I think this is the bit gamer is making reference to, from the archived official Cavedog Galactic War reports (which in terms of official canonicity would be equivalent to something published on GW's websites, like the results of GW online campaigns like Armageddon 3, as both are holders of their respective IPs):bilateralrope wrote:When you say evacuate, do you mean the ship carries away the body of each person. Or do you just mean they uploaded the mind of each person into the ships data banks to install in a new body at a safer location ?powerful space fleets- fluff wise yes TA has spaceships massive ones at that using just 5 starships they can evacuate a planet of billions.
A number of Arm Commanders fell upon a back-up plan early this week in a turn that shocked and surprised the galaxy. In a mass exodus, commanding officers worked fast in evacuating the world of Empyrrean, feverishly moving friends and family from the capital world in the face of its impending demise at the hands of the unstoppable Core onslaught.
http://web.archive.org/web/199911101134 ... _4-12.html
The warm orange glow of the engine burst into new life as the drive kicked into high gear. Five enormous Arm Pioneer-class Colony ships broke formation and rocketed off in different directions. Family and friends were separated, hurriedly packed into the craft as the Core closed its steely fist around Empyrrean.
http://web.archive.org/web/199911101324 ... _4-20.html
The population of the Arm capital world was never explicitly stated so the capacity of these ships is not known. The reference to civilians peering out the windows shows they are still conventional transport ships carrying flesh bodies around, and this is also because these are Arm ships. Core is the side that is about uploading minds into data banks and abandoning the flesh, which sort of parallels Necrons.Arm Commanders formed a ring around the colony craft, the enormous steel ship casting shadows under the world's two suns. In the distance, the smoke from Glynholm castle rose into the skies like a volcano going off. The Commanders looked at each other nervously, shaking their heads. For weeks, they had set about building the defensive ring around this ship, and now was the time that all their work would be put to the test. Core had taken the castle, but there was little they could do about it. It was either Glynholm or the clones in the ship behind them.
Faces peered out the windows of the starship, watching with fear for the attack that would surely come. Though many of the numbers had been removed weeks ago by Glynholm's fleets, many still remained.
http://web.archive.org/web/199911102209 ... _5-25.html
Now if one starts examining the technologies of the TA universe vs. the Necrons:
Starships: We have no idea of the capabilities of TA starships other than they exist, and that some appear to be armed. Insufficient data to make any real comparisons.
"Magical technobabble":
Both sides have weapons that just do things that is not fully explainable by modern science. In the new Necron Codex, it mentions how Gauss weapons use "molecular disassembling beam" to reduce targets to their constituent atoms. How a molecular disassembling beam works is not described other than it does.
This is the bit from the TA manual that gamer is repeatedly referring to:
These guns are also known in the TA universe as EMG (Energy Machine Guns). However what all that babble amounts to ultimately is a spray weapon that achieves damage through a thousand cuts, rather than high individual damage per shot. Really it just seems to be a funky way of getting a rapid fire pulse laser, which as previously mentioned seems to derive its power from shells carried by the firing unit.Energy cannons are similar to standard cannons, except that they fire energy shells. Energy shells are very powerful lasers which fire for several seconds and are frozen in a tiny grid of space time. This grid is then launched in a manner similar to a rail gun, (but using vacuum fluctuations rather than electro-magnetic fields). When the energy shell reaches the target, the entire energy is given off at once in a near microscopic area. No armor can with stand the temperatures generated, and the spray of metal plasma destroys the interior of the target (the spray of plasma is forced inside the unit by the intense light pressure). This weapon is has a flat trajectory and only does damage to the unit struck.
p. 49, TA game manual
These are different from:
There is nothing really said about how the plasma is contained other than a "force field".Plasma Cannon: This fires a spherical force field with a highly pressurized 10,000,000 degree plasma tightly contained within it. When the force ball touches the target, the force field dissolves on the side touching the target and the plasma burns through the target's armor. Simple heat and thermal shock may cause the kill. Heavy Armor is moderately vulnerable to high temperatures and multiple hits by plasma cannons can cause its breakdown. Plasma cannons can be direct fire weapons, or their plasma shells may be used
as indirect artillery when firing over hills.
p. 51, TA game manual
Both sides have technobabble weaponry that just seems to work. However in this regard, TA's weapons still seem to ultimately be about plasma, lasers, electricity (there is a lightning gun) and rockets/missiles containing minute amounts of antimatter as a warhead, even if the method in which they go about producing or firing them involves hand waving. The Necron weapons, while some still seem to resort to things like electricity or plasma, have weirder stuff involving other pocket dimensions. How they work again is not explained or at best is still some vague technobabble.
Now gamer also makes reference to the D-gun or "Disintegrator":
Through some unmentioned technobabble means it seems to be an effective weapon against all matter. The vast amount of energy incidentally in game is 400 energy units which is the output of 20 solar power plants in TA or having the amount of energy stored up beforehand in energy storage facilities. It actually becomes a small expenditure once fusion power plants are up and running.Disintegrator: This is an 'ultimate' weapon: no physical matter provides protection from it. It works by suppressing the quantum field strength of the 'gluons' that hold together atomic nuclei. The matter violently tears itself apart, leaving hydrogen, deuterium and a burst of free neutrons. This is the major advantage of Disintegrators: anything is destroyed and Heavy Armor provides virtually no protection.
The weapon has a number of disadvantages: First the matter is disintegrated so no metal salvage is possible. Second, the weapon is short ranged, partly because of the inherent physical limitations of reasonably sized projectors and partly due to atmospheric attenuation of effect. The most severe restriction is the vast amount of energy required to fire it.
. 48, TA game manual
Now supposing for the moment that it does do all it does in TA (since we give Necrons the ability to do the weird stuff they do) and we allow that it is effective against all physical matter. The biggest problem is that it is a singular weapon. Only the Commander carries it. On a war of any scale, you do not want your commander out there blasting stuff directly on the front lines because commanders are not expendable, whereas front line combat units (both TA and that of the Necrons) are. It is a huge risk given its short range and the potential of being swamped under by sheer numbers. Such concentrated firepower might be very useful in "commando" like raids against relatively unaware or light opposition, plugging breakthroughs, or where terrain allows for a "hit and run" tactic but the usefulness of a D-gun even in TA rapidly diminishes once the conflict scales up to anything approaching a full war.
Teleportation:
The Necrons have functional battlefield teleportation and recovery of casualties with recall teleportation. TA does not have this. TA has Galactic Gates but these really function more along the lines of Stargates, as a means of instant interstellar transport, and not actual tactical battlefield movement:
The downside as shown above is the mass limitation before the gate collapses, limiting movement to a few thousand tons each time. Necron ships are shown to have teleportation capabilities allowing for ship boarding action. So in this particular regard, the Necrons have an edge as they are able to use teleportation on the actual battlefield.Allowing small groups of people to step through them onto a new world, they allowed the colonization of the galaxy. However since one was required to pump energy into a Galactic Gate generator for weeks to open one, and then it collapsed as soon as a couple thousand kilos moved through it, it seemed that purely military conquest was impossible on established planets. The development of the Commanders completely changed this.
p. 49, TA game manual
"Self-repair":
Necrons are teleported back to base for self repair if they cannot repair in the field and if neither is possible, they self destruct. Some TA units self-repair at a very slow rate. Faster repair requires aid of construction units spraying more nanobots on them.
However, there is one bit here that seems to favor TA. TA keeps making new units. In the new Necron Codex, there is much reference to re-activating old mothballed units and at best building new tomb complexes. There does not seem to be however any reference to actual new built Necrons (not Spyders or Scarab maintenance bots). All the Necrons existence appear to be the same Necrontyr that downloaded their minds into metal bodies. That means that if some self-destruct, it would mean a diminishing of the total Necron population. Now it is not said how often a self-destruct event occurs, but if one side is effectively running off of a fixed number, it means that if a conflict could be prolonged long enough (VERY long given Necron self repair abilities), it is conceivable that the Necrons could start noticing losses. If one combines this with the effect of the D-gun effect producing only hydrogen and deuterium as remains, then a Commander D-gunning all enemy Necron units might increase permanent Necron losses, though this runs into the problem again of relying on a single weapon carried by a single unit when talking about a large scale war.
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