It has a major difference. Pre-DoB are your standard First Born with anywhere to 500 to 1,600 Marines, Post-DoB you have the Primaris and the Chapter is a lot larger with upwards of 5,000 Astartes. It just means whether there is a stomp or a complete anal circumference roll table in play from FATAL.
I don't think the chapter was expanded post devastation?
This also brings in Inceptors who would look like falling meteors on radar and would just be absolutely devastating to Military Forces. Then there are the Incursors and Vanguard Infiltrators. And then come the Repulsors which can be dropped from orbit.
Vanguard Eliminators would also be a pain, camo cloaks defeat even Tau thermal scans and fellow Astarte scans, and they can utilize Las Fusils per lore as long range sniper weapons. Then again the First Born Scouts also had camo cloaks as well and were used to wage guerrilla warfare and snipe targets of opportunity.
Inceptors looking like debris or or meteors on radar doesn't help them all that much, it might trick people once (but only maybe, it's not like the government is going to be particularly blasé about mere meteors hitting important infrastructure or bases), but once it happens the first time people will be wary of it in the future.
And more importantly, they cannot meaningfully alter the overall tactical situation. Space marines are already fast, tough, and armed with extremely hard hitting weapons. Adding some marginally faster, marginally tougher, marginally harder hitting marines to their roster will not allow them to turn a situation where they are at the losing end of a massive strategic and numerical disadvantage into a victory by doing really, really well at a tactical level. They were already enjoying an overwhelming tactical advantage.
Vanguard forces are likewise not going to help. Camo cloaks are really fancy camouflage that doesn't show up on thermals. Ok, that's neat, you're still not going to conquer the world with that, nor will you conquer the world with that and some really fancy sniper rifles. We have dudes that have really good sniper rifles now, and I'm fairly sure DAPRA has some sort of anti-thermal imaging cloth under development, those are nice but they're again tactically useful gadgets that are of limited value on a strategic level.
Any conventional engagement with marines is going to feature the same core elements, regardless of the precise equipment used by the marines:
1. They can deploy almost anywhere with ease and will enjoy an overwhelming initial advantage, but they will have an extremely limited time to operate there before overwhelming conventional forces arrive to swamp them with sheer numbers and firepower.
2. Marines cannot deploy everywhere, it is possible to harden a location to the point it is deep strike proof. Drop pods and jump capable force can be shoot down on the way in and cannot avoid detection on the way in by ground based AA forces, marines rely on speed and surprise to overwhelm enemies you can't get the drop on a radar dish wired to a SAM site.
Terminators can teleport down, but they need a homing signal in order to do so, otherwise there is a very high risk of a fatal mishap.
3. They can get down to the surface easily, but any non-terminator force will have severe trouble getting back up, because they must be evacuated with aircraft and 40k aircraft, not matter how fast and sturdy they are, will eventual face weapons built counter them. A conventional SAM modified with an anti-tank type warhead
will hurt a thunderhawk, and enough hits will kill it. Moreover, to pick up troops that thunderhawk must land, bringing it into range of all sorts of weapons that would struggle to engage at higher altitude.
4. Marines cannot win a war of attrition. All of their equipment is difficult to repair and much of it is impossible to replace, and none of it can be replaced quickly. Likewise, training any new marines takes decades.
5. Our capabilities are very hard to degrade away entirely. The marines can probably knock out a lot of the stuff used to make modern weapons. But they can't knock all the stuff needed to produce any weapons that can hurt them. It may well be that a few weeks into this war, we can no longer produce any more SMAWs. Ok, that sucks, but we've still got loads of them and I bet we can still build some kind of panzerschreck type weapon, and that will still kill a marine.
Silo locations are public knowledge, once they get the initial scout and electronic intelligence gathering, they are blown up from orbit, same as nuclear bomber bases, etc.
I'm pretty sure all silos are not publicly known, and please cite the ability to SM craft to precisely destroy them, since those silos are again, built to resist attempts to destroy them via even nuclear blasts.
Also the Lion incident was possible because a peer competitor was able to use advanced technology to evade the scans. And the plan failed anyway. We don't have the technology to evade their scans.
I think you're missing the point. Regardless of the technology used, they hid the bomb in a very small shuttle, so whatever tech they used to shield it must have likewise been very small and compact. It is therefore entirely possible that our technology, though bulkier and less effective, may still succeed.
It will prevent ground radars from monitoring space and most radio traffic. As for the electrical grid, computer viruses and strikes on key weak points can cause cascading power failures all across the world, causing economic collapse.
That seems dubious, given you, and the codexes, have already claimed that a key advantage that jump pack troops have is that they can insert from orbit and the enemies ground defenses will confuse them with meteors or space debris. If the astartes were capable of the sort of jamming you contend, it wouldn't matter what jump infantry looked like, since enemy radar would be unable to detect them at all.
The capability to cause cascaded power failures by hitting a few key points in the grid is, to my knowledge, completely undemonstrated and largely a matter of speculation even for us, who build that grid and know how all of it works, it seems even less likely the marines will be able to do it.
You mean in selected circumstances held their own because said Space Marines got recalled due to internal politics or really lucky there was not a Librarian on the upper scale with truly world breaking powers. A Librarian just capable of hurling thunder balls is different from a Librarian who snaps Titans in half.
No, I mean military forces in 40k regularly engage enemies that have Pyskers, and defeat those enemies, despite not having pyskers of their own.
Probably because both sides are now employing Legion Strength Forces again with the Primarchs returning to lead in person.
That's not a citation. Please cite an incident, ideally a detailed incident, where a single company of marines conquered an entire planet by themselves.
190 tons of force means a conqueror cannon alone packs the power of a 16inch gun, a Battle Cannon is a lot more powerful than that.
So, a Leman Russ can take a 190 tons of recoil and be fine, but on that feat list the entire tank was rocked back by the impact of an enemy shell that hit with far less force, and so given that hitting the tank with 190 tons of force should have flipped the darn thing over.
Speaking of SDN, I recall them getting
really salty over some IA manuals that actually did give explict, and pathetic, figures for 40k vehicles. You'll forgive if I distrust the judgement of people who say "well, when this book says 190 tons of recoil, that's actually 190 tons of recoil, but when this other technical book says Rolled homogeneous Armour it's not
really RHA as we understand it".
The Orks are the most powerful pyschic race in 40K, capable of creating advanced technology out of scrap that works in their hands because they believe it does. The more they fight, the bigger and badder they get. At a certain point they begin to evolve to the Krork whose power and reach exceeded what the DAOT Humanity achieved. The Beasts who led the Orks in M32 were constructing attack moons that created FTL gravity corridors and could whack entire Imperial Battle Fleets. The Adeptus Mechanicus reverse engineered the Technology, used it to teleport Ullanor elsewhere, renamed it Armageddon, and then stuck the secrets deep and dark in their vaults and never used it to replace warp travel because of reasons.
Yes, thank, I've read the wiki page for "WAAGH" as well, but that doen't actually address my point. As a rule*, ork technology does not work "because they think it does" it works better than it should because they think it does, as evidenced by the fact that people who are not orks can use ork technology despite their being no orks around to affect it. Cain used a bunch of hijacked ork vehicles in Death or Glory, the Armageddon Ork Hunter regiment making use of captured ork weaponry, Yarrick and his power claw that still works, etc.
It's not possible to construct weapons of the performance and firepower allegedly reached by imperial technology out of scrap metal and junk, it's simply not possible. However, it is possible to construct crude firearms and weaponry that can perform nearly as well as modern weapons of scrap and junk, and then the WAAGH can make up the difference.
* there are allegedly some instances where Ork tech should not work at all and yet does. I say allegedly as I've never actually seen such a passage dispite being fairly well versed in 40k, so if these passages do actually exist, they are very, very rare and not the norm.
True and they weren't near sacred relics of the Emperor which could serve as an amplifier or had sufficient mass of faith to burn through. Bear in mind the Emperor was surrounded by Sisters of Silence without ill effect and despite their abilities, Sisters could be killed by Daemons of the Warp. So it depends on the strength of the null field vs the strength of the pysker facing it.
That's not at all related to what I said, I didn't say "this time, they were strong enough to power through the anti-warp effect", I said "The book explicitly stated the anti-warp effect didn't work on them, because they didn't use the warp", right after another book explicitly said anti-warp effects do work on them, because the sisters use the warp.
Depends on context. A Siege Regiment sent to dig out a foe from an area that can't be pounded into submission by orbital bombardment like Vraks is different from a Krieg Regiment formed for mobile warfare like Death Korps 23rd Mechanised Regiment. The Former is used for straight up shit kicking contests in which maneuver is not possible, the foe is heavily dug in and safe from ortillery, Astartes are not available to kick the door in, Titans and Knights likewise are not available, and the world's value is not so great as that the Imperium wants to deploy those units but still wants it back on principle. The issue with Vraks was that Chaos Marines got involved and brought their friends with them and Imperial High Command decided to keep grinding instead of saying fuck it, exterminatus. Even in the Vraks storyline, people realized this entire campaign was handled poorly from the get go and tactics were changed and proper resources deployed for the face saving conquering of the world which was then abandoned.
A regular Krieg Regiment is capable of mobile warfare in hellish environments where maneuver is possible, but conditions too bad for even the Penal Legions to be sent and not so valuable that the Imperium will request Astartes.
Ok, you're still not getting it. A fixed defensive line like Vraks would be child's play to a modern military force, the sort of "heavily dug in" defenses used somewhere like Vraks are obsoletely in reality because modern tactics outpaced them. Even if I for a second bought this "40k tech is the best" argument you're making, that wouldn't matter, because vastly superior weapons and armor wouldn't bring trench warfare back into style, because trench warfare was rendered obsoletely by advances in doctrine and tactics using technology. If you made every weapon and piece of steel in WW1 4 times better, the allies would have still broken through the Central power's trenchlines.
Siege of Vraks, Volume 1, it was what the Dark Angels did when destroying the Space Port. Then again they had several hundred marines present and lots of ammo, so they could be a little liberal in its use. Again context. A single space marine squad with limited ammo will use their weapons differently to conserve ammo than a battleforce several hundred strong. Also depends on what rounds they are carrying as well. Marines expecting to take on Tyrranids will pack different rounds than if they were expecting to fight Traitor Astartes. If they are planning on raiding say the Pentagon in this scenario, they would pack Metal Storm Frag Bolts due to the confines of the area and the low likely hood of dealing with armored vehicles. The rounds would ensure massive causalities amongst the military staffers in the Pentagon, many of whom likely do not have BDUs in the building and just personal sidearms, and maybe a platoon at most who have access to longarms and body armor if there is a serious security incident requiring it.
Cite the passage, please. I haven't read the book in a while and don't have a copy to hand, but I don't remember anything in it, and can't find anything on the wiki, about the DAs leveling the starport with small arms fire.
Individuals can still surrender, and secondary administrators can cut their own deals. Say the President of Ecuador is whacked along with top government officials, the governors seeing what happened and told to surrender or die will quickly cut a deal.
That's exactly the issue. The president is dead, but the governor surrenders, but the command staff of the local army unit doesn't report to the govern, they report to someone else, and so on.
Probably because the people generally survived the bombings and took up arms and could actually hurt their tormentors and Serbia did surrender to a bombing campaign by the way, so did the Netherlands. A space marine ortillery strike depending on the power setting can literally vaporize an entire continent with everyone on it. Hell through selective strikes, the Blood Angels can disrupt the weather patterns and cause mass famine or using the Macrocannons, cause super tsunamis. Fewer survivors, and no means to stop the strikes plus surgical hits and break down of the global economy will cause surrenders by people who just want to survive.
The netherlands surrendered because resistance in general was impossible, the surrender just took place after the bombing underscored the impossibility of resistance.
The issue with space marine orbital bombardment is exactly those power levels. We know it's possible to launch light, very weak strikes capable of being safely used for tactical fire support. We also know it's possible to have vastly more powerful bombardments that cause apocalyptic levels of damage. We do not know what the intermediate settings are or are capably of, and that's the issue because Dante's job is to conquer the planet, not blow it up or conquer the shouldering ruins of the planet.
You are forgetting they have Serfs who are qualified pilots and fly the bulk of their combat aircraft and make up the bulk of their support troops.
Serfs do not fly any marine aircraft or engage in any sort of combat as a supporting troops. All marine aircraft are flown by marines, and serfs will only engage in combat if a marine ship or base of operations is attacked, otherwise they are non-combatants.
As it is, most airfields will be blasted from orbit fairly quickly. That takes out the bulk of available air power. Next the Space Marines can pick and choose where to deploy, and depending on where they deploy, their may not be any aircraft in position to intercept even assuming they can get past all the jamming to find them much less realize they are inbound. Their best bet is to hug the ground, become part of the ground clutter on the screen and then pop up and fire quickly before peeling off. But bear in mind the Space Marines can simply dodge the missile if not shoot it down or jam it. Like in Star Wars and neo-BSG, the Space Marines have to operate in heavy ECM/ECCM environments and have plenty of experience in such battles, but when that is not an issue, they have engaged in long range missile warfare.
Pictured: "long range missile warfare", apparently.
As for destroying aircraft on the ground, the issue with that is that the marines only have a few ships capable of doing orbital bombardment, seemingly just 3 in this case. There are substantially more than 3 airbases on earth, and so there will be a lot of time to get planes out of the area before the marines hit them. And while they're bombing airbases, they're not bombing nuclear silos, or factories, or power plants, or miltary bases, and so on. This is the problem the marines have. They are surgical strike force, they are not intended nor capable of engaging in the sort of the massive scale warfare you're envisioning.
With what nukes via what delivery method? Missile? It would be shot down. Aircraft delivered bomb? Good luck being in the right spot at the right time. Artillery shell? Same as Aircraft bomb. Practically there is no real way to nuke them on the ground except by luck.
I actually doubt the marines would be able to shoot down a nuclear missile. Imperial ships have iffy point defense in the first place, and that's vs 40k torpedoes and strike craft, which are
massive targets in comparison to a modern nuclear missile, cruise missile, etc.
As for other weapons, you don't need to be in the right place at the right time, you don't need luck. You just need to be faster than the marine's own transports can get their to extract them. A tomahawk has a range of about a 1000 km and can hit anything within that range in about an hour, less so the closer it is to the target. Marines are fast, but they're not that fast.
Sergeant Culln led 4 other marines in Operation Execution Place. Due to Codex Adherence, they jumped with bolt pistols and and chainswords instead of combi-weapons, thus they had to jump up to engage effectively. One marine took a missile hit to the torso and died, another was hit in the helmet and wounded by an unspecified weapon, there was an Ogryn counter-attack, and how the 3 other brothers under Culln died is not specified.
The Vraksians counter-attacked with an Armored Column supported by Titans. Commander Ainea took a plasma blast from an unspecified plasma weapon that wounded him.
Its kinda clear that heavy weapons of superior quality and technology than we possess are needed to take out a space marine who is fully encased in armor.
And your evidence that these vrakians had some sort of incredibly potent super-missiles vastly better than than anything we have today is? Their small arms certainly weren't, 40k autoguns seem to have demonstrated performance in line with modern weapons. Which, BTW, is another strike against 40k having super weapons, since for some reason only the weapons that are fired against anything but other people are super powerful while stub and auto weaponry seems to be about as good as what we have today. Did they only have enough time on the super bullet making machine to make the super autocannon rounds, and all the small arms just have to use regular bullets?
Culln's men got wiped out before titan's showed, up bfore the armored column showed up, they got mauled by whatever the Vraksians had one hand, weapons which you insist are vastly more powerful than anything we have today but can't seem to prove.
Now a soldier might get lucky and spy a Space Marine taking his helmet off and go boom head shot, but other than that, not much chance to kill Blood Angels in numbers sufficient enough to turn the battle.
That's that whole "attrition" thing again. We don't need to win the battle, we could lose every single battle we fight, as long as we kill a few marines every time, because they can't make good those loses and we can, and even if we decide that for some reason we're not allowed to recruit more soldiers either, we have millions and millions of soldiers and they have a thousand. That's not a winning formula for the marines.
