Tyranids vs the Galactic Empire

[Srelex]

As there doesn't seem to be an exact topic on this, I thought I'd ask. Let's say the hive fleets approaching and encroaching the 40k galaxy are transplanted to the SW one, about a year before The Empire Strikes Back. How would the Empire fare?

Now, while I'm well aware that Tyranid FTL sucks major ass compared to the Empire's, a person on another forum suggested that the Tyranids could catch up by 'evolving', which I suggested was conforming to the No Limits Fallacy, but then again this is 40k; or by consuming Zonama Sekot, with Vong biotech. Now, I'm pretty sure he's wanking, but my knowledge of 40k isn't encyclopedic enough to confirm this.

[Oskuro]

Well, they could always smother the empire under the charred remains of their massive amounts of biomass.

[NecronLord]

New canon reveals that the Tyranids take months or years from dropping sublight, to attacking a planet. That's months of sitting there letting the whole Imperial Fleet concentrate its force upon you.

They die.

[PainRack]

New canon reveals that the Tyranids take months or years from dropping sublight, to attacking a planet. That's months of sitting there letting the whole Imperial Fleet concentrate its force upon you.

They die.

Say what? That's stupid. Give then months of waiting in space above a planet and the Imperium Navy will slaughter them.

[Balrog]

Which new canon? IIRC the Tyranid attack against Tarsis Ultra didn't take months or years, though it was a gradual process of working from the outer planets in.

[Oskuro]

I suspect that time is spent adapting their biowank technology to the planet they intend to gobble up, or they simply make the last leg of the journey at sublight. In any case, it's a bit weird.

[Srelex]

New canon reveals that the Tyranids take months or years from dropping sublight, to attacking a planet. That's months of sitting there letting the whole Imperial Fleet concentrate its force upon you.

They die.

Say what? That's stupid. Give then months of waiting in space above a planet and the Imperium Navy will slaughter them.

I think that's what he meant.

Anyway, does it specify how far away from a planet?

[Simon_Jester]

Say what? That's stupid. Give then months of waiting in space above a planet and the Imperium Navy will slaughter them.

The Imperium doesn't have nearly the same strategic speed the Galactic Empire has; the Imperium's warp-capable ships are restricted to something on the order of 1000 to 10000c. Even given months to move their fleet to counter a Tyranid assault, the Imperium won't be able to get more than the local-sector defense fleet into position.

At that, my impression is that the Tyranids aren't nearly as much of a threat in space as they are on the ground; the Imperium usually wins the naval battles. What keeps the Tyranids alive and dangerous in 40k is a number of factors:

-The shadow in the Warp makes it difficult to move fleets and send messages in the immediate vicinity of a Tyranid fleet.
-The main Hive fleets are big, so big that even given the Imperium's ton-for-ton space superiority, they don't have the tonnage to beat them easily.
-A dispersed Tyranid force can overwhelm local Imperial defense fleets piecemeal; if the Imperium concentrates its fleets too tightly it loses the planets it didn't cover.
-Even if the Imperium manages to take down most of a major Tyranid battlegroup, the splinter fleets will scatter all over the place and make trouble for years.

Against the Galactic Empire, they'd be meat on the table, though. Their warp-jamming abilities wouldn't do a lot of good against hyperspace travel or communication, and the Starfleet could concentrate ships from almost anywhere to meet them in deep space, then drop truly massive firepower on their heads... for months.

[Srelex]

Incidentally, what do you guys have to say to the second part of my opening post? Just so I can have a rebuttal ready to any other people who choose to wank the Nids in that fashion. To paraphrase another part of the guy's argument, he seemed to think that the Hive Mind didn't have to 'evolve' a faster FTL due to the Imperium not having such a strike capability, and thinks that it can do against the Empire, along with the 'eat Sekot' thing I mentioned. Now, while that is quite fallacious--if it had a choice between slow or fast FTL, why slow?--but I'd like it put in more in depth terms.

[Bakustra]

Incidentally, what do you guys have to say to the second part of my opening post? Just so I can have a rebuttal ready to any other people who choose to wank the Nids in that fashion. To paraphrase another part of the guy's argument, he seemed to think that the Hive Mind didn't have to 'evolve' a faster FTL due to the Imperium not having such a strike capability, and thinks that it can do against the Empire, along with the 'eat Sekot' thing I mentioned. Now, while that is quite fallacious--if it had a choice between slow or fast FTL, why slow?--but I'd like it put in more in depth terms.

Logically, the negative is always assumed. The Tyrannids cannot be assumed to have significantly faster FTL travel than they have been shown to possess without evidence for it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Similarly, he must show that the Tyrannids are capable of extracting information from individuals consumed by the Hive Fleets. Even if they do so, they lack the infrastructure necessary to construct, fuel, and maintain hypermatter reactors and hyperdrive, even assuming that a) the Yuuzhan Vong are technologically even with the other Galactic powers (which they are not) and b) all information is transferred in textbook-like chunks that can be adapted readily. Hypermatter itself is an essential component to hyperdrive. However, Tyrannid bioplasma reactors may be sufficiently close to hypermatter reactors in performance that the Tyrannids would gain no net advantage from developing hypermatter technology. Still, the onus is on him to show that the hive fleets can brainsuck their unfortunate victims.

[NecronLord]

Still, the onus is on him to show that the hive fleets can brainsuck their unfortunate victims.

Evidence suggests that the Imperium believes that either they can do that, or they can read gothic.

[Bakustra]

Still, the onus is on him to show that the hive fleets can brainsuck their unfortunate victims.

Evidence suggests that the Imperium believes that either they can do that, or they can read gothic.

It's unsurprising, since Genestealer Patriarchs have to be able to infiltrate Imperial society. On the other hand, it probably depends on how the person was killed, too. Getting ripped apart by a hormagaunt doesn't seem to have any room for brainsucking, but getting tossed directly in a digestion pool, or being devoured by a synapse creature, might work. However, it is a long way from that to adopting SW hyperdrives on all their larger ships, thankfully.

[Oskuro]

Maybe their psi-capable 'nids have some sort of mind-reading or mind-melding ability.

[Bedlam]

I think I remember Lictors having the eat their brains and learn from them ability in one of the early codexes. I dont know if its been mentioned again.

Obviously Genestealer hybrids and their families fit into their native societies and can read / write and use technology.

[Balrog]

The Lictor, another vanguard organism, is specifically bio-engineered to excel at lone-wolf information gathering and assassination (admittedly, a Lictor will gather information by pushing its feeder tendrils deep into the brains of its prey and sucking out the juicy bits instead of summoning data from a cogitator or kidnapping a Servo-skull).

But does that bit about Tyranid fleets taking months/years come from the new codex coming out?

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Do the Tyranids get the same advantage with respect to infiltration that they have in 40k? Specifically, will they have sent genestealers to thousands of planets in the Empire's Galaxy at some point a few millennia in the past before their fleets were even visible to the galaxy? With an open society like the Old Republic and with Imperial Hyperdrive speeds, the genestealer cults could be quite massive and well ingrained into Imperial society by the time the fleets arrive and activate their sleeper agents. The genestealers would have naturally gravitated towards high positions in teh Imperial Navy and the government. Their sudden uprising could be very problematic for the Empire.

[Srelex]

Do the Tyranids get the same advantage with respect to infiltration that they have in 40k? Specifically, will they have sent genestealers to thousands of planets in the Empire's Galaxy at some point a few millennia in the past before their fleets were even visible to the galaxy? With an open society like the Old Republic and with Imperial Hyperdrive speeds, the genestealer cults could be quite massive and well ingrained into Imperial society by the time the fleets arrive and activate their sleeper agents. The genestealers would have naturally gravitated towards high positions in teh Imperial Navy and the government. Their sudden uprising could be very problematic for the Empire.

I wouldn't say so, but I guess they'd likely get a few cults up and running prior to the arrival of the hive fleets proper anyway.

[Simon_Jester]

Incidentally, what do you guys have to say to the second part of my opening post? Just so I can have a rebuttal ready to any other people who choose to wank the Nids in that fashion. To paraphrase another part of the guy's argument, he seemed to think that the Hive Mind didn't have to 'evolve' a faster FTL due to the Imperium not having such a strike capability, and thinks that it can do against the Empire, along with the 'eat Sekot' thing I mentioned. Now, while that is quite fallacious--if it had a choice between slow or fast FTL, why slow?--but I'd like it put in more in depth terms.

Well... I see no reason why the Tyranids couldn't learn a few tricks by eating Yuuzhan Vong, assuming they can catch them. The Tyranids have been known to absorb interesting DNA from species they manage to eat, after all.

So that actually makes sense- it's not guaranteed to be possible, but it's plausible assuming biological compatibility between settings. Which we generally do: it's not as if we commonly write versus threads that end "and then the entire expeditionary force swelled up and died because they'd been living on a diet of right-handed organic molecules while being left-handed themselves."

If there are Vong around, and if Tyranids are able to catch them, it's reasonable to suppose that they'll be able to reverse-engineer Vong biotech and use it themselves, given their known capabilities in 40k.
_______

For the Tyranids to catch up by "evolving" would be much less practical, because no Tyranid bioform is that much more powerful than the norm. The thing about the Tyranids is that their form of evolution pretty accurately matches real life: they can't instantly develop new adaptations at will. Instead, they're stuck gradually improving their capabilities as they try out multiple variations on a theme, some of which work well enough to outcompete the others.*

In real life, we don't see organisms evolving sudden gigantic leaps that increase their strength, durability, speed, reproduction rate, or other factors by orders of magnitude overnight. And there's a reason for that: even if changing an organism to make it that much tougher and more dangerous is possible from a chemical and physical standpoint, there's no way for the change to happen just because someone tweaked a single gene. Since the normal variation among members of a single species is fairly small, evolution only gets small changes to work on- which is why it's so slow under normal conditions.

Likewise, if Tyranid bioships are extremely slow, clumsy, undergunned, or otherwise weak by the standards of the Star Wars galaxy, in the event of a major war they won't have time to evolve to be tough enough to make the grade. If they could, then they'd long since have used such hyperaccelerated evolutionary capabilities to become completely immune to threats they run into in 40k: their ships would have "evolved" to the point of being able to ignore capital ship lance batteries, they would have "evolved" to be fast enough not to need months to make planetfall after emerging from FTL travel, and so on. Sure, they get tougher over time, but the time scale for major increases in their combat power is measured in decades or centuries, not years.

The fact that they don't become more powerful at immense speed in 40k means there's no reason they would become more powerful at immense speed in Star Wars, either.
________

*Whether the Tyranids were like that in the beginning of their existence is another question; my bet is that they're the products of genetic engineering, since I can't imagine them having originated as a normal lifeform that somehow evolved space travel. But that's a side issue.

[Ted C]

Do the Tyranids get the same advantage with respect to infiltration that they have in 40k? Specifically, will they have sent genestealers to thousands of planets in the Empire's Galaxy at some point a few millennia in the past before their fleets were even visible to the galaxy? With an open society like the Old Republic and with Imperial Hyperdrive speeds, the genestealer cults could be quite massive and well ingrained into Imperial society by the time the fleets arrive and activate their sleeper agents. The genestealers would have naturally gravitated towards high positions in teh Imperial Navy and the government. Their sudden uprising could be very problematic for the Empire.

The Old Republic would actually have the Jedi to help them in this regard. Through the Force, they might sense the growth of a genestealer cult before it became a serious threat. Unlike the psykers of the Imperium, the Jedi are widely trusted and have considerable autonomy for their investigations.

Of course, Palpatine managed to hide in plain sight, so there's no guarantee that Jedi senses will pick up on a Genestealer infestation.

[CyrilsScribe]

I would suspect that though they have the bad end of the stick the cults and other infestations would be very hard to combat with the Jedi, as the cults can grow and hide, but the one that survives can be very damaging(especially in Coruscant, with its huge population and The Works).

[Morilore]

Still, the onus is on him to show that the hive fleets can brainsuck their unfortunate victims.

Evidence suggests that the Imperium believes that either they can do that, or they can read gothic.

Is Tyranids reading gothic really that crazy of an idea? Sure, for the average gaunt, but they aren't actually just mindless animals, are they? (Has new canon made them stupider?)

[Simon_Jester]

It's not crazy, but given how insanely versatile and capable they are when it comes to dismantling and analyzing organic life, it could go either way. And they're not mutually exclusive; they could know how to read Gothic because they ripped it from someone's mind, for instance. Since they don't have anything like a language of their own, it seems unlikely that they'd have a thriving translation industry unless they're importing the concept of language along with the languages themselves.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

The Old Republic would actually have the Jedi to help them in this regard. Through the Force, they might sense the growth of a genestealer cult before it became a serious threat. Unlike the psykers of the Imperium, the Jedi are widely trusted and have considerable autonomy for their investigations.

Of course, Palpatine managed to hide in plain sight, so there's no guarantee that Jedi senses will pick up on a Genestealer infestation.

I highly doubt that the Jedi would be any more effective at wiping out genestealers as a galactic threat than the Inquisition has been. The Imperium is a paranoid society that had millennia of experience weeding out traitors, fifth columnists and cultists, and it still can't eradicate the genestealers. The Republic couldn't even figure out that there was a conspiracy of high-profile secessionist entities building up a massive droid army. The Jedi couldn't even find the Sith cultists that they knew existed and were actively searching for when the cult leader himself lived only a few minutes away from the Jedi Temple. The Republic had many, many planets that operated outside its jurisdiction with high technology and brazenly open criminal societies (such as Tattooine). By the time the Republic even discovered that genestealers exist, they could have infiltrated half of the colonized plates in the galaxy.

Even if the Force warns the Jedi about these genestealer cults, and all the evidence we have is that the Force isn't quite up to warning Jedi about existential threats to the Republic as opposed to an imminent physical attack on the Jedi himself, there isn't a whole lot they could do to stop them. Genestealers would have access to the same kind of technology as any other Star Wars criminal organization, as well as an army of hybrids and cultists, but they would also have some significant warp powers that they could bring to bear against the Jedi. Genestealers' psyker abilities give them claws that can rip through tank armor, hypnotizing mind powers, instant telepathic communication and coordination, as well as some heavy offensive and defensive abilities by the Patriarch, Magus or Broodlord, such as telepathic assault and warp force fields. A single Jedi, or even a squad of Jedi with local peacekeeping support, would not be able to eradicate a genestealer cult without significant loss of life and collateral damage. The Republic would not be able to stomach what appears to be a Jedi or two comandeering Naval assets to destroy some sort of civilian religious order or some alien species that likes to blend in on human worlds, at least not until the problem was impossible to ignore.

[adam_grif]

The Jedi had Palpatine and his dark side plot device to stop them working it out. I don't see any reason why the Tyranids would have things like that.

[Shroom Man 777]

But how can the Jedi sense 40k warp stuff? It's not the Dark Side of the Force. Hell, how can they even sense the genestealer infiltration? It's not like they've got Jedi Force-powered Genetic Screening.