because they're not assigned to a squad.
>that doesn't mean in lore they somehow can just take more bullets because they're not assigned to a squad.
Yes it does. Heroic protagonists get wounded and keep fighting while the mooks go down in one shot. Have you never watched a movie?
Yeah, you're right that mechanics don't portray lore, and that lore isn't realistic and will never be. And we should be okay with that. It's just strange and funny when you see GW detailing things like tank armor and giving realistic stats.
Yes. That's how 40k and movies and fiction in general works. (And sometimes reality, it's weird.)
I like this option because it's both the simplest and silliest answer.
>It's just strange and funny when you see GW detailing things like tank armor
GW never detailed it, though. Forge World did that. Back then especially they were much further removed from each other than today. FW lore is essentially 3rd party dubious extended universe canon, same as FFG stuff and to an extent BL. It had no quality control from the main writers. The only material that can be considered inarguable canon of the first degree is from the core rulebooks and the codexes and supplements written within the first 4 editions. Everything else is one, two, or even more steps removed from the initial crop of writers and creators and USUALLY the degraded quality of that is apparent.
Imagine believing all this headcanon bullshit totally detached of how FW was created and other changes in GW over the years. Pure fake grog copium.
Good lord.
I've been around since before FW even existed, I was playing 2nd edition when it was current. You have no idea what you're talking about.
You can find in the credits of the first Imperial Armour books plenty of main GW guys like Chambers or Jervis Johnson, until Kinrade and others became the main producers later. You are the one that has no idea.
You nonsense about canon and "original writers" is also laughtable. You sound like that resident /tg/ village idiot that spergs about Rick Priestly all the time out of nowhere.
FW were on par with or better than the main writers.
Sometimes, for sure. The braindead statistics they gave was not one of those times.
Such a petty complaint.
>GW never detailed it, though
I guess WD and the Chapter Approved books aren't made by GW then
That could be 30-60mm of anything from mud to unobtainium. Forgeworld was the one who made the mistake of making direct comparisons to "conventional steel" before it got laughed out of the 2nd editions.
Unfortunately for them, everything is canon, and while they may claim not everything is true, it still means that in my GW-approved headcanon: numbers and space travel are the only thing keeping the entire 40k setting from getting whip, dabbed, and naenae'd on by a single Earth-like planet. And maybe I'll add one to an RT campaign just to wipe the party there if they land.
>It had no quality control from the main writers.
>GW never detailed it, though.
GW tank stats are very common (see also all the cutaways of the "new" 3rd edition marine tanks).
Their only fault is being based on what nerds in the 80's would have access to. (heavily scrubbed 50s-60s cold-war information that downplays the abilities of western prototypes)
The issue with this line of logic is that GW wasn't statting modern combat vehicles. They should have just kept the real world numbers vague. The moment Forgeworld wrote "conventional steel" they were doomed unless their numbers were truly absurd.
>they should have
They wanted to do it, because GW is full of treadhead geeks who like putting numbers to things. People who have autism fits about numbers not matching conventional reality after the fact are subhumans not worth listening to.
Is a land raider having a 30kph speed shit? a Russ going 25kph? Of course it is, but 40k was made in a universe where modern concerns for vehicles hadn't existed in the rules-writers minds yet.
you realize that it was the autists who were in GW who wrote the numbers down in the first place, right?
Other autists can't be blamed for picking apart these statistics when autists made them up to begin with.
>Other autists can't be blamed
No, because now they're being autistic about a deliberately anachronistic setting where inconsistencies are a foundational part of it. Pointless pedants are scum.
> Pointless pedants are scum.
This. It's a bunch of midwits patting themselves on the back for figuring out the chainsaw sword vs bayonet charge game isn't strictly logical. No shit.
Forge world and FFG lore are both generally better than the first party stuff.
Nah, trying to make it realistic but still within its in-universe rules is fun and has always been part of the hobby and official publications. Just like being a tech nerd in the Trek or SW fandoms.
Frick outa here to a high fantasy setting if you don't like it.
>HEAT is a projectile
No they aren't, do your homework
>HEAT isn't a projectile
>HEAT isn't a projectile
Okay you just have no idea what you're talking about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-explosive_anti-tank
"The warhead functions by having an explosive charge collapse a metal liner inside the warhead into a high-velocity explosively formed penetrator (EFP) jet;"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_formed_penetrator
"An explosively formed penetrator (EFP), also known as an explosively formed projectile (EFP),"
What do you think the explosion just magically pentrated the armour instead of following the path of least resistance around it?
>implying HEMAhomosexualry doesn't make fantasy writers better
No one wants to read "and then he slashed the orc with his sword" 300x in a row, that's the plebbest of plebshit. Aragorn is the chaddest chad in the setting, give me some kino moves or frick right off. Dune does this very, very right btw
They wasted all those lives to kill a single guy. And didn't even care about the planet.
>Siege of Vraks
It was a siege of like one city wasn't it?
It was effectively the Siege of Leningrad on steroids. It gets outsized importance in the community because it has lots of detail from Imperial Armor and Krieg memes.
Yeah, that's what I remembered.
There was like one city, and it was a problem because the city was also the storage depot of a massive amount of war material. It was basically one small but incredibly well armed uprising.
>Isn't one of 40k's selling points is supposed to be about how epic and grand its scale is?
Yes, it's scale is grand and epic.
>but this planet had less combatants than WW1
Okay and WW1 was the entirety of combat among humanity at that time period. During the Siege of Vraks there were also 10,000 other wars happening on other planets. 40k scale happens beyond planetary. Also many of these places are depopulated post-apocalyptic colonies of survivors from dark age civilizations so obviously they have less people and smaller battles in those regions. There are also battles on Hive Worlds involving trillions at the same time. You don't understand 40k.
>Dude 40k isn't supposed to have a large scale in comparison to our own past conflicts
shut the frick up holy shit.
>The eldar bring hundreds of thousands (I can't even strawman you hard enough to say millions) of guys to fights
40k is a company scale wargame. Many of the factions actually use company scale elements as fricking decisive formations. Take a look at how many times in the fluff one space marine company, or one tau hunter cadre, or one eldar warband accomplishes a major goal. 40k is simultaneously massive in scale and very personal.
Here's a hunter cadre. This plus some auxiliary/defector meat gives PDF commanders nervous breakdowns.
That's because the writers are bad you fricking moron
>The entire setting is like this, all the time, constantly
>No it isn't the writers are bad
Do you think 40k is a real place?
The writers fail to understand the scale of planets and write moronic numbers, meanwhile use tactics that should cause horrific casualties far worse than anything we've experienced irl.
Its bad writing because it doesn't work in universe, even if we're not talking about a hive city.
Vraks is supposed to be turbo ww1 and the narrative delivers on that, but not the numbers.
>meanwhile use tactics that should cause horrific casualties far worse than anything we've experienced irl.
It's not a real battle, the tactics are evocative and dramatic and therefore good writing.
>I just find it funny how much of this is resolved if you accept that the WW1 tank with a WW2 turret strapped on top is actually just as trash as it looks to be.
Yeah I don't know why people do these mental backlips to explain how these "futuristic" tanks still using dumb munitions and getting defeated by knights marching in phalanxes are actually supposed to highly advanced and the authors just forgot to say so in the last 40 years.
>It's not a real battle, the tactics are evocative and dramatic and therefore good writing.
I can't imagine being dumb enough to say this in a thread specifically about a conflict that was written about as if it was some kind of in universe historical record.
It's a record for a universe that isn't real. Krieg have been a fan favorite since Vraks, the writing worked, it was good writing.
>It's a record for a universe that isn't real
What do you think your argument even is? Its supposed to follow its own internal logic but fails badly when it comes to numbers.
>Its supposed to follow its own internal logic
It's own internal logic is that single heroes or small units are able to tip the scale of planet wide wars in single engagements. Space Marines would die from old age swinging their swords if the 40k wars had "realistic" numbers of soldiers in each battle.
No its internal logic is that space marines and demons exist but that war otherwise plays out in a realistic way.
If getting even 100 soldiers plus their equipment to a world is a big ask
Imperial ships are absurdly massive and can carry tens of thousands of troops each. They're apparently so big that entire societies can form inside them
>but that war otherwise plays out in a realistic way.
No it doesn't idiot. It plays out at literal knife fight range when screaming hordes of lunatics rush through machine gun fire to bludgeon each other to death.
And, especially in a book like vraks, the result of this is realistic.
That was a bit of an exaggeration for effect. You're right that the big guard mass haulers can move a lot more soldiers. But how many do they bring on an average invasion? A dozen? Less? And they have to carry all the tanks, artillery, shells, etc. etc. So a million guardsmen is a big ask. The advantage of SMs is that their logistical footprint is much smaller.
>The numbers
Fricking autistic, the narrative is everything. Who gives a shit if the page says 1000 or 1000000. Is your problem really that the stats aren't mechanically perfect?
What do you think the thread is about? You're getting upset at OP saying the numbers are dumb and unrealistic, and pulling out whatever justification you can for them instead of just saying "yea they're dumb"
Sane people with basic media literacy can ignore bad numbers thrown out by artists and writers (infamous for being bad at numbers) and follow the intention clearly put forward instead of trying to argue the scifi setting full of giant mechs and black hole guns would fold to an abrams
I don't think the whole setting would. I think an IG regiment would have a bad time in a fair fight, though. This just makes the guard more heroic.
They would fold to an Abrams and thats part of the charm. Their tanks are shit, the ranges of their weapons are shit.
You are braindead, can't even follow a simple argument.
They look old but are supposed to be powerful, that's why they can go up against high tech shit like those that tau or eldar use
>They look old
They function old. Most of the guard doesn't even have night vision. They're worse equipped than modern day Russia
Actually it's good writing to have the battles in a scale thats imaginable for fielding on tabletop
People always bring up Vraks but Taros had even fewer people for a more populated planet
this isn't the Warthunder forums, don't leak classified docs here
The point is that HEAT aren't solid kinectic penetrator projectile rounds, but superheated plasma lances similar to the end effects of 40k "lasers" and "melta" weapons
"Contrary to a misconception (possibly resulting from the acronym for high-explosive anti-tank, HEAT) the shaped charge EFP jet does not depend in any way on heating or melting for its effectiveness; that is, the EFP jet from a shaped charge does not melt its way through armor, as its effect is purely kinetic in nature"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge#Munroe_effect
The EFP is being propelled via the force of the explosion, this isn't thermite.
There were billions of orks at ullanor so no
people in the warthunder era need to remember that people back in the 80's and 90's didn't have accurate military specs for modern combat vehicles
you can just make your own setting instead of nitpicking someone elses shitty 2000AD fanfiction that got too big
Shovels are gay
GW can't count ignore it whenever they say a number
Vrax was a fight for a single hive so why are you comparing it to a world War?
Also if I remember correctly the kill count of vrax is a lot higher than ww1 given that the hive was utterly flattened.
>Siege of Gereon describes a typical Imperial engagement against rebels. The Guard deployed all their forces, held none in reserve, did not do any reconnaissance, and sent everyone forward in a mass bayonet charge. The guard were so pressed in tight together it was possible for men to die standing up, be pushed along by the throng, only to fall to the ground when they fell back, which was great because the rebels were using basilisk and other artillery against the Guard.
>Guardsmen were sent to die against massive mile high walls to form ramps of dead bodies so they could climb them. Seriously though, why are there are no sappers in the guard? No Engineering corps with crossing vehicles? What the hell are those dozer blades on their tanks for? I guess it's the Imperium though, and stupidity is grimdark, right?
>Oh, and of course after a few billion guardsmen die and they take the hive, a titan comes in and obliterates the wall in one shot (killing a couple thousand more Guard), making all the billions of deaths useless. Turns out that the IG general just wanted to take the fortress for his own glory and didn't want to wait for Titan support which was just a few days away. And he gets away with it and gets accolades heaped upon him as well, just to hammer in GRIMDARK. That right there describes the Imperium in a nutshell. They could have taken the city with only a couple hundred thousand or so casualties but instead wasted billions of men to take it in mind bogglingly stupid plans. There's a reason why many people make the claim that the Imperium are space skaven.
Is more of this what you want from 40k?
unironically and without a hint of irony yes. You think I come to the flamethrower skull heel game world for rreeeealism like a b***h?
40k writers, like most of their brethren, are terrible mathematicians.
Vraks was a 17-year siege of essentially just one very large military base on a planet held by a couple million renegades. During that 17-year period most of it was just guardsmen trying to gain ground through artillery warfare and infantry attacks. For the Imperium this was considered an acceptable use of resources as warm bodies are cheap in the Imperium, especially Krieg ones. The conflict is explicitly not some major conflict but starts out as a relatively minor one and elite assets are deemed to not be required.
The Spaces Marines only show up periodically and mostly only because the Chaos marines showed up first. Vraks is located near the Eye of Terror which is a heavily patrolled at that point leading up to the 13th Black Crusade, so it no surprise that there's a swift Imperial reprisal to Chaos marines leaving the Eye of terror. A small titan force of only Reaver and Warhound titans is deployed to speed things up because the Chaos marines fricked up the Imperial schedule after wrecking the Kriegers. This involved a lot of political string-pulling on the part of the Imperial commanders overseeing the Vraks war just to get a relatively small titan detachment.
Things escalate over time to demonic summon and the Grey Knights showing up. Part of the point of Vraks is to show how exotic forces like Space Marines, Titans, and Grey Knights might be drawn into a conflict over time as guardsmen do their grunt work. Alongside that is an equivalent description of how a Chaos incursions can escalate over time from one power mad cleric and his henchmen to the arrival of ancient renegade legionaries and demonic incursions.
And the marines show up only briefly and in small numbers for Vraks. The Dark Angels roll up with 5 companies for a few weeks/months, seize the Vraks spaceport and kill most of the Alpha legion, then leave (200 DA casualties iirc). The Red Scorpions show up with just one company of 100 guys and bring forwards the campaign schedule by years through one critical mission, and then they leave again.
That's several hundred marines in total on Vraks for short time periods compared to the millions of guardsmen who were sent there over the entire 17-year period. That's consistent with marines being a rare and elite force.
Vraks was also an armoury world for the Gothic Sector. Recapturing the central storehouse for a sector so close to the Eye of Terror is profoundly strategically important.
The Imperium was keen to recapture as many of the munitions and materiel as possible and keep the Vraks conflict from spilling over to the rest of the sector.
As the war dragged on the Imperium didn't have any options other than to escalate to using titans, and then a warband (the Purge IIRC) unleashed a Nurgle fart bomb and spoiled the entire planet anyway.
No, literally none of the games besides Epic operate on a grand scale. And they discontinue that. They are squad based toy bashers, going all the way down to the kill team level.
I have never seen a more braindead thread.
This is the common "Sci-Fi Authors can't into scale" trope
OP picked pretty bad examples though
Vraks wasn't that important, and Ullanor was from the good ol'days when Marines did all the real work, and Imperial Army just guarded shit and fought on tertiary fronts not worthy of Marine attention
Lots of BL books would be easier targets, same with Damocles Crusade shit and some of the nu40k campaign books