Crush the Xenos Scum! [40k discussion]

[Inkidu]

Most of the fluff for any faction always makes hem out to be the best, but that's usually explained away in things like:

Imperial propaganda
General Eldar arrogance.
Ork... um... da-red-wunz-go-da-fastestness.

[Vekseid]

Tempting, but I generally like to use boards like these which are not dedicated to such discussions, because that tends to be where you find the most partisan, irreconcilable, and as you said, juvenile types most devoted to seeing their side win no matter what.

Granted, the boards here have been overwhelmingly in favor of 40k . . . I suppose I could make some point about that lending to the idea that it's played overwhelmingly by juvenile man-children who couldn't write their way out of a paper bag XD

I gained a new sort of respect for the 40k verse when I realized what the skull nearly every armed human in the Imperium is sporting on their regalia represents.

For all the nonsense in the setting, I've never seen or read anything in Halo that holds a candle to that.

[Inkidu]

I gained a new sort of respect for the 40k verse when I realized what the skull nearly every armed human in the Imperium is sporting on their regalia represents.

For all the nonsense in the setting, I've never seen or read anything in Halo that holds a candle to that.

It represents the bare essence of what it means to be a human, right?

I like Halo, but it has had less time to divulge its setting. Apparently the Halo Bible is chocked full of stuff. Also, they tend to downplay a lot of backstory in the games. Which is irksome.

That and I think it's easier to get lost in the audacious nature of 40K a little easier. It doesn't take itself seriously, and that's what lets you take it seriously.

[chaoslord29]

It represents the bare essence of what it means to be a human, right?

I like Halo, but it has had less time to divulge its setting. Apparently the Halo Bible is chocked full of stuff. Also, they tend to downplay a lot of backstory in the games. Which is irksome.

That and I think it's easier to get lost in the audacious nature of 40K a little easier. It doesn't take itself seriously, and that's what lets you take it seriously.

You know I've heard that Halo has a pretty rich setting too, but having read pretty much all of the Halo books myself, it hardly conveys the same sort of depth and complexity that 40k does. It was originally an FPS, it's main title will always be an FPS, and no amount of lore or backstory or fluff they'll be able to cram into the background will ever be able to overcome the fact that their primary target audience is going to be people who enjoy handling a controller so their faceless space marine can go pew-pew at hordes of evil aliens and other faceless space marines.

Granted, for what it is, it's setting a fairly high bar in terms of fluff and backstory, but it's all still pretty dualistic. Aliens are bad guys; Humanity are good guys; other aliens turn out to be bad guys too.

[Vekseid]

It represents the bare essence of what it means to be a human, right?

I like Halo, but it has had less time to divulge its setting. Apparently the Halo Bible is chocked full of stuff. Also, they tend to downplay a lot of backstory in the games. Which is irksome.

That and I think it's easier to get lost in the audacious nature of 40K a little easier. It doesn't take itself seriously, and that's what lets you take it seriously.

It's the Emperor.

That man is still alive, trapped in his own corpse, guarding humanity from whoknowsthefuckwhat for ten thousand years, watching the idoltry built around him turn into the very thing he sought to destroy. He failed, in a spectacularly epic fashion, and he pays the price for that failure in every way imaginable, and every single one of his trillions of 'servants' carries around a little token of his own current face to bury that point home.

[Inkidu]

It's the Emperor.

That man is still alive, trapped in his own corpse, guarding humanity from whoknowsthefuckwhat for ten thousand years, watching the idoltry built around him turn into the very thing he sought to destroy. He failed, in a spectacularly epic fashion, and he pays the price for that failure in every way imaginable, and every single one of his trillions of 'servants' carries around a little token of his own current face to bury that point home.

I read an alternate character interpretation where the Emperor likes the worship a lot more than he's willing to admit. Plus there's that great story where the Emperor is destroying the last church on Earth and the priest foreshadows the Emperor's grand failing.

At least from what I read.

[chaoslord29]

Has anyone else considered that the events of Halo might make a decent pre-pre-prequel to the Rise of the Emperor and the Horus Heresy? That would make the Spartans the earliest of prototypes of what would become the Adeptus Astartes, and the end of the Covenant War the beginning of the Golden Age of Technology, I should think.

[Neysha]

Has anyone else considered that the events of Halo might make a decent pre-pre-prequel to the Rise of the Emperor and the Horus Heresy? That would make the Spartans the earliest of prototypes of what would become the Adeptus Astartes, and the end of the Covenant War the beginning of the Golden Age of Technology, I should think.

This is the only pre-pre-prequel to Warhammer 40K.

Event Horizon Trailer

[Inkidu]

Lo, we barely survived first contact with the Warp!  :o

[TheGlyphstone]

Damn Neysha, you beat me to it.

[chaoslord29]

Son of a . . . I swear I could feel the daemons crawling out of my brain even now.

[Neysha]

What we should do, is side by side comparisons of IoM and UNSC or Covenant vehicles and weapons and whatnot. See how they stack up!

Damn Neysha, you beat me to it.

No worries Glyph, I've been beating off guys for years now. You're just my latest conquest.

Wait a minute...

[TheGlyphstone]

40K ships, at least, kick the crap out of most 'realistic' or semi-realistic sci-fi settings primarily because they're so darn big, and tend to thumb their nose at realism to begin with....I've overseen and participated in a number of 40K Vs. X debates on other forums, and even the 40K detractors tend to agree that you have to get pretty high up on the tech/crazy scale to beat the Imperium in a fleet battle. Covenant, for example, would be hard-pressed to accomplish much; their game-changer techs of shields and plasma weaponry are, if not standard-issue, fairly commonplace for Imperium forces, and they're for the most part outmatched in size - the mainstay Imperial ship-of-the-line, the Lunar Cruiser, is 5km long - Covie ships don't get that big until the Assault Carrier, and they're proportionately armed. USNC is completely outclassed, unless you want to get into a vicious and unending debate about Spartans vs. Space Marines. :D

[Inkidu]

40K ships, at least, kick the crap out of most 'realistic' or semi-realistic sci-fi settings primarily because they're so darn big, and tend to thumb their nose at realism to begin with....I've overseen and participated in a number of 40K Vs. X debates on other forums, and even the 40K detractors tend to agree that you have to get pretty high up on the tech/crazy scale to beat the Imperium in a fleet battle. Covenant, for example, would be hard-pressed to accomplish much; their game-changer techs of shields and plasma weaponry are, if not standard-issue, fairly commonplace for Imperium forces, and they're for the most part outmatched in size - the mainstay Imperial ship-of-the-line, the Lunar Cruiser, is 5km long - Covie ships don't get that big until the Assault Carrier, and they're proportionately armed. USNC is completely outclassed, unless you want to get into a vicious and unending debate about Spartans vs. Space Marines. :D

Well I don't know about Master Chief. But if there's a single entity that can hold his or her own in the 40K universe it's Samus Aran. >,> No exceptions.

What about the Space Pirates in the 40K universe. I mean Ridley is often as big as some of the avatars. -_- Stupid internet making me think of awesome...

[chaoslord29]

What we should do, is side by side comparisons of IoM and UNSC or Covenant vehicles and weapons and whatnot. See how they stack up!

Don't know about a side by side comparison, but I did a size matchup on the previous page and as Glyphstone pointed out, the difference is an order of magnitude.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

I hadn't even considered the difference in scale on the space level . . . I was busy factoring how much faster Covenant ships would be in and out of Warp Space. According the Halowiki, Covenant Cruisers, the mainstays of their fleets range between 300 and 3,000 meters in size. The Covenant heavy hitters like the less than common Assault Carriers can be as big as 5km, and the Supercarriers (of which 2 are mentioned anywhere in the series) are a whopping 29km bow to stern. Destroyers and Frigates make up the bulk of the fleet (maybe as much as 2/3rds) and are smaller than 1km in size.

Compare that to the workhorses of the Imperium of Man, the Lunar Cruiser, 5km long and weighing in at nearly double the tonnage of even the largest Covenant cruisers. Now the Covenant are able to field hundreds of their own cruisers as the backbone of their fleet, but the IoM fields 600 Lunar class cruisers in the Segmentum Obscurus alone. That's on top of the Dictator, Dominator, Tyrant, Cardinal, and Gothic class cruisers which make up nearly as many again! That's twelve hundred ships, each of them larger and better armed than a Covenant Assault Carrier, the largest normal class of vessel in any given Covenant Fleet (serving as flagships). Imperial Heavy Cruisers and Battleships are even bigger, better armed, and outnumber their counterparts in the Covenant Navy, maybe 10 to 1 in any give Segmentum of the Imperium. Perhaps most tellingly of all? Covenant weapons appear to have an engagement range of of a few thousand meters, that's missiles and beam projectors and other plasma weapons. The smallest vessels of an Imperial Battlefleet have gun batteries and lance weapons which measure their effective engagement range at tens of thousands of meters. Covenant craft won't even be able to get a shot off against Imperial Craft until engaging them at what any Imperial Captain would consider 'point blank' range, the range at which they'll be launching apartment building sized artillery shells at ships less than half their size.

tl;dr?
The Covenant at full strength can field a few dozen capital class ships and a thousand or so frigate/destroyer/corvette class vessels.

Any given Imperial Sector can deploy hundreds of ships larger than even the largest Covenant carriers and battle cruisers, and while they have fewer escort class vessels, they can boast perhaps 5 to 10 times as many fighter/bomber/assault craft.

The most telling factor? Covenant vessels have a standard engagement range of a few (1-5) kilometers, with an extreme range of 10km or so for the larger vessels. The smallest Imperial vessels measure their effective range in hundreds of thousands of meters. Any covenant vessel would be under the guns of standard imperial cruisers at a range of 5-10 times their own, and even if they reach their standard effective engagement range, will at that point be fighting at what the Imperial Navy considers point-blank range.

If you've ever played Battlefleet Gothic, or are at all familiar with Napoleonic era naval warfare, this is where you never, ever, ever want to be unless you're sure you can shoot first/hardest/fastest because aiming no longer matters. Basically, for the Covenant to engage Imperial Vessels at anything short of extreme long range, they would have to give up their greatest advantage in speed and agility.

Edit:
On shielding. The regenerative shielding of Covenant craft appears to be far superior to the standard Void Shields on Imperial vessels, at least in terms of absorbing comparable weaponry of their own craft and very capable against UNSC projectile weapons. Void Shields require massively more power drain and are notoriously hard to get back up once depleted.

The difference again is one of scale. Covenant shields are designed to absorb the blast of plasma weapons and beam projectors and torpedos relative to the size of their ships. Void Shields are designed to absorb the terrific impact and energy of 40k Lance batteries, which fire blasts as hot as a star's corona and roughly as large as smaller Covenant escort craft. There is little doubt in my mind as to exactly how effective Covenant shields would be.

[TheGlyphstone]

And on the ground, the Covenant are basically Tau with a splash of Eldar, minus the latter's stealth and psionic talents. And the Imperium regularly trounces both of them when they get their teeth into each other. Tau survive by being just nasty enough and just unimportant enough that exterminating them isn't worth the investment, and Eldar are too darn sneaky (and psychic) to fight except on their own engagement terms. Covenant are neither of these, even before taking into account they basically have the same ultra-xenophobic attitude the Imperium does, and are thus likely to end up in a fatal confrontation all the sooner.

[Inkidu]

What about the Reapers in 40K?

[chaoslord29]

And on the ground, the Covenant are basically Tau with a splash of Eldar, minus the latter's stealth and psionic talents. And the Imperium regularly trounces both of them when they get their teeth into each other. Tau survive by being just nasty enough and just unimportant enough that exterminating them isn't worth the investment, and Eldar are too darn sneaky (and psychic) to fight except on their own engagement terms. Covenant are neither of these, even before taking into account they basically have the same ultra-xenophobic attitude the Imperium does, and are thus likely to end up in a fatal confrontation all the sooner.

Took the words right out of my mouth. The whole problem for the Covenant is that they're the best implement of their own destruction, even in their own series. They spend the whole time attempting to annihilate themselves and the rest of life in the galaxy and between their civil war and the Flood manage to kill more of each other than the UNSC ever gets a piece of. The Covenant nearly wholly sacrificed a fleet of 3,000 ships at the Battle of Reach which they presumed to be the human home world. I think they're every bit as likely to try the same tactic against a Forge or Fortress world, or Emperor willing a an Adeptus Astartes homeworld at which point they will likely have bitten off way more than they can chew, and even if they sacrifice everything to glass said planet, they've still barely chipped the Imperium's armor.

[Neysha]

What about the Reapers in 40K?

The Mass Effect powers had roughly eighty dreadnought class ships right? Seems... rather small in number. ;)

And Mass Accelerators, their main guns, how big were the projectiles they fired?

[Inkidu]

The Mass Effect powers had roughly eighty dreadnought class ships right? Seems... rather small in number. ;)

And Mass Accelerators, their main guns, how big were the projectiles they fired?

I don't know. The Reapers used lasers all the time I saw them.

But I'm not talking about Mass Effect in general I'm talking about the Reapers specifically. Each Reaper is a nation unto themselves. They don't have supply lines, they don't grow tiered, they turn whole planets of organics against their forme take r mates. They indoctrinate all organic life. I know there were a  more than eighty giant Reapers. They could literally indoctrinate the chaos space marines out from under Chaos.

[chaoslord29]

I don't know. The Reapers used lasers all the time I saw them.

But I'm not talking about Mass Effect in general I'm talking about the Reapers specifically. Each Reaper is a nation unto themselves. They don't have supply lines, they don't grow tiered, they turn whole planets of organics against their forme take r mates. They indoctrinate all organic life. I know there were a  more than eighty giant Reapers. They could literally indoctrinate the chaos space marines out from under Chaos.

Woah, woah, woah. I think you are underestimating the taint of Chaos there my friend. How can the Reapers hope to corrupt what is already totally rotten to the core? I mean, granted their not immune to psychology entirely, but I can't see the Chaos Space Marines succumbing to the Reapers any more than the Adeptus Astartes themselves because by and large they've already been so thoroughly programmed or deprogrammed as to be beyond conversion.

Now the Orks . . . that's a different story.

[Inkidu]

I don't think the Orks have enough brains between them to indoctrinate.

[chaoslord29]

I don't think the Orks have enough brains between them to indoctrinate.

Well, it's not like there aren't trillions of human beings on countless worlds which are perfectly susceptible to indoctrination already is it XD

[consortium11]

I think the Reapers are an interesting one but in essence it comes down to how effective indoctrination is on the 40k populace. As a military force in-and-of themselves the Reapers are fairly powerful but nothing spectacular; in all honesty they likely carry less threat then a medium sized WAAAGH, Hive fleet or Black Crusade and one of the threads shown throughout Mass Effect is that as powerful as an individual Reaper is they're vulnerable to more numerous opponents. As a direct comparison their consumption of the galaxy in the previous cycle seems to have been considerably less efficient then say the Emperor's crusades which forged the Imperium, despite the fact they were attacking worlds which were already crippled by the lack of communication and transport.  That said the Mass Effect canon has been so torn apart that it's hard to really take anything from it and if you do follow it then the Reapers become one of the single most (plot induced) idiotic 'big bads' I've encountered.

On the indoctrination point there appears to be little definitive information about how it works. It appears to follow a rough similarity to the way Chaos is able to seduce someone and takes a considerable amount of time. However from the limited information there is indoctrination is a purely physical process, the Reapers using infa and ultra sound and electromagnetic waves to stimulate/corrupt areas of the brain. 40K in contrast has a less (hand wave to) scientific approach and a more psuedo-religious one; Chaos corrupts the soul and from there the body. How the two interact is somewhat unclear. If we use a Rachni/Tyranid comparison then indoctrination was able to effect "lesser" Rachni but not their queens; how this would correspond to the Hive Mind is unclear. Likewise there are some questions as to whether indoctrination can effect those who are already under the influence of another; the Thorian's pawns seemed unaffected by any indoctrination but their exposure to a Reaper would have been short at best.

[Inkidu]

True but if the Reapers could take  over any one faction in the 40K-verse then it would probably a shift in balance that would insure victory for the Reapers.