Galactic Empire Vs Imperium of Man (Vs Chaos)

[Darth Hoth]

Dark Empire palpatine was clearly far more insane than his earlier (say prequel) incarnation, so he was far likelier to do more insane things (his obsession with having a force-strong infant rather than a clone, for example.) And if he "could" do it, why didn't he? There's absolutely ntohign stopping him from mass producing his own droid armies and fleet of robotic warships? Given what he did with the DS1 and a few decades he could have done that easily and kept it secret.

Perhaps it is of some consequence that they are to be used far away, in other galaxies and against "barbarians"? In our history, the Western world has been rather more tolerant of various atrocities if they happen in colonies or backwards third-world countries than when they take place close to our own homes and borders. It is already fairly established that the Empire could stomp a lot harder on the Rim it could than closer to the Core (where this was also required, to a greater extent), and further away still would logically be yet more acceptable (if nothing else, little news of it will find its way back to the people).

Hell for that matter there's no reason the Rebels couldn't have either, and they have FAR more reason to want to

Their moral compunctions are well known (though arbitrary and contradictory; they will not fire upon civilians, but feel comfortable using "false flag" operations to call down the Empire's wrath on innocents . . .). These are the guys who refused to wield Executor-class Super Star Destroyers because they were associated with evil or whatever . . .

(considering the Geonosians supposedly could buidl their own DS.)

The Geonosians built the Death Star? I thought it was the Confederacy as a group?

You mean this?

"We are growing stronger," he began. "When the war started, contracts were awarded in order to increase in our force strength. More capital ships, more fighters, more transports, larger ground forces. The shipyards at Kuat, Talaan, Corellia, and here at Mon Calamari have been disrupted by the war but not fatally injured, and now they are delivering new capital ships, while many contractors dispersed throughout friendly space are delivering large numbers of smaller craft."

It took a while, Luke knew, First you built droids. And then the droids built a factory—not for warships, but for more droids. Then the first set of droids, plus the new droids built by the factory, built another factory, and that built ships, while the first factory continued to build new droids to build new factories to build new droids to build new factories to build ships. You could keep going forever building new factories, new droids, and new ships, provided supplies weren't interrupted and someone was willing to pay for it all. Once the cascade started, it just kept growing, and the only way to stop it was to destroy all the factories, ships, and droids, because if just one droid survived, that droid could start the cascade all over again, by building another droid.

What this meant was that new ships were coming into service, and they'd keep coming, in geometrically increasing numbers as the largely droid workforce brought new factories on-line.

"We also have many new recruits," Ackbar went on. "Despite the efforts of the Peace Brigade and others favoring surrender to the Yuuzhan Vong, many idealistic citizens have volunteered for the military. Many of these have been drawn from refugee populations who prefer the hazards of battle to the tedium of refugee camps— and the refugees, who have seen their homeworlds destroyed or occupied, provide a highly motivated brand of recruit, who wish to win back their homes and take vengeance on the enemy. The bottleneck in making use of their volunteers hasn't so much been their numbers, but the necessity of building training camps in safe areas and staffing diem with qualified instructors. But this has now been done."

Luke knew that building training camps and training recruits ran along the same lines as building ships and droids, except that military instructors couldn't be built as easily as droids, or turned out hi a factory. Still, in addition to the instructors the military possessed at the beginning of the war, there were a great many veterans of the Rebellion who had returned to the colors, and were busy training the next generation in every tactic they knew.

That pretty much proves my point for me though, especially taken in context of World Devastators. It also tells us some key things:

- they're not complteyl automated, even here. "Largely droid" workforce, for example. and they still seem to be utilized along the conventional shipyards, wheras the Deathstars were built independent of yards.

Point conceded; the full reference does appear to refer to a production not entirely automated (though it is sufficiently vague that the organic personnel could refer simply to supervisors not essential to operations, as was the case with the Devastators and Automadons in the DE comics and those droneships in the Han Solo books). Building new factories by 'droid is also not close to the automation the Devastators implied (unless those 'droids are the kind of deep space construction drones the Death Star used), and references to costs and standing infrastructure are damning.

- crew training is a bottleneck. Now, training existing huumans is faster and probably cheapper than using clones (the other alternative, no all-droid forces here even with dire straits) but its also bound to be a more finite quantity (you only have so many organic beings of the neccesary age range you cna draw on.)

Why would training humans be quicker? I thought the old Zahn fluff had been ret-conned, i.e. cloning does not necessarily take years. A tie-in with Lando's statement that they based their records for the "one year" limit on old experiments before the Clone Wars.

- It took about 3-4 years to actually set up where it got to this point of "rapid building.", if they did indeed "award contracts at the beginning of the war", which gives us an indicator of a minimum time to get something like this rolling (at least in this limited fashion. But even if you argued that it could somehow be set up quicker (or ignoring it may already have been in place - commerical yards seem to be using it) then you run into the fact that even though they were several years into the war, had lost the capital, and had lots of planets conquered or enslaved, they still weren't going full tilt with automated construction!

So even here with this example, we're hardly talking the sorts of production that the CIS droid army implied, or the scope/infrastructure the Death STar constructions implied. Hardly proof for them "pulling out all the stops" now is it.

They are the New Republic, the village idiots of the history of Galactic government. They have consistently shown themselves as being a collection of dreamers removed from reality, pathetic at war management (and crisis management in general) and having strange morals seemingly saying that it is OK for any number to die as long as you do not yourself pull the trigger (along with various PC craziness on par with the old Jedi Order). They are exactly the people I could see sitting on a stockpile of nukes right up till forced to sign the surrender because they wished to retain "moral superiority" over the enemy.

By contrast, I strongly doubt the much less squeamish Empire would not bring out their heavy artillery in battle with any 40k power (the majority of which are much worse than the Vong to live under). The SW galaxy has never faced anything remotely as repulsive as some 40k factions; their shock alone at their brutality will pave the way for a lot of radical measures. Show one holo of Planet Random after its ravaging by Chaos (or Dark Eldar, or Orks, or hell, just an overzealous Guard detachment) to the Senate, and the cries for blood will resound throughout the Empire.

How about the fact the 40K Galaxy gives him a viable threat to show to the people in order to maintain/increase his power or facilitate military spending hmm? Its the same thing he did with the Rebellion,a nd if he thinks they're "no threat" the way some people do, he'd be less inclined to squash them outright. Remember that this is the man who deliberately fucked up the Empire to the extent that it would fall apart without him (so that the entire galaxy falls into chaos if he falls in the bathtub, basically.)

I could see that working, but Palpatine is also precognitive and (at this point, if it is before Dark Empire) not a complete loon. Would he not be at least dimly aware of the supernatural powers working against him . . . and fearing them? 40k contains some things that could conceivably be (or become) major threats to the Empire itself (Chaos, for example, or of course the Necrons). The Rebellion was nurtured because it was harmless and insignificant; major 40k evils are neither, even to the SW galaxy.

Of course, 40K is Magic Incarnate, so I wouldn't put it past him to want to plunder 40k for its "magic" as well.

I do think he would want to study their various sorceries in detail. But would it be the same kind of monomania that tied him to the Skywalkers? It is less specific, and he does not have all the prophecies and stuff (Teh Chosen One, Sith'ari, &c) to interest him in them.

[Darth Hoth]

How so? I just got done explaining the problems with Chommell, and we dont really know enough about population averages to make a guess. At best, you could say they're comparable (million worlds with billions each, about the same assumption you could make for the Imperium. We don't know how many "coruscant-like" worlds there are after all, and their actual populations are largely conjecture anyhow.) I would further submit that even if SW had higher populations, that number is somewhat misleading. In the Empire, they tended to utilize the nonhuman races alot less, especially militarily. There's something like 20 million races as I recall, and even if we assumed quintillions of people in the SW galaxy (quite possible) and that humanity was 1000x more numerous than everyone else, the human population total would come out to the trillions (maybe low quadrillions at best.) And you couldn't count on a large percentage of that being "military worthy" due to age, genderand whatnot. And you'd also need numbers for the "supply/support" side of the military machine (industry, transportation, services, etc.) And you also have to factor in the "less military" mindset of the SW galaxy- I dont remember Palpy forcibly conscripting people into the armies, after all (he had to use considerable guile to get recruits in fact.)

Given that the Clonetroopers fought quintillions of war 'droids and were roughly 1:1 with them, I doubt the total galactic population is not an order of magnitude or two higher at least to be able to support such forces. And the Empire has no problem using aliens in the industry and such. For the proportions between species, we have no idea, of course, except that humans are by far the largest group (and the only one, as far as I know, to be identified by nationality rather than species). Of course, a lot of species are implied to be largely single-planet (e.g., Falleen), which would imply vastly lower numbers for them, as opposed to more numerous species (Duros, Bothans, humans, &c).

As for conscription, apparently it is done (Zeth Durron and some other guy, I think), but very haphazardly, certainly not in any regimented fashion or on a large scale. It amounts more to impressment by local authorities in the less enlightened parts of the Empire, so it most likely will not increase available manpower in any significant way.

Emphasis on "least" as the complexity of the clone apparently affects growing time.)

Is that so? I never heard of that (offhand statements by Thrawn in the original Thrawn Trilogy do not match how fast sophisticated clones could be made elsewhere, e.g. in Crimson Empire II). Where is it from?

Besides which, its not as if the Imperium can't WMD the Empire's ass either (Soft or Hard exterminatus).

[. . . ]

and I just see WMD spamming of any kind as a sort of MAD.

The analogy is flawed because the Imperium does not have the delivery systems to impose Exterminatus on the Empire on a significant scale (though terror attacks could probably make it through); Warp travel will be slower in the SW galaxy due to lack of a proper Astronomican, and there is the point that they usually exit Warp hours or days from their in-system destinations (and doing otherwise being considered crazy, so there is a reason for it). In the time it will take them to reach firing positions and launch the cyclonic torpedoes (or alternatives), reinforcements will likely have gotten through (Hyperdrive will work at full in their own mapped space). Also, given Imperum communications and the imprecise nature of Immaterium travel, it will be more or less impossible to pull it off as one concerted strike, and after the first one the Empire will be prepared. Add that the ship will not be able to leave the system for the same time again that it to enter it, and it is a suicide run.

And of course, the rich and important worlds tend to have planetary shields, which render direct assault with anything but stupendous power useless.

And I'm really trying to avoid dragging out the "GEOM" card here, because I really dont believe he'd sit still for things either (although I tend to believe he wouldn't act directly unless the situation is dire. There's tons he can do in the logistics/coordination standpoint that would help since he's in charge of the Astronomican and the astropath network basically.)

Can this contribution be quantified to any degree, or is it up to arbitrary interpretation? And if he does intervene directly and starts playing pool with the Empire's planets, there is always the Valley to counter.

And if we're going to play the "both sides fight intelligently as possible" card, then why wouldn't the AdMech start pulling out the stops. They have been known to discover "miracles" of technology or suddenly unleash new abilities when a significant threat emerges (local or otherwise.) The Gothic war is the largest example to come to mind immediately (refititng or upgrading ships to greater capability because of Abbadon's atack.) but lesser examples (cain's Last Stand, Dark Apostle, etc.) come to mind too. And the "religious" nonsense that keeps the Imperium from sometimes using its tech more intelligently is not any different from whatever keeps SW from doing the same with its tech (and Ic an think of a great many examples in addition to the automated construction spam that aren't ever used despite the fact its easily capable.) Again I feel its rather hypocritical to allow one side that advantage but not the other, so we either allow it or we just disregard it.

Besides which, this also tends to venture dangerously into the territory of speculation as in "we never see it used but it could in theory be used" sort of in the same vein (if better substantiated) that trekkies use (IE warp strafing.)

Agreed, somewhat, though Wars tech tends to be better quantified than AdMech stuff; I can see the point you're making.

What other examples of underutilised Wars tech were you thinking of, by the way? Reverse engineering the Shawkenese planet-smasher?

Technically all you'd need to do is either load up a hyperdrive capable ship with explosives (all you really need is the guidance system engines and explosives.) or just stick a hyperdrive on some large impactor (say a moon - think the 3 ISDs crashing into the Executor writ large) Ignoring for a second how this would influence ship to ship combat, think of the military potential in attacking fixed targets (IE planets.) Hell, think of the potential terrorists havef or such a weapon (Hyperdrives are very plentiful after all, as are asteroids and moons)

However, things leave Hyperspace and decelerate rather dramatically when they encounter a "mass shadow". It is not usable against a planet-sized target for the kinetic impact (though accelerating to insane speeds in subspace and ramming a planet might probably be, but then you have weapons that can destroy them before they impact). Kamikaze dives against planets above lightspeed do not appear possible in the physics of Wars. It would be somewhat more useful against military targets in deep space (i.e., warships), but given how imprecise realspace reentry is, hitting them will be difficult (the "Darth Vader Strikes!" case was a singular accident, combining incompetence with insane bad luck); you would have to saturate an entire area of space to hit a non-stationary target, and that might not be more economic than just slugging it out. Especially since it can be easily countered with gravity well generators. And, of course, Wars shields display a massive capacity for taking kinetic hits (the three ISDs did not even sink the Lady Ex's shields).

Hell such capability pretty much would render the need for ship to ship combat kinda pointless, ,dont you think? Yet, they never use it that way,.save a single superweapon or accident/sabotage (agin the 3 ISDs ramming the Exec, or the Eclipse ramming the Galaxy gun in Empire's End.)

I do not own Empire's End; what are the exact circumstances? Does it drop right out of hyperspace and hits it while still at relativistic speeds, or is it a more "conventional" ram (to which the Galaxy Gun may be more vulnerable; does it have shields?)? And since this was a stationary target (in dead space, if I recall correctly), it makes plotting a collision course much easier.

[Connor MacLeod]

Perhaps it is of some consequence that they are to be used far away, in other galaxies and against "barbarians"? In our history, the Western world has been rather more tolerant of various atrocities if they happen in colonies or backwards third-world countries than when they take place close to our own homes and borders. It is already fairly established that the Empire could stomp a lot harder on the Rim it could than closer to the Core (where this was also required, to a greater extent), and further away still would logically be yet more acceptable (if nothing else, little news of it will find its way back to the people).

That doesn't hold up. The only possible restraining factor could be that other people would use such armies (which would lead to a MAD type situation.) but any half intelligent enemy would have the advantage of surprise, and if they built up enough beforehand. Detection could be an issue here (probe droids, recon, whatever.) but if Palpy can funnel the resources for the DS1 and DS2 into secret locations without being found out (unless he wanted to) I don't see why he can't funnel it to a place it couldn't be detected. Say, outside the galaxy (the same way the Rebels hid.) Its not as if the SW galaxy somehow is compltely and totally under constant surveillance (otherwise the REbels would never be able to hide or supply themselves.) Besides, Palpatine still had factions outside the Empire he could have dominated through this method if he'd wanted to as well - those same factiosn he basically made into client-states, in fact, w hich is alot more tenuous and indirect a method of control - same with Palpy's control over the Empire itself post ROTS in fact (Hence his need for the Death Star).

And if we're playing the "what if" game, what makes you think that whatever is holding back Palpy from using automated droid factories and military forces to steamroll the SW galaxy doesn't prevent him from doing it elsewhere? It could literally be anything, which makes appealing to an unknown rather pointless. Hell, I don't even HAVE to play "What if" here, I can just point to the fear of "endlessly growing droid armies" and the fear of droid revolt in general as proof enough why they wouldn't turn it loose in the 40K galaxy, because they'd have far LESS control over it there than they would in their own galaxy (and thus more potential for things to go wrong.) So again, unless the threat against them is quite obviously severe/dire I doubt they'd start doing it.

Their moral compunctions are well known (though arbitrary and contradictory; they will not fire upon civilians, but feel comfortable using "false flag" operations to call down the Empire's wrath on innocents . . .). These are the guys who refused to wield Executor-class Super Star Destroyers because they were associated with evil or whatever . . .

Bullshit. The Rebels had some high minded individuals, but its also true they had some outright terrorists as well. They weren't all that high minded (as I recall some of their military officials didn't mind the possibility of assasinating Palpatine, for example.) Another example that pops to mind is when Rebel forces betrayed their partners in taking Ylesia because they needed the money (Rebel Dawn.)

And even then, there's the various allied/alien species that make up the Alliancee and have no love for the Empire I don't see them neeeding to hold back.

As for the whole "refusal to wield power" that only came to be after they actually HELD power, and the threat of the Empire wasn't really all that much of a threat.

The Geonosians built the Death Star? I thought it was the Confederacy as a group?

Not as I understand it. The Geonosians had the plans and built the darn thing, which is what the movies and the DK books seem to imply. checking wookiepedia and SWTC seems to support that idea.

Point conceded; the full reference does appear to refer to a production not entirely automated (though it is sufficiently vague that the organic personnel could refer simply to supervisors not essential to operations, as was the case with the Devastators and Automadons in the DE comics and those droneships in the Han Solo books). Building new factories by 'droid is also not close to the automation the Devastators implied (unless those 'droids are the kind of deep space construction drones the Death Star used), and references to costs and standing infrastructure are damning.

It won't matter if the "organics" are simply supervisory or not, the fact is they still fear and deliberately try to limit the potential of their "automateD" building capacity - Hell the DS's weren't exactly unsupervised either (either one). And they're just starting to fight even half intelligently at this point. This just fits with the coruscant constructio ndroid and World Devastator examples (or whatever else we come up with.), and makes it alot less likely they're just going to throw out massed armies of robotic warships or a plethora of self-replicating factories, much less do this from the get go. (and by the time they MIGHT startt contemplating this, there's no guarantee they'd be able to do so effortlessly, since alot of the speed of this depends on the veins of commerce remaining relatively untouched.)

Why would training humans be quicker? I thought the old Zahn fluff had been ret-conned, i.e. cloning does not necessarily take years. A tie-in with Lando's statement that they based their records for the "one "year" limit on old experiments before the Clone Wars.

WEG and TLC (and this was with Karrde, I dont know what the hekc you're talking about with Lando) is that pre-Clone Wars documents indicated 3-5 years to be "safe". 1 year was a minimum, and that was for crews for starships ("one year minimum if you wanted stable crews to trust your warships with" to recall what Karrde said.) I doubt you can seriously compare the crew of a technologically sophisticated warship to a mere ground soldier. If you have evidencee of a "specific" retcon to any of that, I'd love to see it.

Besides, growing the body isn't always just the problem. Growing the organic bits is the easy part. Making it functional for its purpose is another matter (clone madness is only just part of this, we're talking about training/learning processes.) A big part of the Kaminoan process was that it allowed for extensive training over the growth cycle, which is why it was so slow. Therefore, I imagine, there is an inverse relationship between growth time and training, and stability may very well fit in there also (trying to cram too much information into a clone's mind may make him insane.) Its worth onting that Wookiepedia seemed to imply that "Non-Kaminoan" clones were not nearly as well trained/skilled as the Kaminoan ones (and from waht I recall from the 5th Clone Wars ep, they were rushing the Kaminioan process as well to get more clones into service, which may very well mean they cut back on training there as well.)

In any event, even assuming "one year" clones, training nonclones is going to be faster/easier because... you don't have to grow them. Mike made this point in fact with AOTC, I believe. The trade-off, of course, is that your "supply" of nonclone recruits will be limited, and they grrow slower. So there are still tradeoffs.

They are the New Republic, the village idiots of the history of Galactic government. They have consistently shown themselves as being a collection of dreamers removed from reality, pathetic at war management (and crisis management in general) and having strange morals seemingly saying that it is OK for any number to die as long as you do not yourself pull the trigger (along with various PC craziness on par with the old Jedi Order). They are exactly the people I could see sitting on a stockpile of nukes right up till forced to sign the surrender because they wished to retain "moral superiority" over the enemy.

This is the same New REpublic that post Star By Star started to get competent and kicking the Vong ass, I might add. A New Republic, as I recall, that was also experimenting with biowarfare against the Vong (Alpha Red?) Your argument doesn't really appyl there. Especially sincee you seem ot assume the Empire (or rather the Emperor) is somehow automatically exempt from oversight (even though he needed the Death Star to allow him to be that "All powerful." Or did you forget as per ROTS that the Empire til ANH was the Republic Under New Management?

I still have yet to see any compelling evidednce the Empire would actually "pull out all the stops" as it were, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

By contrast, I strongly doubt the much less squeamish Empire would not bring out their heavy artillery in battle with any 40k power (the majority of which are much worse than the Vong to live under). The SW galaxy has never faced anything remotely as repulsive as some 40k factions; their shock alone at their brutality will pave the way for a lot of radical measures. Show one holo of Planet Random after its ravaging by Chaos (or Dark Eldar, or Orks, or hell, just an overzealous Guard detachment) to the Senate, and the cries for blood will resound throughout the Empire.

Even taking your assumptions at face value, how long will the 40K galaxy have to have been attacking the SW galaxy before they contekmplate this? how much damage would they inflict? How long to set it up?

I could see that working, but Palpatine is also precognitive and (at this point, if it is before Dark Empire) not a complete loon. Would he not be at least dimly aware of the supernatural powers working against him . . . and fearing them? 40k contains some things that could conceivably be (or become) major threats to the Empire itself (Chaos, for example, or of course the Necrons). The Rebellion was nurtured because it was harmless and insignificant; major 40k evils are neither, even to the SW galaxy.

40K has its own share of precognitivies (which I just ended up discussing with NecronLord) so this is hardly an advantage here, and there's no real way to quantify it. I wouldn't count on precog alone to totally save him - he's not bloody omniscient.

I do think he would want to study their various sorceries in detail. But would it be the same kind of monomania that tied him to the Skywalkers? It is less specific, and he does not have all the prophecies and stuff (Teh Chosen One, Sith'ari, &c) to interest him in them.

Yes. Immortality. 40K has lots of that. And we learned that Palpy is quite obsessed with living forever, even during the Prequels.

[Connor MacLeod]

Since you replied to some of my reply to NL, I'll just keep this separate:

Given that the Clonetroopers fought quintillions of war 'droids and were roughly 1:1 with them, I doubt the total galactic population is not an order of magnitude or two higher at least to be able to support such forces. And the Empire has no problem using aliens in the industry and such. For the proportions between species, we have no idea, of course, except that humans are by far the largest group (and the only one, as far as I know, to be identified by nationality rather than species). Of course, a lot of species are implied to be largely single-planet (e.g., Falleen), which would imply vastly lower numbers for them, as opposed to more numerous species (Duros, Bothans, humans, &c).

As for conscription, apparently it is done (Zeth Durron and some other guy, I think), but very haphazardly, certainly not in any regimented fashion or on a large scale. It amounts more to impressment by local authorities in the less enlightened parts of the Empire, so it most likely will not increase available manpower in any significant way.

The clones did NOT fight 1:1 odds. On Geonosis it was over a million droids vs less than 200,000 clones. In other cases we have seen higher ratios (JEdi Trial, although some aid from the Freedom's Sons must be accounted for also.) Certainly not the absurd "hundreds to one" ratios of a Travisstian clone, but hardly "equal parity." Maybe you're thinking of capability wise from the AOTC novel (where a BD1 is roughly comparable to a Clone in terms of capability.)

Furthermore you seem to operate on the bizarre assumption that all those "quintillions" were frontline troops, which is bloody absurd (we've seen them used to crew starships, as well as provide security or defense as well as offensively.) Hell, what makes you think "quintillions" means "Active" droids? The Separatists had spent years amassing their military might. If they'd had quintillions of active droids from the get go they would have conquered the Republic without trouble, Kaminoan clones or no.

And your argument about "support" flies in the face of the fact that whatever limits they put on droid militaries do not neccesarily apply to droid support/servants. The GAR made extensive use of droids in support roles, and such technologies can greatly simplify the support of a military. (Just because their automated factory/construction capability isn't as rampant as their capbilities imply does not mean it ceases to be used at all.) And that still doesn't rule out nonhuman assistance either (Medstar novels are a prime example.)

Is that so? I never heard of that (offhand statements by Thrawn in the original Thrawn Trilogy do not match how fast sophisticated clones could be made elsewhere, e.g. in Crimson Empire II). Where is it from?

I already addressed this. If you have counter-evidencec, bring it forward.

The analogy is flawed because the Imperium does not have the delivery systems to impose Exterminatus on the Empire on a significant scale (though terror attacks could probably make it through)

Based on what? Exterminatus can be conducted via bombardment or other methods (cyclonic or virus bombardment). The latter of whch can be carried out by vessels as small as a destroyer (cf Codex Tyranids) or even by specialized vessels (Tactica Imperialis.) Hell, planetary populations have access to potnetially genocidal weapons (Krieg, who rendered their planet uninhabitable by such payloads.)

Hell, if you want to be pedantic, 40K torpedoes have been noted to have millilons/tens of millions of km range easily (rogue Trader, Sons of Fenris) and possibly quite longer (Blood Angels duology implied multi-AU ranges). Hitting a planet is not exactly difficult.

Warp travel will be slower in the SW galaxy due to lack of a proper Astronomican,

You need the Astronomican because warp in teh 40K galaxy is unreliable, because (as its been put before) 40K FTL requires travelling through hell. The warp in the 40K galaxy is not going to be nearly as turbulent, mainly because it lacks the thing that creates the problem in the 40K galaxy - psykers. So yes, no Astronomican, but you're not goign to be travelling thorugh 40K warp either.

and there is the point that they usually exit Warp hours or days from their in-system destinations (and doing otherwise being considered crazy, so there is a reason for it). In the time it will take them to reach firing positions and launch the cyclonic torpedoes (or alternatives), reinforcements will likely have gotten through (Hyperdrive will work at full in their own mapped space) Also, given Imperum communications and the imprecise nature of Immaterium travel, it will be more or less impossible to pull it off as one concerted strike, and after the first one the Empire will be prepared. Add that the ship will not be able to leave the system for the same time again that it to enter it, and it is a suicide run

And Star Wars is going to magically, instantlay detect 40K ships.. why? They don't have warp sensors, or astropaths, so they won't neccesarily detect warp arrivals, and stealth isn't unknown to 40K warships any more than it is to SW ones. Moreover, what are you basing your "response" times on? Are you assuming that warships are fully crewed 24/7 and can be raised to full capability instantly? I get the sneaking suspicion you're assuming optimal conditions for the SW side in this (that 40K ships would be immediately detected, that the intent deduced, that the call would immediately go out, be immediately responded to, and departure occuring shortly after the distress call is given.)

I also like how you continaulyl assume they'd somehow need to get close to attack a planet even though there's no reason a planet should need to dodge a munition, nevermind how you seem to assume the Empire would infallibly be able to detect any stealth attacks against it. This isn't even addressing the durability of 40K ships (which as I've noted is considerably greater than SW sh ips of equal size.)

And of course, the rich and important worlds tend to have planetary shields, which render direct assault with anything but stupendous power useless.

Unless they use teleporters. Teleportation weaponry isn't an unknown in 40K either. (Soul Drinkers mentions psychoportive weapons, and Deathwatch MArines used teleporters to dump munitions into a moon to divert a Hive Fleet in one of the Codexes.) Teleporters work via the warp, in case you forgot. Even then, so what? That just means that everything BUT the rich and important worlds get wiped out, which will be problems in and of itself, since worlds like Coruscant rely on support to maintain their existence, and shields can't remain up indefinitely for that same reason.

[quote
Can this contribution be quantified to any degree, or is it up to arbitrary interpretation? And if he does intervene directly and starts playing pool with the Empire's planets, there is always the Valley to counter.[/quote]

Off the top of my head? He's been known to render aid to specific individuals (Saved a navigator and his crew from daemons in one short story OTOH, intervened to save a cruiser Captain by delivering a warning via Astropath.)

We learn from the Inquisition War novels that the GEoM is basically a bunch of individual entities working collectively, and helping to oversee and monitor the entire Imperium (IIRC).

In one novel, Eye of Terror, he managed to guide events to place a single Space Marine from the Horus Heresy era in a position to destroy an alliance between Chaos factions that might have endangered the Imperium (or so he believed, at least.) In one of the Titanicus books (Codex titanicus) fluff describes him as directly influencing the galactic mobiliziation of the Imperium against a Ork WAAAAGGH once he couldn't deflect Gork and Mork by other means (through measures like influencing the Tarot, etc.)

On the direct attack scale? He can probably do everything a dAemon, Daemon Prince, DAemon Lord, or a Chaos God could do (which includes affecting worlds on the global scale, if not greater.) and he's orders of magnitude more powerful than the strongest psykers (Who can be pretty damn strong.) I recall offhand mention that he can assist in faster Warp Travel as well if he wishes (I believe Chaos Gods can do that anyhow, so no reason he couldn't.)

What other examples of underutilised Wars tech were you thinking of, by the way? Reverse engineering the Shawkenese planet-smasher?

Galaxy gun or hyperspace capable munitions (you can send message pods via hyperspace across the galaxy, or starfighters. DEvastating missile payloads or kinetic impactrs would be trivial.)
Automation. Droid militaries in general.

However, things leave Hyperspace and decelerate rather dramatically when they encounter a "mass shadow". It is not usable against a planet-sized target for the kinetic impact (though accelerating to insane speeds in subspace and ramming a planet might probably be, but then you have weapons that can destroy them before they impact). Kamikaze dives against planets above lightspeed do not appear possible in the physics of Wars. It would be somewhat more useful against military targets in deep space (i.e., warships), but given how imprecise realspace reentry is, hitting them will be difficult (the "Darth Vader Strikes!" case was a singular accident, combining incompetence with insane bad luck); you would have to saturate an entire area of space to hit a non-stationary target, and that might not be more economic than just slugging it out. Especially since it can be easily countered with gravity well generators. And, of course, Wars shields display a massive capacity for taking kinetic hits (the three ISDs did not even sink the Lady Ex's shields).

Oh bullshit. We know collisions between hyperspace and realspace objects can occur - this is a fundamental bit of logic that Curtis himeself estalbished (CF Endor holocaust) and "mass shadows" mean nothing if you don't care whether your vehicle survives or not. You need not even emerge from hyperspace for that to occur, so your arguments regarding that don't fly.

A warhead on the other hand doesnt need to get close or be allt hat precise either. The Precision of single ships we've seen is enough to get warheads close to a planet to fuck it up.

Lastly, a simple way around that is to simply have the target accelerating to a high velocity before entering hyperspace. Momentum has to be conserved and hyperdrives can't circumvent that.
Even gravity well generators won't help here (kick it out of hyperspace it can still get near or hit the planet if its travelling fast enough, and we know SW ships can reach relativistic velocities handily.) unless you're going to disrupt your own trade or hamper your own capabilities.

I won't even comment on examples of "Sublight acceleration" via hyperdrive examples. (IE making the jump to lightspeed and then cutting it off before actually raeching/crossing it, covering the distance with relatavistic velocity)

And no shield is completely immune to momentum - and if you don't understand this I suggest you read Mike's essay on shields and consider the Endor Holocuast example (again - this time as to why shields would not have neccesarily saved Endor.)

I do not own Empire's End; what are the exact circumstances? Does it drop right out of hyperspace and hits it while still at relativistic speeds, or is it a more "conventional" ram (to which the Galaxy Gun may be more vulnerable; does it have shields?)? And since this was a stationary target (in dead space, if I recall correctly), it makes plotting a collision course much easier.

R2 reprogrammed the Eclipse to jump to Byss from Onderon and it emerged from hyperspace nearly on top of the Galaxy gun and collided with it. It probably hit at relatavistic speeds given the emergence point (same wiht the 3 ISDs.)

[Darth Hoth]

That doesn't hold up. The only possible restraining factor could be that other people would use such armies (which would lead to a MAD type situation.) but any half intelligent enemy would have the advantage of surprise, and if they built up enough beforehand. Detection could be an issue here (probe droids, recon, whatever.) but if Palpy can funnel the resources for the DS1 and DS2 into secret locations without being found out (unless he wanted to) I don't see why he can't funnel it to a place it couldn't be detected. Say, outside the galaxy (the same way the Rebels hid.) Its not as if the SW galaxy somehow is compltely and totally under constant surveillance (otherwise the REbels would never be able to hide or supply themselves.) Besides, Palpatine still had factions outside the Empire he could have dominated through this method if he'd wanted to as well - those same factiosn he basically made into client-states, in fact, w hich is alot more tenuous and indirect a method of control - same with Palpy's control over the Empire itself post ROTS in fact (Hence his need for the Death Star).

And if we're playing the "what if" game, what makes you think that whatever is holding back Palpy from using automated droid factories and military forces to steamroll the SW galaxy doesn't prevent him from doing it elsewhere? It could literally be anything, which makes appealing to an unknown rather pointless. Hell, I don't even HAVE to play "What if" here, I can just point to the fear of "endlessly growing droid armies" and the fear of droid revolt in general as proof enough why they wouldn't turn it loose in the 40K galaxy, because they'd have far LESS control over it there than they would in their own galaxy (and thus more potential for things to go wrong.) So again, unless the threat against them is quite obviously severe/dire I doubt they'd start doing it.

All right, conceded.

Bullshit. The Rebels had some high minded individuals, but its also true they had some outright terrorists as well. They weren't all that high minded (as I recall some of their military officials didn't mind the possibility of assasinating Palpatine, for example.) Another example that pops to mind is when Rebel forces betrayed their partners in taking Ylesia because they needed the money (Rebel Dawn.)

Mon Mothma was dead opposed to it, as were Leia and various others; it were the "General Ripper" military elements that favoured it. And stealing spice and reneging on deals with smugglers and pirates is not exactly comparable to breaking out the nuke-analogues. I repeat, these are the guys who decommissioned ship classes and threw away the Sun Crusher because the technology was eeevol.

And even then, there's the various allied/alien species that make up the Alliancee and have no love for the Empire I don't see them neeeding to hold back.

Well, they might reckon themselves too small to compete with the Empire (i.e., the Empire can trump them even if they start building up first), and the more insane ones did not have the technology (Yevetha and company). Still, conceded per above.

Not as I understand it. The Geonosians had the plans and built the darn thing, which is what the movies and the DK books seem to imply. checking wookiepedia and SWTC seems to support that idea.

If you say so.

It won't matter if the "organics" are simply supervisory or not, the fact is they still fear and deliberately try to limit the potential of their "automateD" building capacity - Hell the DS's weren't exactly unsupervised either (either one). And they're just starting to fight even half intelligently at this point. This just fits with the coruscant constructio ndroid and World Devastator examples (or whatever else we come up with.), and makes it alot less likely they're just going to throw out massed armies of robotic warships or a plethora of self-replicating factories, much less do this from the get go. (and by the time they MIGHT startt contemplating this, there's no guarantee they'd be able to do so effortlessly, since alot of the speed of this depends on the veins of commerce remaining relatively untouched.)

Conceded.

WEG and TLC (and this was with Karrde, I dont know what the hekc you're talking about with Lando) is that pre-Clone Wars documents indicated 3-5 years to be "safe". 1 year was a minimum, and that was for crews for starships ("one year minimum if you wanted stable crews to trust your warships with" to recall what Karrde said.) I doubt you can seriously compare the crew of a technologically sophisticated warship to a mere ground soldier. If you have evidencee of a "specific" retcon to any of that, I'd love to see it.

I checked my copy of The Last Command, and I was wrong, it was Karrde saying it, not Lando; my apologies. However, the passage you are referring to was not the one I meant. I was talking of the one just in the beginning of Chapter 6; my edition is a translation, so I cannot quote it directly, but it is Karrde and Aves talking. Aves says something to the effect of, "I still don't believe Skywalker's numbers [for Thrawn's cloning speeds]. If you can do it that fast, wouldn't the old Clonemasters have done so?" And Karrde replies, "Maybe they did. As far as I know there are no records of cloning technology from that time left, all I saw was much older records from before the war."

Furthermore, the New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology lists that Spaarti clones are grown in a few weeks, and though it notes that "Unfortunately, Spaarti cylinders create clones that suffer from 'clone madness,' a psychosis caused by a disturbance in the Force or the accelerated growth cycle," this does not appear to be the case for all.

Besides, growing the body isn't always just the problem. Growing the organic bits is the easy part. Making it functional for its purpose is another matter (clone madness is only just part of this, we're talking about training/learning processes.) A big part of the Kaminoan process was that it allowed for extensive training over the growth cycle, which is why it was so slow. Therefore, I imagine, there is an inverse relationship between growth time and training, and stability may very well fit in there also (trying to cram too much information into a clone's mind may make him insane.) Its worth onting that Wookiepedia seemed to imply that "Non-Kaminoan" clones were not nearly as well trained/skilled as the Kaminoan ones (and from waht I recall from the 5th Clone Wars ep, they were rushing the Kaminioan process as well to get more clones into service, which may very well mean they cut back on training there as well.)

This flies in the face of a number of references to "flash learning" and the training time for Thrawn's ultra-accelerated clones (being months of basic training if you make a generous estimate, based on the length of the Thrawn Regency as such - certainly nothing like the raised-from-birth Clonetroopers - and they are described as being as good as Stormtroopers). The clone of Feena, Baroness d'Asta, in Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood could not reasonably have been growing/trained for more than a year (this, too, is generous; the Interim Ruling Council took over only after Palpatine's death, and I doubt Black Sun were cloning Imperials at random before), and she was able to pass for the real thing in the eyes of the Baroness's father, an act of mimicry that should be rather more difficult to produce than cannon-fodder clones. The NEGtWaT further notes that "Spaarti clones are actually trained and educated during growth: a computer processing system linked directly to a clone's cerebral cortex feeds the clone a constant stream of useful information." In "A Princess Alone!", Leia Organa used "sleep imprinting" to get enough knowledge of Metalorn, a highly regimented "forgeworld" analogue, to pass for a native and outwit local Stormtropopers in its labyrinthine corridors.

In any event, even assuming "one year" clones, training nonclones is going to be faster/easier because... you don't have to grow them. Mike made this point in fact with AOTC, I believe. The trade-off, of course, is that your "supply" of nonclone recruits will be limited, and they grrow slower. So there are still tradeoffs.

Assuming "one year" clones, this is so, though less so if they are "trained during growth" than otherwise. In a total war scenario, the first year would have to do without them.

This is the same New REpublic that post Star By Star started to get competent and kicking the Vong ass, I might add. A New Republic, as I recall, that was also experimenting with biowarfare against the Vong (Alpha Red?) Your argument doesn't really appyl there. Especially sincee you seem ot assume the Empire (or rather the Emperor) is somehow automatically exempt from oversight (even though he needed the Death Star to allow him to be that "All powerful." Or did you forget as per ROTS that the Empire til ANH was the Republic Under New Management?

Um, no. I was merely assuming the battle would take place in the post-ANH era. Was that unreasonable? (If earlier, no Death Stars, Dark Troopers and a lot of other goodies.) As for the New Republic, that was a secret project by their Intelligence, specifically the uber secret Alpha Blue and its analogues, which operated completely without government oversight. It was only seriously considered after all the New Republic politicos had been either killed or thrown out, and a new Galactic Alliance been formed under the leadership of Cal Omas.

Even taking your assumptions at face value, how long will the 40K galaxy have to have been attacking the SW galaxy before they contekmplate this? how much damage would they inflict? How long to set it up?

This might not be readily quantifiable, but the Imperial propaganda machine should be able to turn a bare few minor incursions into a full-blown extragalactic invasion. Their spin supposedly made the majority of the Galactic populace believe that Alderaan had been destroyed by Rebels or a freak cosmic accident, rather than the Death Star, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

40K has its own share of precognitivies (which I just ended up discussing with NecronLord) so this is hardly an advantage here, and there's no real way to quantify it. I wouldn't count on precog alone to totally save him - he's not bloody omniscient.

I do believe you missed my point. What I meant to say was, precog will give him at least some understanding of the true scope of the 40k threat. This will make him less likely to hold back than a lesser threat in his own galaxy, or the initial (relative) weakness of Imperium technology, would have posited.

Yes. Immortality. 40K has lots of that. And we learned that Palpy is quite obsessed with living forever, even during the Prequels.

Makes sense, I guess. Though depending on where in the timeline we are, he might be immortal already.


And: Yaaay! Thousandth post!

[Darth Hoth]

The clones did NOT fight 1:1 odds. On Geonosis it was over a million droids vs less than 200,000 clones. In other cases we have seen higher ratios (JEdi Trial, although some aid from the Freedom's Sons must be accounted for also.) Certainly not the absurd "hundreds to one" ratios of a Travisstian clone, but hardly "equal parity." Maybe you're thinking of capability wise from the AOTC novel (where a BD1 is roughly comparable to a Clone in terms of capability.)

Well, it was probably that, then. Still, the number of 'droids likely will not be larger than the number of clones by more than perhaps an order of magnitude.

Furthermore you seem to operate on the bizarre assumption that all those "quintillions" were frontline troops, which is bloody absurd (we've seen them used to crew starships, as well as provide security or defense as well as offensively.) Hell, what makes you think "quintillions" means "Active" droids? The Separatists had spent years amassing their military might. If they'd had quintillions of active droids from the get go they would have conquered the Republic without trouble, Kaminoan clones or no.

And clones are not used as starship crews and security? From what I heard of the new animated series, they make up the vast majority of the Republic Navy's offshore personnel, and this is not helping the case for lower numbers, considering that (if I recall correctly, at least) the Republic had a considerable naval superiority. And in a security role, we have them being "ubiquitous" on Coruscant; taking one clone for every 1,000 citizens, which is rather less proportion of policemen to civilians in Sweden (and the police is not "ubiquitous" here), this is still billions - on a single planet.

As for active, I believe the line from the Ep III ICS was "[The Juggernaut] strikes fear in the hearts of the galaxy's quintillions of battle droids and their Separatist masters" or somesuch. This does not lend itself well to thinking of automata already destroyed or not yet active.

And your argument about "support" flies in the face of the fact that whatever limits they put on droid militaries do not neccesarily apply to droid support/servants. The GAR made extensive use of droids in support roles, and such technologies can greatly simplify the support of a military. (Just because their automated factory/construction capability isn't as rampant as their capbilities imply does not mean it ceases to be used at all.) And that still doesn't rule out nonhuman assistance either (Medstar novels are a prime example.)

Agreed.

Based on what? Exterminatus can be conducted via bombardment or other methods (cyclonic or virus bombardment). The latter of whch can be carried out by vessels as small as a destroyer (cf Codex Tyranids) or even by specialized vessels (Tactica Imperialis.) Hell, planetary populations have access to potnetially genocidal weapons (Krieg, who rendered their planet uninhabitable by such payloads.)

Hell, if you want to be pedantic, 40K torpedoes have been noted to have millilons/tens of millions of km range easily (rogue Trader, Sons of Fenris) and possibly quite longer (Blood Angels duology implied multi-AU ranges). Hitting a planet is not exactly difficult.

And the Empire cannot detect or intercept torpedoes at such ranges why? Are they stealth-equipped? And if so, what does that stealth constitute?

You need the Astronomican because warp in teh 40K galaxy is unreliable, because (as its been put before) 40K FTL requires travelling through hell. The warp in the 40K galaxy is not going to be nearly as turbulent, mainly because it lacks the thing that creates the problem in the 40K galaxy - psykers. So yes, no Astronomican, but you're not goign to be travelling thorugh 40K warp either.

So the situation is akin to Milky Way, before the Fall?

And Star Wars is going to magically, instantlay detect 40K ships.. why? They don't have warp sensors, or astropaths, so they won't neccesarily detect warp arrivals, and stealth isn't unknown to 40K warships any more than it is to SW ones. Moreover, what are you basing your "response" times on? Are you assuming that warships are fully crewed 24/7 and can be raised to full capability instantly? I get the sneaking suspicion you're assuming optimal conditions for the SW side in this (that 40K ships would be immediately detected, that the intent deduced, that the call would immediately go out, be immediately responded to, and departure occuring shortly after the distress call is given.)

How effective is 40k stealth, and how widely implemented? Wars have long-range sensors even for "realspace".

My assumption is that the Imperium will not be jumping in massive Exterminatus strikes immediately upon the war beginning. The Empire, in the meantime, will have time to mobilise to what they consider total war, and this includes massive military readiness (e.g., Coruscant's shields are continually up before the New Republic conquers it, and the same goes for the Yuuzhan Vong War). Given that their strategies are based on arbitrarily fast FTL that cannot be readily detected or intercepted (unless you have massive sensor grids and deep space patrols in place, like what Palpatine built for the Deep Core), it make sense to have the fleet at readiness to defend any given target; they will not look for intent, if a large enemy warship appears it would have to be a complete moron of a commander not to call for assistance (unless he has sufficient forces to take it on himself, of course). Unless I am mistaken, we see something of this in the Thrawn books, though the New Republic there is obviously demilitarised as compared to the Galactic Empire at its height (three sector fleets is considered a major loss in Thrawn's planning for Bilbringi).

As for reaction times, there is precedent for short such; in the Young Jedi Knights books, the Organa government could supposedly mobilise "half the New Republic fleet" and send it against a given target (the "fleet" of the Diversity Alliance terrorist group) in a matter of hours (there are no precise data, but it certainly was not days). Even allowing for obvious hyperbole, this shows that sending battle groups at short notice is possible in the New Republic. The Last Command shows that distress calls from individual planets are responded to by local military commands as soon as they reach them, and this when they are not considering the possibility of planetary devastation. In Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka, the Empire can send hourly reinforcements to suppressing a restive planet with a few days' preparation at most, and this is in peacetime. Admittedly, I might be wary of extrapolating that particular to a much larger scale, but it is not like I am grasping all this out of thin air. Certainly, if it takes the Imperium ship days to reach the planet, that is well within the Imperial window of action, and if it fires torpedoes from afar, the planet has ample time to detect and intercept it.

Even if we assume that the first few strikes are successful, this will certainly alert the others to the threat and make them react accordingly. Given the random nature of warp travel and Astropath communications, I would think pulling off a massive coordinated strike is not feasible.

I also like how you continaulyl assume they'd somehow need to get close to attack a planet even though there's no reason a planet should need to dodge a munition, nevermind how you seem to assume the Empire would infallibly be able to detect any stealth attacks against it. This isn't even addressing the durability of 40K ships (which as I've noted is considerably greater than SW sh ips of equal size.)

With the speed advantage of hyperdrive, it does not really matter if the individual ship is more durable unless it is absurdly so. The Empire can jump ships in and out on it whenever it cares to - or is the suicide fleet delivering the missiles a significant portion of overall Imperium assets in order to overwhelm the Empire by sheer numbers?

Again, I lack information on Imperium stealth systems; what are they like?

Unless they use teleporters. Teleportation weaponry isn't an unknown in 40K either. (Soul Drinkers mentions psychoportive weapons, and Deathwatch MArines used teleporters to dump munitions into a moon to divert a Hive Fleet in one of the Codexes.) Teleporters work via the warp, in case you forgot.

I did not. Though I would question the extent to which such weapons are available (is it "lost and decaying" technology like a lot of other gizmos? It does not appear to be in all that common use) and how effective they are - can you teleport from anywhere, or do you need to be close?

Even then, so what? That just means that everything BUT the rich and important worlds get wiped out, which will be problems in and of itself, since worlds like Coruscant rely on support to maintain their existence, and shields can't remain up indefinitely for that same reason.

So are you assuming that the Imperium can kamikaze a significant fraction of the galaxy's billions of worlds, enough so to disrupt the flow of essentials to the Core? Do they have cyclonic torpedoes and whatnots enough for that (I thought they were supposed to be rare?)? And standard wartime practice appears to be to leave shields raised, letting through commerce piecemeal on preordained routes and "holes" in the shield (Coruscant and Byss for examples).

Off the top of my head? He's been known to render aid to specific individuals (Saved a navigator and his crew from daemons in one short story OTOH, intervened to save a cruiser Captain by delivering a warning via Astropath.)

We learn from the Inquisition War novels that the GEoM is basically a bunch of individual entities working collectively, and helping to oversee and monitor the entire Imperium (IIRC).

In one novel, Eye of Terror, he managed to guide events to place a single Space Marine from the Horus Heresy era in a position to destroy an alliance between Chaos factions that might have endangered the Imperium (or so he believed, at least.) In one of the Titanicus books (Codex titanicus) fluff describes him as directly influencing the galactic mobiliziation of the Imperium against a Ork WAAAAGGH once he couldn't deflect Gork and Mork by other means (through measures like influencing the Tarot, etc.)

So it is less "direct help", more easing up communications and such, and then mostly on an individual basis?

On the direct attack scale? He can probably do everything a dAemon, Daemon Prince, DAemon Lord, or a Chaos God could do (which includes affecting worlds on the global scale, if not greater.) and he's orders of magnitude more powerful than the strongest psykers (Who can be pretty damn strong.) I recall offhand mention that he can assist in faster Warp Travel as well if he wishes (I believe Chaos Gods can do that anyhow, so no reason he couldn't.)

Do you mean awoken and in full omnipotent mode, here, or still dead but dreaming on the Golden Throne?

Oh bullshit. We know collisions between hyperspace and realspace objects can occur - this is a fundamental bit of logic that Curtis himeself estalbished (CF Endor holocaust) and "mass shadows" mean nothing if you don't care whether your vehicle survives or not. You need not even emerge from hyperspace for that to occur, so your arguments regarding that don't fly.

A warhead on the other hand doesnt need to get close or be allt hat precise either. The Precision of single ships we've seen is enough to get warheads close to a planet to fuck it up.

Lastly, a simple way around that is to simply have the target accelerating to a high velocity before entering hyperspace. Momentum has to be conserved and hyperdrives can't circumvent that.
Even gravity well generators won't help here (kick it out of hyperspace it can still get near or hit the planet if its travelling fast enough, and we know SW ships can reach relativistic velocities handily.) unless you're going to disrupt your own trade or hamper your own capabilities.

I seemed to recall counter-examples (from the Thrawn trilogy for example), but cannot find any on perusal. Conceded, then.

I won't even comment on examples of "Sublight acceleration" via hyperdrive examples. (IE making the jump to lightspeed and then cutting it off before actually raeching/crossing it, covering the distance with relatavistic velocity)

Sublight could be defended againt in part; fighters can intercept objects travelling at near-light velocities. Still, this would naturally call for rather more security around entering and leaving hyperspace (or hyperdrives in general). So, conceded.

And no shield is completely immune to momentum - and if you don't understand this I suggest you read Mike's essay on shields and consider the Endor Holocuast example (again - this time as to why shields would not have neccesarily saved Endor.)

Of course there are limits to what shields can do; only a dishonest wanker would pretend otherwise. But when one considers what the Executor's shields could take (three standard ISDs, massing cubic kilometres, sporting neutronium-laced armour and carrying large loads of superdense hypermatter, ramming it at near c), one could question how feasible kinetic impact is against shielded targets. To top the mass and momentum of that, you would need rather special and expensive projectiles (unless you do something like tying a giant hyperdrive to a planetoid, but then you would still need rather large amounts of energy to move it).

R2 reprogrammed the Eclipse to jump to Byss from Onderon and it emerged from hyperspace nearly on top of the Galaxy gun and collided with it. It probably hit at relatavistic speeds given the emergence point (same wiht the 3 ISDs.)

All right. That was some precise targeting, then. But, point conceded.

[open_sketchbook]

Teleporters are not "lost and decayed" gizmos. Their just somewhat rare... which means they come standard to everything bigger than an escort. Every Imperial ship in Battlefield Gothic can execute teleport attacks.

[Darth Hoth]

Teleporters are not "lost and decayed" gizmos. Their just somewhat rare... which means they come standard to everything bigger than an escort. Every Imperial ship in Battlefield Gothic can execute teleport attacks.

Teleportation as such is rather commonplace, I am well aware of this (though not its exact capabilities in terms of range, accuracy and mass transported), but "psychoportive weapons" was something I was unaware of. From scant appearances they sound rather rare, and if they can bypass any armour at will, that makes said armour rather useless if they are very common (which would beg the question why they bother with it); anything without void shields is toast, plain and simple.

[Thanas]

With regard to Feena D'Asta, it is probably more correct that she managed to pass as the real thing in the eyes of the council members, as she did only communicate via hologram with her father iirc. Also, note that when she meets her father, she does act in a manner that puts him off (refusing to act like her when meeting him, e.g. not hugging).

[Darth Hoth]

With regard to Feena D'Asta, it is probably more correct that she managed to pass as the real thing in the eyes of the council members, as she did only communicate via hologram with her father iirc. Also, note that when she meets her father, she does act in a manner that puts him off (refusing to act like her when meeting him, e.g. not hugging).

Checked the comic, and fair enough, conceded on the particulars. Still, representing the d'Asta Corporation on the council in a believable and competent manner should require a fair amount of training and study.

As an addendum to my earlier post, further checking of TLC reveals that two months passed between it and Thrawn's first meeting with C'baoth. This puts a distinct upper limit on the training period, if any, for his clone soldiers.

[Connor MacLeod]

Teleporters are not "lost and decayed" gizmos. Their just somewhat rare... which means they come standard to everything bigger than an escort. Every Imperial ship in Battlefield Gothic can execute teleport attacks.

Teleportation as such is rather commonplace, I am well aware of this (though not its exact capabilities in terms of range, accuracy and mass transported), but "psychoportive weapons" was something I was unaware of. From scant appearances they sound rather rare, and if they can bypass any armour at will, that makes said armour rather useless if they are very common (which would beg the question why they bother with it); anything without void shields is toast, plain and simple.

I dont have time to get to your long-ass replies yet but I'll settle this one flat out:

Page 56

"DiGoryan here and I were discussing the same thing. WE thought it might be a subspace propulsion rig at first, those solid-state numbers they had docked at Hydraphur a few years back."

"But that, of course, would cause infra-quantum fluctuations far beyond the range of what we are currently acquiring." Said the Navigator, DiGoryan, folding his long, intricate fingers into a steeple below his chin.

..

"WE believed it was a psychoportive weapons system powering up," continued DiGoryan, "But, of course, the astropaths have detected nothing that might suggest such a thing."

"Then we realised," said Vekk conversationally, "It was a teleporter. The Mechanicus have brought a teleporter along with them."

Its evidently common enough that a starship officers can recognize the possibilities of such a weapon (the odds of only a few captains in the galaxy knowing of such a weapon just happening to RUN across such a weapon in the Imperium if it were very rare are so high as to be astronomical I'd bet.)

To this we can add to the fact that a number of sources (ADeptus Titanicus, Codex Titanicus, other related titan sources) have mentioned the existence of weapons that Titans use called "Warp missiles" - weapons that can "teleport" through the warp to bypass defenses and attack the target.

I wouldn't call them "commonplace" weapons, but they're not exactly unheard of either. The soul drinkers psychoportive weapons would presumably be an upscaled version of warp missiles.

[NecronLord]

Subspace propulsion? What?

[Connor MacLeod]

Subspace propulsion? What?

In universe, "sub-space" probably is another reference to the warp (which fits with the context of the quote.) Subspace stuff is mentioned in the 2nd Rogue Trader novel too I believe (too lazy to go back and look) and there it was referenced WRT to Warp.

Out of Universe, I simply treat it as another example of Star Trek rudely intruiding in on the 40K universe, like it did in those Hoare Rogue Trader novels and ignore it as an outlier.

[NecronLord]

The only instance of the Emperor assisting with warp travel I recall was in the Horus Heresy artbook, when, before shit hit the fan, the Emperor could use the astronomicon to focus on a particular fleet and allow it to travel across the galaxy in hours.

[NecronLord]

For the record, I mentioned, way back in this thread, the Gehemenet psychic-weapon tower capable of instantly destroying Imperium cruisers, from Dark Apostle. The sequel, Dark Disciple reveals a bit more about these.
Spoiler

The Word Bearers homeworld of Sicarus in the Eye has at least eight of these, arranged in a chaos star around their central fortress. There may be more elsewhere on the planet. It's definately not a single-appearance one-off thing.

[Shadowtraveler]

Spoiler

The Word Bearers homeworld of Sicarus in the Eye has at least eight of these, arranged in a chaos star around their central fortress. There may be more elsewhere on the planet. It's definately not a single-appearance one-off thing.

Spoiler

It's mentioned in the first book that the Word Bearers have made other Gehemenets when they needed to. They help make Daemon Worlds I believe. The only thing different with that particular one was it was used to crack open the Necron tomb.

[Connor MacLeod]

The only instance of the Emperor assisting with warp travel I recall was in the Horus Heresy artbook, when, before shit hit the fan, the Emperor could use the astronomicon to focus on a particular fleet and allow it to travel across the galaxy in hours.

That might be where I heard it. Though like I said, I'm pretty sure Daemons and the other Chaos powers have helped their minions Navigate the warp faster/more effectively (they can manipulate warp storms at least, I'm pretty sure that happened in both the latter Ghosts novels as well as Traitor's Hand.) - and if Chaos can do it I'm damn sure the Emperor (and his "angels" "saints" or what the fuck ever) can. Especially if, as in this situation, the threat of Chaos is greatly diminished (taking out their minions is going to greatly weaken the Chaos Gods.)

[Connor MacLeod]

For the record, I mentioned, way back in this thread, the Gehemenet psychic-weapon tower capable of instantly destroying Imperium cruisers, from Dark Apostle. The sequel, Dark Disciple reveals a bit more about these.
Spoiler

The Word Bearers homeworld of Sicarus in the Eye has at least eight of these, arranged in a chaos star around their central fortress. There may be more elsewhere on the planet. It's definately not a single-appearance one-off thing.

That's not surprising given what Warp weaponry (Vortex warheads, Blackstone fortress weapons and D-cannons, etc.) do. Hell, the simple expedient of overloarding warp engines and triggering them inside a systsm is bound to be pretty nasty (like what the Battlefleet Bakka flagship did to the Tyranid forcees attacking Ultramar.) It shouldn't be too difficult for the Imperium to rig up a glorified warp engine dedicated to a kamikaze run like that (and if not they have old shisp to use as dedicated fire ships in reserve fleets anyhow.)

[Connor MacLeod]

For the record, I mentioned, way back in this thread, the Gehemenet psychic-weapon tower capable of instantly destroying Imperium cruisers, from Dark Apostle. The sequel, Dark Disciple reveals a bit more about these.
Spoiler

The Word Bearers homeworld of Sicarus in the Eye has at least eight of these, arranged in a chaos star around their central fortress. There may be more elsewhere on the planet. It's definately not a single-appearance one-off thing.

Speaking of Dark Disciple I noticed that that novel too (skimming through some bits) indicated that the Word Bearers were doing "in system" jumps (At least at the end - they were clearly insystem when they were gonna leave after achieving their objective)

Its occured to me that the whole "emerge at the edge of the system and travel in" may not be a hard and fast rule. Beyond certain older details (stuff mentioned in Rogue Trader mainly comes to mind) we dont know the exact parameters and reasons preventing large ships from doing it. Its certainly dangerous to do so, I admit openly, but it can be done apparently (hell if we look at the samller scale we know it can be done because Titan warp missiles, displacement devices, and teleporters do it. And I recall some "warp gates/portals" are in-system phenomena as well.)

Also, emergence point distance seem to vary (Eye of Terror mentions tens of millions of miles, whereas the Inquisition War novels say billions of kilometers.)

My guess is that like FTL speeds, ,the nature of the warp itself futzes up the reliability of emergence points and makes it dangerous (but not impossible) to emerge or exit in-system unless you have some sort of precise data and/or a "calm" spot (which basically makes it unpredictable, at least in the 40K galaxy. RT I think suggested that the presence of nearby masses can futz up warp drives somewhat too, so that may be a further complicating factor.

Another possible reason why warp jumps are mainly limited to out-system is that we know that it takes alot of energy to enter/exit the warp (Stellar scale ouputs as per Execution Hour) and that the entry/exit can release alot of energy and/or warp nastiness. Which may be something you WANT to keep away from habitable portions of the system.

[NecronLord]

Speaking of Dark Disciple I noticed that that novel too (skimming through some bits) indicated that the Word Bearers were doing "in system" jumps (At least at the end - they were clearly insystem when they were gonna leave after achieving their objective)

The planet they were on (Perdus Skylla) was introduced as the frozen moon of a gas giant. It could just be out of the zone of interference.

Certainly Cain's Last Stand backs up that theory, though, with the chaos forces practically jumping into orbit, something that is presented as very dangerous (and more than a little crazy).

[Connor MacLeod]

Speaking of Dark Disciple I noticed that that novel too (skimming through some bits) indicated that the Word Bearers were doing "in system" jumps (At least at the end - they were clearly insystem when they were gonna leave after achieving their objective)

The planet they were on (Perdus Skylla) was introduced as the frozen moon of a gas giant. It could just be out of the zone of interference.

Yeah but as I remember seeing they hid close to the star's corona, they'd have to go alot closer in-system. (As I recall they took some shuttle in-system to the planet, due to the Imperial fleet presence across the system.)

Maybe I'll go double check again.,

Certainly Cain's Last Stand backs up that theory, though, with the chaos forces practically jumping into orbit, something that is presented as very dangerous (and more than a little crazy).

True, although I'd bet in such a case they tend to have teh assistance of the Chaos Gods and whatnot assisting them in doing it.

[NecronLord]

Ah, yes, that bit mentions that when Kol Badar called the ship, it flew out to meet them, past the Imperials, pretending to be a freighter.

Infidus Diabolus had left the surging radiation of the system's sun to meet the damaged Idolator [not an idolator-class, BTW, a captured sublight transport], they had made little move to break their blockade to intercept them. A single cruiser with a host of escorts had formed a rearguard behind the bulk of the cordon, though it had made no hostile move towards them as yet.

[...]

'Jump on my Mark'

It's not clear where they are, mind, but as the Infidus seems to have flown past the Imperial fleet (it's not quite clear which of the four planets/moons the fleet is nearest to, either, it's just... engaging the enemy somewhere) I'd say it's probably quite a way out.

For comparison, in the same part on the story, Marduk is Spoiler

being brought unconcious, with other captives, aboard the dark eldar ship and operated on for a while while he's under to implant a null-generator

so there's no way to time how long it takes to get out there, but it could take hours or even days.

[Connor MacLeod]

Spoiler

As I recall there was a six hour timeframe for the Imperial fleet before they launched an exterminatus on the planet, certainly within a day anyhow

Plus, just a page earlier than your quote, it indicates the warp engines started to power up "twenty minutes later" after rendezvousing with the idolator. Given the locations of the ships, the Idolator would have come from the moons, and the Strike cruiser from the star on roughly converging courses. The moons were at least somewhat habitable, so athat is going to limit how far/close they are to the star in question.

[Connor MacLeod]

Mon Mothma was dead opposed to it, as were Leia and various others; it were the "General Ripper" military elements that favoured it. And stealing spice and reneging on deals with smugglers and pirates is not exactly comparable to breaking out the nuke-analogues. I repeat, these are the guys who decommissioned ship classes

The REBELS and the NR are two separate entities. Mon Mothma didn't have exclusive total control over the Rebellion - any faction could have done it (hell if hte Hutts could have done it she could have.) Hell the Mon Cals were desperate enough (they could secure their planet AND inflate the Rebel's fleet size.)

I assume the "decomissioned ship classes" thing refers to the Executors in the BFC? We know htat wasn't true, and more to the point, we know that post BFC they hcanged their mind on that.

and threw away the Sun Crusher because the technology was eeevol.

Which they weren't united on. You seem to be assuming that somehow if there is the slightest bit of dissent involved noone would dare doing it at all. Its not an either/or situation.

Well, they might reckon themselves too small to compete with the Empire (i.e., the Empire can trump them even if they start building up first), and the more insane ones did not have the technology (Yevetha and company). Still, conceded per above.

In a conventional snese maybe, but thats why they'd break out the uber-droid construciton tech, build up a massive force, then curbstomp them. You dont even need to position those facilities near your planet. They can be far away and work just fine.

I checked my copy of The Last Command, and I was wrong, it was Karrde saying it, not Lando; my apologies. However, the passage you are referring to was not the one I meant. I was talking of the one just in the beginning of Chapter 6; my edition is a translation, so I cannot quote it directly, but it is Karrde and Aves talking. Aves says something to the effect of, "I still don't believe Skywalker's numbers [for Thrawn's cloning speeds]. If you can do it that fast, wouldn't the old Clonemasters have done so?" And Karrde replies, "Maybe they did. As far as I know there are no records of cloning technology from that time left, all I saw was much older records from before the war."

That's all that Karrde claims to have known or seen, why should we assume Karrde is automatically omniscient on the topic of cloning, pray tell? Otherwise all that quote tells us is basically a confirmation of what was mentioned earlier.

Furthermore, the New Essential Guide to Weapons and Technology lists that Spaarti clones are grown in a few weeks, and though it notes that "Unfortunately, Spaarti cylinders create clones that suffer from 'clone madness,' a psychosis caused by a disturbance in the Force or the accelerated growth cycle," this does not appear to be the case for all.

No it does NOT say "a few weeks" it says "a matter of weeks"m and it speaks of that being the "fastest possible growht rate" Spaarti cylinders can manage, as long as you don't mind insane clones. In other words, the context clearly indicates the "fastest capability irrespective of all other considerations" not the "fastest it can make sane clones." I'll note in context that the timeframe Thrawn used with the Ysalamiri in TTT is probably also the "Fastest" they can be grown by the limits of the technology, so it hardly contradicts (aside from your speculation that it does.)

[quote
This flies in the face of a number of references to "flash learning" and the training time for Thrawn's ultra-accelerated clones (being months of basic training if you make a generous estimate, based on the length of the Thrawn Regency as such - certainly nothing like the raised-from-birth Clonetroopers - and they are described as being as good as Stormtroopers).[/quote]

Stormtroopers by the time of ANH are of varying quality, so that doesnt really tell us anything itself. Furthermore as I recall Thrawn was using imprinted memories/experiences of his troops (IE the Fel Clones he madE) which may very well accelerate the sequence (so long as you have such experiences to draw upon.) but even that may depend on other factors (such as "do they transmit all memories/experiences/personality traits, or only those pertinent to their specific roles?" - the Cloens in TTT were rather automatonlike as I recall.) And that at best covers soldiers, not ship crewS (which you still cannot treat as comparable.)

The clone of Feena, Baroness d'Asta, in Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood could not reasonably have been growing/trained for more than a year (this, too, is generous; the Interim Ruling Council took over only after Palpatine's death, and I doubt Black Sun were cloning Imperials at random before), and she was able to pass for the real thing in the eyes of the Baroness's father, an act of mimicry that should be rather more difficult to produce than cannon-fodder clones.

They had to kidnap her before they could substitute the clone. Are you telling me they kidnapped her, held her while they GREW the clone, then sent the clone off to do its purpose? How the hell did noone notice her absence even if we assume mere weeks or even days? She'd be well guarded and no hyperspace journey would take that long, een the slowest. Seriously, did you even think that through before you posted it. It seems far liklier they obtained some of her material, grew and trained the clone beforehand (which would allow them to take steps to ensure ti was a good copy, no need to rush) then kidnap the lady at some specific point and substitute the clone.

The NEGtWaT further notes that "Spaarti clones are actually trained and educated during growth: a computer processing system linked directly to a clone's cerebral cortex feeds the clone a constant stream of useful information."

I'll also note it also says that the clone madness results frfom the "accelerated cloning process" as well as whatever Force technoabble is involved, which would seem to mesh with what I say, as the NEGW&T doesn't even give an indication of the minimum length of times or the quality producecd, so its hardly detailed enough to support your point. (Whereas I can point to the accelerated growht resulting in psychological damage to the Clone aas an indicator that learning is indeed a benchmark. After all like I said, growing the physical bits like the cloness is easy, you can grow clone parts very rapidly without a problem.)

In "A Princess Alone!", Leia Organa used "sleep imprinting" to get enough knowledge of Metalorn, a highly regimented "forgeworld" analogue, to pass for a native and outwit local Stormtropopers in its labyrinthine corridors.

And how long of this "imprinting" did it take? And I remind you "stormrtrooper" quality is again highly variable (they're not all clones.)

Assuming "one year" clones, this is so, though less so if they are "trained during growth" than otherwise. In a total war scenario, the first year would have to do without them.

You've yet to prove they can actually produce military (and in particular warship crew) clones "faster than a year" without the Ysalamiri method.

Um, no. I was merely assuming the battle would take place in the post-ANH era. Was that unreasonable? (If earlier, no Death Stars, Dark Troopers and a lot of other goodies.)

In the context you seem to think that Palpatine is the "all powerful do what he wants regardless of what others think" type, yeah it is. That was the entire point I was getting at in case you didnt notice, and it applies EVEN in the classic trilogy era.

As for the New Republic, that was a secret project by their Intelligence, specifically the uber secret Alpha Blue and its analogues, which operated completely without government oversight. It was only seriously considered after all the New Republic politicos had been either killed or thrown out, and a new Galactic Alliance been formed under the leadership of Cal Omas.

The same government in existence as per Destiny's Way, right? Since we're talking about the whole automated construction thing frmo that novel I fail to see how this backs up your point, other than being pointless speculation. And I can just throw the Viscounts in your face again (since they learned some of their lessons from the earlier years.)

This might not be readily quantifiable, but the Imperial propaganda machine should be able to turn a bare few minor incursions into a full-blown extragalactic invasion. Their spin supposedly made the majority of the Galactic populace believe that Alderaan had been destroyed by Rebels or a freak cosmic accident, rather than the Death Star, in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

Source? As I recall Alderaan's destruction tended to rather throw MORe support to the Rebels cause, and Palpy had difficulty settling things down post Yavin. At best, he might've kept the Core Worlds pacified by that excuse. Its certainly not as if the Rebels weren't engaging in their own propaganda.

I do believe you missed my point. What I meant to say was, precog will give him at least some understanding of the true scope of the 40k threat. This will make him less likely to hold back than a lesser threat in his own galaxy, or the initial (relative) weakness of Imperium technology, would have posited.

Even assuming the Force somehow gives him ample warning (a complete unknown, I might add)P that he'd neccesarily believe it? If we believe you, he must have been warned about Yavin and Endor and other things, but he'd failed to "see" it (or thought he had.)

Of course if you want to play that game the same case could be made for the GEoM and HE can pull out all the stops too (he's a bloody god, I think he can get things to change if he wanted to, and if he's not bothered with tangling it up with other forces like Chaos and whatnot.)

[Connor MacLeod]

Well, it was probably that, then. Still, the number of 'droids likely will not be larger than the number of clones by more than perhaps an order of magnitude.

Unknown, but irrelevant, since you're still assuming that all those "quintillions" were thrown into the battle at once. Even though if that were the case, they'd have curbstomped the Republic shortly after Geonosis, Clone Army or no.

Now that I think about it, Dooku basically has flat out said in the Clone Wars TV series that the Droid armies outnumbered the clones 100 to 1, so that is pretty much solved. More to the point, sicne we already know that you can't have absurd "kill ratios", that also indicates that its unlikely the CIS was throwing quintillions of droids at the REpublic all at once.

And clones are not used as starship crews and security? From what I heard of the new animated series, they make up the vast majority of the Republic Navy's offshore personnel, and this is not helping the case for lower numbers, considering that (if I recall correctly, at least) the Republic had a considerable naval superiority. And in a security role, we have them being "ubiquitous" on Coruscant; taking one clone for every 1,000 citizens, which is rather less proportion of policemen to civilians in Sweden (and the police is not "ubiquitous" here), this is still billions - on a single planet.

Coruscant is the bloody center of the Republic. so of course its well protected. It also has a huge fleet protecting it as well. I doubt this means that other planets that were not active war zones or training/deployment zones were housing massive numbers of clone troops. Do you rember the shit fit thrown about the idea of simply deploying mere REGIMENTS of Clone troops with the newly installed Moffs/Governors as per the ROTS novel?? A few regiments wouldnt make a lick of diffrence if everry planet in the REpublic was housing millions or billions of troops.

And this ignores the fact alot of planets also had their own native defense forces, navies, etc. (Something that Coruscant may or may not have.)

As for active, I believe the line from the Ep III ICS was "[The Juggernaut] strikes fear in the hearts of the galaxy's quintillions of battle droids and their Separatist masters" or somesuch. This does not lend itself well to thinking of automata already destroyed or not yet active.

Pointless speculation. The quote in no way indicates HOW those droids are being used. You seem to think that because someone might fear a bombing by the enemy that automatically makes them a combatant (I guess noncombatants can't fear attack by the enemy?) And again if they were deploying all these quintillions of battle droids, they must have had at LEAST thjat many during the beginning of the conflict (they spent a long time building up before the war actually began remember) which means they could have deployed them anyn time during the earlier phases and swamped the Republic

More to the point, it actually makese sense the Separatists would not actively use the droids unless they NEEDEd to, given what total cheapass bastards they are (both in terms of replacing lost droids as well as maitnaining active droids.)

And the Empire cannot detect or intercept torpedoes at such ranges why? Are they stealth-equipped?

The torpedoes themselves? Not neccesarily. But the delivery vessels can be (vessels as small as one designed to carry a single space marine can be stealtehd against Tau detection, for example. As per the novel Kill Team.)

Of course, there's other nasty shit they might try doing. Hell, activating warp en gines IN a system can be nasty all on its own and almost as bad as a WMD.

And if so, what does that stealth constitute?

A sort of cloaking shield in some cases, emissions control, their regular shields can serve EW functions as well (blockign signals). Regular ships likely have to have cloaking shields because "running silent" in spacee is rather uesless (Same in Star Wars unless you have some sort of shield to suppress them. Same is actually true of SW vessels or most sci fi vessels where "running silent" is used, really.) We've seen the "running silent" in various starship examples (most notably Execution Hour, covered on this site by myself) and we know for a fact that 40K ships run similar performance capabilities (in terms of acceleration, power generation, etc.) to SW ships. The EW like funciton of shields is covered in various novels (Gaunts Ghosts, such as Necropolis, as well as the William King Space Wolf novels.) Specific examples of stealthing on craft is from various novels (Eye of Terror, Ravenor, Inquisition War omnibus, ,Kill Team, Tactica Imperialis, ,etc.)

In terms of effectiveness such ships are meant to be able to shield/redirect the emissions of Imperial ships (and as noted they have at least similar capabilities WRT to power generation and systme performancee to SW ships). We know they've been used to protect against their own sensors, Tau sensors, etc. Imperial sensors, while having difficulties against Eldar/Dark Eldar sensors, can in enough cases detect them fairly well (Shadow point and Nightbringer esp. Indeed, the first novel indicates that if the sensors are tuned properly they can detect them much more easily.)

This also probably doesnt factor in the possibility of psychic shielding of some kind (ships carry astropaths and other psykers after all, and at least two kinds of psychic shielding - Ravenor and Inquisiton war, ,w ere of a psychic variety or incorporated psychic elements.) Chaos ships could certainly do it (they did it in Storm of Iron, in fact.) so I dont see why Imperial psykers couldn't.

So the situation is akin to Milky Way, before the Fall?

Something like that.

How effective is 40k stealth, and how widely implemented? Wars have long-range sensors even for "realspace".

Already addressed this. And yes while SW has long range realspace sensors, so does 40K, so I fail to see what advantage this is meant to possess.

My assumption is that the Imperium will not be jumping in massive Exterminatus strikes immediately upon the war beginning. The Empire, in the meantime, will have time to mobilise to what they consider total war, and this includes massive military readiness (e.g., Coruscant's shields are continually up before the New Republic conquers it, and the same goes for the Yuuzhan Vong War).Given that their strategies are based on arbitrarily fast FTL that cannot be readily detected or intercepted (unless you have massive sensor grids and deep space patrols in place, like what Palpatine built for the Deep Core), it make sense to have the fleet at readiness to defend any given target; they will not look for intent, if a large enemy warship appears it would have to be a complete moron of a commander not to call for assistance (unless he has sufficient forces to take it on himself, of course). Unless I am mistaken, we see something of this in the Thrawn books, though the New Republic there is obviously demilitarised as compared to the Galactic Empire at its height (three sector fleets is considered a major loss in Thrawn's planning for Bilbringi).

And yet you've failed to give adequate reason why they would go for "total war", even though we've got ample examples that they do not do so without VERY extreme reason, regardless of the era we talk about. There is in fact a strong "bias" against "strong militarization" and this is a rather big drawback. So I have to ask (yet again) why you assume the Empire is going to employ their ideal tactics from the get go. Because if you are going to assume that, then why should we not do so for the Imperium?

Would the Imperium go for exterminatus right away? Maybe or maybe not. It depends on alot ot factors (If we play the "precog warning" game you yourself already deployed, then its quite possible the GEoM might arrange such a matter in order to remove the Empire's ability to do so. Whether he would or not or actually become aware of it is another matter.)

As for reaction times, there is precedent for short such; in the Young Jedi Knights books, the Organa government could supposedly mobilise "half the New Republic fleet" and send it against a given target (the "fleet" of the Diversity Alliance terrorist group) in a matter of hours (there are no precise data, but it certainly was not days). Even allowing for obvious hyperbole, this shows that sending battle groups at short notice is possible in the New Republic.

Quote? Source? Page number? Its been a long time since I read those particular novels.

The Last Command shows that distress calls from individual planets are responded to by local military commands as soon as they reach them, and this when they are not considering the possibility of planetary devastation.

And how many ships deploy to each given planet? Single digit? Double digit? Triple digit? And what sort of readiness were they at? Were they expecting war, or what?

By a contrasting example, I'd throw the Corellian Trilogy, where the NR was caught completely unprepared by events, and could NOT mobilize nearly as rapidly as you claim.

In Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka, the Empire can send hourly reinforcements to suppressing a restive planet with a few days' preparation at most, and this is in peacetime. Admittedly, I might be wary of extrapolating that particular to a much larger scale, but it is not like I am grasping all this out of thin air. Certainly, if it takes the Imperium ship days to reach the planet, that is well within the Imperial window of action, and if it fires torpedoes from afar, the planet has ample time to detect and intercept it.

I know the Renetasian incident quite well. And to clarify the troopships were appearing at "hourly" intervals, not that they took hours to arrive, and I certainly recall no mention of preparation. More to the point, this makes no indication of the number of placees troops were being called from. Its not even a remotely reliable example of reaction times.

Its also not the best case to use for other reasons, since the REnetasians (not exactly the most high tech of forces) repeatedly massacred Imperial forces landed on the planet, so much so that it REQUIRED those hourly reinforceements (What was it, over ninety percecnt of the intiial deployment wiped out?) And this was with orbital superiority, mind. I tend to figure they weren't using very good troops (either due to the region, or because of the rushed nature of the conflict they may have been using poorly trained or inexperienced soldiers.)

Even if we assume that the first few strikes are successful, this will certainly alert the others to the threat and make them react accordingly. Given the random nature of warp travel and Astropath communications, I would think pulling off a massive coordinated strike is not feasible.

If they strike in a piecemeal fashion, yes. This depends entirely on how they decide to attack. (and as I mentioned, the total lack of psykers and significant warp connection by SW humans is going to lead to a very different materium in the SW galaxy. And if it didn't then that leads to other nasty possibilities, such as deliberately engaging warp engines in system, tactics that can wipe out entire Tyranid invasion fleets with a single battleship if they try it.)

With the speed advantage of hyperdrive, it does not really matter if the individual ship is more durable unless it is absurdly so. The Empire can jump ships in and out on it whenever it cares to - or is the suicide fleet delivering the missiles a significant portion of overall Imperium assets in order to overwhelm the Empire by sheer numbers?

So? They need precision too, especially since what you are talking about basically involves micro jumping close into targets. They can do that, but only under certain conditions or when certain requirements are met, and certainly not instantly. (otherwise SW battles would make far gerater use of hyperspace jumpign as a tactical advantage.) Disregarding the aforementioned detection issues, you also seem to be assuming that Imperial vessels will just limp along slowly in realspace so as to make for the most optimal targets for SW vessels to hyper in, swarm and bombard. What the hell happens if they come in at high speeds? (IE the sortts of speeds you get if you have to cross multiple AU in hours/days?) What if they come in at relativistic speeds (they can do that, too.) Engaging relatavisstic targets via pinpoint hyperspace tactics isn't easy, especially when it comes to microjumping. I won't even touch on the "concetrating number of ships" issue due to its utter ambiguity.

I did not. Though I would question the extent to which such weapons are available (is it "lost and decaying" technology like a lot of other gizmos? It does not appear to be in all that common use) and how effective they are - can you teleport from anywhere, or do you need to be close?

Already covered.

So are you assuming that the Imperium can kamikaze a significant fraction of the galaxy's billions of worlds, enough so to disrupt the flow of essentials to the Core? Do they have cyclonic torpedoes and whatnots enough for that (I thought they were supposed to be rare?)? And standard wartime practice appears to be to leave shields raised, letting through commerce piecemeal on preordained routes and "holes" in the shield (Coruscant and Byss for examples).

Who said they need to kamikaze most of the galaxY? We're talking about the EMPIRE, not the SW galaxy as a whole. The Empire's territories are a much smaller fraction of that (and its doubtful that more than a fraction of that is habitable in any substnatial manner.)

And yes, they can leave shields raised, making them utterly invulnerable. But this also leaves them totally cut off from the galaxy. Which then begs the question of how long they can keep shields raised (maintence issues become importtant) as well as how long supplies and resourcees last. Its a double-edged sword.

So it is less "direct help", more easing up communications and such, and then mostly on an individual basis?

As a conservative measure of his abilities? Yeah. Of course, those all occur when Chaos and whatnot are are also significant threats (IE the "Imperium is beset on all sides") meaning GEoM is far more distracted in those cases. The extent of what he could (or would) do is up for debate. Though I'm not betting on Palpy standing up to him if it came down to raw power.

Do you mean awoken and in full omnipotent mode, here, or still dead but dreaming on the Golden Throne?

In his current state, as in "on the Golden Throne." Where he's fighting to protect the Imperium from Chaos, managing psykers and the FTL travel, and whatnot. I also forgot to mention he's been shown to stop time at least locally in his palace (Inquisition War novels)

Sublight could be defended againt in part; fighters can intercept objects travelling at near-light velocities. Still, this would naturally call for rather more security around entering and leaving hyperspace (or hyperdrives in general). So, conceded.

In theory it could (interdictor fields extending the distances ships have to enter/exit Hyperspace from, but this doesnt seem to be a uniform thing in SW) but for any vessel within light seconds of the planet, the risk of dangerous collision becomes trivially easy. Using something like a robot Ramship from the Corellian Trillogy would be downright nasty.

Of course there are limits to what shields can do; only a dishonest wanker would pretend otherwise. But when one considers what the Executor's shields could take (three standard ISDs, massing cubic kilometres, sporting neutronium-laced armour and carrying large loads of superdense hypermatter, ramming it at near c), one could question how feasible kinetic impact is against shielded targets.

Once you get to a really large size (Such as chucking moon size masses at planets, or largeg masses at very high - ie relatavistic - speeds) the problems of momentum become quite significant. Because unless the shield mountings (and all the other associated bracing mechanisms to help distribute it throughout the mass) hold up well (and probably extensive use of tensor fields) the forces involved will fuck things over SEVERELY.

Lets say a planetary shield gets hit by a DS1 sized object moving at slow speeds (say a few km/s). The shields might absorb all the energy efificently, but there's a shitload of momentum behind it (well into e19-e20 kg*m/s) Assume each shield generator masses around a billion tons, and that there are oh 100 such generators on this particular facing of the planet. Each generator will then absorb engouh momentum to accelerate them to a velocity of around 100-1,000 km/s if the generators can't handle the impact. Which in turn will be imparted to the surfacee of the planet (which is actually more problematic because plaents cannot be made from supersciency materials, so you need alot of tensor fields to help distribute the force/momentum.)

Now, the REALLY fun bit there is that I'm ignoring inefficiencies and failures. What happens if the shields fail to handle even a small parrt of the force/momentum of the impact? What if a shield generator's bracings buckle or tear? The force(and the energy from the resulting accecleration) has to go somewhere. I assume I don't have to paint out the results for you.

Now, the really fun thing is when you get to mass-scattering energies. Even if the shields STILL stay up, the shields still have to do something with the momentum, and by this time, you're talking about momentums sufficient to actualyl MOVE the planet about (assuming it can be held together agains tthe forces of the impact, ,that is) so even if some hypothetical planetary shield prevented a planet from being destroyed by a planet-destroying impact, it probably would still be destabilized in some fashion (having its orbit changed, for example.)

NOW do you get the scope of the problem I am talking about?

To top the mass and momentum of that, you would need rather special and expensive projectiles (unless you do something like tying a giant hyperdrive to a planetoid, but then you would still need rather large amounts of energy to move it).

Says who? You just need to stick a hyperdrive and/or engines on a big asteroid. We've seen that done (Dark Nest comes to mind, but as I recall Zonoma Sekot also used hyperdrive/realspace engines) The most they might need are some sort of tensor fields to help hold them together, but that would just make them EASIER.

And considering the proliferation of annihliation technologies in Star Wars (superfreighters and large transpots, like the TF ones, or the transport fleet Palpy used to transport that planet's oceans in Slave Ship) the energy issue is also arguably trivial.