Imperial armour: Siege of Vraks analysis

[Simon_Jester]

Well decentralized can solve many problems, but then you’d think that groups like the Munitorum would have already been massively undermined as each regional military force sets its own requirements and contracts directly with the million whatever planets of factories. Plus this would mean its just unlikely that supplies are flowing across the entire empire.

The decentralization extends to the factories, which are run by their own separate sub-organization, the Adeptus Mechanicus. The degree to which the Mechanicus is fucked up is its own rant, and probably does a lot to explain why, as you say, the galaxy has been ineffective at reinventing some of the more advanced technology of humanity's height.

Given their history, it seems like human technology peaked around 20-25000, not during the Emperor's active conquests- the Emperor was to a large extent fighting over the partly-ruined leftovers of a more advanced civilization. And ever since his death, humanity's just never had time, or competent leadership, to make all that much progress- all government is either fragmentary or too detached to cope with the problem, the specialists responsible for running all the machinery are just too weird and crazy, and the ongoing needs of the wars tend to be bad for preservation and expansion of basic research knowledge.

Well, it sounds like we shouldn’t expect standardization in the first place, but that precisely because the various military forces are independently operating any given campaign wouldn’t have the full mix of weapons and spare parts and ammo thrown in together anyway. Makes life a lot easier, and suggests that indeed supplies should be coming from distributed locations.

They usually do.

[Connor MacLeod]

It is the essence of logistical planning that you are tallying up requirements before they are requirements. Otherwise you aren’t planning anything, you’re purely reactive. Thus my point about WW2 being planned on a 2 year schedule, involving meeting requirements for numerous units whose very existence and deployment were in many cases only projected. The exception to this would be Overlord which was planned on a three year basis, though it also kept expanding in scope as it went along. Detailed operational and tactical planning for specific amphibious operations took 4-6 months normally but the planners were working with material already planned for me. Having predictable troops and a predictable, static enemy with known technology should in fact make these methods rather effective. That they were not means its just absurd incompetence.

I see what you're saying, and again.. its a mixed bag. They don't always initiate the attacks - they get attacked. The scale and scope of conflicts and the nature of the enemy can vary. They try to counter that by keeping military forces garrisoning worlds (in addition to the PDFs - at least for important worlds) as well as troops on standby to deploy in case of an emergency. They have contingencies to draw off portions of the militaries of other worlds to draft into their military (or if emergencies require, concription of militias or civilians.) They stockpile resources and even some ships (albeit this is usually older or more untrustworthy ones.) and have contingencies set up to move them if need be. But that is, by its nature a reactive one, and it isn't 100% effective because you simply can't predict everything.

On the offensive (when they invade a planet, or decide to conquer or launch a crusade.) things do the 'planning and requirements' thing. The problem isn't so much in that they don't do planning, its the assumptions/criteria/requirements they use in the planning. In the case of Vraks (or Taros) they tend to make some fucking stupid decisions. which shows how the Imperial approach goes wrong. When it doesnt go wrong, it can look something more like the Sabbat Worlds Crusade.

Going by the book can actually cause major problems with excess too, and artificially delay operations while you wait for it to all arrive. For example in the Gulf War the US stocked ammunition for 21 days fighting, including over 350,000 120mm sabot rounds. Now…. Iraq had a lot of tanks but this was still 70 sabot rounds per Iraqi tank! As it was no US tank fired off one single load of ammunition.

Again its a mixed bag. How operations are conducted in the field (After the planning) usually depends on the officer involved. Some are very much 'by the book' - some are more mentally flexible than that. And some are Zapp Brannigan reborn (they may be effective despite this or utter incompetents.)

Seems like he’d more or less have to be actively holding it together like that.

He might be. As I said, one of the things about the Warp is that the entities that exist on it feed off the thought and emotion (and even souls) of living beings in the galaxy - in addition they can (to varying degrees) also influence human behaviour ot make feeding easier. Its what makes Chaos so dangerous: Khorne's influence can lead to more warfare, Slaanesh to greed and excess, Tzeentch to more plotting and betrayal, etc. For humans, the Emperor is the closest thing they have to an actual god - a god of humanity and (in a way) a god of Order (The only one, perhaps.) It logically follows from that that he acts both to actively maintain order as well as shield humanity from the influences of Chaos.

Even in limited war, an underground nuclear detonation isn’t really doing anything carpet bombing wouldn’t, but the idea of limited war in this environment is rather ludicrous. It’s not like it’s the only planet you’ve got! Earth is doing okay after near two thousand nuclear tests.

True. Although having other planets does not neccesarily mean they'll like dumping nukes on them. Exaggerated paranoia about the dangers of nukes is hardly new.

Even more amusing, despite being all grimdark and shit, its been explicitly stated that the Imperium does NOt like blowing the shit out of worlds unless they have to - even their own - because they consider them precious commodities. This is despite the fact they can settle uninhabited/dead worlds, irradiated wastelands (via hives). Hell they have an entire segment of the Imperial population that exists purely aboard starships and orbital facilities (the void born.) They don't really NEED to worry as you say, but the policies remain in place nonetheless.

It's perfectly in line iwth Imperial (bureacratic) thinking that 'nukes are a no no' under any circumstance, even if (like with Vraks) they end up fucking the planet over in the long term. Hey it works for Earth!

That sounds like incompetent small unit leadership, as much or more then a failure of planning up high but I have no idea of how big a force you are talking about.

At the risk of enraging Black Admiral/Orsai, it was. I believe it was a Space Marine officer who fucked it up. But really you get incompetence at varying levels, and that stems directly from the politics.

People in the rear area controlling too much tends to be a problem because conditions at the front can change rapidly from what’s in the textbooks… but 40K is obsessed with stuff not really changing. That’s the problem that I’m seeing. WW1 for example happened because the last big war anyone closely paid attention too was 40 years and two generations of weapons earlier; anyone who paid attention to more recent wars more or less completely predicted what was going to happen. Lots of stuff on Google books utterly confirms this. Lack of war also does facilitate incompetents taking root in command, but once more this tends to be linked into them remaining aloof of change and trying to protect turf from change. If the tech don’t change, that isn’t such an issue. Course, that part has never made any sense to me anyway. They can’t replicate technology they have, and they have a million planets of people to work on it? HUN? How the hell was it ever supposed to have been invented?

Yeah, the Imperium's bureacracy is obsessed with things not changing, everyone obeying quietly without questioning, etc. And yet in the fluff it happens all the time. Things change, people don't listen, and they're forced to adapt to the realities whether they like it or not. It's part and parcel of the decentralized, authority-delegating nature.

Again as you say such things (as like what happened with WW1) can happen in 40K. People at the more local scales (sector or subsector) may be aware of things and even make predictions or preparations. But this may become problematic if the upper tiers (who probably won't pay attnetion but act as if they did) try to do things differently.

I would also point out 'tech changing' is a bit vague. We can talk about innovation (completely new stuff never before seen) which rarely happens on any large scale (but can in limited scales) in the Imperium, or it can mean improvements/variations in existing tech (which does happen, albeit slowly.) That only adds to the confusion really lol.

In general my best understanding of the fluff is - things will be relatively less retarded and more sane at the more local levels (sector and below), while the 'classic' 40K problems the propoganda shit mentions start becoming significant above the sector level. Which generally means its only something you see in really significant wars or when the higher levels get involved in planning a war (like Vraks.) Vraks and TAros both stand as examples of 'centralized planning gone wrong' basically.

Well even if they have a rational reason for a ban, which I doubt in a universe in which at least one major enemy has to be wiped out to the last spore, tunnels full of ammonia nitrate work. This is what WW1 tunnel warfare was all about, dig under and blow up the other side, I’m getting the impression that 40K tunnel warfare is constant chainsword fights.

I know. That was one of the more hilarious bits of stupidity that disgusted me with this whole battle. They could have gone with the 'overwhelmign firepower' approach early on and ended this war years earlier, but they thought they could take it back nice and neat and mathematical. I acutally think Forge world thought this would be hilariously ironic too, rather than just stupid. *shrugs*

Place nuke in tunnel, make explode. Not a very tricky delivery system. Failing that, the bigger an area the enemy shields protect, logically the weaker they should be. Use every heavy weapon you have to blast them down bit by bit.

Shields may or may not extend underground, I dont remember exactly. I do know they have forcefield tech (powerfields, etc.) that can sort of 'reinforce' existing materials (it permeates the matter the field is ingrained into and improves durability.) THey use it in starships, buildings, etc.

I’m pretty certain they have the means given reports of bombardments that wipe out all life on planets. Even if it takes a vast number of ships to do so, you only need such a tiny fraction of that firepower for this.

That assumes they actually understand the reports or care, of course. Again, mixed bag. Not all the Munitorum are stupid, inefficient assholes of course - otherwise the organisation would cease to operate - but enough of it is (or at least enough are in positions of power) that it can cause problems - again politics and infighting.

Well if the Munitorum operates as claimed, they should have a billion formulas for operational losses. If people are just sabotaging the entire operation that’d be a problem, but then it feeds back into the idea that they really should be having some kind of civil war or just completely bypassing those idiots.

They might very well. The Administratum/Munitorum obsess about numbers. They may or may not use it, or catalogue it/stockpile it or even look at it (depends on who and where and such) but they at least collect it.

I’d kind of assume the anti grav would just hold you in the air, and agility would come from some jet engines that can also provide your required electrical power.

That's supposedly how land speeders and their jet packs work, as I recall. Not all do. Tau jump packs IIRC are pure antigrav.

Well, Japan, one of the most incompetent military powers of the 20th century in planning and logistical terms also orchestrated the largest and most rapid imperial expansion ever on a very tight shipping budget. The biggest problems with fighting at long distances are usually in the detail planning for combat loading and unloading, and no opposition on landing evaporates those issues. Just pack crap in any way possible and sort it out on arrival. Remember, lack of standardization means you have more items in your logistical tables. However those tables already have many thousands of items, and the problem then becomes shipping enough of each one to the combat zone. Historically that has been a problem because means of transport are subject to multiple limits, the worst of which is shear weight. Having enormous spacecraft that can’t capsized if loaded wrong and can transport enormous weights goes a long way towards mitigating the problem.

Yeah. Although they can 'capsize' in the warp in a way (if you consider 'getting your matter warped and dissolved and the souls of your crew eaten by demons' as capsizing.)

I actually tend to be cautious about applying 'modern' military examples to 40K because I'm not entirely sure how comparable they are - at least not without some modification. The Modern USA tends to be a force that has no real equal (currently) and hasn't for a long time. Its most recent wars have been against enemies who can't quite match it (at least in important regards.) and where the US has been able to control the important elements (air and sea power, the supply lines, communication and information, etc.) and because the enemy being faced is one that is both predictable and whose capabilities can be known or predicted. In 40K some of that may apply at some poins or antoher, but rarely do they have it as comprehensively as we do in modern life. Not knowing the kind of enemy you face (or not knowing enough) can really pose a problem for logistics and planning nad other areas.

Very long lead times in planning also create problems, because you have more uncertainty but that can be dealt with by sending more of everything. For a niche operation launched in the absence of a wider war, that shouldn’t be a big deal. The writers should really have the Munitorum sending out vital fuses packed under eight billion pairs of cold weather socks to planet desert sun never sets rather then just not doing its job at all. If it simply cannot administer the problem at all then first of all one must ask what on earth they actually exist for, secondly what’s all this supposed living for the job about, and thirdly how have they not already been overthrown.

This is another case where I thnk the 'level' of the Munitorum we're talking about comes into play here. The Segmentum level Munitorum (or the topmost levels on Terra) probably would be where the most incompetence occurs, whereas at sector levels and below it can operate at least semi-competently. Distance at those levels tends to be shorter, communications and warp travel more reliable/predictable, and much more organized. At the sector (or subsector) level we're talking scores or hundreds of worlds to deal with, whereas at the segmentum level you're talking about thousands of sectors.

You can even have cases where close groupings of sectors work together fairly well and without much trouble (That happens with the Jericho Reach Crusade and its logistics, and its implied they routinely are required to pull off resupplying their forces on a daily basis.)

These trench warriors sound like they more or less already are zombies; I thought that was the point. Once you have someone emotionally detached from trench fighting for protracted periods I don’t think they much count as human whatever the DNA might or might not say. Actual humans WILL break in heavy combat. It is purely a matter of time.

More or less. Its more grimdark that way. [/sarcasm]

Though about the only advantage Krieg has as per this book (except 'do as ordered and just need to be reined in.) is that the uniformity of mindset might have some positive benefit on influencing the warp. I'd also guess the Krieg are used for 'political reliability' - they're basically the Munitorum's hatchet men - troops they can rely on and call in if there is problems (whereas other regiments might be considered unreliable because they have the capacity to think independently and a measure of self preservation.)

That said there are some examples of the Kriegers actually acting human (like in Warriors of Ultramar) and even having names, so we might think that the meat-droid krieg just represent one type of force or one segment of the planet's forces they deploy. After all they do have more than just siege regiments, and even Imperial Armour admits that.

(Can you tell I've tried very hard to marginalize this shit? LOL)

Well decentralized can solve many problems, but then you’d think that groups like the Munitorum would have already been massively undermined as each regional military force sets its own requirements and contracts directly with the million whatever planets of factories. Plus this would mean its just unlikely that supplies are flowing across the entire empire.

It could be. Again this is where level comes into play. AT around the sector levels I imagine there are far less problems, and for 90% of the conflicts the Ipmerium faces, they're going to be at the sector level or smaller. And if they are bigger they won't be much bigger. Anything that approaches the scale of a whole Segmentum tends to be much rarer - the larger Tyranid incursions, Chaos Black Crusades, etc.

Well, it sounds like we shouldn’t expect standardization in the first place, but that precisely because the various military forces are independently operating any given campaign wouldn’t have the full mix of weapons and spare parts and ammo thrown in together anyway. Makes life a lot easier, and suggests that indeed supplies should be coming from distributed locations.

This might be a 'level' thing again. Standardization would probably occur (at the very least) at planetary levels and then decrease as we scale up to subsector or sector. And I'd just guess (based on what I've observed from the fluff) it only becomes a serious problem once you approach the segmentum levle. For example at sector/subsector levels Munitourm decrees still seem to enforce some standardization on ammo/powerpack types - or at least have weapons that can be adapted to use powerpack types. They might keep adaptors or conversion kits handy to make such changes (Lasguns are pretty modular for repair and maintenance purposes - plug and play even.) or they may enforce that a certain percentage of powerpacks conform to a standard. This may force tradeoffs (efficiency or capacity for ease of use) but it would be in keeping with their ideas. Their tanks for example can run on most any fuel - but they can be adapted/converted to run on plant matter/wood if they need to.

[Connor MacLeod]

Skimmer, you are still being rational. Thats not going to work.

And I like that he's being rational, TYVM. I'm learning a ton and it he's poking holes in my ideas which can always use holes poked in them to see if they actually work or not.

[Black Admiral]

That sounds like incompetent small unit leadership, as much or more then a failure of planning up high but I have no idea of how big a force you are talking about.

At the risk of enraging Black Admiral/Orsai, it was. I believe it was a Space Marine officer who fucked it up. But really you get incompetence at varying levels, and that stems directly from the politics.

The mission in question was a regiment-level raid/assassination mission, and most of the screwups come from the planning phase. A lot are courtesy of Shadow-Captain Retard Korvydae (like completely failing to use his orbital assets, wildly misdirecting his recon assets, and failing to coordinate with the allied unit he specifically requested), but some are the fault of the Elysian 181st's command (like placing their planet-side aerodrome at the absolute edge of the combat radius of the 181st's gunships. With those gunships being the only things stopping a horde of angry Orks piling up the 181st's collective backside ....).

[Korto]

I can't help thinking that wars like this would make a lot more sense if, at the end of the tale, there was a postscript saying how "this military action has been extensively studied, and taught to trainee officers in academy as examples of how NOT to wage a war. The people in charge of the action, their family, friends and pets, were all charged with treason by incompetence, found guilty, and executed slowly."

[Simon_Jester]

If that, and the standard of quality it implied for Imperial strategists, were the norm, the Imperium would by now have uncontested rule of the galaxy, and the Tyranids would be a modest nuisance.

[Zinegata]

I can't help thinking that wars like this would make a lot more sense if, at the end of the tale, there was a postscript saying how "this military action has been extensively studied, and taught to trainee officers in academy as examples of how NOT to wage a war. The people in charge of the action, their family, friends and pets, were all charged with treason by incompetence, found guilty, and executed slowly."

The postscript pretty much says that the campaign was a mess that left millions of Guardsmen dead, while leaving Vraks in complete and utter ruin - to the point that it was unusable and therefore left abandoned by the Imperium. They don't make the leap of logic and say that "Well, we should have listened to the commanders who said we should just nuke it from orbit!" however.

Still, given that the point of the first Vraks book was apparently to show that "Kriegs are awesome Siege Regiments!" when all it showed is that they are still fighting the war in the 41st Millenium with tactics from 1916... You kinda figure that they have different standards of "competence".

Apparently, employing tactics that actually work (massing artillery against smaller sectors for piecemeal gains, having armor support the initial infantry advance, etc) is not as important as the fact that despite the patent stupidity of their leaders and the insanely poor odds of survival, only one Krieg regiment broke in the first couple of years of the Vraks campaign - thus making the Krieg uber-super Siege soldiers. It's twisted and fucked up logic, but that's the Imperium for you.

[Alkaloid]

That shouldn't be a problem if they have all the factories working full time and you're all telling me they are not in fact involved in a constant mass war. You can't pull resources out of a million worlds to assault one, you've got a serious problem going on. Of course your numbers have to add up, you'd be completely irresponsible to promise people weapons and equipment you know you won't have. That would imply they actually do plan in a realistic fashion. So which is it??

The Imperium is constantly at war, it's just largely unthreatened by it. There may be a hundred planetary wars going on over the whole imperium on any given day, but saying that is actually a threat to the imperium is like saying that the US is about to collapse into a chaotic crime ridden failed state because there are several hundred traffic stops a day, it just isn't going to happen. They sit a production capacity most of the time because that is what forge worlds do, they make stuff, it just isn't always used, some arms or re arms a regiment and the rest is stockpiled on a place like Vraks, for the day when they suddenly need a lot more police because Mexican drug lords have decided to invade texas or similar equivalent.

Think about the scale, an entire planet with a population of about 8 million which produces literally nothing, its only purpose is to expand their one fortress supply dump to hold more stuff. That is administered by fanatic lunatics who don't operate in generalities because to them record keeping is more like a religion than a job, and the most important thing in the world by far. They absolutley have to know exactly how many lasgun powerpacks are in storage, and send exactly the right number to the right theatre, and they get so bogged down in the details of what they do that no one really has a clear look at what is actually going on at all.

As I was saying, given the situation they very much should be able to reasonably predict requirements, and reasonably met them.

Reasonably, yes. Thats not what happened. He claimed he could work out exact numbers, exactly how many tanks would be needed, how many destroyed, how many soldiers killed, how many rounds expended, and the Munitorium, because they are obsessive compulsive loonies think that this is not only possible, but how all wars should be run.

The system is basically predicated on being unable to function at all, which umm, yeah stuff like that tends not to last long. If only because the many enemies would notice it and exploit it and make all humans go squish. Problems like that motivate people to take counter actions.

Yes, the system is designed to almost not function at all. Most of the imperial organisations are built less to work well and more to prevent large scale rebellion, so they are completely separated from each other. Half the Imperial Guard in the galaxy could rebel at once and the rebellion would be over in 6 months because they would be completely unable to resupply, because all the people who know where their supplies are are separate from them, in an entirely different chain of command and being influenced by entirely different people.

So they plainly have weapons which can breach them since I don't recall those battleships being immune to each other. But of course, thus the logic of exploding the nuke underground to undermine them anyway. The shield can't protect you from being tossed in the air and then dropped into a crater unless the fortification is not actually anchored in the ground at all, which would seem to imply a lot more advanced technology then is otherwise being portrayed. Especially if ground warfare isn't being dominated by low altitude aerial battleships. I mean... if you can make bunkers float via anti gravity or magic while waves of soil splash over them, surely you can do the same with a 100 foot ceiling ultra armor gunship.

It was less to say they cant be breached and more size does not necessarily mean weaker. Sure they can penetrate them, but the largest land based weapons they have, titans, seem to roughly scale to low end space ship weapons, so equally powerful shields are going to be a bitch to penetrate. Actual physics stuff, yeah, it should work, why they don't do it, meh?

And I like that he's being rational, TYVM. I'm learning a ton and it he's poking holes in my ideas which can always use holes poked in them to see if they actually work or not.

I'm trying to explain how the Munitorium thinks and works, and he insists on being rational. If he keeps it up I will have a stroke, I can already feel my IQ dropping.

[Sea Skimmer]

On the offensive (when they invade a planet, or decide to conquer or launch a crusade.) things do the 'planning and requirements' thing. The problem isn't so much in that they don't do planning, its the assumptions/criteria/requirements they use in the planning. In the case of Vraks (or Taros) they tend to make some fucking stupid decisions. which shows how the Imperial approach goes wrong. When it doesnt go wrong, it can look something more like the Sabbat Worlds Crusade.

Yes I say it goes well beyond normal stupid to send your siege troops to make massed frontal attacks, instead of engaging in siege tactics. I wonder if the author even understood the difference.

[quoteAgain its a mixed bag. How operations are conducted in the field (After the planning) usually depends on the officer involved. Some are very much 'by the book' - some are more mentally flexible than that. And some are Zapp Brannigan reborn (they may be effective despite this or utter incompetents.)[/quote]
Zapp Brannigan seems like he could beat most 40K forces because they are much dumber than him. Plus his plan to defeat the rampaging killbots was foolproof!

He might be. As I said, one of the things about the Warp is that the entities that exist on it feed off the thought and emotion (and even souls) of living beings in the galaxy - in addition they can (to varying degrees) also influence human behaviour ot make feeding easier. Its what makes Chaos so dangerous: Khorne's influence can lead to more warfare, Slaanesh to greed and excess, Tzeentch to more plotting and betrayal, etc. For humans, the Emperor is the closest thing they have to an actual god - a god of humanity and (in a way) a god of Order (The only one, perhaps.) It logically follows from that that he acts both to actively maintain order as well as shield humanity from the influences of Chaos.

I am reminded of Japans old habit of shutting the god emperor up in his palace if he got too annoying. This is what I’d expect in 40K if it wasn’t written so stupid and inconstantly.

True. Although having other planets does not neccesarily mean they'll like dumping nukes on them. Exaggerated paranoia about the dangers of nukes is hardly new.

That’s really not an excuse, all the more so in an Empire that’s ruled totally by military force. I don’t see the public opinion polls controlling much.

Even more amusing, despite being all grimdark and shit, its been explicitly stated that the Imperium does NOt like blowing the shit out of worlds unless they have to - even their own - because they consider them precious commodities. This is despite the fact they can settle uninhabited/dead worlds, irradiated wastelands (via hives). Hell they have an entire segment of the Imperial population that exists purely aboard starships and orbital facilities (the void born.) They don't really NEED to worry as you say, but the policies remain in place nonetheless.

So it’s just totally retarded because the authors don’t want to write about a nuclear war. Endlessly stupid since if they have energy shields, it’s not like you have the same problem you’d have with a nuclear ground war on earth when all operations just grind to a halt.

It's perfectly in line iwth Imperial (bureacratic) thinking that 'nukes are a no no' under any circumstance, even if (like with Vraks) they end up fucking the planet over in the long term. Hey it works for Earth!

But earth is limited to one planet of limited resources. And while I can’t really hold it against the writers, since planets used to be thought of as somewhat rare… BOY does the galaxy have a lot of planets. So many that it really makes any conception of fighting over resources absurd, if the immense resources of our own solar system weren’t crazy enough.

Again as you say such things (as like what happened with WW1) can happen in 40K. People at the more local scales (sector or subsector) may be aware of things and even make predictions or preparations. But this may become problematic if the upper tiers (who probably won't pay attnetion but act as if they did) try to do things differently.

WW1 saw some fast learning though; both sides learned and neither side had enough resources so an apparent deadlock lasted a while, but in fact the war was waged pretty successfully the whole time in terms of destroying enemy forces. Being unable to defeat an isolated enemy base for 20 years… yeah sure, this is not very comparable.

I would also point out 'tech changing' is a bit vague. We can talk about innovation (completely new stuff never before seen) which rarely happens on any large scale (but can in limited scales) in the Imperium, or it can mean improvements/variations in existing tech (which does happen, albeit slowly.) That only adds to the confusion really lol.

It takes new stuff to change anything. Adjusting the number of bolters on a tank ect… isn’t a real military change. Going from towed anti tank guns to amphibious armored carriers with night vision equipped guided missile systems, ones which that triple effective ranges and can defeat any tank at any range while needing fewer men to operate, something like that is a real change. Basically, if a change does not require a serious rethinking of tactics, something that would make you publish new field manuals if you had them, it doesn’t really matter.

I know. That was one of the more hilarious bits of stupidity that disgusted me with this whole battle. They could have gone with the 'overwhelmign firepower' approach early on and ended this war years earlier, but they thought they could take it back nice and neat and mathematical. I acutally think Forge world thought this would be hilariously ironic too, rather than just stupid. *shrugs*

It’s not going out on a limb then to say the writer had no real clue what a ‘siege’ even is. Shock troops would be a much better term for what they seem to have actually had in mind.

Shields may or may not extend underground, I dont remember exactly. I do know they have forcefield tech (powerfields, etc.) that can sort of 'reinforce' existing materials (it permeates the matter the field is ingrained into and improves durability.) THey use it in starships, buildings, etc.

Well the basic thing being, if the shields and force fields can’t physically hold you in place, then you’d end up being tossed in the air, and then land back in a crater. They might allow you to avoid being smashed by falling back into the crater…, but I am informed that being at the bottom of a crater is NOT good for your field of fire!
It should be really easy to obtain vast amounts of ammonium nitrate style explosives, and with no need to deal with people who just control weapons supplies. Fairly small fertilizer plants can make ~200,000 tons a year at 250 dollars a ton. You also need hydrocarbon fuel and a vat for mixing… and basically nothing else except booster charges and fuses to set it all off.

That assumes they actually understand the reports or care, of course. Again, mixed bag. Not all the Munitorum are stupid, inefficient assholes of course - otherwise the organisation would cease to operate - but enough of it is (or at least enough are in positions of power) that it can cause problems - again politics and infighting.

You would think any of the ones bothering to go out of the way to arrange for some pet invasion project would be the smarter ones. If all they care about is balancing numbers then they should hate wars, they’ll do nothing but make the job more difficult.

That's supposedly how land speeders and their jet packs work, as I recall. Not all do. Tau jump packs IIRC are pure antigrav.

Yes well, if its just for jumping you don’t need propulsion. For 30,000 ton aerial pocket battleship you do.

Yeah. Although they can 'capsize' in the warp in a way (if you consider 'getting your matter warped and dissolved and the souls of your crew eaten by demons' as capsizing.)

Not unless it was caused by cargo shifting or lack of metacentric height

I actually tend to be cautious about applying 'modern' military examples to 40K because I'm not entirely sure how comparable they are - at least not without some modification. The Modern USA tends to be a force that has no real equal (currently) and hasn't for a long time. Its most recent wars have been against enemies who can't quite match it (at least in important regards.) and where the US has been able to control the important elements (air and sea power, the supply lines, communication and information, etc.) and because the enemy being faced is one that is both predictable and whose capabilities can be known or predicted. In 40K some of that may apply at some poins or antoher, but rarely do they have it as comprehensively as we do in modern life. Not knowing the kind of enemy you face (or not knowing enough) can really pose a problem for logistics and planning nad other areas.

Well, in the story in question everything seems entirely predictable. For fighting other powers, the jist of the planning situation would remain the same for all cases. I haven’t seen anything out of 40K so far that would make me think it would be different. Specific point details would be different, but the overall concepts are not. Clearly you won’t combat load artillery ammunition and gas masks the same way, but doing one or the other ect… it doesn’t flip your world around like a shift from horse drawn wagons to nuclear powered steam ships might or actually having lots of large scale combat take place in chaos space or some other dimension with different physics. In large part it seems like they have a WW2 kind of combat situation, just with more like 1870 levels of shipping reliability. So its like launching a WW2 operation with the U-boats being highly active, as in say, Torch.

More or less. Its more grimdark that way. [/sarcasm]

Maybe if they are evolved to only drink mud made out of pulverized human flesh.

Though about the only advantage Krieg has as per this book (except 'do as ordered and just need to be reined in.) is that the uniformity of mindset might have some positive benefit on influencing the warp. I'd also guess the Krieg are used for 'political reliability' - they're basically the Munitorum's hatchet men - troops they can rely on and call in if there is problems (whereas other regiments might be considered unreliable because they have the capacity to think independently and a measure of self preservation.)

Rather dumb idea then to expend then on an isolated enemy target in human waves. Generally this would be exactly the kind of situation you can and would send unreliable troops to fight on, because if they fail you can’t actually lose because the enemy can’t do more than defend his own position, and they can at least weaken the enemy.

It could be. Again this is where level comes into play. AT around the sector levels I imagine there are far less problems, and for 90% of the conflicts the Ipmerium faces, they're going to be at the sector level or smaller. And if they are bigger they won't be much bigger. Anything that approaches the scale of a whole Segmentum tends to be much rarer - the larger Tyranid incursions, Chaos Black Crusades, etc.

Likely the situation is also better at sectors near the edge of the empire then. Because they’ll just be overrun every time if they don’t even somehow know the location of supplies and have to wait to even talk to anybody.

This might be a 'level' thing again. Standardization would probably occur (at the very least) at planetary levels and then decrease as we scale up to subsector or sector. And I'd just guess (based on what I've observed from the fluff) it only becomes a serious problem once you approach the segmentum levle. For example at sector/subsector levels Munitourm decrees still seem to enforce some standardization on ammo/powerpack types - or at least have weapons that can be adapted to use powerpack types. They might keep adaptors or conversion kits handy to make such changes (Lasguns are pretty modular for repair and maintenance purposes - plug and play even.) or they may enforce that a certain percentage of powerpacks conform to a standard. This may force tradeoffs (efficiency or capacity for ease of use) but it would be in keeping with their ideas. Their tanks for example can run on most any fuel - but they can be adapted/converted to run on plant matter/wood if they need to.

Well it would be very straightforward to make an M1 Abrams run on a very large pot of woodchips if you wanted; I AM NOT IMPRESSED. But yeah, generally standardization matters the smaller scale you go, and the smaller capacity your transportation system. It’s also a factor in how expensive things are, standardized engines for example are a high priority because complete replacement engines and the vast range of parts in each one are a big deal to stock and transport.

[Simon_Jester]

I am reminded of Japans old habit of shutting the god emperor up in his palace if he got too annoying. This is what I’d expect in 40K if it wasn’t written so stupid and inconstantly.

When the Emperor was healthy and active and unambiguously alive, he was actually a very good strategist and technologist, along with being psychic enough to turn you inside out with his mind. So that wouldn't have worked back in the day.

Today, it's exactly what they do, for practical purposes. Almost no one gets into the Palace, and the Emperor seldom if ever communicates with anyone. Any interaction he has with anyone is through very indirect psychic means that are physically impossible to block.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yes I say it goes well beyond normal stupid to send your siege troops to make massed frontal attacks, instead of engaging in siege tactics. I wonder if the author even understood the difference.

I doubt it. I'm sure the first idea was 'have trenches, have people rushing trenches - SCORE!'

It's even kinda silly because in a good many other novels (Rebel Winter, Warriors of Ultramar, Fifteen hours) where the trench warfare is the Imperium letting their enemies rush them (and mowing them down.)

That’s really not an excuse, all the more so in an Empire that’s ruled totally by military force. I don’t see the public opinion polls controlling much.

Politics is what really rules the Imperium, that and the perceptions of power by the various organziations. Military force is just one tool of many in that respect. Even the AdMech and Inquisition (supposedly unlimited in power) can be balked by politics (or just mutual self interest.)

And it isn't so much 'public opinion' so much as what the orgnaization/rules say. If some adminstratum twit decides he doesn't want cities nuked because it would be (in his opinion) too costly to replace him and he's in a position to make that stick, that will stick.

So it’s just totally retarded because the authors don’t want to write about a nuclear war. Endlessly stupid since if they have energy shields, it’s not like you have the same problem you’d have with a nuclear ground war on earth when all operations just grind to a halt.

They write about nuclear wars, planetary devastation, etc. quite a bit. In some writing the Imperium gets hamstrung to 'compensate' for their sheer size - a good many of the Imperial armour battles are proof of this.

Or they may do it for purposes of theme (again in this case, they want trench warfare, so by damn they will HAVE trench warfare.)

Neither answer helps in an in-universe sense, however.

But earth is limited to one planet of limited resources. And while I can’t really hold it against the writers, since planets used to be thought of as somewhat rare… BOY does the galaxy have a lot of planets. So many that it really makes any conception of fighting over resources absurd, if the immense resources of our own solar system weren’t crazy enough.

The Administratum/munitorum are the kind of organzation that can begrudge even assigning an individual trooper 'replacement' lasguns for valid reasons. They begrudge having their neat little numbers and ledgers messed up and having reality imposed on the ordered nature of their little universes. Some of them will even go so far as to make rules that preserve their status quo rather than make things easier for the troops (or benefit the procuerers and suppliers, or whatever.) It's perfectly in line with their thinking to complain about waste for the simple sake it is waste, no matter whether or not resources are plentiful enough (even with planets) that the losses matter.

As I explained elsewhere, politics is the main constraint on this, largely in interacting with other organizations whose goals may run contrary to the Administratum/Munitorum.

WW1 saw some fast learning though; both sides learned and neither side had enough resources so an apparent deadlock lasted a while, but in fact the war was waged pretty successfully the whole time in terms of destroying enemy forces. Being unable to defeat an isolated enemy base for 20 years… yeah sure, this is not very comparable.

Yes, it is. But they don't fight every enemy exactly in this manner, or even in remotely the same ways. That's kinda the point. There are cases where shit like this happens, and then there are cases where they don't so anything like this. Shared universe, different authors, and all that.

It takes new stuff to change anything. Adjusting the number of bolters on a tank ect… isn’t a real military change.

Going from towed anti tank guns to amphibious armored carriers with night vision equipped guided missile systems, ones which that triple effective ranges and can defeat any tank at any range while needing fewer men to operate, something like that is a real change. Basically, if a change does not require a serious rethinking of tactics, something that would make you publish new field manuals if you had them, it doesn’t really matter.

I was thinking along the lines of changing the kind of armor setups the tanks use (different materials, or perhaps materials designed more to face off against an enemy using energy weapons more than projectiles.) Or maybe developing new/differnet kinds of ammo to face off against an enemy. Or altering/adjusting the gunnery/sensor systems on the vehicle for a new purpose. Or reconfiguring/adapting a pre-existing design with a new hardware/weapons/armour mix to fill a needed role. Stuff like that does happen. It creates problems because there are conservative factions to balance out/oppose the 'radical' factions who actually like doing this sort of thing, but it can happen.

It’s not going out on a limb then to say the writer had no real clue what a ‘siege’ even is. Shock troops would be a much better term for what they seem to have actually had in mind.

Then they must not have an idea of what shock troopers are. Because thats what Cadians supposedly are, and they don't fight this way. (In fact Cadians may be closest to what we can call a 'standard' for the Imperial Guard.)

It should be really easy to obtain vast amounts of ammonium nitrate style explosives, and with no need to deal with people who just control weapons supplies. Fairly small fertilizer plants can make ~200,000 tons a year at 250 dollars a ton. You also need hydrocarbon fuel and a vat for mixing… and basically nothing else except booster charges and fuses to set it all off.

Might depend on the world. Hive Worlds might not have much of that kind of stuff ( at leeast not readily available)
But then again I can also think of one cases where prison inmates were able to macguyver up what looked like a homemade Teller-Ulam nuclear device from scavenged Imperial tech so, it could be as you say. You can't rule uot stupidity as a motive for things in 40K (or STar Wars for that matter.)

You would think any of the ones bothering to go out of the way to arrange for some pet invasion project would be the smarter ones. If all they care about is balancing numbers then they should hate wars, they’ll do nothing but make the job more difficult.

They may hate wars for the messes they represent, but they like preparing for the,. The Munitorum just provide the supplies and make the preparations, while the Guard and Navy conduct the wars - although the Munitorum IIRC provides officers beyond a certain level in some cases. This is where the politicking comes in and it gets even more complex with the AdMech, Ecclesiarchy, Astartes, etc. come in. If it was just the Guard and/or Navy in isolation, or just the Munitorum in isolation it might be a different story.

Yes well, if its just for jumping you don’t need propulsion. For 30,000 ton aerial pocket battleship you do.

I think they had something like that at least in the Heresy Era. Called it a Sky Fortress. Had a quasi-nuclear reactor and shields and everything. Damn thing blew up and made a miles-wide crater when it got shot down and they crashed it into the enemy.

Bear in mind something like that at Vraks might have drawn the fire of Titans, superheavy tanks armed with heavy energy weapons, or the fortresses defence lasers/macrocannon emplacements. Then again I think we're talking something that qualifies as Ordinatus so it would probably be under AdMech control, and they're notoriously leery about employing shit like that if they can build it.

Hell now that I think about it the novel Helsreach had one such an Ordinatus platform - massive antigrav-platform that propelled some scaled down starship mass driver or something. That would put it in 'lost tech' territory (either they can't make it, or they can't maintain it, or there's something in the design or operation of such that makes it dangerous. In the novel they were pretty damn pissed off at the Space Marines breaking in and trying to use the damn thing.)

Re: Drinking humans - they actually do recycle human bodies on some worlds as a means of sustenance for the population. corpse starch I think they call it. How they make it is another story.

Rather dumb idea then to expend then on an isolated enemy target in human waves. Generally this would be exactly the kind of situation you can and would send unreliable troops to fight on, because if they fail you can’t actually lose because the enemy can’t do more than defend his own position, and they can at least weaken the enemy.

That is (I think) what the Penal legions are for if they have them. or your hive ganger conscripts. Or the feral/feudal world regiments they might raise.

Of course there's still the fact the Vraks Kriegers may not be the sole kind of trooper they employ, and they may not all be Meat Droids (dramatically different depictions exist.) Orsai/Black admiral can probably describe the 'pre -Vraks' Krieg better than I can, mainly because I havne't gotten to all those sources yet.

Likely the situation is also better at sectors near the edge of the empire then. Because they’ll just be overrun every time if they don’t even somehow know the location of supplies and have to wait to even talk to anybody.

Probably. The edges tend to be more 'frontier' like than the more centralized regions (EG Closer to Terra.) but that can have downsides too (less technologically advanced, less important politically, etc.) And the scattered nature of the Imperium can mean that even sectors deeper in the Imperium might be relatively isolated from each other (due to how warp routes are arranged, warp 'weather' conditions, how well explored/settled the region is, etc.)

Well it would be very straightforward to make an M1 Abrams run on a very large pot of woodchips if you wanted; I AM NOT IMPRESSED.

That's the first time I've heard of that. How would one go about doing that? Can one improve Abrams fuel efficiency (say doubling or tripling the operational range of the tank before refuelling?)

But yeah, generally standardization matters the smaller scale you go, and the smaller capacity your transportation system. It’s also a factor in how expensive things are, standardized engines for example are a high priority because complete replacement engines and the vast range of parts in each one are a big deal to stock and transport.

Tanks and other armoured vehicles might be more standardized than infantry gear due to their relative rarity. And if not its probably designed to be adaptable to local conditions (swapping out the engine or other systems as needed.) Sometimes (or in some ways, or some regiments/planets) they standardize, and in some cases they can differ from regiment to regiment (or at least region to region, or war to war, or osmething.)

It could simply be a matter of that standardized stuff is simply a low quality 'baseline' they achieve so that all infantry, armour, artillery, etc. forces can operate at least at some minimal level of capability, but higher levels of effectiveness (higher performance engines, weapons, etc. ) require the right connections and politics to pull off. OR a damn big emergency (During the Gothic war the Admech got pretty liberal in making changes and upgrades to ships and vehicles to improve their fighting capabilities, for example.)

[Sea Skimmer]

Politics is what really rules the Imperium, that and the perceptions of power by the various organziations. Military force is just one tool of many in that respect. Even the AdMech and Inquisition (supposedly unlimited in power) can be balked by politics (or just mutual self interest.)

And it isn't so much 'public opinion' so much as what the orgnaization/rules say. If some adminstratum twit decides he doesn't want cities nuked because it would be (in his opinion) too costly to replace him and he's in a position to make that stick, that will stick.

Military command and politics always merge near the top, that’s why people like Eisenhower end up so revered for doing a good job of it. But, by the same token failure can have a highly destabilizing effect, and surely would when you have a motivation of multiple galactic scale threats to deal with, all the time.

They write about nuclear wars, planetary devastation, etc. quite a bit. In some writing the Imperium gets hamstrung to 'compensate' for their sheer size - a good many of the Imperial armour battles are proof of this.

Or they may do it for purposes of theme (again in this case, they want trench warfare, so by damn they will HAVE trench warfare.)

Neither answer helps in an in-universe sense, however.

But do they actually write about nuclear warfare taking place on the ground, or do places just get blown up?

The Administratum/munitorum are the kind of organzation that can begrudge even assigning an individual trooper 'replacement' lasguns for valid reasons. They begrudge having their neat little numbers and ledgers messed up and having reality imposed on the ordered nature of their little universes. Some of them will even go so far as to make rules that preserve their status quo rather than make things easier for the troops (or benefit the procuerers and suppliers, or whatever.) It's perfectly in line with their thinking to complain about waste for the simple sake it is waste, no matter whether or not resources are plentiful enough (even with planets) that the losses matter.

See, stuff like that is what makes you loose wars if you actually stuck with it, and then have a military coup round all those people up and execute them to a standing ovation. Incompetence thrives on peace, because nothing exposes it, but even a highly incompetent military force can overthrow its government just fine.

Yes, it is. But they don't fight every enemy exactly in this manner, or even in remotely the same ways. That's kinda the point. There are cases where shit like this happens, and then there are cases where they don't so anything like this. Shared universe, different authors, and all that.

Yeah, feels like they lack anyone managing the canon department. Star Wars actually has that, and still has endless problems, though it feels like less of them recently.

I was thinking along the lines of changing the kind of armor setups the tanks use (different materials, or perhaps materials designed more to face off against an enemy using energy weapons more than projectiles.)

Only relevant if it significantly changes tactical employment of the tank, which is unlikely given the diversity of enemy threat weapons.

Or maybe developing new/differnet kinds of ammo to face off against an enemy. Or altering/adjusting the gunnery/sensor systems on the vehicle for a new purpose.

Same as above, you already expect troops to employ a range of ammunition and sensors. New ammo like a indirect fire gun launched missile could be a change that you take note of, turning the tank into this remote weapon system it was not before. On the other hand a radical change in direct fire ammunition may actually change nothing in how you fight, you just make the enemy die better.

Or reconfiguring/adapting a pre-existing design with a new hardware/weapons/armour mix to fill a needed role. Stuff like that does happen. It creates problems because there are conservative factions to balance out/oppose the 'radical' factions who actually like doing this sort of thing, but it can happen.

I’d expect it to happen, but if it creates serious supply and planning problems is hardly a given.

Then they must not have an idea of what shock troopers are. Because thats what Cadians supposedly are, and they don't fight this way. (In fact Cadians may be closest to what we can call a 'standard' for the Imperial Guard.)

Figures; though shock troops is a somewhat vague category anyway, and only the USSR actually called anyone that formally past WW2 that I can think of. Shock Tank Army is what everything should be. But anyway siege troops, that kind of impels something fairly specific, if it is to make any sense. Some military designations do just become obsolete but persist for reasons of prestige, like British light infantry battalions. They used to be very special things, actually significantly differently equipped and employed; today the only difference is the march faster on parade then normal troops. Amusingly this actually causes problems when they take part in military parades. Proper siege troops should have stuff like lots of obsolete artillery that’s not that mobile but can be fired freely to blast enemy positions.

Might depend on the world. Hive Worlds might not have much of that kind of stuff ( at leeast not readily available)

Well the main idea was it would come from the civilian market, and 20 years is more then long enough to place an order. If only 1,000 planets in the empire made as much nitrogen fertilizer as earth you’d only have a 100 billion tons supply to draw on, earth making a little over 100 million tons a year right now.

But then again I can also think of one cases where prison inmates were able to macguyver up what looked like a homemade Teller-Ulam nuclear device from scavenged Imperial tech so, it could be as you say. You can't rule uot stupidity as a motive for things in 40K (or STar Wars for that matter.)

Twenty years is a long time to think about what’s going wrong and become slightly less retarded. I mean you are talking about the possibility that in this time span a person could be promoted from second lieutenant to major general by normal channels. A complete military career accomplished in this campaign. Never mind the rapid promotion massive battlefield losses create.

They may hate wars for the messes they represent, but they like preparing for the,. The Munitorum just provide the supplies and make the preparations, while the Guard and Navy conduct the wars - although the Munitorum IIRC provides officers beyond a certain level in some cases. This is where the politicking comes in and it gets even more complex with the AdMech, Ecclesiarchy, Astartes, etc. come in. If it was just the Guard and/or Navy in isolation, or just the Munitorum in isolation it might be a different story.

The end result would probably be lots and lots of backchannel procurement, all the more so since with the Empire not being solidly ruled from the top down, you’re going to have a lot of the economy out of government control anyway.

I think they had something like that at least in the Heresy Era. Called it a Sky Fortress. Had a quasi-nuclear reactor and shields and everything. Damn thing blew up and made a miles-wide crater when it got shot down and they crashed it into the enemy.

Good, that’s what should be happening all the time. It fits perfectly with other elements of 40K too, like people want Space Marine wank? Well the chainsowards would work a lot better if you fast roped down from a flying battleship directly onto the roofs of enemy tanks than if you tried to charge across open fields.

Bear in mind something like that at Vraks might have drawn the fire of Titans, superheavy tanks armed with heavy energy weapons, or the fortresses defence lasers/macrocannon emplacements. Then again I think we're talking something that qualifies as Ordinatus so it would probably be under AdMech control, and they're notoriously leery about employing shit like that if they can build it.

Well if you face fire from heavy weapons like that, clearly any ground assault should be doomed. That’s why logically, install siege batteries in prepared positions, use flying warships as heavy support to keep the enemy off balance while steadily reducing his firepower, you can use terrain masking like crazy for this, and slowly creep forward your shield wall while pounding tiny sections of enemy line into utter oblivion.

Re: Drinking humans - they actually do recycle human bodies on some worlds as a means of sustenance for the population. corpse starch I think they call it. How they make it is another story.

Recycling doesn’t count, what is this some eco friendly hippy shit now. Raw human milkshakes three meals a day for two months ought to test the resilience of those super troopers.

That is (I think) what the Penal legions are for if they have them. or your hive ganger conscripts. Or the feral/feudal world regiments they might raise.

Of course there's still the fact the Vraks Kriegers may not be the sole kind of trooper they employ, and they may not all be Meat Droids (dramatically different depictions exist.) Orsai/Black admiral can probably describe the 'pre -Vraks' Krieg better than I can, mainly because I havne't gotten to all those sources yet.

Moral and élan sure would be awesome if they employ meat droids alongside normal troops.

That's the first time I've heard of that. How would one go about doing that?

Works by making wood gas. Green woodchips in a pot are heated externally, boiling off methane which is piped to the engine. When the woodchips dry out and give no more gas you use them to fuel the fire under the boiler. This was commonly used to power civilian vehicles in WW2. You’re just going to need a damn lot of woodchips for a tank.

Can one improve Abrams fuel efficiency (say doubling or tripling the operational range of the tank before refuelling?)

Fuel economy on the Abrams is actually very good as long as it’s moving at a decent speed, this was one of the reasons to use the turbine in the first place as the US Army expected highly mobile battles. The idle fuel economy will always suck with a turbine, which is why the proper solution is an APU under armor, but actually fielding that has moved as a glacier pace. A turbine not from the 1970s could significantly improve fuel economy, but it isn’t going to double it with any existing technology.

Tanks and other armoured vehicles might be more standardized than infantry gear due to their relative rarity. And if not its probably designed to be adaptable to local conditions (swapping out the engine or other systems as needed.) Sometimes (or in some ways, or some regiments/planets) they standardize, and in some cases they can differ from regiment to regiment (or at least region to region, or war to war, or osmething.)

I can’t see why you’d ever need to swap out the engine, even on a world with no air you could just add bottled O2 assuming combustion power, but in any case some fairly high levels of diversity can and have been supported in war, its just not optimal.

It could simply be a matter of that standardized stuff is simply a low quality 'baseline' they achieve so that all infantry, armour, artillery, etc. forces can operate at least at some minimal level of capability, but higher levels of effectiveness (higher performance engines, weapons, etc. ) require the right connections and politics to pull off. OR a damn big emergency (During the Gothic war the Admech got pretty liberal in making changes and upgrades to ships and vehicles to improve their fighting capabilities, for example.)

With such a huge empire one would expect deliberate Soviet style categories of readiness and equipment for formations, even if formations are nominally the same like ‘tank division’. Each formation need not have the same equipment as another either, but this is all manageable as long as you can keep the gross economic impact to a sustainable level. The Soviets didn’t, but then the Soviets had utterly comical levels of armament. Can’t say I’ve ever seen anything in sci fi that would match the shear integrated scale and relative firepower of a Soviet Front… of which they were setup to form around twenty, but maybe it exists somewhere. Ensuring it does is why I've started working on my own sci fi fantasy stuff. I mean god

[Sea Skimmer]

The Imperium is constantly at war, it's just largely unthreatened by it. There may be a hundred planetary wars going on over the whole imperium on any given day, but saying that is actually a threat to the imperium is like saying that the US is about to collapse into a chaotic crime ridden failed state because there are several hundred traffic stops a day, it just isn't going to happen. They sit a production capacity most of the time because that is what forge worlds do, they make stuff, it just isn't always used, some arms or re arms a regiment and the rest is stockpiled on a place like Vraks, for the day when they suddenly need a lot more police because Mexican drug lords have decided to invade texas or similar equivalent.

Those would be called warstocks; but if warstocks are actively expanding in an Empire of this scale, well, supplying one operation should just be so trivial. Supply it will stuff that fell on the floor of the factory level trivial. The Munitorium can be as crazy as it wants, but this also requires that all the field commanders be just as crazy all the way to the top... which just really doesn't work. They'd be incapable of fighting.

Think about the scale, an entire planet with a population of about 8 million which produces literally nothing, its only purpose is to expand their one fortress supply dump to hold more stuff. That is administered by fanatic lunatics who don't operate in generalities because to them record keeping is more like a religion than a job, and the most important thing in the world by far. They absolutley have to know exactly how many lasgun powerpacks are in storage, and send exactly the right number to the right theatre, and they get so bogged down in the details of what they do that no one really has a clear look at what is actually going on at all.

Seems likely that people would just start sending them endless false data to keep them busy, while making off with the super space freighters full of ammunition and ponchos.

Reasonably, yes. Thats not what happened. He claimed he could work out exact numbers, exactly how many tanks would be needed, how many destroyed, how many soldiers killed, how many rounds expended, and the Munitorium, because they are obsessive compulsive loonies think that this is not only possible, but how all wars should be run.

Well, you DO produce exact numbers when you do that kind of thing. Nobody will ever manage to actually ship exactly what was called for, but the numbers should be specific. In the world wars you had the further issue that resources were in fact finite, at least for ammo you could fire it faster then it could ever be produced, so real management was required to make sure everyone got enough in vital areas, while minor theaters had to make do. Here, that's a complete non issue.

Yes, the system is designed to almost not function at all. Most of the imperial organisations are built less to work well and more to prevent large scale rebellion, so they are completely separated from each other. Half the Imperial Guard in the galaxy could rebel at once and the rebellion would be over in 6 months because they would be completely unable to resupply, because all the people who know where their supplies are are separate from them, in an entirely different chain of command and being influenced by entirely different people.

Seems like they are itching to be wiped out.

It was less to say they cant be breached and more size does not necessarily mean weaker. Sure they can penetrate them, but the largest land based weapons they have, titans, seem to roughly scale to low end space ship weapons, so equally powerful shields are going to be a bitch to penetrate. Actual physics stuff, yeah, it should work, why they don't do it, meh?

Titan's being about the worst idea for a gun platform ever... they really should have some siege guns in the siege bombardment korps of similar power that just drop on the ground. But being 40K, maybe they have some four man chainswords to open up fortress walls?

I'm trying to explain how the Munitorium thinks and works, and he insists on being rational. If he keeps it up I will have a stroke, I can already feel my IQ dropping.

I consider it a victory to cause brain damage. Its a society built on humans fundamentally, rationality applies. Once logic gets loose you can't break out of it.

[Zinegata]

Yes I say it goes well beyond normal stupid to send your siege troops to make massed frontal attacks, instead of engaging in siege tactics. I wonder if the author even understood the difference.

Quite clearly not. Almost every successful assault in the first book of the Vraks campaign was due to luck (i.e. artillery scoring direct hits on a large emplacement, which was then rushed by the infantry) or through unorthodox tactics that still boiled down to massed frontal assaults (i.e. infiltrating a whole regiment into No-Man's land in the middle of the night, having no artillery bombardment, then a bayonet charge at first light that took the defenders by surprise).

It's honestly no different from the insane frontal assaults you see elsewhere in 40K lore. You've got Captain Chenkov who essentially order millions of Guardsmen to march straight into the waiting claws of the Tyranids... and even Dan Abnett manages to portray a totally insane human wave assault in Armour of Contempt that proved pointless since it was the Titans that actually destroyed the relevant fortress fortifications anyway.

[Sea Skimmer]

So basically all the successful attacks should have been stopped by razor wire and landmines alone if this was a proper fortress. Wonderful. You people read this stuff why? Enjoying the fluff of the universe I can understand, but this just sounds worse and worse.

[Simon_Jester]

Don't look at me, the stuff I bother to read is the ones where the opposition consists of people who are explicitly insane, being fought by protagonists who are basically themselves sane. The Imperial Armour books seem to be at the shallow end of the pool.

Titan's being about the worst idea for a gun platform ever... they really should have some siege guns in the siege bombardment korps of similar power that just drop on the ground. But being 40K, maybe they have some four man chainswords to open up fortress walls?

The largest-caliber artillery in the 40k guard does seem to approach Titan-scale weapons, unless I'm much mistaken. Although at some point you run into problems like "ballistic artillery powerful enough to do this would launch its shells into planetary orbit and/or be a comically easy target for enemy point defense" and "direct fire weapons powerful enough to do this will be so big and obvious as targets that the port's defenses will blow them up with their own artillery."

Remember the Paris Gun, and all the crap they had to go through to keep the French from just locating the thing and destroying it with conventional counterbattery fire? So there's an incentive to make the gun platforms somewhat mobile and protected against at least normal antitank weapons, which is where you get the Guard's superheavy armored units from.

[Black Admiral]

So basically all the successful attacks should have been stopped by razor wire and landmines alone if this was a proper fortress. Wonderful. You people read this stuff why? Enjoying the fluff of the universe I can understand, but this just sounds worse and worse.

Personally? I read the Imperial Armour books to laugh my head off at how dumb they get (which I think the crowning moment of is the anti-logic employed by Shadow-Captain Muppet in IA8 for not bombing the shit out of an Ork army at its staging ground using his strike cruiser; it is, literally, that he's going to wait for them to disperse and engage his allies before calling in fire from the Aeruginosus - and still misses when he finally gets around to it).

[Sea Skimmer]

]The largest-caliber artillery in the 40k guard does seem to approach Titan-scale weapons, unless I'm much mistaken. Although at some point you run into problems like "ballistic artillery powerful enough to do this would launch its shells into planetary orbit and/or be a comically easy target for enemy point defense" and "direct fire weapons powerful enough to do this will be so big and obvious as targets that the port's defenses will blow them up with their own artillery."

Remember the Paris Gun, and all the crap they had to go through to keep the French from just locating the thing and destroying it with conventional counterbattery fire? So there's an incentive to make the gun platforms somewhat mobile and protected against at least normal antitank weapons, which is where you get the Guard's superheavy armored units from.

Its a siege and you have energy shields, this should not be a killer problem concern. The whole point of siege troops should be that they prepare siege batteries, which can now be protected by shields instead of heaps of earth. With such absurd time frames being considered, you could also get pretty elaborate with concrete works, as the Germans did anyway for the Paris gun, and do stuff like building the battery on the reverse slope of a hill, then plow an embrasure through the hill crest when you are ready to open fire. You can find examples of sieges in which the siege batteries were silenced by counter fire, the first attempt to breach Sevastopol in the Crimean War for example, but shields would make life just vastly easier.

[PainRack]

I'm sorry,but isn't the answer to Skimmer question the warp?Apoc already tells us that the generals cannot predict what forces and supplies will arrive at a theatre due to the vagaries of the warp. Ships could arrive early,or up to decades late. Hell,the Nid codex showed us a crusade force appearing decades after the Damocles gulf crusade had ended.

This is presumably counterweighed by creating Fortress or Vrak Armoury worlds,where the tithes of men and supplies are directed and reconstitued but astrocommunications and ship combine to make this a mess. When communications can be routinely disrupted,has an uncertain time tranmissions,planning goes out the window. Even at subsector levels.

[PainRack]

At the risk of enraging Black Admiral/Orsai, it was. I believe it was a Space Marine officer who fucked it up. But really you get incompetence at varying levels, and that stems directly from the politics.

The mission in question was a regiment-level raid/assassination mission, and most of the screwups come from the planning phase. A lot are courtesy of Shadow-Captain Retard Korvydae (like completely failing to use his orbital assets, wildly misdirecting his recon assets, and failing to coordinate with the allied unit he specifically requested), but some are the fault of the Elysian 181st's command (like placing their planet-side aerodrome at the absolute edge of the combat radius of the 181st's gunships. With those gunships being the only things stopping a horde of angry Orks piling up the 181st's collective backside ....).[/quote]
Except that placing it so far helped provide perimeter security. Its the last place the Orks attacked anyway.The raid is a perfect exanple of not focusing on the objective and non-cooperation. They realised their primary objective,but diddly about with dispersing their forces and secondary targets/goals. Their goals were also flawed in pirority.What was mode important?The gargant or the Mek? Why were there multiple attacks on sec targets like the fuel dumps?It actually perfectly mirrowed Midway. Like the Japs,they had multiple targets and dispersed forces to meet them,ensuring that they couldnt cooperate. Even the end was similar,albeit more foolish. The Raven Guards were still mission fixated and offensive,like the Horyu in launching her last carrier strike.

[Zinegata]

So basically all the successful attacks should have been stopped by razor wire and landmines alone if this was a proper fortress. Wonderful. You people read this stuff why? Enjoying the fluff of the universe I can understand, but this just sounds worse and worse.

Yep. Also, I'm just reporting the news dude. I can't unread what I've already read :p.

The actual reason why I read Siege of Vraks was to look for more material on the Kriegers, as I was planning to write some stuff featuring them. I was pretty disappointed to see how they turned out to be complete idiots tactics-wise and their reputation stemmed entirely from their unbreakable nature (again, despite all the slaughter, only one regiment out of dozens ever broke) and not their actual competence in siege or trench warfare.

The Black Library novels (particularly by Dan Abnett) generally manage to avoid this trope somewhat however. Albeit Dan also has the bad habit of making everything hinge on one squad of heroes turning the whole tide of battle for an entire front (like in the first three Gaunt books, after which it only happens every other book).

[Simon_Jester]

Its a siege and you have energy shields, this should not be a killer problem concern. The whole point of siege troops should be that they prepare siege batteries, which can now be protected by shields instead of heaps of earth...

Okay, yes- this culminates in gigantic artillery duels between Titan-scale artillery protected by shielded lines of circumvallation and Titan-scale defensive weapons located inside the fortress. Since the guys on the outside have a galaxy and the guys on the inside have munitions dumps only... yeah.

I'm sorry,but isn't the answer to Skimmer question the warp?Apoc already tells us that the generals cannot predict what forces and supplies will arrive at a theatre due to the vagaries of the warp. Ships could arrive early,or up to decades late. Hell,the Nid codex showed us a crusade force appearing decades after the Damocles gulf crusade had ended.

So send too much stuff. This is really no different from, say, planning Operation Torch in light of the fact that some unpredictable percentage of your ships are going to get sunk by U-boats. Put in a margin of error, make sure that no single irreplaceable or indispensible cargo gets loaded all onto one ship or convoy, and go to town.

This is presumably counterweighed by creating Fortress or Vrak Armoury worlds,where the tithes of men and supplies are directed and reconstitued but astrocommunications and ship combine to make this a mess. When communications can be routinely disrupted,has an uncertain time tranmissions,planning goes out the window. Even at subsector levels.

Yes, but the Munitorium really ought to be able to plan to just send five convoys each carrying a third of enough men and materiel to get the job done instead of three. If four or five arrive safely, the excess can be rerouted to another war zone. Some time is wasted, but it beats sitting on your asses or taking heavy casualties because the stuff you need didn't show up or you made a stupid plan so that you could do without it.

[PainRack]

The Munitorim does do that. Its stayed explictly that IG doctrine relies on this spamming of forces to get a well balanced force and supplies. You under the impression that astrocommunications is easy though. Outside of the novels,its not.

[Alkaloid]

Those would be called warstocks; but if warstocks are actively expanding in an Empire of this scale, well, supplying one operation should just be so trivial. Supply it will stuff that fell on the floor of the factory level trivial. The Munitorium can be as crazy as it wants, but this also requires that all the field commanders be just as crazy all the way to the top... which just really doesn't work. They'd be incapable of fighting.

It is trivial. It just messes up all the calculations that have already been done, and changes the predictions of what will have been put into reserve by when, so the Munitorium are as unaccommodating with moving anything as they can possibly be. Good officers exist, but are dwarfed in influence by the Administratum and the Munitorium so they are left stuck trying to game the system as best they can.

Seems likely that people would just start sending them endless false data to keep them busy, while making off with the super space freighters full of ammunition and ponchos.

How, the Munitorium administers all the supply depots, so the local Munitorium are going to know its happening, and it wouldn't do to have the Guard humping the Munitorium at any level, so they are going to report it. And even if you got you hands on some stuff, theres no way to ship it, because the Munitorium and the Administratum own nearly all the ships in the galaxy. The Navy are the next group that own ships, but they aren't the Guard and have no interest in breaking the rules to solve their problems. Beyond that it's small groups like the Inquisition and the Arbites, and if you go to them asking for help smuggling war supplies you frankly deserve what you get. There are a small number of privately owned trading vessels, which fall into two types. The first are the ones who have inherited their ship and trading licence, which allows them to trade very specific cargoes on very specific routes, breaking those conditions will get your ship confiscated and you executed, so they are very unlikely to help. The second are rogue traders, who are far less common, but mostly the same except they have far less restrictive licences and are allowed to do more or less whatever they like, providing they don't get too out of hand. Rich beyond belief, they wouldn't have any interest running convoy duty, and regardless there are nowhere near enough of them to actually do anything useful.

Well, you DO produce exact numbers when you do that kind of thing. Nobody will ever manage to actually ship exactly what was called for, but the numbers should be specific. In the world wars you had the further issue that resources were in fact finite, at least for ammo you could fire it faster then it could ever be produced, so real management was required to make sure everyone got enough in vital areas, while minor theaters had to make do. Here, that's a complete non issue.

Yes, but there is no way that any general could give a tally sheet of exactly what his forces used in a multi year war before it has been fought. That is what happened here, and what the Munitorium think is only reasonable if the Guard are going to be so inconsiderate as to actually use the supplies. Exactly, down to the last round.

Seems like they are itching to be wiped out.

Sort of the opposite, the biggest threat to the Imperium is rebellion and civil war. Almost anything else they have the sheer manpower to crush, but the closest they ever came to actually breaking up was when large elements of the Imperium rebelled, so most of the Imperium is built to make a successful rebellion impossible by making it difficult for any one person to have a large (in galactic terms) balanced military force at their disposal.

Titan's being about the worst idea for a gun platform ever... they really should have some siege guns in the siege bombardment korps of similar power that just drop on the ground.

I'm not going to argue the merits of a Mecha, I'm just saying the biggest guns at their disposal are small in comparison to what is normally used to breach void shields.

But being 40K, maybe they have some four man chainswords to open up fortress walls?

Don't be absurd, that's far too small. They have titan scale chainswords. Mounted on titans. Used to carve holes in city walls.

I consider it a victory to cause brain damage. Its a society built on humans fundamentally, rationality applies. Once logic gets loose you can't break out of it.

There is a logic to it, it's just a very strange logic used by people who have goals contrary to what their actions may suggest.

[Simon_Jester]

If the Munitorium were always as obnoxious, aggressively incompetent, and obviously blind to military realities as they're portrayed at Vraks, then hell yes they'd have been overthrown by now. It wouldn't be the first time Imperium agencies have struggled against each other for dominance in a de facto state of civil war- there's all those references to the Age of Apostasy.

My impression is that most of the time the Munitorium is actually fairly decent about getting the hardware to the front, or at least trying hard enough to convince the Guard that the Munitorium isn't a bigger obstacle to victory than the enemy is. It's just the occasional campaign like Vraks where they manage to fuck up as badly as the British quartermaster corps in the Crimea or something.