Tyranids invade Star Wars

[Gurgeh]

What if... Tyranid hive fleets decided to invade a new galaxy and that just happens to be the Star Wars galaxy! This takes place right after the battle of Endor. How will the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance react to meeting the Tyranids? Can anything in SW stop them?

[Srelex]

We had a discussion on this a while ago--with Tyranid FTL speeds compared to hyperdrive, at least, the SW factions are in a far better position to respond strategically than the Imperium.

[SpaceMarine93]

Dude, why not just pit The Flood against the Star Wars galaxy? Even the Forerunners can't defeat that hive mind. And what about the Zerg? Sure, they are less powerful than Tyranids, but there is no stated limitation to the Zerg FTL capability. So where does these two go from here?

[Imperial528]

The Flood are really not a hive mind at all. They're a collective of barely sentient creatures controlled by a central brain form. They're more comparable to the geth of mass effect, in that you take a large amount of barely thinking creatures and hook them all together and they eventually become self aware and organized as a greater whole. You could also compare it to cluster computing, and that actually has significance to the flood-forerunner war as the gravemind convinced Mendicant Bias that it had more in common with the flood than the forerunners.

Let's also not forget that the reason why the forerunners didn't defeat the flood is because they were pretty damn stupid in handling the situation, and it is a fact that the flood outbreak the forerunners faced was initially less dangerous than the original flood outbreak, which was defeated by a combined ancient human and prophet empire, which had vastly less resources than the forerunners did and they even managed to develop a cure for infection.

Of course then they pissed of the forerunners, and in the wake of forerunner invasion they destroyed all accumulated knowledge of the flood, sort of as a "fuck you guys" I guess. Which is in a way justified because the forerunners did destroy their entire civilization over a border skirmish.

[Solauren]

What if... Tyranid hive fleets decided to invade a new galaxy and that just happens to be the Star Wars galaxy! This takes place right after the battle of Endor. How will the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance react to meeting the Tyranids? Can anything in SW stop them?

Congratulations. You just gave the Imperial Government a massive and obvious outside threat to rally against. The Tyranid's are now going to be slammed into by 25000+ Imperial Star Destroyers, under the command of several strategic genius's. The galaxy will be comparatively stable during the fighting, and when the Emperor's next clone hatches with him in it in a month or two, it's back to business as usual.

[Simon_Jester]

Dude, why not just pit The Flood against the Star Wars galaxy? Even the Forerunners can't defeat that hive mind. And what about the Zerg? Sure, they are less powerful than Tyranids, but there is no stated limitation to the Zerg FTL capability. So where does these two go from here?

The Zerg are not faster than the other warp drive users of their setting- which means months or years to travel galactic distances. There's a reason all the action in the Starcraft games happens in the nebulously defined "Koprulu Zone" worlds, which make up only a small fraction of the galaxy.

[Connor MacLeod]

Congratulations. You just gave the Imperial Government a massive and obvious outside threat to rally against. The Tyranid's are now going to be slammed into by 25000+ Imperial Star Destroyers, under the command of several strategic genius's. The galaxy will be comparatively stable during the fighting, and when the Emperor's next clone hatches with him in it in a month or two, it's back to business as usual.

That's a likely outcome even if Palpatine is alive. Palpy relies heavily on fabricating external and imaginary threats to bolster his own authority, and he's just been handed a ready, genuine threat for him to work off of.

Anyhow, this thread has been done before many times, and it always comes down to the same things: How fast is hyperdrive/how fast is Tyranid FTL and what kinds are we allowing them. How big the Tyranids actually are and how much biomass they need to reproduce (they take in a shit ton of resources but we dont know how much of that translates into new soldiery) How serious a threat is SW going to take this - are they going to go with the usual fanboy 'Churn out billions of robotic kamikaze ISDs and quintillions of Supar Droid Killbotz based on DS outputs' or are they going to respond some other way? What timeframe are we talking about (This has impact on the political situation, the coverage of the holonet, the military strength of responses, etc.)

Now I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say "Hyperdrive for the win" but I am going to point out one salient, ICS derived fact. Hyperdrives tend to have limits on how far their Hyperdrives can travel in the galaxy. The Acclamators for example ave a 250,000 LY range, but a Venator has only a 60K LY range. They might be able to cover that distance in 'a few hours' but the same ICS also lists Starhsip 'max power' endurance in a matter of hours (and hours is generally the fastest *I've* ever heard of STarships running at. As a benchmark I think Curtis said an ISD had a 'canon' fuel supply of around 10,000 seconds so that gives us a rough idea of intended, max power endurance.) Even with ISDs having 200K LY ranges they could easily end up coming from across the galaxy and.. running out of fuel in the middle of a fight. Hell they might evenn run out of fuel simply trying to arrive.

Such are the problems when you are chucking around the PETATONz and TERATONZ

[Simon_Jester]

Anyhow, this thread has been done before many times, and it always comes down to the same things: How fast is hyperdrive/how fast is Tyranid FTL and what kinds are we allowing them. How big the Tyranids actually are and how much biomass they need to reproduce (they take in a shit ton of resources but we dont know how much of that translates into new soldiery) How serious a threat is SW going to take this - are they going to go with the usual fanboy 'Churn out billions of robotic kamikaze ISDs and quintillions of Supar Droid Killbotz based on DS outputs...'

Anyone who goes for that really should be sent to the mines. The land mines.

I mean, it's even more ridiculous than Federation time travel; Star Trek at least has used time travel to save itself from terrible enemies, whereas the Star Wars galaxy has never gone full droid-spam* or churned out fleets of billions of capital ships.

*The CIS went close, arguably, but were never more than a despised fraction of galactic civilization.

Now I'm sure someone is going to chime in and say "Hyperdrive for the win" but I am going to point out one salient, ICS derived fact. Hyperdrives tend to have limits on how far their Hyperdrives can travel in the galaxy. The Acclamators for example ave a 250,000 LY range, but a Venator has only a 60K LY range. They might be able to cover that distance in 'a few hours' but the same ICS also lists Starhsip 'max power' endurance in a matter of hours (and hours is generally the fastest *I've* ever heard of STarships running at. As a benchmark I think Curtis said an ISD had a 'canon' fuel supply of around 10,000 seconds so that gives us a rough idea of intended, max power endurance.) Even with ISDs having 200K LY ranges they could easily end up coming from across the galaxy and.. running out of fuel in the middle of a fight. Hell they might evenn run out of fuel simply trying to arrive.

Yes- this reminds me of air warfare, where range and speed and weapons loadout and endurance are all tied together. A fighter with a range of 400 km will not fight very well 350 km from its airbase, because it will only have enough fuel to fight at all for a matter of minutes before it needs to fly home to refuel. Planes operating at the limits of their range may not be able to carry as many missiles or bombs, because of the weight and volume requirements of the fuel it took to get them there (drop tanks replace hardpoints that could go to bombs).

Thing is, if the Tyranids are taking months or even weeks to get into a system this doesn't matter much. Ships can still take a few days to cross the galaxy, refuel in the general vicinity of the combat zone, then make the final jump and hammer them.

If the Tyranids can pick up the pace, and hit planets with only a few days' warning, then the limits of Imperial fuel capacity start to matter more. The touchstone here is Coruscant- within hours of a CIS fleet appearing over the Republic's capital, ships from all over the galaxy were appearing to reinforce. That was under emergency conditions, but if they could do it out of desperation in 12-24 hours (is that the right figure?), it seems reasonable that they could do it as a planned, cold-blooded maneuver in a week.

[Connor MacLeod]

Anyone who goes for that really should be sent to the mines. The land mines.

I mean, it's even more ridiculous than Federation time travel; Star Trek at least has used time travel to save itself from terrible enemies, whereas the Star Wars galaxy has never gone full droid-spam* or churned out fleets of billions of capital ships.

*The CIS went close, arguably, but were never more than a despised fraction of galactic civilization.

But I used to go for... *dragged off to the mines*

Anyhow, I'd rate it on the same level as time travel. The potential exists at least - you can't look at the sheer amount of resources the Death STar requires (and its ability to be built outside any static shipyard) and say it doesn't exist - but at the same time there are clearly factors governing its use (or lack of use) because that potential isn't exploited. In Star Wars' case it's not surprising - they're not very militant and have no real need to build or sustain billions of warships (valuable money which could be spent on enriching corporations and furthering general corruption and decadence.) That and the logistics to sustain and coordinate that scale of fleet simply doesn't exist. There is robotics of course to solve those problems, but that adds another dimension of problems too.

Point of fact is we've never really seen the SW Galaxy in a situation where its very existence was under threat of eradication, so we don't really know how they'd react. we've seen plenty of conflicts, wars, and threats created by magical superweapons (which don't really count as a conventional military threat), political or economic cases or just general strife. EVen the Vong was more a threat of conquest than eradication.

Yes- this reminds me of air warfare, where range and speed and weapons loadout and endurance are all tied together. A fighter with a range of 400 km will not fight very well 350 km from its airbase, because it will only have enough fuel to fight at all for a matter of minutes before it needs to fly home to refuel. Planes operating at the limits of their range may not be able to carry as many missiles or bombs, because of the weight and volume requirements of the fuel it took to get them there (drop tanks replace hardpoints that could go to bombs).

Thing is, if the Tyranids are taking months or even weeks to get into a system this doesn't matter much. Ships can still take a few days to cross the galaxy, refuel in the general vicinity of the combat zone, then make the final jump and hammer them.

If the Tyranids can pick up the pace, and hit planets with only a few days' warning, then the limits of Imperial fuel capacity start to matter more. The touchstone here is Coruscant- within hours of a CIS fleet appearing over the Republic's capital, ships from all over the galaxy were appearing to reinforce. That was under emergency conditions, but if they could do it out of desperation in 12-24 hours (is that the right figure?), it seems reasonable that they could do it as a planned, cold-blooded maneuver in a week.

That might matter if we were talking about a single, concentrated hive fleet threat. What if they're attacking from multipel angles across a dispersed front, with lots of individual fleets? If we're talking about the entire Tyranid race then the potential numbers could get quite big to deal with, especially if it goes en masse (another factor to consider.) There's also the issue of tracking them down and locating the, - by the fluff Tyranids are supposed to be hard to detect via normal sensors. And one of the intresting 'drawbacks' the Empire had is that Palpy cannibalized a great deal of the holonet and restricted it to purely military uses - which means that access to it (and the ability to send superfast messages) is going to be more limited. If a warship picks up on the threat all well and good, a random world on the bumfuck edge of the outer rim quite probably could be SOL unless a subspace message makes it in time. And the thing about planets is that as long as the planet has some organic or biologicla matter, water, etc. on it, it will be of SOME use to the Tyranids.

I suspect one reason they tend to take it slow is because the Tyranids are, by nature, something of a reactive force by preference. THey simply choose not to expend energy or resources unless they HAVE to, and they only go proactive (EG creating a Swarmlord for example) when the situation needs it. That would hamper them against Star Wars is Star Wars acts quickly of course. However, we've also seen the Tyranids adapt their fighting style to face different opponents - the way they fight Orks and Tau differ than against the Imperium, so they could pick up the pace depending on those 'what if' factors I already alleged.

So again, the debate comes down to the same factors of 'how both sides want to play it out' and unless that can be agreed on the debate won't go anywhere.

[VarrusTheEthical]

There is the question of what happens to the Force if the Tyranids invade the Star Wars Galaxy. Would they be like the Vong and simply not register, or would they flood the Force with a
torrent of new and malicious life?

Also, given the Nids can incorporate the genetic traits of creatures they consume, what happens when they eat Force-sensitives? Or, how about if they eat creatures like Ysalamiri?

[Connor MacLeod]

There is the question of what happens to the Force if the Tyranids invade the Star Wars Galaxy. Would they be like the Vong and simply not register, or would they flood the force with a torrent of new and malicious life?

Considering the Force has absolutely fuck-all to do with the Warp (unless you go by 1st edition Rogue Trader, which we won't.), and we know that Tyranid weirdness does not usually fuck with the realspace warping magick of the Necrons (which is the closest analogue to the Force you get in 40K). Of course there's absolutely nothing in SW to inhibit the Tyranids either, and when it comes to MAGICK 40K has a definite advantage there in terms of what they can achieve.

It's faintly possible that eating life in the SW galaxy might weaken the force if we go by that 'created by all living things' shit, but that depends on exactly how it is created and what is required. If simply being organic and living is all then it may not do anything.

Also, given the Nids can incorporate the genetic traits of creatures they consume, what happens when they eat Force-sensitives? Or, how about if they eat creatures like Ysalamiri?

We dont know enougha bout how the Force is made to say. Possible, and they migth be able to subvert the Force (there's enough weird bio-mechanical/organic force-wank tech around like the Kathol/Darkstryder shit to make this at least remotely feasible) but we don't know.

I'd actually think it would be hilarious if they manage to devour the STar Dragons or the Oswaft. The latter have insanely precise, insanely fast hyperdrive capabilities (literally like 'pop out of space a few km from a target and blow it to shit and then disappear.)

[Block]

Doesn't the whole Midichlorians being organisms that're everywhere since the prequels pretty much give tyranids a massive advantage since they can devour any biological they want as long as they can touch it?

[evilsoup]

It's faintly possible that eating life in the SW galaxy might weaken the force if we go by that 'created by all living things' shit, but that depends on exactly how it is created and what is required. If simply being organic and living is all then it may not do anything.

Oh it'll definitely do something, the destruction of Aldaraan created a disturbance in the force that obi-wan could detect over interstellar distances, and it looked like it affected him quite a lot. Now he's had training and meditations and so on to become one with the force, and the untrained Luke didn't seem to notice anything, so the effect would probably be limited to those with that level of trained force-sensitivity... but I think it would fuck up Palpantine's day, probably throw off any kind of future-seeing shenanigans he has going on. And Aldaraan was a load of people dying in an instant, there was no time for them to suffer (well maybe a few seconds as their atmosphere boiled away around them and the ground exploded beneath them); this would not be true for any planets that would fall victim to the Tyranids, even at their fastest it would take hours as the inhabitants were torn apart by ferocious monsters and then digested by the gastric juices of the hive fleet - hours (or days depending on the local resistance) of pain and fear: if instant fiery death can cause a ripple in the force, Tyranid attacks would create storms.

[Connor MacLeod]

I doubt it since there is very little evidence that the Force is genetically inherited the way psychic powers are in 40K. Indeed, much evidence tends to argue AGAINST that notion, and the exact mechanism that leads to force-sensitivity has never been explicitly explained - for all we know it got sprinkled with magic midichlorian dust and made them able to fly. I mean fuck, you can have force sensitive planets and magic crystals for crying out loud.

So the end result of the 'Nids chomping some force sensitives is not neccesarily a guarantee they will instantly gain force powers. Chomping Vornskrs probably won't help either becuase they're an extremely specialized (and perhaps unique) approach to it and we dont really know enough about their origins. As I said about the only possible way the 'Nids could gain an edge with Force powers is to chomp on some Darkstryder/Kathol organic technology, and that stuff isn't exactly widespread.

What's more likely is that the Nids chomp Jedi or Sith and end up contributing to the greater pool of force sensitivity. What impact this has on the Jedi and Sith we dont know.

[Connor MacLeod]

Oh it'll definitely do something, the destruction of Aldaraan created a disturbance in the force that obi-wan could detect over interstellar distances, and it looked like it affected him quite a lot. Now he's had training and meditations and so on to become one with the force, and the untrained Luke didn't seem to notice anything, so the effect would probably be limited to those with that level of trained force-sensitivity... but I think it would fuck up Palpantine's day, probably throw off any kind of future-seeing shenanigans he has going on. And Aldaraan was a load of people dying in an instant, there was no time for them to suffer (well maybe a few seconds as their atmosphere boiled away around them and the ground exploded beneath them); this would not be true for any planets that would fall victim to the Tyranids, even at their fastest it would take hours as the inhabitants were torn apart by ferocious monsters and then digested by the gastric juices of the hive fleet - hours (or days depending on the local resistance) of pain and fear: if instant fiery death can cause a ripple in the force, Tyranid attacks would create storms.

'

Again the Force is not the warp. Destroying planets is not going to lead to some great 'Force rift' where it leaks into realspace ot fuck things up. It doesn't work that way.

Ben was disturbed by it, but hearing the death screams of an entire planet in my head is not going to be exactly heartwarming, but it doesn't impair my abilities in any significant way (He didnt stop training Luke.) Hell planets were bombed or destroyed fairly often in the Clone Wars (nevermind the massive death tolls) and it didnt do much to block out Jedi abilities (except for that whole 'Shroud of the Darkside' thing, but that isn't quite the same thing and the exact nature/source of the Shroud is still debated anyhow.)

All its likely to do is give a warning/means of tracking the Tyranids, albeit a not very precise one.

[Simon_Jester]

Anyhow, I'd rate it on the same level as time travel. The potential exists at least - you can't look at the sheer amount of resources the Death STar requires (and its ability to be built outside any static shipyard) and say it doesn't exist - but at the same time there are clearly factors governing its use (or lack of use) because that potential isn't exploited. In Star Wars' case it's not surprising - they're not very militant and have no real need to build or sustain billions of warships (valuable money which could be spent on enriching corporations and furthering general corruption and decadence.) That and the logistics to sustain and coordinate that scale of fleet simply doesn't exist. There is robotics of course to solve those problems, but that adds another dimension of problems too.

Point of fact is we've never really seen the SW Galaxy in a situation where its very existence was under threat of eradication, so we don't really know how they'd react. we've seen plenty of conflicts, wars, and threats created by magical superweapons (which don't really count as a conventional military threat), political or economic cases or just general strife. EVen the Vong was more a threat of conquest than eradication.

I don't rate it as you do because it's purely and entirely inferred by the fan base- there's no basis for it in the EU, let alone the movies. Inhabitants of the Star Wars galaxy seem to take for granted the idea that the Empire's fleet is strong and sufficient, that making a fleet ten times larger would be unnecessary if not outright impossible... Remember, if it were so easy to churn out masses of ships, if 100% of the galaxy could build a billion ships, then 0.1% of the galaxy should be able to build a million ships- and use them to overpower the hundred thousand or fewer ships of the Imperial fleet.

Why hasn't that happened? Why hasn't someone actually tried that, put their own tiny faction on a total war footing and turned out a military that could overrun the much larger but unmobilized remainder of the galaxy? It seems impossible to explain, in my eyes, if the gap between their theoretical capabilities and what they're actually doing is so wide.

So I'm reluctant to accept the logic that the ability to build the Death Star implies the ability to build the mass equivalent of a Death Star in other things.

That might matter if we were talking about a single, concentrated hive fleet threat. What if they're attacking from multipel angles across a dispersed front, with lots of individual fleets?

That makes it better, not worse.

If the entire Tyranid hive fleet were concentrated at one point, the Empire would have to concentrate its entire fleet to give battle at that one point. Sending ships to any other place would be useless, so it would be a fight between all of the Tyranids and all of the Imperial Navy. The fight would be purely one of attrition, and the Imperial advantage in mobility and communications would be reduced to the minimum- all it would accomplish is to let them concentrate their full might for a mindless slugging match. The slugging match itself would be unchanged. The Tyranid advantage of numbers and ferocity would come fully into play, and if they can possibly win at all, they can win that way.

If the Tyranids disperse and attack many points, using the basic pattern described in 40k, they need years of space travel to cross respectable fractions of the galaxy, months of space travel to enter a system, and weeks or months to fully consume a planet's resources. Meanwhile, Star Wars fleets can move about and communicate in a matter of weeks or days. Even if the hypernet is unavailable, there's still hyperspace-capable courier craft, which can cross the galaxy as fast as as any other ship. You may not be able to 'radio' Coruscant for help, but you can hire a YT1300 to carry the message and hand-deliver it easily enough.

So any planet which is threatened will know in a general sense that they're in danger far ahead of time (the Tyranids are 5000 light years away and approaching this region of space at 10000c), and that they are specifically in danger far ahead of time (they will hit the planet in two months).

Using the Hypernet if possible, or couriers if not, any inhabited planet (including backwaters like Tatooine, who still have ships and can still send for help if they detect anything) can alert the Empire to the Tyranid attack. The Empire will be able to assess the situation, and see if a big enough fleet can be moved into position in time to stop this particular Tyranid attack. Perhaps this can be done at once, if there are ships in reserve for the emergency. Perhaps it cannot be done for some weeks, because all the ships are busy fighting and refueling and being repaired- which is still survivable, since you have weeks. Perhaps the schedule is so long that this planet will be attacked before it reaches the top of the "saved from Tyranids" wait list, in which case an Imperial fleet could still come in to attack the Tyranids from orbit, destroy concentrations of bioforms on the ground, and if necessary sterilize the planet to keep the Tyranids from benefiting from its biosphere.

But unlike the "all Imperials fight all Tyranids at one point" scenario, here the Empire can always get a pretty good idea of how big a Tyranid force is threatening that planet, and can schedule the assembly of a big enough Imperial fleet to defeat it, if ships are available. This favors the Empire, because it can choose to accept or deny battle, and can amass enough force to overpower a single Tyranid sub-fleet without having to waste ships that would be better used fighting a different fleet- it can send enough ships to have a 2:1 advantage in firepower, say, and be sure of having not accidentally sent so many that it gets a 10:1 advantage on that one planet at the expense of four others.

Which favors the Imperials- if they can win at all, they can win in this situation, because their great strengths of fast travel and communication are operating constantly, permanently, while the Tyranids' advantages of numbers and ferocity only operate some of the time (when a Tyranid force can somehow come to grips with an Imperial force not specifically assembled to have enough firepower to overwhelm it).

So again, the debate comes down to the same factors of 'how both sides want to play it out' and unless that can be agreed on the debate won't go anywhere.

I figure it's fair to limit the Tyranids and Empire to the methods they use in their respective depictions. There are enough fudge factors that we can't just trivially say "X beats Y because lol gigatons," but I really do think that if both sides play by their normal rulebook, the Empire enjoys a strategic advantage that will require the Tyranids to have a huge edge in raw muscle and firepower to overcome.

The real X-factor is the uninhabited worlds of the setting- planets which have life, but don't have ships or transmitters to call for help, like Dagobah. Tyranids might attack these planets without anyone even realizing it has happened, which could be a serious problem. The Empire would be wise to enlist large numbers of small, hyper-capable fighters, shuttles, and freighters to keep a watch on all the uninhabited but inhabitable planets in areas threatened by Tyranid attack; how much of this can be done depends on how many shuttles and gunboats and so on the Empire has available, and how many worlds there are to monitor.

[Srelex]

Incidentally, how effective would weapons like the Defoliator prove against Tyranids? As far as I know, the Tau in 40k have something similar, but it's effectiveness against 'Nids has never been described.

And yes, perhaps this is just resorting to 'tech of the week' tactics, but I'm curious anyway.

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't rate it as you do because it's purely and entirely inferred by the fan base- there's no basis for it in the EU, let alone the movies. Inhabitants of the Star Wars galaxy seem to take for granted the idea that the Empire's fleet is strong and sufficient, that making a fleet ten times larger would be unnecessary if not outright impossible... Remember, if it were so easy to churn out masses of ships, if 100% of the galaxy could build a billion ships, then 0.1% of the galaxy should be able to build a million ships- and use them to overpower the hundred thousand or fewer ships of the Imperial fleet.

That depends on how accessible the relevant technology is? Given the costs and difficulties associated with creating and maintaining the holonet (which only the Republic was reputed to do) IT's likely that only large governments can mess around with the quantities of hypermatter and shit needed to create and maintain it (Hyperwave/holonet transmissions are about as energy intensive as most high end hypermatter feats according to the ICS.) hypermatter-powered warships (with the associated firepower and capabilities) are likely to be relatively rare (like the Death STar itself.) Indeed, the reason Palpy could probably build the Death STar is because he cut back on the Holonet (and could pour those resources nad money into other projects.) So your hypothetical millions strong locally built warship fleet is going to be inferior to what the government can deploy (which is actually the case both with the Separatists, and the Corellian Rebels that arose prior to the conflict over the CAamas document.)

Of course, based on the ISB the resources used in the DS1 are equivalent to the resources that could be expended upon a 'score' of sector groups - how those mateerials are used we don know (it could be transports, fixed fortifications and space stations as well as starships) but that's also a tiny fraction of the number of sector groups (thousands) the Empire is reputed to have. So it can go either way.

Why hasn't that happened? Why hasn't someone actually tried that, put their own tiny faction on a total war footing and turned out a military that could overrun the much larger but unmobilized remainder of the galaxy? It seems impossible to explain, in my eyes, if the gap between their theoretical capabilities and what they're actually doing is so wide.

You realize this logic could be applied simply on the basis of hyperdrive, right? Any random lunatic or terrorist faction could destroy any other planet simply by attaching a hyperdrive to a large asteroid and dropping it on the planet, or by useing some sort of hyper-drive equipped pod equipped with some sort of biological or chemical weapons. Hell, Sea Skimmer some time back pionted out that all you need is a really big civilian freighter (like we know they have) and the ability to carry a few billion or trillion tons of conventional antipersonnel munitions to fuck up most planets, and yet that doesn't happen (planetary shields are not omnipresent on every world.)

If the Tyranids disperse and attack many points, using the basic pattern described in 40k, they need years of space travel to cross respectable fractions of the galaxy, months of space travel to enter a system, and weeks or months to fully consume a planet's resources. Meanwhile, Star Wars fleets can move about and communicate in a matter of weeks or days. Even if the hypernet is unavailable, there's still hyperspace-capable courier craft, which can cross the galaxy as fast as as any other ship. You may not be able to 'radio' Coruscant for help, but you can hire a YT1300 to carry the message and hand-deliver it easily enough.

The speed at which the Tyranids 'advance' depends entirely on the FTL you ascribe to them. Nowadays they've had the Narvahl fold space stuff added to (or supplanting) the warp drive ability. With warp the problem is that they're required to traverse the same medium as every other 40K ship, along with the same problems (and warp conditions in Star Wars are unlikely to be the same in the 40K galaxy. There are no psykers in Star Wars for one thing.) If we go with Narvahls' the speed becomes unknown, and the 'years or longer' delays get chalked up to cases where they may make slow approaches in realspace (for whatever reason - this goes back to alot of the earlier editions when they would drift through space in hibernation.) OF course the gravitic manipulation of Narvahls also tends to fuck up the system (and planets in the system) in interesting and catastrophic ways, which introduces a whole nother set of variables.

Communication is a differnet story. AFAIK the Tyranids still are more or less instantly linked to the hive mind, so it is realtime or nearly realtime as I recall.

So any planet which is threatened will know in a general sense that they're in danger far ahead of time (the Tyranids are 5000 light years away and approaching this region of space at 10000c), and that they are specifically in danger far ahead of time (they will hit the planet in two months).

Well yes, if those are the parameters you go with then what you say is true.

Using the Hypernet if possible, or couriers if not, any inhabited planet (including backwaters like Tatooine, who still have ships and can still send for help if they detect anything) can alert the Empire to the Tyranid attack. The Empire will be able to assess the situation, and see if a big enough fleet can be moved into position in time to stop this particular Tyranid attack. Perhaps this can be done at once, if there are ships in reserve for the emergency. Perhaps it cannot be done for some weeks, because all the ships are busy fighting and refueling and being repaired- which is still survivable, since you have weeks. Perhaps the schedule is so long that this planet will be attacked before it reaches the top of the "saved from Tyranids" wait list, in which case an Imperial fleet could still come in to attack the Tyranids from orbit, destroy concentrations of bioforms on the ground, and if necessary sterilize the planet to keep the Tyranids from benefiting from its biosphere.

Thats a whole lot of 'perhaps' - and that also begs the question of - how long can they fight? How long can the crews keep up those fights, how long can the starship fights, before they need to be overhauled or refitted? How about crew cycles? It also begs the question about the logistical side of things (again with the Death STar example, they should have plenty of HM fuel available t run a 25,000 ship fleet, but how quickly cna they transport it and how much is supplied to given regions and whatnot.)

And of course there's the question of parity - how many Tyranid ships to match an Imperial ship (or how many Tyranid ships can an Imperial warship destroy before running out of fuel or being destroyed?) This also applies to sterilizing/bDZing the planet, because it is not a trivial energy expenditure (even for them) to do that.

But unlike the "all Imperials fight all Tyranids at one point" scenario, here the Empire can always get a pretty good idea of how big a Tyranid force is threatening that planet, and can schedule the assembly of a big enough Imperial fleet to defeat it, if ships are available. This favors the Empire, because it can choose to accept or deny battle, and can amass enough force to overpower a single Tyranid sub-fleet without having to waste ships that would be better used fighting a different fleet- it can send enough ships to have a 2:1 advantage in firepower, say, and be sure of having not accidentally sent so many that it gets a 10:1 advantage on that one planet at the expense of four others.

Again this depends entirely on how you picture the 'Nids attacking an dthe capabilities involved. I mean what happens if the Nids have billions of warships that are close on to parity with the ICS level Imperial ones?

Which favors the Imperials- if they can win at all, they can win in this situation, because their great strengths of fast travel and communication are operating constantly, permanently, while the Tyranids' advantages of numbers and ferocity only operate some of the time (when a Tyranid force can somehow come to grips with an Imperial force not specifically assembled to have enough firepower to overwhelm it).

I'm not sure the Imperials have a communication edge against the Hivemind (I dont remember the exact nature of the connection or it's speed but its definitely faster than astrotelepathy) and how fast they travel FTL (Unless they make the entire journey sublight) is entirely up in the air. Unless they manage like I said to gain one of the biotech-examples of hyperdrive.

Ignoring planets is also a problem because the Tyranids will want to go after biomass rich planets (finding them is another story, they don't have warp signatures to home in on, I think, so they'll have to rely on scouting.)

I figure it's fair to limit the Tyranids and Empire to the methods they use in their respective depictions. There are enough fudge factors that we can't just trivially say "X beats Y because lol gigatons," but I really do think that if both sides play by their normal rulebook, the Empire enjoys a strategic advantage that will require the Tyranids to have a huge edge in raw muscle and firepower to overcome.

It's hard to use 'respective depictions' because those depictions at best only loosely conform to the osrt of threat the other side faces. I mean the Tyranids have faced enemies with fast transit abilities before (The Eldar and probably Necrons) but that doesnt exactly corrrespond to facing the Empire now, does it? And the Empire has never ever been in a war of annihilation so what sort of analogue do the Tyranids come up as? The closest I can think of is the Vong and they're not really a good one for a number of reasons.

As far as the factors and abilitied/edges.. that entirely depends. We don't even know how big the Tyranids really are for one thing. Or even how big Leviathan is other than 'its probably bigger than millions of ships.'

The real X-factor is the uninhabited worlds of the setting- planets which have life, but don't have ships or transmitters to call for help, like Dagobah. Tyranids might attack these planets without anyone even realizing it has happened, which could be a serious problem. The Empire would be wise to enlist large numbers of small, hyper-capable fighters, shuttles, and freighters to keep a watch on all the uninhabited but inhabitable planets in areas threatened by Tyranid attack; how much of this can be done depends on how many shuttles and gunboats and so on the Empire has available, and how many worlds there are to monitor.

If and when they figure out what the Tyranids are after and what they do yeah.

[Simon_Jester]

That depends on how accessible the relevant technology is? Given the costs and difficulties associated with creating and maintaining the holonet (which only the Republic was reputed to do) IT's likely that only large governments can mess around with the quantities of hypermatter and shit needed to create and maintain it (Hyperwave/holonet transmissions are about as energy intensive as most high end hypermatter feats according to the ICS.) hypermatter-powered warships (with the associated firepower and capabilities) are likely to be relatively rare (like the Death STar itself.) Indeed, the reason Palpy could probably build the Death STar is because he cut back on the Holonet (and could pour those resources nad money into other projects.) So your hypothetical millions strong locally built warship fleet is going to be inferior to what the government can deploy (which is actually the case both with the Separatists, and the Corellian Rebels that arose prior to the conflict over the CAamas document.)

Local powers manage to build ISD-equivalent warships (Hapan, Mon Calamari, et cetera). It's in numbers where they fall down and can't match the Empire.

But if the Empire's industrial base could produce billions of ISDs "if it really wanted to," and if a nation with at most a thousandth the industrial base can produce ISDs at all... I'm just not seeing it.

In real life, peacetime militaries usually remain at at least 5-10% of the size of the wartime-mobilized military. There are good reasons to not spend 50% of GDP on the military or something unsustainable like that, but once you've got it down to 5% or so, why keep cutting?

The idea that in Star Wars, despite the very strong appearance of the Empire as a military dictatorship and the ongoing civil wars fought within the SW galaxy, only about 0.0001% of GDP is actually spent constructing warships... I'm sorry, but while you may infer the capabilities I simply cannot consider them binding for purposes of a versus- they never appear outright in the source material, not really.

You realize this logic could be applied simply on the basis of hyperdrive, right? Any random lunatic or terrorist faction could destroy any other planet simply by attaching a hyperdrive to a large asteroid and dropping it on the planet, or by useing some sort of hyper-drive equipped pod equipped with some sort of biological or chemical weapons. Hell, Sea Skimmer some time back pionted out that all you need is a really big civilian freighter (like we know they have) and the ability to carry a few billion or trillion tons of conventional antipersonnel munitions to fuck up most planets, and yet that doesn't happen (planetary shields are not omnipresent on every world.)

Some of these things have answers- it's hard for a random lunatic to procure a billion tons of artillery shells without someone noticing, Star Wars medical technology makes the use of biological and chemical warfare tricky, blah blah blah...

I mean, I can accept that the Empire could load a billion ton freighter with artillery shells, because that's not outside the limits of the other things we see them doing. A freighter a cubic kilometer in size would not be beyond what we've seen them build, and loading it with 155mm shells is presumably easier than loading it with turbolasers, fine... but when we talk about scaling their capabilities up beyond anything we've ever seen them do, in ways that you would think they have incentives to do, and yet never do...

Put it this way. You can speculate about it all you like. But I think it's very very poor form to bring it up in a versus debate, because it defeats the purpose. There's no talk of "well, what strengths and weaknesses do the two sides have." It's just you strutting up and down and beating your chest about what you have decided the Star Wars universe is capable of, despite no published author or director having ever made a single thing showing people in Star Wars doing it.

Poor form.

The speed at which the Tyranids 'advance' depends entirely on the FTL you ascribe to them. Nowadays they've had the Narvahl fold space stuff added to (or supplanting) the warp drive ability. With warp the problem is that they're required to traverse the same medium as every other 40K ship, along with the same problems (and warp conditions in Star Wars are unlikely to be the same in the 40K galaxy. There are no psykers in Star Wars for one thing.) If we go with Narvahls' the speed becomes unknown, and the 'years or longer' delays get chalked up to cases where they may make slow approaches in realspace (for whatever reason - this goes back to alot of the earlier editions when they would drift through space in hibernation.) OF course the gravitic manipulation of Narvahls also tends to fuck up the system (and planets in the system) in interesting and catastrophic ways, which introduces a whole nother set of variables.

...What is this about Narvahls? I think I missed a step.

Communication is a differnet story. AFAIK the Tyranids still are more or less instantly linked to the hive mind, so it is realtime or nearly realtime as I recall.

Yes, but this is only helpful if their strategic mobility gets a boost. I'm basing my assessment of their strategic mobility off of how they are portrayed in 40k to the best of my knowledge.

How they achieve this in Star Wars I don't much care, I just assume interoperability as long as ther'es no reason to assume otherwise. But unless they turn out to be a hell of a lot faster because of [handwave], they're way slower than Star Wars ships.

Thats a whole lot of 'perhaps' - and that also begs the question of - how long can they fight? How long can the crews keep up those fights, how long can the starship fights, before they need to be overhauled or refitted? How about crew cycles? It also begs the question about the logistical side of things (again with the Death STar example, they should have plenty of HM fuel available t run a 25,000 ship fleet, but how quickly cna they transport it and how much is supplied to given regions and whatnot.)

And of course there's the question of parity - how many Tyranid ships to match an Imperial ship (or how many Tyranid ships can an Imperial warship destroy before running out of fuel or being destroyed?) This also applies to sterilizing/bDZing the planet, because it is not a trivial energy expenditure (even for them) to do that.

Yes- but an ISD appears to be able to perform a BDZ without refueling during the bombardment. So that's a lot of energy output through the guns- equivalent to a lot of heavy lance fire from 40k ships, I think, probably enough to kill a whole mess of Tyranids. How many? I'm not saying right now.

The Imperial strategy, as I'm describing it, would be to look at a given Tyranid fleet and concentrate "enough" ships on that one fleet to defeat it quickly and cleanly, then return to a refueling station located far enough away to be out of imminent danger of Tyranid attack.

The tactical-level question would be "How much is enough? How many tons of Karlack bioships can one ISD kill?" I'm not going to try to answer that question. Remember my use of the sentences "If the Karlacks/Imperials can win at all." That was meant to allude to the firepower question, which I can't easily judge.

If the Karlacks can win, if there are physically enough Karlacks to defeat the Imperial Navy in a naval battle by sheer weight of numbers and firepower... then the best scenario for the Karlacks is to fight all the Imperials at once in one place with their entire fleet.

If the Imperials can win, if they won't run out of bullets/torpedoes/hypermatter/whatever before they run out of 'Nids to shoot up, then having that big edge in strategic mobility gives them a huge advantage in using their weapons to defeat a numerically superior but dispersed opponent, one that they can defeat in detail.

Again this depends entirely on how you picture the 'Nids attacking an dthe capabilities involved. I mean what happens if the Nids have billions of warships that are close on to parity with the ICS level Imperial ones?

Game over, Nids win. Do they actually have that level of capability though? I don't know, so I didn't assume it- I assumed something like firepower parity: that if the entire Nid fleet and the entire Imperial fleet were concentrated all in one place to have a cage match, the powers of the two fleets would be within, say, an order of magnitude of each other.

If the total Tyranid strength (measured in kilotons thrown out the gun-equivalents and kilotons of fire absorbed before the hive fleets are destroyed) is thousands or millions of times greater than the total Imperial strength, then the Imperials won't be able to kill Nids fast enough. Such is life... but I didn't want to assume or predict or assert such a thing. Nor did I want to predict the reverse- that one ISD could kill an entire planetary attack fleet's worth of Tyranids, so that the Empire could vaporize something the equivalent of Hive Fleet Kraken before it even made landfall on any of its target worlds.

I just assumed broadly comparable levels of raw force and used the known levels of baseline strategic mobility. If nothing else, that lets me accurately describe the kind of fight the Imperials would be wise to put up, however strong the total Karlack force is.

I'm not sure the Imperials have a communication edge against the Hivemind (I dont remember the exact nature of the connection or it's speed but its definitely faster than astrotelepathy) and how fast they travel FTL (Unless they make the entire journey sublight) is entirely up in the air. Unless they manage like I said to gain one of the biotech-examples of hyperdrive.

Karlacks in their native setting are slower than Imperials in theirs. Going beyond that, all bets are off and I don't know what happens.

It's hard to use 'respective depictions' because those depictions at best only loosely conform to the osrt of threat the other side faces. I mean the Tyranids have faced enemies with fast transit abilities before (The Eldar and probably Necrons) but that doesnt exactly corrrespond to facing the Empire now, does it? And the Empire has never ever been in a war of annihilation so what sort of analogue do the Tyranids come up as? The closest I can think of is the Vong and they're not really a good one for a number of reasons.

Yes-ish. The Eldar and Necrons are fast, but are neither well coordinated nor well suited to wage total war on a galactic scale.

Who is capable of total war... Put it this way: I think that given only hyperdrive and nothing else, the Imperium of Man from 40k would utterly defeat the Tyranids. Because of the process I described- they could move and coordinate their forces so much more freely, avoiding the Shadow in the Warp and getting to Tyranid-threatened systems long before the Tyranids themselves arrived, in enough strength to blast Tyranid fleets and move on quickly to the next hot spot.

As to the Empire, the real question is whether they can ramp up military production that much in response to an existential threat, and if so how fast, or whether they basically go to war "with the army they have, not the army they wish they had."

[bilateralrope]

If the Karlacks can win, if there are physically enough Karlacks to defeat the Imperial Navy in a naval battle by sheer weight of numbers and firepower... then the best scenario for the Karlacks is to fight all the Imperials at once in one place with their entire fleet.

But bunching in giant fleet and attacking a single world at a time would also be an effective strategy against the Imperium, something the Tyranids don't do. Even within a single hive fleet, the front of the tyranid advance is spread across a range of systems.
My guess as to why is that it is necessary to gather enough resources to sustain the hive fleet. Which means that if the Tyranids gather in a single system, and the Empire lets them have it without a fight, then the Tyranids still have a net loss of resources.

Which means that, as long as the Empire can defeat the largest Tyranid fleet that can sustain itself from a single system, then they should be able to win.

To say nothing of BDZing worlds that the Empire knows it can't hold, before the Tyranids land, to deny biomass to them*. Or speculating on how much the Empire could ramp up production in the centuries it takes them to consume the galaxy.

*And it would be a cleaner death for those stuck on the planet.

[S.L.Acker]

The one thing working against the Tyranid Hive fleet would be replacement rate of losses. Given the fleets don't seem to massively inflate in size when they eat planets we can assume that a lot of that mass goes into sustaining things at their current level. It also takes them a fair while to travel between stars so getting the biomass to replace losses, even if we assume that the fleet can build ISD equivalents as fast as the Empire can build ISDs, would be based on the time it takes to get to a new world. We also know that, while uncommon, Star Wars can cut recruitment numbers by using slave systems on ships. If pressed they could also use cloned soldiers and droids again which might give them the edge in beating the Nids for replacing losses.

[Simon_Jester]

But bunching in giant fleet and attacking a single world at a time would also be an effective strategy against the Imperium, something the Tyranids don't do. Even within a single hive fleet, the front of the tyranid advance is spread across a range of systems.
My guess as to why is that it is necessary to gather enough resources to sustain the hive fleet. Which means that if the Tyranids gather in a single system, and the Empire lets them have it without a fight, then the Tyranids still have a net loss of resources.

The Imperium of Man cannot muster its forces to meet a single attack in a decisive battle. And if the entire Tyranid fleet hit only one system at a time, consuming the galaxy would take millions of years.

What it comes down to is that in war you can either divide or concentrate your forces. Dividing your forces is a good plan when you have overwhelming tactical strength, because you can use small bits of your force to destroy big chunks of the enemy. It's a good plan when you can communicate and coordinate and maneuver very efficiently, because you can keep track of all your little sub-units and use them efficiently to carry out a complicated plan and catch the enemy by surprise.

It's not a good plan if you don't have overwhelming strength and don't have superior mobility and communications (both of them). Because then, you divide your forces up and the enemy defeats you in detail, snapping up each little detachment separately. And you can't stop them easily, because you can't maneuver to protect your own forces.

The Tyranids have great communications, but bad mobility, so dividing their forces more widely than they have to just puts them at a bigger disadvantage when it comes to fighting the Empire. Unless they can fix the mobility problem, anyway

Which means that, as long as the Empire can defeat the largest Tyranid fleet that can sustain itself from a single system, then they should be able to win.

It depends. The Tyranids may be capable of stockpiling biomass; if so, they can store 'food' to support their combined fleets in a pitched battle to overwhelm a strongpoint. They might not think of it, but then again they might, I'm not sure.

Also, if Tyranids are strong enough, then your statement stops being true. Suppose that the combined Tyranid fleets have ten times the strength of the total Imperial fleet, but that they can only sustain 5% of their numbers off of one inhabited planet. They must divide their forces over twenty worlds at a minimum to survive... but to defeat any one of those twenty fleets, the Empire must pull together almost its whole navy. And when it predictably takes losses from fighting in that one system, it comes out of the battle with only, say, 80% of its strength left... while the Tyranids have 95% of their strength.

[Vendetta]

It's faintly possible that eating life in the SW galaxy might weaken the force if we go by that 'created by all living things' shit, but that depends on exactly how it is created and what is required. If simply being organic and living is all then it may not do anything.

Oh it'll definitely do something, the destruction of Aldaraan created a disturbance in the force that obi-wan could detect over interstellar distances, and it looked like it affected him quite a lot.

Yes, he had to have a little bit of a sit down and everything.

[Connor MacLeod]

Local powers manage to build ISD-equivalent warships (Hapan, Mon Calamari, et cetera). It's in numbers where they fall down and can't match the Empire.

But if the Empire's industrial base could produce billions of ISDs "if it really wanted to," and if a nation with at most a thousandth the industrial base can produce ISDs at all... I'm just not seeing it.

Er, not quite. Mon Cals are outdone by sheer firepower and toughness. They make up the difference with bettery gunnery and greater redundancy of their ships (supposedly.) That was from the Star Wars technical journal. Same thing with the new Class ships really - they were smaller, had fewer guns and less overall firepower, but greater accuracy made them the equal (firepower wise) of an ISD purportedly.

Hapan Battle dragons actually had markedly inferior. Their turbolasers can match the power output, but they take 3x as long (IIRC) to recharge, which was why they had to have that 'spinning wheel' gimmick.' Tactics-wise, they relied on ganging up on relatively few targets and were explicitly designed as such - which puts limits on their targeting abilities.

And even if that was the case... who says that the ISDS are all made the same? Going by EU data I've seen ISDs range from a mere 365,000 tons to a million tons, and carry armaments varying from the ICS layouts (4 big turrets per side and lots of little turrets) to the old WEG 60 TLS/60 Ion cannons. Which also had its own breakups (each 60 was a 5 gun battery, meaning 300 TL and 300 Ion cannons, whilst in other sources it was 60 TLS and 60 Ion cannons arranged into 5 gun batteries, so there are actually 12 TL batteries and 12 Ion cannons per ship.) Nevermind other variants like the Interdictors, the hangarless, etc. Hell I'm pretty sure that the Black Fleet Crisis made explicit mention of ISDs using fusion-powered hyperdrive rather than hypermatter, and its debatable whether Solar Ionization is the same as a hypermatter reactor (we know at least ISD-2s were outfitted with some hypermatter reactors, for example, from the DS novelization.)

We could get into intelligence issues (hiding that scale of construction, hiding the logistical train to support it, etc.) and all the dangers it carries (neighbors noticing, getting worried, attacking or undergoing similar buildup, etc.) And even if thy could, they still can't outmatch the Empire for production. And this assumes they can get access to things like hypermatter, long range military hyperdrives, etc. which is debatable. The Empire (IIRC my WEG stuff accurately) made a strong effort at restricting and suppressing various technologies like Turbolaser tech and blasters amongst the greater populace.

In real life, peacetime militaries usually remain at at least 5-10% of the size of the wartime-mobilized military. There are good reasons to not spend 50% of GDP on the military or something unsustainable like that, but once you've got it down to 5% or so, why keep cutting?

Because people can be idiots? I don't think I need to go out of the way to prove this as a possibility, evne for Palpatine. THe movies stand ofr themselves on that regard. and the idea that they can make stupid military decisions is also pretty self-evident (STarships with bridges, the Death sTar itself is not the best designed planet killer they could employ, etc.)

The idea that in Star Wars, despite the very strong appearance of the Empire as a military dictatorship and the ongoing civil wars fought within the SW galaxy, only about 0.0001% of GDP is actually spent constructing warships... I'm sorry, but while you may infer the capabilities I simply cannot consider them binding for purposes of a versus- they never appear outright in the source material, not really.

How much does an ISD cost? Does that stay fixed? How much does corruption, bribery, and gneral economic fuckery (all of which we know goes on in real life America never mind Space America) affect these things? I can think of lots of EU-derived examples of how the military funding is used, misued, etc. (The IG-88 project for example arose from some Imperial officer's skimming off public funds for his own purposes, and the funding for Death STars was hidden in funding for more legitimate practices as I recall.)

Some of these things have answers- it's hard for a random lunatic to procure a billion tons of artillery shells without someone noticing, Star Wars medical technology makes the use of biological and chemical warfare tricky, blah blah blah...

I mean, I can accept that the Empire could load a billion ton freighter with artillery shells, because that's not outside the limits of the other things we see them doing. A freighter a cubic kilometer in size would not be beyond what we've seen them build, and loading it with 155mm shells is presumably easier than loading it with turbolasers, fine... but when we talk about scaling their capabilities up beyond anything we've ever seen them do, in ways that you would think they have incentives to do, and yet never do...

Who do you see pulling this of? I'm not figuring on some joe off the street being able to do it, I'm figuring a single planetary or multi-system government might do, or some sector-spanning terrorist/criminal organization (it's not as if we don't have shit-tons of those) or mercenary outfits, or whatever. Discussion of Sea Skimmer's idea was here and it didn't seem too involved. Depending on the wealth, resources, and patience involved, it could be quite easily achieved - and that's at relatively modern technological bases ofr things like materials and explosives tech. Nevermind something more exotic.

Put it this way. You can speculate about it all you like. But I think it's very very poor form to bring it up in a versus debate, because it defeats the purpose. There's no talk of "well, what strengths and weaknesses do the two sides have." It's just you strutting up and down and beating your chest about what you have decided the Star Wars universe is capable of, despite no published author or director having ever made a single thing showing people in Star Wars doing it.

Poor form.

How is it 'poor form?' This has always been a relevant part of the debates, both for the continuity problems it addresses as well as in terms of vs debating - if for no other reason to avoid people flaming and nitpicking over it. And no, its not what *I* have decided, since I have no ability to dictate what people do or don't think. I can only present my opinions as they are, and as much as I know the data. My knowledge of SW isn't as current as it used to be, but I still know a whole hell of alot and what can or can't work - especially pertaining to the ICS related crap.

This same logic applies to anything with any other type of vs crap - from 'flood wanking' to, 40k 'chaos corruption ftw lololol!!!1111' idiocy, to any number of fan-derived trek superweapons. Hell, the Tyranids have similar issues as SW does here regarding the obsecne amounts of materials they strip off a planet here being a fairly common indicator - unfortunately the link no longer works.

This link may or may not work, it doesnt seem to be working for now How much can the nids build from that much potential material, and why don't they?

...What is this about Narvahls? I think I missed a step.

Narvahls are the FTL transportation from 5th edition. I'm guessing you haven't read up on any 5th edition material pertaining to the Tyranids?

Yes, but this is only helpful if their strategic mobility gets a boost. I'm basing my assessment of their strategic mobility off of how they are portrayed in 40k to the best of my knowledge.

How they achieve this in Star Wars I don't much care, I just assume interoperability as long as ther'es no reason to assume otherwise. But unless they turn out to be a hell of a lot faster because of [handwave], they're way slower than Star Wars ships.

Which asks the question 'which portrayal' are you going off of? Which edition(s) and are we ignoring the rest or accepting them? And how long do you expect that portrayal ot be accurate once the conflict begins?

Yes- but an ISD appears to be able to perform a BDZ without refueling during the bombardment. So that's a lot of energy output through the guns- equivalent to a lot of heavy lance fire from 40k ships, I think, probably enough to kill a whole mess of Tyranids. How many? I'm not saying right now.

People don't even agree what firepower BDZ (or exterminatus) represents, or that either side can do it with starships (and thus as a benchmark for firepower.) Firepower can range from petatons to KILOGRAMS of TNT per second and it has been argued for both sides. As far as ship comparisons If we go with Hive Fleet Behemonth as an analogy, you have hundreds of Imperial ships facing off against thousands of Tyranid ships. But nid ships have matched Imperial ships on even terms before as well.

The Imperial strategy, as I'm describing it, would be to look at a given Tyranid fleet and concentrate "enough" ships on that one fleet to defeat it quickly and cleanly, then return to a refueling station located far enough away to be out of imminent danger of Tyranid attack.

The tactical-level question would be "How much is enough? How many tons of Karlack bioships can one ISD kill?" I'm not going to try to answer that question. Remember my use of the sentences "If the Karlacks/Imperials can win at all." That was meant to allude to the firepower question, which I can't easily judge.

If the Karlacks can win, if there are physically enough Karlacks to defeat the Imperial Navy in a naval battle by sheer weight of numbers and firepower... then the best scenario for the Karlacks is to fight all the Imperials at once in one place with their entire fleet.

If the Imperials can win, if they won't run out of bullets/torpedoes/hypermatter/whatever before they run out of 'Nids to shoot up, then having that big edge in strategic mobility gives them a huge advantage in using their weapons to defeat a numerically superior but dispersed opponent, one that they can defeat in detail.

Ok, but it strikes me as pretty pointless and silly to discuss tactics and strategy without deciding how they go about beating them. I mean fuck if all they need to use are hyperspace capable drones/missiles/fighters deployed en masse (even if it means hundreds or thousands) to kill them that simplifies the tactical equation greatly, doesn't it?

Game over, Nids win. Do they actually have that level of capability though? I don't know, so I didn't assume it- I assumed something like firepower parity: that if the entire Nid fleet and the entire Imperial fleet were concentrated all in one place to have a cage match, the powers of the two fleets would be within, say, an order of magnitude of each other.

Why would you assume 'parity'? That seems a risky thing to do because if the Tyranids actually DO happen to have numbers, this is an advantage for them. Even if they have the *potential* for high numbers (EG through consuming large numbers of planets and multiplying their fleets which is also possible) it is still an advantage. And dependign on how the other capabilites (firepower, FTL speed) stack up it isn't automatically gamewinning either.

If the total Tyranid strength (measured in kilotons thrown out the gun-equivalents and kilotons of fire absorbed before the hive fleets are destroyed) is thousands or millions of times greater than the total Imperial strength, then the Imperials won't be able to kill Nids fast enough. Such is life... but I didn't want to assume or predict or assert such a thing. Nor did I want to predict the reverse- that one ISD could kill an entire planetary attack fleet's worth of Tyranids, so that the Empire could vaporize something the equivalent of Hive Fleet Kraken before it even made landfall on any of its target worlds.

I just assumed broadly comparable levels of raw force and used the known levels of baseline strategic mobility. If nothing else, that lets me accurately describe the kind of fight the Imperials would be wise to put up, however strong the total Karlack force is.

I'm curious, how is this different form what you accused me of doing before?

Who is capable of total war... Put it this way: I think that given only hyperdrive and nothing else, the Imperium of Man from 40k would utterly defeat the Tyranids. Because of the process I described- they could move and coordinate their forces so much more freely, avoiding the Shadow in the Warp and getting to Tyranid-threatened systems long before the Tyranids themselves arrived, in enough strength to blast Tyranid fleets and move on quickly to the next hot spot.

I'd think they need more than just hyperdrive. They'd need a replacement for astropathic communications as well. And FTL sensors to allow them to safely navigate in Hyperspace (risk of collision and all that.) Though to be fair, it just occured to me that like Warp Drive, hyperdrive tends to have that 'interdictor' problem with gravity wells.

Let me quote the Narvahl bit from the 5th codex to establish the issue:

It can then harness that system's own gravity, creating a compressed space-time transit corridor through which the Narvhal, and nearby vessels, can cover vast distances.
...
The Narvhal's manipulation of a star system's underlying forces is not always without side effects. A prey planet will sometimes be subjected to earthquakes, solar flares, tidal waves and other natural disasters in the time between the Narvhal casting its gravitic snare and the Hive Fleet actually arriving.

If they're fucking around with the gravity in a star system, that can create some interesting problems for hyperdrive travel in-system, methinks. This isn't unprecedented either: During the Corellian Crisis centerpoint station generated a system-wide interdiction field which cut the system off from outside access. It's also quite possible that if the Nids could figure out the limits of hyperdrive they could exploit this to hamper SW hyperdrive.

As to the Empire, the real question is whether they can ramp up military production that much in response to an existential threat, and if so how fast, or whether they basically go to war "with the army they have, not the army they wish they had."

And the magnitude/sustainability of production. It's something you'll get discussion over, because people WILL cite the Death STar as proof for the SW side. It's happened before in any SW vs 40K debate, and its something I've used myself in years past. It has to be dealt with, the same way other things do (firepower/durability parities, FTL speed comparisons, etc.)

[Solauren]

How would the Tyranids do if the Emperor decided 'enough of this shit' and went after them with Force Storms and his apparent abilty to create miniature wormholes (or however he grabbed luke in Dark Empire)