Warhammer 40k Fluff Discussion XII - DIS FINGY GOT NO SQUIGZ IN IT!

[Cheesegear]

It's entirely possible to be teleported onto the outside of a ship and to then cut your way in where you want to go to.

Or Caestus Assault Ram. On the way in, shoot your magna-melta into the side of a ship, crumpling and melting at the same time, when the Assault Ram does what it's name says it does, and rams into the side of the ship, the rest of the Hull crumples in on itself, and Space Marines jump out the front of the Ram.
Kharbybdis Assault Claws do the same thing, latch onto the side of a ship and burn a hole in the hull.

A Navy has Marines. Space Navies have Space Marines. I've found that a lot of people don't quite understand what that means.

I remember in the start of Mont'ka, where Battlefleet Ultima opened the space fight by launching boarding torpedoes of Space Marines at orbital stations. It was awesome.

[Destro_Yersul]

And now I want to write bolter porn involving Space Marine boarding parties. Thanks, Cheesegear.

[LCP]

This actually happens in the audiobook Mission: Purge and it gets justified. Four Deathwatch Marines end up on a Rogue Trader vessel full of genestealers, an in lieu of fighting their way through endless hoards of the buggers they turn a multimelta on the walls and escape laterally. A quick conversation occurs that they're doing this because none of them have a Thunderhammer, or a chainfist (even though the latter would take too long under the circumstances) but it's not a remarkable manoeuvre. None the less, the squad is still able to move fast enough to all-but-completely evade Purestrain Genestealers.

The bolded part sounds like narrative fiat to me. Why can't the genestealers just follow them down the hole they're making?

A Navy has Marines. Space Navies have Space Marines. I've found that a lot of people don't quite understand what that means.

Except that these Space Marines aren't attached to a navy? They have their own ships but they are a separate organisation, with the ships being very much subordinate to the marines.

More importantly though, space is not the ocean and analogies between the two are tenuous at best.

Even in naval warfare on Earth, navy vs. navy boarding actions pretty much died out with the advent of long-range battleship weapons. Quotes from Wikipedia:

The adoption of ironclads and increasingly powerful naval artillery vastly increased the risk to boarding parties. Meanwhile, the suppression of piracy and the abandonment of privateering and prize money made boarding actions even against merchant vessels less rewarding. The massacre of Paraguayan canoe-borne boarding parties by Brazilian ironclads during the Paraguayan War demonstrated the futility of direct assault by boarding in the face of 19th-century technology.

For the most part, boarding became a police action in which the attackers came on board only when no resistance could be expected

In space, the range of "naval" artillery is longer than modern ship guns by an absurd (technically infinite) degree - and in 40K, the energy output of those weapons is also scaled up by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile the passive risks to boarders are hugely amplified by the fact that you have a much greater distance to cross, you can't accelerate or decelerate too hard without jellifying your passengers, and you need vulnerable life support systems on your boarding craft for the boarders to be able to do simple things like breathe or not freeze to death. (Teleportation circumvents these of course, but comes with its own suite of problems like the teleporting bomb).

The only way I see boarding actions making sense as a standard military doctrine in 40K is as a way of capturing valuable ships after they have been completely disabled in a space-based slugfest. Come up alongside the crippled ship, dock, pour your crew into their ship to accept their surrender. Boarding torpedoes, assault rams etc. are just a really great way to get your expensive soldiers killed.

Note of course that I know they're in the fluff regardless - I'm perfectly happy to accept them as part of the general silliness of the setting. But acting like people "don't understand" for calling them silly really rubs me up the wrong way. 40K does not make sense and it's really not meant to.

[Wraith]

Or Caestus Assault Ram. On the way in, shoot your magna-melta into the side of a ship, crumpling and melting at the same time, when the Assault Ram does what it's name says it does, and rams into the side of the ship, the rest of the Hull crumples in on itself, and Space Marines jump out the front of the Ram.

Assault Rams, Kharbybdis Claws and Drop Pods can be intercepted by Fighter Wings and defensive turrets. Don't get me wrong, your vision of Space Boarding is awesome and both historically (future-historically?) accurate.... But as you said before, they could instead just teleport a bomb and kill everyone near it. Or, failing that, teleport guys somewhere that they're not going to telefrag in the wall (as easily...) or look up into the muzzle of 50 Naval Ratings with Autocannons at the other end of the corridor. *shrug*

The bolded part sounds like narrative fiat to me. Why can't the genestealers just follow them down the hole they're making?

That would be the hail of Storm Bolts and frag grenades coming the other way.

But yeah, Mission: Purge is pretty dumb, but in it's defence it is gloriously dumb. It's also the only in-universe reference I know of to the Rainbow Warriors Chapter, which is both awesome and hilarious because a) RAINBOW. WARRIORS. and b) even other Space Marines consider it to be a pretty stupid name.

[Forum Explorer]

The only way I see boarding actions making sense as a standard military doctrine in 40K is as a way of capturing valuable ships after they have been completely disabled in a space-based slugfest. Come up alongside the crippled ship, dock, pour your crew into their ship to accept their surrender. Boarding torpedoes, assault rams etc. are just a really great way to get your expensive soldiers killed.

Note of course that I know they're in the fluff regardless - I'm perfectly happy to accept them as part of the general silliness of the setting. But acting like people "don't understand" for calling them silly really rubs me up the wrong way. 40K does not make sense and it's really not meant to.

That's more or less true, except for the completely disabled part. Space ships are incredibly valuable, and it's hard to stop a ship from jumping into the warp to retreat. And because they are so valuable, it's worth taking the risk of a boarding action, even if they aren't actually disabled yet. It's the same sort of reason, just on a smaller scale, on why the Imperium risks boarding Space Hulks instead of just blowing them up whenever they appear.

[LeSwordfish]

if you're landing within a ship, you need a very specific size of open area needed in which to appear with anything like safely, so the defenders just have to cover those places. It's still diificult, granted, but it's certainly far more plausible than "the entire exterior of a 5km long ship

Armsmen! We believe the enemy are using teleported boarding parties. On my command you will spread out across the entire main deck at five-foot intervals - they'll have to have at least one of them collide with at least one of you.

"Beg pardon sir, but won't that kill whoever they collide with?"

Reckon we've got any other way to one-to-one trade you with a space marine, lad? Now, to your positions!

[lord_khaine]

That's more or less true, except for the completely disabled part. Space ships are incredibly valuable, and it's hard to stop a ship from jumping into the warp to retreat. And because they are so valuable, it's worth taking the risk of a boarding action, even if they aren't actually disabled yet. It's the same sort of reason, just on a smaller scale, on why the Imperium risks boarding Space Hulks instead of just blowing them up whenever they appear.

It used to be one of the main things Terminator armor were useful for. Its slow and cumbersome, extremely hard to maintain, and still falling to heavy weapons. But it shines when it comes to exploring narrow, monster filled corridors.

[Tehnar]

Remember, if you get boarded by hammernators and you're without space marines of your own, you're pretty screwed because unlike the tabletop, terminator armour doesn't fall down to 1 round of autogun fire. If you do have marines, you're probably still screwed because they're probably not packing the sort of armament that stops terminators in the few seconds that you have between the terminators coming around the corner, seeing you and then smashing your face in with a thunderhammer or evicerating you with a pair of lightning claws.

As for losing the best when a boarding action goes tits up, well I think that's why they send their best, so that it doesn't go tits up in the first place. Because, again, unlike tabletop, terminator armour is the best thing ever and nigh invulnerable and the dudes who are wearing said armour are some of the deadliest individuals in the galaxy. Boarding actions are, by their very nature, incredibly dangerous, so you should be sending the best you've got instead of some rookies because getting over there when the bad guys are still pewpewing your ship (and yours is sometimes still pewpewing theirs) and you're going to be outnumbered 100:1 with no real chance of backup or reinforcements while they've got the homeground advantage, it's a tough ask, even for vets.

I can see that in the 40K universe boarding actions can be effective, or even needed to take over some ships/stations because the shields of such installations are so strong pounding them away takes a while.
I can see the benefit of teleporting where you want, even though it is really unreliable.
What I don't understand is the logic of using teleporting hammernators to routinely attack high value targets.

Let me explain with a checklist:

1. You have to make sure that its even possible to teleport close enough to the target
2. Once you teleport, the teleport has to work and getting the cream of the chapter stuck in the walls and stuff
3. In a universe where political power = personal power, high value targets will be powerful, often enough to crush the terminators. Even with the 40K Terminator armor fluff (as opposed to Deathwatch/tabletop crunch) teleporting next to bunch of Ork Nobs/Warbosses, Hive Tyrants, Meks with SAGs, Melta totting crisis suits or Lychguard makes it very hard for your Hammernators to come out on top.

But actually the complaint is due to the nature of logistics. If Imperial guard had access to teleporters, by all means cram as many guardsmen as you can in the teleporter room and push the button. But sending your best dudes, in a armor that is impossible to replicate anymore just doesn't make sense unless your back is to the wall and it is literally the only thing that will save your ass.

[Drasius]

I can see that in the 40K universe boarding actions can be effective, or even needed to take over some ships/stations because the shields of such installations are so strong pounding them away takes a while.
I can see the benefit of teleporting where you want, even though it is really unreliable.
What I don't understand is the logic of using teleporting hammernators to routinely attack high value targets.

Let me explain with a checklist:

1. You have to make sure that its even possible to teleport close enough to the target
2. Once you teleport, the teleport has to work and getting the cream of the chapter stuck in the walls and stuff
3. In a universe where political power = personal power, high value targets will be powerful, often enough to crush the terminators. Even with the 40K Terminator armor fluff (as opposed to Deathwatch/tabletop crunch) teleporting next to bunch of Ork Nobs/Warbosses, Hive Tyrants, Meks with SAGs, Melta totting crisis suits or Lychguard makes it very hard for your Hammernators to come out on top.

But actually the complaint is due to the nature of logistics. If Imperial guard had access to teleporters, by all means cram as many guardsmen as you can in the teleporter room and push the button. But sending your best dudes, in a armor that is impossible to replicate anymore just doesn't make sense unless your back is to the wall and it is literally the only thing that will save your ass.

IIRC, you can't teleport through a ships shields (an enemy ship that is, you can teleport out from your own shields just fine, same as weapons fire I guess), so the only time that you're going to want to board someone is so you can get something of value, since if you just wanted to explode them, well, their shields are down, you could totally just keep shooting them and call it a day.

Also, if the high value target that you've got to kill to get the thing that you're after is as dangerous as you say, why would you not send the best people with the best gear after them? If you think that hammernators are going to have trouble, why on earth would you think that anything else that marines have access too is going to fare any better?

[Grim Portent]

You also can't teleport people without something at least as durable as power armour usually since daemons and warp exposure are a side effect of teleportation.

Trying to send a whole platoon of guardsmen through a teleporter is inviting daemonic incursions into your field of operations.

[bluntpencil]

You also can't teleport people without something at least as durable as power armour usually since daemons and warp exposure are a side effect of teleportation.

Trying to send a whole platoon of guardsmen through a teleporter is inviting daemonic incursions into your field of operations.

So, you're saying I could fill an Eldar ship with daemons?

[Grim Portent]

So, you're saying I could fill an Eldar ship with daemons?

More likely your own ship since that's the first spot to have a small warp rift with juicy unguarded humans in it appear. Either way a daemonic incursion is unlikely but not worth the risk.

Based on the fluff for Grey Knight Interceptors the most likely result is just no one reaching their destination, or at least not in any state to fight.

[Wraith]

[*] In a universe where political power = personal power, high value targets will be powerful, often enough to crush the terminators. Even with the 40K Terminator armor fluff (as opposed to Deathwatch/tabletop crunch) teleporting next to bunch of Ork Nobs/Warbosses, Hive Tyrants, Meks with SAGs, Melta totting crisis suits or Lychguard makes it very hard for your Hammernators to come out on top.

This is dissonance between fluff and crunch. On the tabletop, Hammernators are slow, cumbersome and prone to being needled to death by 10,000 papercuts (or, at least, being forced to roll a huge amount of saves until some of them show '1's). In the fluff, however, they are nigh indestructible, being trodden on by titans and hauling themselves out of a self-shaped crater to carry on fighting.

Terminator Armour doesn't work as well in open battle fields because they have little peripheral vision and too many of the few things that can potentially hurt them - tanks, dreadnoughts and so on - can get a clear line of sight over a large distance. Highly trained veterans in Terminator Armour, however, are still utterly lethal to virtually everything that it can get their hands on, up to and including Daemon Primarchs (even if that does result in some grotesque attrition besides).

[LCP]

It's kind of worth pointing out though that the fluff tends to hyperbole much more than the rules. In reality, there are upper limits to how durable you can make a suit of body armour, beyond which layering on more metal and purity seals isn't really helping. There are also a lot of weapons in the setting that trivially surpass those limits in terms of the damage they can inflict - and those weapons aren't even necessarily expensive or rare. c.f. Genestealer cults with repurposed mining equipment.

I tend to think of tabletop marines as the more accurate depiction than movie marines. It's more in line with them being products of actual genetic engineering than portraying them all as minor demigods.

[lord_khaine]

So, you're saying I could fill an Eldar ship with daemons?

I guess you could fill anyone's ship with demons. Though im not certain if there is any sort of official material regarding how easy it is to send someone though a shield with a teleporter, and it yet again coils back to "why not send a bomb instead?".

This is dissonance between fluff and crunch. On the tabletop, Hammernators are slow, cumbersome and prone to being needled to death by 10,000 papercuts (or, at least, being forced to roll a huge amount of saves until some of them show '1's). In the fluff, however, they are nigh indestructible, being trodden on by titans and hauling themselves out of a self-shaped crater to carry on fighting.

Terminator Armour doesn't work as well in open battle fields because they have little peripheral vision and too many of the few things that can potentially hurt them - tanks, dreadnoughts and so on - can get a clear line of sight over a large distance. Highly trained veterans in Terminator Armour, however, are still utterly lethal to virtually everything that it can get their hands on, up to and including Daemon Primarchs (even if that does result in some grotesque attrition besides).

Nah, if you go though that list then every singel entry is one that you would expect could handle a couple terminators.
(alright, every single one of them are things I would expect to chew up a few terminators)

[LCP]

^ agreed - anything capable of a tank kill should be capable of a terminator kill.

[Gauntlet]

Terminator armour does incorporate a power field in addition to just being super tough, to be fair, which I believe is missing from most vehicles for some reason.

[Artanis]

IIRC, you can't teleport through a ships shields (an enemy ship that is, you can teleport out from your own shields just fine, same as weapons fire I guess), so the only time that you're going to want to board someone is so you can get something of value, since if you just wanted to explode them, well, their shields are down, you could totally just keep shooting them and call it a day.

I guess you could fill anyone's ship with demons. Though im not certain if there is any sort of official material regarding how easy it is to send someone though a shield with a teleporter, and it yet again coils back to "why not send a bomb instead?".

In BFG, you can only make teleport attacks against enemy ships whose shields are down.

[Grim Portent]

It occurs to me that it's odd the Imperium and Chaos don't seem to use their Warp Drives in space battles at all. The things are usually depicted as working by tearing open a warp rift in front of the ship and then just flying into it.

Which means ships can tear open portals to hell over a distance. Why is this not used as a weapon?

[Artanis]

It occurs to me that it's odd the Imperium and Chaos don't seem to use their Warp Drives in space battles at all. The things are usually depicted as working by tearing open a warp rift in front of the ship and then just flying into it.

Which means ships can tear open portals to hell over a distance. Why is this not used as a weapon?

It takes time and energy to do, and the distance is actually quite short. I figure that if you're in range to catch something in your Warp engines' rift, you're close enough to spend that time and energy just shooting them.

I think there was at least one occasion where an Imperial ship overloaded its Warp engines in the middle of a Tyranid fleet as a kamikaze maneuver. It took out a hell of a lot of Tyranids, but it came at the cost of a nigh-irreplaceable ship.



Edit: Found the source, fixing things up. It was the Dominus Astra, during the Battle for Macragge.

[Drasius]

It occurs to me that it's odd the Imperium and Chaos don't seem to use their Warp Drives in space battles at all. The things are usually depicted as working by tearing open a warp rift in front of the ship and then just flying into it.

Which means ships can tear open portals to hell over a distance. Why is this not used as a weapon?

Like Artanis said, they open a warp portal maybe a few hundred meters in front of them while engagements are fought at a range of hundreds or thousands of kilometers.

[LCP]

Vortex torpedoes are pretty much that though right? Stick a scaled-down warp drive on a torpedo and scoot it right up to the enemy.

[Forum Explorer]

You know, the fact that it goes through the warp might explain why teleporting bombs doesn't work. You might need a consciousness to actually move through the warp, or contain one at least. Else the object simply doesn't move.

Though you could just strap bombs to guardsmen then. Doesn't matter how poor of condition they are in when the go through, they'll blow up just fine.

[Grim Portent]

Bomb teleporting has been done at least once though.

In one of the Word Bearer's books they remote pilot a damaged loyalist ship towards a star fortress to goad it into lowering it's shields so the ship can 'escape' the pursuing chaos forces, then teleport some nuclear warheads onto it at the last second too late for them too detect them with scans and still have time to do anything about it.

[Forum Explorer]

Bomb teleporting has been done at least once though.

In one of the Word Bearer's books they remote pilot a damaged loyalist ship towards a star fortress to goad it into lowering it's shields so the ship can 'escape' the pursuing chaos forces, then teleport some nuclear warheads onto it at the last second too late for them too detect them with scans and still have time to do anything about it.

Nevermind then.

[lord_khaine]

Terminator armour does incorporate a power field in addition to just being super tough, to be fair, which I believe is missing from most vehicles for some reason.

Its just a limited power field though, and they got less armor than a actual vehicle. I mean, imperial guard commanders or inquisitors are also often given power fields of some type. Yet noone ever accused them of being anything besides squishy.

In BFG, you can only make teleport attacks against enemy ships whose shields are down.

Makes sense, its most likely also like that in the RPG.

It occurs to me that it's odd the Imperium and Chaos don't seem to use their Warp Drives in space battles at all. The things are usually depicted as working by tearing open a warp rift in front of the ship and then just flying into it.

Which means ships can tear open portals to hell over a distance. Why is this not used as a weapon?

It is, its just only the Eldars who are advanced enough to do so. Its the basis of all their D-weapons.

Edit: Found the source, fixing things up. It was the Dominus Astra, during the Battle for Macragge.

I do wonder where such a ship and a planet lies on the scale of importance. How many Tyranids do you need to off before the trade is worth it?

[Artanis]

As was said, teleporters don't go through shields.


To elaborate on where I'm coming from, in the BFG tabletop game, shields regenerate very, VERY quickly. You can knock shields down just fine, but once something stops getting blasted, its shields come right back the very next turn. Next, the BFG rulebook describe teleport attacks as requiring a LOT of power from the attacking ship's reactors as part of the reason why only big ships can use them, and then only once per turn. Also, they're quite short-range (10cm max, where most weapons are 30cm, FWIW).

So basically, if you're going to do a teleport attack, you get one shot to put a bomb somewhere inside the enemy ship. If you just wanted something over there to blow up and didn't care what it was, you would put all that extra power into the dozens of guns that cover the rest of your ship. So if you're doing a teleport attack in the first place, it means that you're willing to commit the time, resources, and effort to make absolutely f***ing certain that that one shot hits something critical




Edit: apparently that took longer to type than I thought it would, because lord_khaine ninja'd me

[Grim Portent]

Bomb teleporting has been done at least once though.

In one of the Word Bearer's books they remote pilot a damaged loyalist ship towards a star fortress to goad it into lowering it's shields so the ship can 'escape' the pursuing chaos forces, then teleport some nuclear warheads onto it at the last second too late for them too detect them with scans and still have time to do anything about it.

To clarify since I realized I was a bit vague in this post, the bombs were teleported onto the damaged ship not onto the star fort.

Trying to 'port bombs onto a spaceship in combat seems kind of pointless to me, you can't guarantee a hit on your target because teleporting is inaccurate. At least with terminators they can walk to an important target even if they arrived in the wrong spot rather than just exploding there and then, not to mention that a lot of stuff in 40k just seems to be more durable than their weapons can generally destroy, at least from a distance. It's probably a lower expenditure of resources to teleport 5 super soldiers in antique armour to kill the enemy bridge crew than it is to fire enough shots to actually scuttle the ship.

[LCP]

Teleportation has to be more accurate than that, otherwise 90% of the time your teleport squad would end up fused into a wall.

[Borgh]

Why are we arguing "there are more practical way to do this" in 40k?
There are Mecha-knights, Titans, chainswords, gene-engineered infantry and starships occasionally ram each other.

Teleporters work because they are a really good way to get your heroes into the action (or out, as the story demands).

Otherwise the book won't contain nearly enough heretics being laminated across a wall.