Jub wrote:Boeing 757 wrote:Nice try, dude, but what does it matter how the shields of each respective universe work in this particular case? You seem to know a little about 40k, so I hope that you understand that teleporters transport stuff from one spot in normal space by sending them into the warp and making them emerge at some other point into real space? The method is akin to opening up a wormhole, basically making making any material or energy barrier in normal space a moot defense.
Just like the teleporters in Star Trek are assumed to beam through a Star Destroyer's shields... oh wait, we don't assume that at all. In order to open a wormhole, you still need to get through the energy barrier that is sci-fi shielding. Wormholes aren't magic, they still need a way in.
A wormhole doesn't need to get through the energy barrier that is a brick wall; it bypasses it. In and of itself the fact that there's an obstacle in the path of a teleporter is not sufficient proof that the teleporter will have to breach the obstacle.
Moreover, Star Trek transporters are repeatedly demonstrated as being ineffective at transporting through shields
in their own setting. They have various gimmicks that sometimes let them bypass shields, but in general cannot beam through their own shields. It is therefore logical that if Star Trek transporters can't beam through their own shields, they also cannot beam through anyone else's, unless there's something unique about their own shields (so far as I know, there isn't).
But Warhammer 40000 teleporters do NOT consistently have trouble teleporting through shields in their own setting. Why would that suddenly change when they're working on someone else's shields?
We don't assume that Trek's teleporter's will work through shields. Star Wars also deals with extra-dimensional travel on a daily basis, hint, it's called hyperspace. Lastly, you need the warp to make 40k teleporters work, there is no warp energy in the Star Wars galaxy, so at best teleporters are a limited defensive option.
This response is a mass of self-contradictions. For one, you say that higher dimensions exist and are operated with in Star Wars, without providing evidence that Star Wars shielding blocks them. Just because they know hyperspace exists doesn't mean their shields cover against attacks that pass
through hyperspace. There's no reason to assume they can or will do that, because Star Wars has no weapon technologies in normal service that attack via hyperspace.
For another, the assumption that the Warp does not exist in Star Wars is unfounded, and if we apply this assumption consistently there is no hyperspace in Warhammer's Milky Way, neither side has FTL propulsion or communication, and the whole encounter turns into a silly and irrelevant joke.
Moreover, there is some evidence that SW shields may not fully provide coverage over the entire vessel, such as when the Millenium Falcon attached itself to the hull of the star destroyer Avenger while still in a combat situation.
Or, you know, they're designed to let out fighters and landing craft and, by definition, let them back in again.
This is nevertheless a gap in the defenses. If physical objects the size of a house can literally
fly through the shield and land on the hull of your ship, that represents a weakness in your defenses. The same weakness may or may not do someone trying to teleport aboard any good, but it certainly means your ship is not shielded against all possible attacks from all angles to a thorough extent.
Well no shit…who could have rightfully not guessed that a huge battle testicle of doom would not possess the capability of screwing with the Rebels’ already shoddy and out of date sensor suites. Is this really shocking to anyone?
The Incom T-65 'X-Wing' was a top of the line starfighter at the time of the battle Yavin. It was still in the prototype stage when captured only a year before the death star went down. It was also noted for being a useful recon craft with a good sensor suite. So please do, tell me about how outdated the X-Wing was again...
Although it occurs to me that if you stole a bunch of prototype fighters straight from the factory, they might not be fully equipped with the sensors they're designed to use in combat service. If you stole the US Air Force's prototype F-35s
right now, you might well be very disappointed in them. Many of their software systems, sensors, and weapons control devices are still either untested, incompletely tested, or not working.
I'll give you the force. But unlike the Warp, hyperspace doesn't rely, on what is explicitly called out as supernatural in its own universe to function. Hyperspace is a mere law of physics, it doesn't require untold numbers of psykers and a host of gods to function.
The Warp doesn't require large numbers of psychics or a bunch of gods to exist either- it just happens to be the place where those gods live and through which the psychic messages travel. You're getting cause and effect wrong; it's as though you were saying that an alien planet can't possibly have oceans because it has no fish.
AFAIK 40k ships are also able to reach high percentages of lightspeed, as witnessed in the Leoten Sempre Battlefleet Gothic books. Also, 40k warships have much greater ranges than what we see in SW, that span tens of thousands of kilometers. The only weapon in SW that came even close to that thus far is the Death Star, and possibly this new superweapon that we will see in the new film.
If 40k ships are so fast, why does it take military vessels anywhere between days to months to reach a system when coming out of the warp? Are the guard and space marines just being fuel efficient, or are the high fractions of C speeds an outlier when looking at 40k fleets as a whole? There's also evidence of light minute engagement ranges in Star Wars though that's been relegated to Legacy status for the time being.
Fuel efficiency and engine service are definitely possible answers, because in Warhammer 40000 ship engines are designed to operate for many months without refueling and for centuries without dockyard maintenance. Often, the engines (and the rest of the ship) are ancient relics thousands of years old. It would be very sensible for them to normally operate at very low power settings compared to what they are theoretically capable of... but the evidence on this issue is mixed.
In general, 40k accelerations are in the tens or hundreds of gravities. At ten gravities you could reach half the speed of light in about 1.5 million seconds (roughly seventeen days). At 100 gravities it would take about 1.7 days.
On this point I actually agree with you; while Imperium ships may well have the ability to travel at relativistic speeds, they do
NOT normally have high enough accelerations to reach those speeds in a relevant amount of time. There may be individual ships that have this ability, or even individual fleets where the ability is common, but you can't just point to any old Imperial ship and assume it can reach half the speed of light in a useful timespan. Given several days in which to burn the engines, sure- but that's not a reasonable timescale for tactical issues.
And to reply to some who spoke to me...
Q99 wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:To borrow TVTropes-isms, this is "Fragile Speedster" against "Mighty Glacier." And it's not because individual Star Wars ships can't take a 'punch' from the Imperium (they can). It's because once Star Wars starts taking significant casualties, or starts losing significant numbers of ships to Chaos, they really are not in a good position to recover and keep fighting effectively.
I'm not sure about that. Consider how quickly forces were made while they were at war, while the Imperium's ship construction is a continuous process where each ship takes many years to make. Sure, the Imperium is more militarized from the star, but the rate SW can militarize is impressive.
The Death Star took 20 years to build, which is a blink of an eye to the Imperium's strategic situation, and in the same time all the Clone Wars Venators and Acclamators were gone, replaced with Star Destroyers. The Victory class being the only CW ship still in regular service.
For one, the
volume of ships that the Republic and Imperial militaries are replacing is very small compared to what the Imperium would have to replace. An Imperial star destroyer is about the size of one of the Imperium's frigates or corvettes; just because the Imperium can't replace tens of thousands of battleships in a few decades doesn't mean it can't replace tens of thousands of corvettes.
By analogy, during World War Two the British built enormous numbers of destroyers very quickly... but totally halted the construction of entire categories of capital ships that they didn't feel they could finish in a useful amount of time.
For another, the trouble is that once we talk about the Empire being able to replace its whole fleet in five or ten years... the Empire doesn't necessarily
have five or ten years. Historically, within five years of the completion of the first Death Star, you have Endor and the death of the Emperor and the beginning of the breakup of the Empire at the hands of the Rebellion.
Clone Wars, Vong War, each only a few years long, and each had the Republic build gigantic fleets in that time frame.
If Star Wars is a 'fragile speedster,' it's one that can repair damage done to it's fragility fast.
The catch here isn't so much the ability to build a new fleet, it's that losing the existing fleet may have consequences. The Empire rules largely by force and fear, but it really doesn't have very much force per unit of space. The existing canon provides little reason to think the Empire has enough ships to consistently garrison all of its inhabited planets. At seems like they have only small numbers of ships (a few dozen) to spare for critical duties like guarding the second Death Star or hunting the rebels' primary starbase.
Plus, in Legends canon we have examples of independent political powers like the Hapan surviving and not joining the Empire because the Empire was unwilling or unable to pay the price required to conquer them. Given the 'personality' of the Empire, this suggests that their iron fist of oppression may still have a few fingers under construction.*
Even though the Empire clearly
has thousands of starships, circumstantial evidence suggests that those ships are being kept busy, and that if they were lost there might be immediate negative consequences for the Empire's political stability.
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*Credit for that image to a friend of mine...
Adam Reynolds wrote:One option a Star Wars faction has in such a scenario is to send a droid army. that would normally have the problem that it would be politically problematic in the aftermath of the Clone Wars, but in a fight like this it wouldn't matter. This would be a solution to the manpower limitations that seem to plague Star Wars militaries(hence why the Clone Wars were fought solely between hastily created and expendable armies as well as why the Empire built a Death Star). Droids might not be as effective man for man, but they could be created based on resources gathered in the target galaxy and using prefab facilities. That would make the reinforcement problem even easier.
This would work, BUT...
1) The Empire seems very reluctant to rely on battledroids, at least until well into the post-Endor era by which point they're in the process of collapsing as a political entity and aren't capable of conquering a whole new galaxy.
2) It is uncertain what will happen if you introduce large numbers of robot armies into the 40k Milky Way. Either they would be very reliable politically, or very unreliable. We know that 40k humanity
used to employ quite sophisticated droids (the Iron Men)... and that these Iron Men proved rebellious and vulnerable to Chaos infestation.
As for the Chaos, how do we know it would affect a Dark Sider? They are already corrupted by one thing, how would that make them more likely to be corrupted by an entirely different force(of sorts). I don't really have any particular knowledge of how Chaos works, how exactly does it corrupt people?
Chaos can contact you telepathically (even if you're not already a telepath). Its gods and demons can implant messages in your mind. It can send you visions, can infect you with memetic ideas that cause you to become obsessed with doing things it wants you to do. It can do all these things fairly quickly. It can offer earth-shaking supernatural powers, greater even than anything a Sith Lord exhibits in the movie era, to those who serve it.
In addition to which, a human soldier who is physically struck by a
piece of a Chaos idol or a powerful Chaos being may well end up physically transforming into a Chaos beast themselves, even against their will.
Chaos is
very infectious compared to the Dark Side of the Force. I would not trust anyone who fell to the Dark Side, and who explicitly embraces the 'ideal' of seeking personal power regardless of the cost to others, to resist the temptations of Chaos.
The next fundamental problem is one of why would the Empire ever decide to carry out such an attack? I could understand the GE attacking the Star Trek galaxy because it is a relatively easy target, but why would they attack an enemy that is potentially stronger than them? What I would see in such a scenario is the Empire using the Death Star to blast the wormhole connecting the two galaxies. Not sure of W40K could do anything to prevent this.
I doubt they could and honestly doubt they'd want to. Especially if they consider the Empire to be a bunch of xenos, a bunch of heretics, or a bunch of xenos heretics. The Imperium would probably say "we are well rid of them."
Eternal_Freedom wrote:Oddly enough, droids would probably be the best choice for fighting in the 40K universe, for the reasons you stated and one major one: being machines, they have no souls and thus don't feed Chaos through their actions (massive wars feed Khorne, rot and decay feeds Nurgle etc). Plus Thy would probably be more resistant to some psyker attacks, not having souls and all that. You'd basically have a easily-built version of Necrons without the infighting, political intrigue and envy of the living that their various Dynasties engage in.
I wouldn't assume that droids do not have souls without evidence, but that's my philosophical issues kicking in.
Thing is... the Iron Men presumably didn't have souls either, and still rebelled or were subverted by Chaos. And there is considerable evidence that in 40k "machine spirits" are a thing that actually exists, which would further complicate the situation. Droids are advanced and complex enough that it seems unlikely to me that they are entirely without such a machine spirit
in the 40k Milky Way.
NecronLord wrote:People saying the Galactic Empire has less men, need to present calcs to back up that claim. The Imperium has a million worlds, the Galactic Empire has charted the entire galaxy and unified it, I'm not sure what stats there are in nu-canon, but it used to be rated at 50 million worlds. The Imperium's terra is ungoverned below the top layers, while the Empire has Coruscant, which in nu-canon, seems to go deep into the core of the planet. The Galactic Empire built the death stars in secret. Confronted with a witch-burning theocracy and tyranids, they would have no need for secrecy, and could build them faster.
The Empire may well have an equal or higher
population than the Imperium. But it also has a much lower average level of militarization. So far as I know, there just isn't evidence for the Empire practicing total-war conscription of soldiers across its entire territory. Now, the Empire might be able to change this given a few years to mobilize... but that would involve massive dislocations of its war economy.