Considering they can scoop up a pile of dirt and turn it into a man in mere seconds I would say it wouldn't take long at all for them to understand 40k tech. They would have issues understanding Ork tech, Eldar and Dark Eldar tech, and Chaos tech since that is pretty much pure magic, but everything else should be easily understandable it's going to be hard to resist having nanomachines being teleported directly into your brain or AI computer systems and physically rewriring it.

The thing is, they have a set number of things that they can create. The commander can build xyz, the kbot factory can build abc, that sort of thing. Who knows how long it took them to research those designs? Years, decades, centuries? Maybe it takes a ludicrous information storage space to build things out of dirt with their nanolathe, and they have to store the specific patterns. Capturing could well work the same way, or a similar way: they have intricate knowledge of their enemy's systems (the bits that matter anyway, the control mechanisms), which could be required in order to capture them with nanomachines.

(In case anyone is confused as to what we are talking about, in Total Annihilation the Commander unit - the only unit to start in play - is able to 'capture' most enemy units, turning them to your side complete with a change of paint scheme.)

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And also one of the ingredients to making a pony is cocaine. -Darth Fanboy.

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What about the technology they are most likely to encounter first: Necron tech ?

And, even if they can teleport the nanomachines into a brain/computer system, they need to know how it works if they want to do anything other than destroying it.

Gamer what you seem to fail to understand is that Necron tech is advanced to the point it might as well be magic, to subvert or reverse-engineer something you'll need to know how it works. "just beam some nanobots into it" won't work as any nanobots will be limited by what you know.

also why you think Tau technology will easy to subvert sure it's not necron tech, but it's still pretty advanced. Hell there might even be some high tech Imperium tech that would hard to subvert since you wouldn't have a clue as to how it works.

you still seem to a nasty habit of taking something that's known and then assuming it's limits are essentially infinite, like you assume that the nanomachines can "capture" anything as long as it's "tech". rather then looking at the big picture and judging the nanomachine's limits from that.

Why does a pre-made appliance for converting metal (dirt lol that's why all the dirt is gone right lol) into metal robots have any relevance to a completely alien tech base? Indeed TA suggests even designing new tanks is non-trivial; the machines can build it, but the instructions for the machines are hardly totally fluid.

Oh right - because NANOWANK.

Do you understand that this statement communicates nothing except GAMER IS AN EMOTIVE TRYHARD?

What problem? For whom? Why? How will this come about? What response can be expected? What are the objectives and how will they be achieved?

It's becoming clear to me that you simply have no fucking idea beyond SPAM THERMONUCLEAR LASER CARS.

The whole issue of Arm or Core capturing technology runs into the issue of whether their nanobots can overcome Necron systems. There is no data with which to make any definitive assertions either way, and any decision would be an arbitrary one.

Let's suppose however for the moment that arbitrarily, somehow capture technology does work on Necron systems. Is it really that big of an issue? Only the Commander unit can really capture still active enemy units. So that's a big risk to have one's Commander trying to capture an enemy combat unit. Capture time in TA was proportionate to the build time of the target unit, so realistically only small and run of the mill units in TA had any chance of being captured. More often, it was stationary resource units or unarmed construction units that were captured. In TA, capturing a construction unit or factory yielded access to the other side's build options. Such an advantage would not be present for captured Necrons. Arm and Core fundamentally use the same technology base and are basically the same aside from some minor details about what actually is in control of each unit and ideology.

A few random captured Necron combat units here and there is not going to be a huge strategic difference. If a Tomb Spyder were captured or tomb world AI system were captured, then things get more up in the air depending on how much access this would grant to the Necron technological base.

Not only that, but the constructor being controlled obviously already had the ability to build those units. It's not like a broken necron arm or a discarded rifle is going to provide my such industrial information, certainly not in a ready to use format for the commanders tools. Capturing in the game is, as you say, not really evidence of 'techology theft' at all, any more than stealing a bulldozer means you've 'stolen' the ability to push things.

Why do you assume nanomagic requires massive amounts of power? There is also no reason to assume it requires very small amounts of power either. The point is we don't know how it works and just picking the highest values you can to win a vs debate rather than trying to find a reasonable (as far as that can be said for any sci-fi analysis) explanation is idiotic.

There are reasons to use anti-matter besides needing massive firepower, mainly incredible energy density. A commander could use an anti-matter power source because it provides a long lasting operating life with a very small amount of fuel in a compact mobile source and not because it produces eleventy billion gigajoules. Since base structures don't have to move you can build windmills that produce more power than the backpack to supply your energy needs. Since you mention later that a unit called the "Peewee" is apparently 30 feet tall and is small compared to the windmills in the opening cutscene from what I saw those must be some giant windmills. Hardly normal everyday windmills from our experience.



I've never disputed how fast TA units are built. However the rest of this part of your post doesn't translate into ridiculous firepower or combat capabilities. Something that shoots "bullets made out of compressed light that somehow focuses all of its energy into a microscopic space" could easily be a highly focused pulse laser and nothing about that says they have to have nuclear yields. Nothing I've seen of TA units in combat can be said to be combat genius unless you're also willing to grant that title to the clones on Geonosis. Other people have already mentioned that cloaked units can still be detected on radar and there many races in 40k with far more advanced sensors, the Necrons included. So can Peewees wreck MBTs? That depends entirely on the MBT they're fighting.



Others have said it but it bears repeating, you need to know how a technology works in order to replicate it. Since CORE and ARM know how the other's tech works they can take over and replicate their opponents tech base. Against the Necrons they will not know this and will thus not be able to do this without first doing at least A LOT of research first. Of course according to Codex:Necrons Necrons can mind control people too with Mindshackle Scarabs and Canoptek Scarabs can break down organic and non-organic matter into raw energy to make new necron forms, TA is not alone in this regard.

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LOL emotive tryhard, dude look in the mirror you are the most emotional person in this thread, and you've still failed to explain how they get defeated other than as you so eloquently put it "they get blown the fuck up".

Anyway think of it this way the ARM possesses the tech to build the equivalent of Warhound Titans (simple Peewees will cut through near any armor in 40k) in the same time it takes for the Tyranids to create gaunts. As for the objectives I already described them in the OP its fairly simple mine out the materials to build units, construct factories, build an army, crush the resistance, take any tech possible, teleport commander to new world rinse or if they have some time they could build a starship as well rinse and repeat. And yes unit spam or zerg rush as it is commonly called is a valid tactic in 40k, works well for the Tyranids now imagine the Tyranids being able to create entire legions of Titans in hours and being able to eat metal and if we allow fluff the ability to reduce entire planets into bedrock in just a few weeks of fighting with ground troops.

As for taking Necron tech most of the Necron stuff is quite useless, the ARM already have the equivalent of Necron gauss weaponry their construction units have their reclaiming beam that works much the same way except alot more efficient as they can reuse the matter and more powerful (I doubt Necron Warrior forms can zap away 100+ metre tall trees with gauss flayers like simple construction units can), and despite all of this that isn't even considered a weapon. What they would want would be some of the Necron artifacts like their obelisks?(not sure but Necrons allegedly have tech to ward off Chaos the ARM might want some of that).

Do you realise how laughable describing pewees as combat geniuses with uber weapon powah makes you look? Stop reading fluff and design documents and stick to what's actually in the game. I find the claims of size (which I accurately predicted you'd pull out) pretty absurd and I'd love to see you prove it beyond 'wah a man said it in the intahwibs'.

And again, peewee guns being TIME FROZEN LASERS says nothing - I repeat - nothing about their power. Pewter destroy a tank you need to demonstrate the peewee gun can actually do this, not just say 'plasma' and 'antimatter' and 'nano'. Those are not power levels.

I always thought fluff is higher than game mechanics.

Anyway as for PeeWees just a 4 MJ laser focused like it is described in game could penetrate more than 70km of solid diamond every second.

WOW real impressive! A 70km hole less than a millimeter wide! That will do a whole LOT of damage!

EDIT: It's also nice you ignored that site's point about about aspect ratios greater than 30:1 being unlikely to be achieved but it's not like that matters in this absurd case anyway.

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From what I can find, the melting point of diamond is 3823K, and the boiling point is 5100K. That data-sheet has a melting point higher than its boiling point (a pretty good trick), and the numbers don't match anyway.

And I'm not sure I'm too impressed by just saying "the armour is compressed into a single molecule!". As I remember, isn't most elemental metal a single molecule anyway? The outer electrons drift in an "electron sea", and the atoms all clump together. It's why we can transmit electricity over wires. I believe crystals are a single molecule too. And plastic (well, consists of very large macro-molecules).
Is there any explanation of why having the armour as one molecule makes it so resistant? There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection.

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“I am the King of Rome, and above grammar”
Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor

With power at just 4MJ (Peewees probably have far more firepower than that) you can penetrate 70km of diamond even if the hole is a little less than a millimeter wide you are still going to be cutting through 40k tanks like a hot knife through butter, remember making massive holes in armor isn't the goal penetrating the armor is, and according to the manual the damage isn't just from the laser but the resulting spray of plasma as well.

Anyway why do we have to go purely on game mechanics and visuals? In a standard vs debate isn't going by gameplay bad debating? Isn't fluff always considered higher canon if there is no set canon heirarchy? Going by gameplay in Starcraft, Terran marines can conceivably take on battlecruisers and win. In TA using pure visuals we can get megameter trees by going off the speed of light, using gameplay calcs we get megatons of firepower being thrown out by the big units like Krogoths and Peewees dishing out kilotons of firepower, which kind of coincidentally goes with the fluff like having 200 units deliver gigatons of firepower on the enemy or reduce planets to bedrock with ground fighting. In gameplay units have trouble with simple pathfinding due to ai limitation in the game engine but in fluff every single unit has thousands of years of combat experience downloaded into their minds so should we go with the limitations in the game engine or fluff?

What's so special about TA armor you ask?

Does that sound like normal matter to you?

I noticed in the laser test if you change the duration and material the hole can be made much wider a 4 MJ laser focused at a microscopic level firing for approximately 1 millisecond on tungsten can expect to penetrate 13.2m of solid tungsten leaving a 9.31mm hole in just 1 millisecond of firing (drill rate is stated to be 13.2km/sec)

Wow, so according to you once you penetrate the armor of a tank or ship or aircraft or person or what have you actually being able damage the insides is irrelevant. The reason I laughed at making a .3mm hole in armor is because a .3mm is so tiny that even if it was bored out by a laser and it sprays the plasmafied armor out of the hole there's simply not enough mass there to do any significant damage. Unless of course you get lucky and hit something volatile like the magazines, but that goes for any weapon and since your micro dot laser is making such tiny holes you're far less likely to hit those critical locations.



Since a core part of TA and your argument is their resource system is part of the game mechanic we have to discuss it. We just don't do it in game mechanic terms with hitpoints and units of metal and energy and trying to scale the size of trees we see during gameplay. I've been treating the opening cinematic as higher canon since as a cinematic it has no gameplay elements in it and can be treated as a look into the "real TA" if you want to treat it that way. Trying to scale TA from gameplay itself and getting kiloton range Peewees is just as stupid as saying Terran marine rifles can destroy battle cruisers.



You're still ignoring the point the site makes that very high aspect ratios are unlikely. Since you like How to Build a Laser Death Ray;



Once you reach a certain point all you're going to be doing is making wider holes. If you want a better 4 MJ laser gun try this:
Beam power: 100 TW
Beam diameter at target: 1 μm
Beam duration: 1E-09 s
Beam energy: 100 kJ
Number of pulses: 40
Time between pulses: 10 μs
Total Beam energy: 4 MJ
Total Beam duration: 0.4 ms

Which gets you this in Tungsten:

Material damage from pulse train
Width of hole: 3.5 cm
Depth of hole: 70.1 cm
Aspect ratio: 20

A hole that's large enough to actually cause meaningful damage (it's about the same diameter as modern sabot penetrators), has enough penetration to go through a reasonable amount of tank armor and it doesn't have an absurd aspect ratio. Although I think 4 MJ is actually rather low for a modern MBT round, which are closer to 8 or 9 MJ if not more.

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You cant whinge about only having game mechanics and a brief cutscene to go on when you're cherry picking from both to get the biggest, most obviously wrong numbers.

Since Gamer is incapable of actually discussing anything beyond WAH WAH WAH MEGANUKE, the energy supply is a serious vulnerability for TA forces. A few orbit strikes can stall the entire operation. Nercrons win.

Well they can build cloaked fusion reactors after 20 minutes :v

"Cloaked", lol.

Since their air units are so awful, they're unlikely to have any real defence against 40k's mobile warfare and space superiority. They can build all the wanked-out nuclear 30 foot tall peewees they want; when their economy stalls it'll still be a laugh.

PS peewees being 30 feet tall is pretty much my favourite fat person metric ever; I'm glad he followed up on my 100m tree suggestion. Yes, everything in TA is ACTUALLY SECRETLY really big, and has huge energy densities, and amazing firepower and range. In short, TA is actually nothing like TA at all, it's a completely different thing connected only by branding.

Man you know some of the cars had windscreens right :v

Let's go with the game premise of a commander being able to drop onto a planet and within 5min have lasers, economy and dozens of tanks setup and after an hour or so be able to fire off nukes at will. That's all pretty impressive, and it means the Commander can probably win any battles up to battalion scale.

The important question is does it really matter? Firing off a number of nukes and flooding out a few hundred tanks is pretty much the limit of the commanders abilities; he can't build spaceships, and he doesn't have sophisticated strategic defense capabilities (he can build abm and small shields (shields may have been a mod)). After that he is going to lose out to long range 40k systems, like death strike missiles, or to orbital assets.

So what we'll have is a highly capable strategic raider running around, with no ability to hold ground or fight stand up battles.


Hooray?

Well if you speculate the commander isn't really a super-high level space robot general, but just a regular engineering robot from a destroyed civilisation, he probably never had the capability to do anything beyond that sort of middling level.

So rolling with the spam, you can't get around the structure of TA economy whereby things like energy create huge economic dependencies. They're not unlimited von neumanns; they each have a significant backend (especially if you run them all at once, which will probably have to be avoided). In this way, the twenty thousand flash tanks can do whatever it likes; once strategic-level stuff is brought to bear on them, they have no defence and no counter. Their huge arrays of powerplants will get blown away by some cruiser in space, and all the poor little nanowank builders will be useless (if they weren't already due to Necrons fucking with technology with magic). Their more powerful stuff (like the buzzsaw gun, roffle, totally 500m tall) is even fixed, and thus basically doomed without area defence that can deal with 40k weapons (like the shields and defence lasers the 40k guys rely on). The buildings can be 'cloaked' all they want; the guys in 40k can rely on telescopes and sub-orbital recon to find them anyway.

I think the shape of the battle will be determined by the pace of necron response. If they were against imperial guard, I could imagine instituational inertia would give them time to really get set up with quite a redundant economy, but against the necrons, where the battles won't be pushovers and they are totally outmatched in communication and reaction time, I'm not sure they'd be able to hit hard enough to avoid being levelled immediately.

Stark: Scarabs in current game terms don't have rules for messing with machines, nor have I seen that in the fluff for a while. They are ludicrously good at eating tanks in game though, and their rules are written to represent this. There are said to be many versions, though, so the tank-futzing ones might be out there somewhere still.



In fairness, this is also the excuse used by Achron, my current RTS of choice, for fog of war. Of course, this also implements it in game, having you able to hear battles in the distance as they occur.



I can't be bothered actually reading the data-sheet or what it's trying to say, but you may be aware that diamond sublimes; it does not melt, it goes directly from a solid to a gas with enough input of energy.



Until someone kills him.

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I think you'd see stuff like the commander throwing down small resource stations with a few defenses to keep his energy supply going, whilst action a fighting withdrawal/running on cloak until he can escape to any oceans the planet has. If he can get to those he can pretty effortlessly hide (I don't think the neurons have any attack subs :v) and stand a good chance of massing considerable forces; hundreds of planes and what not