Imperium of Man vs Galactic Empire.

[Bloody Chaplain]

Besides, the Imperial Guard figures do not involve PFD-forces.
While those tend to be second-rate troops, they are generally pretty good at defending their worlds.

So you can easily double (if not more) the amount of troops.

As TV tropes put it, the PDF is the redshirt army that is responsible for holding the line for THE Redshirt army.

[Serafina]

Besides, the Imperial Guard figures do not involve PFD-forces.
While those tend to be second-rate troops, they are generally pretty good at defending their worlds.

So you can easily double (if not more) the amount of troops.

As TV tropes put it, the PDF is the redshirt army that is responsible for holding the line for THE Redshirt army.

Ugh, don't get us started about TVtropes.

Anyway, the PDF is really not that bad. They don't have much quality controll, but retired guardsmen are used to train local PDF-forces when possible and some of them have a lot of experience (say, the PDF of Armageddon) on their own, too.

If you want to make an actual comparision, the Guard is the Army and the PDFs are the National Guard.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The Imperial military is a massive organization, with tens of trillions of regular army soldiers, trillions of fleet crew, and a vast force of stormtroopers both cloned and conditioned. The sheer weight of numbers enables the Empire to simply overwhelm opponents in head-to-head battle.

Well that is some improvement in terms of canon.

As for armor, I think the issue is that the Imperial Guard come better equipped in terms of armor. How armor compares I'm not sure. IG armor is well optimized for urban warfare which will be the primary setting however. In the open field, I'm not sure what the range of the cannons are, though should be of the order of a few km at the least.

[Serafina]

Well that is some improvement in terms of canon.

As for armor, I think the issue is that the Imperial Guard come better equipped in terms of armor. How armor compares I'm not sure. IG armor is well optimized for urban warfare which will be the primary setting however. In the open field, I'm not sure what the range of the cannons are, though should be of the order of a few km at the least.

Ranges are generally comparable to modern tank guns, tough that can be lower if inferior technology is used (tough that is somewhat negligible for tanks).

The main disadvantage is that most Leman Russ Battle tanks are somewhat slow (~20 mph on terrain), so GE-tanks will propably have a speed advantage.
However, several tank regiments seem to employ better engines, getting much faster speeds. That's most likely because their engines are optimized for a certain kind of fuel, while the standard engines can more or less run on everything (antimatter, fissile material, hydrogen, gasoline, raw oil, alcohol, wood - as long as it burns, it works).

However, i have yet to see any source of combined-arms assaults in SW (AotC and TESB do not really count, since those were advancing infantry/walkers or pure siege walkers).

[Ghost Rider]

To be honest, if we are not going to have a defined battle scenario this is an endless fucking navel gaze.

Both the GE and IoM can literally force millions of world to produce a huge assortment of goodies for this, but do not otherwise because there is no threat that leverages that much attention.

For the IoM, if we decide that it is just them versus the GE in some open easy battlefield, we have the warp cooperating and not going against them for travel and have all the lovely Alpha, Beta, Omega Psykers and legions of Primarchs with their Space marines at full strength and IG in perfect lockstep order.

For the Empire we have fleets of World Devastators, fleets of Sun Crushers and whatever wank material you want with a back up of Death Stars within a few years of conflict and a massive army and droid forces.

Which then is nothing but a numbers count of relegating what does the IoM produce and what are likely projections with said data and do the same with the Empire. Then crunch said numbers together to get...whatever.

The reason the last one was so fucking effective as a scenario is that it was a fucking battle and had conditions. Having two powers that are on par with each other is seeing where their strengths and weaknesses are and making scenarios that exploit one or the other. Not some blasted vagueries in which we can just pull virtually any source to bolster one's side to infinity.

[Night_stalker]

Depends on the gun, but probably a klom at max.

[Raxmei]

Gotcha. I'm not pulling these figures out of my ass, I assure you. However, seeing as many of my sources for hard numbers are wiki's they are not the most reliable. Thank you for clearing that up for me, though I don't really think I should seeing as how you are hurting my argument.

Somebody's pulling it out of his ass even if it isn't you. What is your source? I know it isn't Lexicanum or Wikipedia and I'm not familiar with any other wikis that concern themselves with this subject.

Still, If I am not mistaken, most warzones have sizable fleets, and so do important planets and systems. If you have the Terran navies fleet numbers I'd be very appreciative.

Sizable is a fuzzy term. Battlefleet Cadia has 12 battleships, 12 cruiser squadrons, and 21 escort squadrons, potentially over a hundred warships, and Cadia's defense has priority second only to Terra's. By 40k standards that is a large fleet; nearby sectors only have half as many battleships. Battlefleet Armageddon has far fewer battleships but more cruisers and escorts, possibly due to the nature of the conflict in Armageddon sector. I don't have any numbers on Battlefleet Solar. I think one of the Space Wolf novels describes the defenses of Terra briefly, but I haven't read it. There was a thread about it a few years back.

[Serafina]

Well, let's propose a szenario then, shall we?

The GE is on a war of conquest in the IoM, but can not marshall it's full forces since they are still worried about rebels at home (tough they are not in any immediate danger of loosing).
The IoM stays as it is and so we do not have any kind of large-scale intervention.

Right now, the GE is trying to conquer a macropol world similar to Armageddon. They already have secured orbit.

The IoM-force consists of ~100 regiments of the Imperial Guard (50 of the mechanized) and 400 regiments of PDF (100 of the mechanized), 1 full titan legion, 30 regiments Skitarii, one company of Space Marines, 10 companies Sororitas, along with ground-based air support.
They are well-entrenched and supplied, and the factories can replicate most of the equipment. Due to the sheer availability of fresh recruits, 50 new PDF-regiments are produced each month, 10 of them mechanized.

The GE's has forces in about equal strenght, along with the fighter support of ~50 ISDs. Most of them are army troops, tough storm troopers are available.

Both sides can not expect outside relief within a relevant timeframe. No outside powers are intervening.

The world consists of three zones:
-The northern third of the world consists mostly of open wasteland. 30 makropoles are placed here.
-The equatorial area is sparesly populated and consists mostly of woodland and jungle (not of the death-world variety). Only 5 Macropoles are placed here.
-The southern hemisphere consists of archipels and islands, with only a small polar cap. 15 macropoles are placed here.
All Macropoles have void-shields similar to that in Necropolis (it withstood months of intense bombardement with ease).

The GE's strategic goal is to counqer and hold the world while preserving at least some industrial capacity and population.
The IoM's strategic goal is to hold them off as long as possible.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The GE is on a war of conquest in the IoM, but can not marshall it's full forces since they are still worried about rebels at home (tough they are not in any immediate danger of loosing).

The Empire, as of HoT series, apparently spent considerable resources to put down considerable resources to keep various warring factions from each others' throats anyway. The Rebellion was just the more annoying gnat.

[Serafina]

The GE is on a war of conquest in the IoM, but can not marshall it's full forces since they are still worried about rebels at home (tough they are not in any immediate danger of loosing).

The Empire, as of HoT series, apparently spent considerable resources to put down considerable resources to keep various warring factions from each others' throats anyway. The Rebellion was just the more annoying gnat.

Well, that works too .

Ghetto Edit:
Both sides havee, of course, access to their usual personell and equipment - i.e. the IG has some Primaris- & Sanctioned Pskyers in some regiments, the SM's have librarians etc. However, that propably means no force users for the SW-side, as they are not part of the normal force structure.

By the way, i tried to model those forces from the Third Battle of Armageddon, with reduced SM and titan forces (due to lack of outside reinforcements/being a less renowned world).

[Simon_Jester]

Why? The Imperium does not have huge giant fleets everywhere, man. It takes them time to muster those huge fleets, and it takes more time for those huge fleets to move anywhere! Hell, a lot of their worlds do not have huge fleets or even small fleets, and a lot of the action in the Cain novels I've read do not have huge fleets defending Imperium worlds.

The Imperium doesn't have really huge fleets everywhere, and it doesn't have major capital ships everywhere. But it has to distribute its heavy metal a lot more than the Empire does, just because of that response time: if the sector fleet takes a year to arrive at the edge of the sector starting from a fleet base in the center, it's going to be useless for defending the provinces... unless the provinces have planetary defenses strong enough to be a significant problem for strong 40k forces in their own right.

In which case the Empire runs into a different problem: any place they attack that's important enough to be a useful target has defenses that could hold off a fairly credible 40k attacker for months until reinforcements arrive. To break down those defenses quickly and without getting caught in a war of attrition, they'll have to concentrate overwhelming force for each operation. Which they can do, at the cost of greatly slowing down the tempo of operations because their available ships are concentrated onto fewer targets. Which drags out the process of dismembering the Imperium.

Do we need a victory? Won't a disadvantaged, debilitated, and constantly defensive Imperium be satisfactory enough for the GE? Because that's all what I'm arguing for.

The problem is that achieving this will require the Empire to hammer through planetary defenses of hard targets like Terra... if we're looking for a cost-effective solution, it would be a lot cheaper for the Empire to just stay out of the whole stupid mess. This thing has QUAGMIRE! written all over it if the Empire actually tries to profit from the war or extract any direct advantage to themselves from fighting it.

[Raxmei]

Here's a musing. What if they manage to avoid failing at diplomacy and never go to war? Could Imperial assistance save the Imperium from destruction, and what could the Imperium offer the Empire in exchange?

[Kuroji]

What can the Empire offer the Imperium? Why they can offer up some... HERESY! *blam*

Okay, seriously though, it depends on what each side wants out of the deal. If they simply offer military support... send some psykers to root out any Jedi and Force-attuned individuals in the Jedi's universe. This may have the beneficial side effect, since they're not in their native galaxy anymore, of not having to worry so much about Chaos corrupting them and daemons attacking them. On the other hand, I'm sure the Empire would be happy to absorb the Tau, take on the Necrons in exchange for their tech since it's heresy to the IoM but not the Empire... perhaps they can make an exception so far as diplomacy goes, for a friendly primarily human empire that is not committing heresy, but simply not knowing the light of the immortal Emperor. And since they're a strong military power and presumably the 'Nids are a threat to any life in the universe that isn't them, the Empire could probably do a hell of a lot of good on that front too. After all, they have precise and fast FTL. If they can stand off from the swarm as it passes through space and start whittling it down through attrition... actually, that could end (or at least significantly impede) the Tyranid threat.

[Rama]

How would you even consider working alongside the Imperium?

Droids would be heresy. So there goes a major contributing factor to the civilization of the Star Wars universe.
Nearly 20 million sentient species that are allowed to live under the control or at least the watchful eye of the Galactic Empire would be considered as an act of heresy. Any technology, ever, that doesn't utilize the cathedral aesthetic set by the Adeptus Mechanicus would be a sign of heresy. Any of the quadrillions of beings who worship any ruler other than the GEOM would be considered an act of mass heresy.

The best thing they could do is to push the Galaxy Gun project in secret, destroy Terra in a single strike and allow the Imperium to fall into a million separate and easily conquered pieces divided from local support by decades.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Destroying Terra and releasing the Emperor from his mortal connection might trigger something interesting however...

There is of course the Emperor's tarot too..

[Shroom Man 777]

So, yeah. Just because XYZ-40Kguys can infiltrate ABC-40Kguys doesn't mean that EFG-Star Wars guys will be just as susceptible.

Actually, yes, it certainly DOES, since paranoia and superstition are beneficial for detecting infiltrators.

Not all the time. Imperium paranoia is focused on shit like heresy and witchcraft and blasphemy and mutations and shit. IF you're NOT a mutant, NOT a witch, NOT a heretic, and if you are a Necron Lord or some other non-stupid party, you can easily EXPLOIT these prejudices to make your deception easier.

I mean, Jesus. Even the Imperium's foremost intelligence organization, the Inquisition, has SHITLOADS of psychopaths who are prone to inadvertently succumbing to Chaos and selling souls to daemonhosts and other crazy fuck nonsense.

So, in light of this, claiming that 40k intelligence/counter-intelligence capabilities are superior to Galactic Empire ones is highly suspect.

Can they teleport and/or walk through walls that are shielded? Can they teleport and/or walk through walls that are shielded with Star Wars shielding tech, ala ray shields and particle shields, and not 40k void shields? Can they teleport and/or walk through neutronium-ingrained hulls?

Well, given that void-shields block normal 40K-teleportation AND necron teleporation, it is fair to assume that the Death Sta would be shielded against those IF the shields are hull-hugging (which they are not on DS1+2).

However, the hulls should pose no problem, since teleporters can regulary teleport into imperial vessels, which have similary tough hulls.

Um, so whatif the Death Star's shields are not hull-hugging?

They have also shown themselves to be not rather inactive in the 40k verse, aside from small-scale activities where they scare people and go woo-woo. Do we see Necrons engage in large scale activities in the present 40k timeline? Their activities are so few and far between that they're pretty much still unknown to a lot of people in 40k - with knowledge of their existence actually restricted to guys like the Inquisition and whatever.

We have seen large-scale activity whenever it was called for - i.e. destroying the Blackstone Fortresses.

What did the Necrons do?

Wrong. A large portion of Imperium worlds are sub-standard, often with minimal defenses, with only a pair of defending warships (if that) and some PDF forces. A lot of those worlds featured in the Ciaphas Cain novels did not have the extreme degree of militarization you claim, despite them being near combat zones. A lot of those worlds are agriworlds, or worlds filled with anachronistic people with less-than-modern technologies, etc.

SIGNIFICANT wordls are well-defended.
Sure, you can take out agricultural and mining worlds, that will inflict damage.
But if you want to counqer industrialized worlds, you will have to deal with at least some orbital defenses, ground-orbit defenses and a big army.

IF the Imperium sits tighton its "signifiant worlds" which are well-defended, while the Galactic Empire frags or occupies or bombards those outer mining worlds and agricultural worlds and whatver, do you not think that the IoM will be very adversely affected? Those shitloads of soldiers come from shitloads of shit-planets. Those shitloads of ships come from a shitload of mining planets. Those shitloads of people eat food from a shitload of agriworlds.

If the Imperium is unable to keep up the pace, then the Galactic Empire will control the momentum and with superior hyperdrive space they can attack and bombard less-defended IoM worlds at whim - which will degrade the IoM's resource base, logistics supply whatevers, and make shit worse for them. IF the IoM just focuses its forces on significant worlds... then basically the Galactic Empire is besieging them. The significant worlds are, like, just giant fortresses that the IoM has retreated to - while the less-significant and less-defended worlds have been ceded to the Galactic Empire.

This brings me back that there will be no protest when several billion guardsmen will ARRIVE TOO LATE, even if they couldn't take out a comparable amount of the enemy with them.

Actually, that means that the GE has to leave behind significant garrisions if it wants to hold a planet, since they have no means to intercept these "billion guardsmen".
So unless they garrision their worlds, they can't be sure if they will loose them again.

Why would the GE want to keep those worlds? The IoM has to gather forces and send them to a world, which takes time. By the time they've arrived on that world, the GE has already left its ruins and is moving to attack ANOTHER world that the IoM has not defended. The IoM cannot defend every world.

Every world the IoM chooses to defend or reinforce, or every counter-attack, requires troops/ships/assets/resources mobilized and deployed from OTHER WORLDS. Which means these worlds will become undefended themselves. Which gives the Galactic Empire NEW TARGETS to attack. When these new targets are attacked, the IoM will have to redeploy and reinforce and launch counterattacks AGAIN.

The Galactic Empire can use hit and run tactics on a galactic scale. The Galactic Empire'll be like Mohammad Ali punching someone with slow-ass reaction speed. By the time the IoM moves to defend itself on one spot, Galactic Empire Mohammad Ali is attacking ANOTHER spot!

Blasters have been able to take down Super Battle Droids. Literature suggests that blasters were used in blowing up that door in the Tantative in A New Hope (that scene, you know, when the Stormtroopers entered the ship) and that blasters were used to skeletonize Luke Skywalker's family.

True, but lasguns are capable of similar feats.
Really, they are both pretty close in firepower.

Yes they are.

On that note, 40k depictions are also not that good. It depicts the Imperial Guard as a fucking retarded force that uses trench warfare tactics and uses commissars to execute its own soldiers to make the rest of the soldiers fight "better" or "boost morale"

At least, in the Prequels, we get to see that SW forces are very much capable of making rapid planetary assaults deploying CRAPLOADS of Clone/Stormtroopers in mere minutes along with air-dropped armor units and heavy artillery in Attack of the Clones.

And trench warfare is wrong because...?
A lot of enemies of the IG do not have the capability to punch trough a well-defended trench line (e.g. Orks, many chaos troops, demons, other armies under certain circumstances)with tanks, given the capabilities of AT-weapons (e.g. lascannons).
Really, when they have to defend a target, i see nothing wrong with that. Defensive lines still work with sufficient preparation (e.g. Battle of Kursk).

Bloody Chaplain was using poor performances of the Galactic Empire based on stuff seen in Return of the Jedi. I was just bringing up similar comparisons of poor Imperium performances. 15 Hours, anyone?

Both examples of lousy Galactic Empire/Imperium performances would make for poor generalizations, because we know not ALL stormtroopers are blind morons who can't hit the side of a barn and who get killfucked by Teddy Bears. And we know that not ALL Imperial Guardsmen are illiterate shit-eater with 15-hour lifespans who have to be executed by commissars to maintain morale.

Also, you conveniently forget that the IG is also capable of combined-arms assaults and similar orbital drops as described above (Ghostmaker, Guns of Tanith).

The IG is has much better armor and simply more of it (unless there are some EU-sources i do not know about) than the GE. Most importantly, the tactics are just better.
The same goes for artillery, especially heavy artillery, which is still a prime factor on a modern battlefield.

The Empire is also capable of combined-arms assaults and orbtal drops.

While the IG will have more armor and whatever, the GE does have examples of decent armor designs like the Juggernaut. The tactics employed in the Clone Wars, such as the rapid-ass assault on Geneosis and in other campaigns, shows that large conventional Star Wars ground battles are also waged very competently. Not to mention, the Clone Wars was a massive GALAXY-WIDE campaign - which means that Star Wars also has SHITLOADS of Clones and shitloads of AT-STATPTGTXTDPT/whatever walkers to deploy everywhere.

As for artillery, once SW establishes orbital dominance - because IoM ships are super-ass-slow and will take days/weeks to arrive - they can just throw turbolaser bolts at IoM ground forces. Or send TIEs or LAATs to deliver death from above.

Or drop some of those Jango Fett seismic charges on top of an IoM ground army...

But yes. While the IoM generally do have more badass ground vehicles, I don't think it's fair to count the Galactic Empire out in ground warfare. At the very least, their ground warfare capabilities closely match those of the Tau - who, despite being pretty "light", can still hold their own in the 40k universe.

Also, again, the Galactic Empire can deploy more troopers MUCH FASTER than any possible IoM equivalent. The Galactic Empire can launch planetary assaults and invasions in ANY PLACE IN THE GALAXY, in places that might take the IoM weeks or even months to respond. So, yeah.

Do we need a victory? Won't a disadvantaged, debilitated, and constantly defensive Imperium be satisfactory enough for the GE? Because that's all what I'm arguing for.

Unless all their opponents misterously dissappear, you already have that - why start a bloody war (pun inteded)?
The only conveivable reason for the GE to start an all-out war is conquest.
While it is relatively certain that they could beat the IoM in an war of annihilation by taking out terra, i am pretty certain that a war of conquest would be a pretty dissappointing thing for the GE due to the high costs.

Well, yeah. I'm just saying that if there were any hostilities, the GE is pretty capable of holding the IoM at bay and keeping the IoM on the perpetual defensive, with the IoM stuck to holing up in their fortified systems in a galactic state of siege while being unable to do much about the Galactic Empire ships that can TRAVEL TO AND ATTACK ANY POINT IN THE GALAXY WITHIN HOURS. While actually conquering or annihilating the IoM will be a PAIN IN THE ASS, yeah, no doubt about that.

Why? The Imperium does not have huge giant fleets everywhere, man. It takes them time to muster those huge fleets, and it takes more time for those huge fleets to move anywhere! Hell, a lot of their worlds do not have huge fleets or even small fleets, and a lot of the action in the Cain novels I've read do not have huge fleets defending Imperium worlds.

The Imperium doesn't have really huge fleets everywhere, and it doesn't have major capital ships everywhere. But it has to distribute its heavy metal a lot more than the Empire does, just because of that response time: if the sector fleet takes a year to arrive at the edge of the sector starting from a fleet base in the center, it's going to be useless for defending the provinces... unless the provinces have planetary defenses strong enough to be a significant problem for strong 40k forces in their own right.

This means that the Imperium forces are heavily diluted across the IoM territories, then?

In which case the Empire runs into a different problem: any place they attack that's important enough to be a useful target has defenses that could hold off a fairly credible 40k attacker for months until reinforcements arrive. To break down those defenses quickly and without getting caught in a war of attrition, they'll have to concentrate overwhelming force for each operation. Which they can do, at the cost of greatly slowing down the tempo of operations because their available ships are concentrated onto fewer targets. Which drags out the process of dismembering the Imperium.

The Galactic Empire can assault any point in the galaxy within hours. An IoM response will take weeks or months. This means that for the Imperium, the GE's assault will be super bloody fast like greased lightning. The GE can send a hundred ships to assault an Imperium system defended by several dozen ships, the GE can destroy those dozens of IoM ships, and then bombard the IoM planet.

This will take, what, a day of fighting?

Then the GE ships can then hyperspace out, and attack ANOTHER world in ANYWHERE IN THE GALAXY, within mere hours of travel time. An IoM response will take days or weeks or months. Yes, attacking the well-fortified worlds may drag it out a bit for the GE, but still they'll be attacking at such a pace that the IoM simply cannot respond to them in any meaningful timeframe. Which sucks for the IoM.

Any single Galactic Empire group of warships can, literally, strike anywhere almost at any time. Any signicant IoM resistance will only mean that more GE ships will be sent in to the fray - from ANY point in the galaxy - and then the IoM force is fucked. Quite literaly, for the IoM the GE fleets will be Space Mongols in Space. The well-defended worlds can be attacked, with some difficulty, but nonetheess the GE can still strike hard and strike fast. While the lesser-defended worlds can be attacked any time, no matter where in the galaxy they are. Which sucks for the IoM.

My point is that this war is totally going to suck for the IoM.

Do we need a victory? Won't a disadvantaged, debilitated, and constantly defensive Imperium be satisfactory enough for the GE? Because that's all what I'm arguing for.

The problem is that achieving this will require the Empire to hammer through planetary defenses of hard targets like Terra... if we're looking for a cost-effective solution, it would be a lot cheaper for the Empire to just stay out of the whole stupid mess. This thing has QUAGMIRE! written all over it if the Empire actually tries to profit from the war or extract any direct advantage to themselves from fighting it.

It'll be less of a quagmire than the Clone Wars. Why? Because the Clone Wars was waged against an enemy that can churn out near-unlimited numbers of droids and deploy them anywhere in the galaxy at any time. The Republic nonetheless managed to fight that and win against the CIS. The IoM is an opponent that is much slower than the CIS, and cannot attack as effectively as the CIS. The IoM will be in a perpetual defensive, in a perpetual galactic state of siege. Because of ther slowness, the IoM cannot defend its outlying worlds effectively - which is very bad. Also, because of their slowness, the IoM cannot send reinforcements to any well-defended world if the GE decides to attack with overwhelming force.

If a well-defended IoM world has a hundred ships, the GE can just send two hundred ships in a couple of hours. Any IoM attempt at reinforcing that fleet will take days, at best. And this can happen to ANY IoM world in the entire galaxy. The Galactic Empire has the option of concentrating large numbers of warships to destroy well-defended targets in the IoM, or the Galactic Empire can choose to disperse its forces all over the galaxy to attack less-defended targets all over the place.

Either way, the IoM has to reinforce its well-defended worlds with more ships, taking days or weeks or months to do so, or it can disperse its own ships to the less-defended worlds, taking days or weeks or months to do so too. Any IoM attempt at defense will be SUPER SLOW.

Speed kills.

*graph*

[Samuel]

Nearly 20 million sentient species that are allowed to live under the control or at least the watchful eye of the Galactic Empire would be considered as an act of heresy.

I'm not sure- didn't the Imperium offer sanctuary to an alien race in Codex:Tyranids (it was mentioned because they were Tyranid infiltrators) and try to convert a race in Codex: Necrons?

As long as an alien race isn't a threat to the Imperium they seem to be more lax than their usual genocidal selves.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Erm... Shroom. The Empire still takes weeks to a month to travel across the galaxy. A trip between Endor and Bakura was 1 week. A Victory Star Destroyer was noted in the Thrawn trilogy to be making 135 light years per hour or something like that and it was apparently pushing hard.

[Shroom Man 777]

Didn't Obi-Wan Kenobi take mere hours to travel from Coruscant, in the Core Worlds region, to Kamino which is outside the Outer Rim? On a tiny spaceship, no less? Because that actually happened in a movie, and we know movie trumps shitty minimalist crap from the EU. Next thing you know you'll be telling me that three million clone/stormtroopers is too little to wage ground war against the IoM Imperial Guard.

[Serafina]

Why would the GE want to keep those worlds? The IoM has to gather forces and send them to a world, which takes time. By the time they've arrived on that world, the GE has already left its ruins and is moving to attack ANOTHER world that the IoM has not defended. The IoM cannot defend every world.

Shroomy, you are completely ignoring the GE's possible strategic objectives.

If they actually want to conquer worlds, they have to garrision them.
If they just want to annihilate the IoM, they can just BDZ them - but why would they want to do that?

The Empire is also capable of combined-arms assaults and orbtal drops.

Where?
I mean, orbital drops, sure, we have seen them (altough not as fast as with IoM drop pods). But actual combined arms?
Do you mean the "infantry alongside walkers"-stuff in AotC? Not very impressive, me thinks.
Do you mean the "huge giant walkers against a position with no sufficiently heavy weapons or artillery" in TESB?

By all means, give me a source for good combined arms usage by the GE, or at least for a decent armored assault.

As for artillery, once SW establishes orbital dominance - because IoM ships are super-ass-slow and will take days/weeks to arrive - they can just throw turbolaser bolts at IoM ground forces. Or send TIEs or LAATs to deliver death from above.

Aearial bombarment is no replacement for artillery du to lack of intensity. Likewise, orbital bombarement is no replacement for artillery due to lack of precision.
Both are of course viable assets, but you also require aerial and orbial supremacy.
Aearial superiority is NOT given (the IoM has quite competent fighters in significant numbers, and often a load of AA-weapons) and orbital supremacy can be disrupted by ground-orbit weapons (this works agains 40K-vessels, so it should work against SW-vessels as well).

Speed kills.

I sure does, but that does not reduce the cost of actually conquering all those worlds.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Didn't Obi-Wan Kenobi take mere hours to travel from Coruscant, in the Core Worlds region, to Kamino which is outside the Outer Rim? On a tiny spaceship, no less? Because that actually happened in a movie, and we know movie trumps shitty minimalist crap from the EU. Next thing you know you'll be telling me that three million clone/stormtroopers is too little to wage ground war against the IoM Imperial Guard.

I don't recall that mentioned in the movies, maybe the novels, but I'm unsure. If any thing, the movies were vague on the time scales.

Personally I find it hard to believe that though. But then again, Star Wars is riddled with inconsistencies here and there.

[Simon_Jester]

Um, so whatif the Death Star's shields are not hull-hugging?

Then small, agile spacecraft (like X-Wings or a lot of the smaller Necron craft) can fly through the shield and attack the surface directly, from inside that awesome star destroyer-proof shielding.

Why would the GE want to keep those worlds? The IoM has to gather forces and send them to a world, which takes time. By the time they've arrived on that world, the GE has already left its ruins and is moving to attack ANOTHER world that the IoM has not defended. The IoM cannot defend every world.

If the Empire's only desire is to neutralize the Imperium, they'd be better off just mining the damn wormhole and parking several hundred star destroyers with their main batteries pointed at it.

If their desire is to profit from conquest, they have to occupy planets.

If their desire is to destroy random stuff for the joy of it... well, then this strategy makes sense.

This means that the Imperium forces are heavily diluted across the IoM territories, then?

Yes. They are. On the other hand, there's a ridiculous number of those forces, because the Imperium has been heavily militarized for so long. The total size of the Imperium fleet is very high, partly because their strategic mobility is so poor. They could probably get away with having a lot fewer ships if they could count on being able to move those ships to trouble spots as fast as the Empire does.

The Galactic Empire can assault any point in the galaxy within hours. An IoM response will take weeks or months. This means that for the Imperium, the GE's assault will be super bloody fast like greased lightning. The GE can send a hundred ships to assault an Imperium system defended by several dozen ships, the GE can destroy those dozens of IoM ships, and then bombard the IoM planet.

Yes, yes, OK, I understand this. Believe it or not, I do know what the words "hit and run" and "strategic mobility" mean.

The catch for the Empire is that in the process of destroying dozens of Imperium ships, they're going to lose some. They need either absolutely overwhelming force at each point of contact, or the ability to fight a long attrition campaign. In an attrition campaign their mobility advantage drops, because they wind up having to fight each Imperium task force sooner or later. They wind up taking casualties more in line with the damage they're doing. If they mass overwhelming forces for each super-mobile raiding attack, they take fewer casualties... but also do a lot less damage because they can't hit nearly as many targets at once.

My point is that this war is totally going to suck for the IoM.

Well, of course. It's a grim dark universe. All wars suck for the Imperium; this one just sucks in a new and exciting way.

Seriously, I get what you're saying. My point is that to really "kill" the Imperium, the Empire will need to accept fairly heavy losses attacking hard targets, or spend a very long time knocking out secondary targets and waiting for the whole system to fall apart (because the effects of that kind of strategic bombing aren't felt overnight).

[Srelex]

Do you mean the "infantry alongside walkers"-stuff in AotC? Not very impressive, me thinks.
Do you mean the "huge giant walkers against a position with no sufficiently heavy weapons or artillery" in TESB?

By all means, give me a source for good combined arms usage by the GE, or at least for a decent armored assault.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YXXQ3I2fxQ

Infantry, light walkers, air support, anti-air SAMs, fast recon vehicles. That's combined arms right there.

[Shroom Man 777]

Why would the GE want to keep those worlds? The IoM has to gather forces and send them to a world, which takes time. By the time they've arrived on that world, the GE has already left its ruins and is moving to attack ANOTHER world that the IoM has not defended. The IoM cannot defend every world.

Shroomy, you are completely ignoring the GE's possible strategic objectives.

Oh, the one you posted? Because my posts, from the start, have never been going on about a war of conquest - as in, actual occupation of IoM territories.

If they actually want to conquer worlds, they have to garrision them.
If they just want to annihilate the IoM, they can just BDZ them - but why would they want to do that?

I never said annihilation. The GE's attacks will be more like a conventional bombing campaign in a real-world modern sense. Why? Simple, to degrade the IoM's military capabilities. To starve them. To deny them resources. To make them weaker, and thus a lesser threat. Just like Iraq after Desert Storm, but before Operation Iraqi Freedom, when the USA was putting sanctions and No Fly Zones. The bombardment of agriworlds, the destruction of mining facilities, population centers, and the like will weaken the IoM strategically. Perhaps in the future, the degraded IoM will gradually become weak enough to conquer with less difficulty. Maybe not. But it WILL decrease their capabilities.

The Empire is also capable of combined-arms assaults and orbtal drops.

Where?
I mean, orbital drops, sure, we have seen them (altough not as fast as with IoM drop pods). But actual combined arms?
Do you mean the "infantry alongside walkers"-stuff in AotC? Not very impressive, me thinks.
Do you mean the "huge giant walkers against a position with no sufficiently heavy weapons or artillery" in TESB?

By all means, give me a source for good combined arms usage by the GE, or at least for a decent armored assault.

The Juggernauts in Kashyyk, for one. Hell, the deployment of the droid army in Geneosis. AOTC showed us walkers being dropped from orbit and enterng the battlefield while fighters and LAATs engaged enemies in both air and ground, while SPHAT batteries fired long-range beam artillery on large and hard targets like the Seperatist ships, while clone troopers did whatever, and Acclamator ships came in from orbit to disgorge troops and/or do battle. It wasn't JUST infantry alongside walkers. That engagement showed a whole CRAPLOAD of cohesion in all theaters of combat, from infantry to friggin' starships, from airborne assets to artillery.

There might be other stuff, but I'm not an expert on the EU, so meh.

As for artillery, once SW establishes orbital dominance - because IoM ships are super-ass-slow and will take days/weeks to arrive - they can just throw turbolaser bolts at IoM ground forces. Or send TIEs or LAATs to deliver death from above.

Aearial bombarment is no replacement for artillery du to lack of intensity. Likewise, orbital bombarement is no replacement for artillery due to lack of precision.
Both are of course viable assets, but you also require aerial and orbial supremacy.
Aearial superiority is NOT given (the IoM has quite competent fighters in significant numbers, and often a load of AA-weapons) and orbital supremacy can be disrupted by ground-orbit weapons (this works agains 40K-vessels, so it should work against SW-vessels as well).

I've seen SW artillery, as in howitzers with indirect-LOS trajectories, in the Clone Wars cartoon. And weren't those AT-PTs, or whatever those walkers were in AOTC, capable of firing projectiles? Hailfire droids can fire from long-ranges too, as can Juggernauts.

Artillery, precise? Hah.

Speed kills.

I sure does, but that does not reduce the cost of actually conquering all those worlds.

They don't have to conquer them. They don't even have to SET FOOT on them. They can just firebomb them like what the USA did to Japan, or blow up Imperium assets in "No Fly Zones" like what was done to Iraq prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

What I'm arguing for is merely the GE striking hard and fast to debilitate the IoM. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Shroom Man 777]

Um, so whatif the Death Star's shields are not hull-hugging?

Then small, agile spacecraft (like X-Wings or a lot of the smaller Necron craft) can fly through the shield and attack the surface directly, from inside that awesome star destroyer-proof shielding.

Then they can use a completed Death Star 2 instead, with shielding impervious to fighters. A DS2 can blow up more targets without recharging, too.

Besides, ISD shields ARE hull-hugging. And, screw it, if that fails then they can just shoot Terra from half a galaxy away with a Galaxy Gun. Or blow up the sun.

Why would the GE want to keep those worlds? The IoM has to gather forces and send them to a world, which takes time. By the time they've arrived on that world, the GE has already left its ruins and is moving to attack ANOTHER world that the IoM has not defended. The IoM cannot defend every world.

If the Empire's only desire is to neutralize the Imperium, they'd be better off just mining the damn wormhole and parking several hundred star destroyers with their main batteries pointed at it.

If their desire is to profit from conquest, they have to occupy planets.

If their desire is to destroy random stuff for the joy of it... well, then this strategy makes sense.

Of course occupying planets in 40k is NOT profitable. Conquest is not profitable. Not only will they have to deal with indigenous rebels, they'll now have to deal with the batshit inhabitants of the 40k who'll wage a fuckoff insurgency like one no one's seen before. Fuck that.

This is exactly why I'm using Galactic Empire hit-and-run speed kills bombardment strategy. Because this is analogous to the war against Japan in WW2. An actual invasion would've been bloody, and thus the Americans planned to bombard Japan and firebomb it and blockade it and mine the ocean so that not only will Japan's cities be reduced to rubble and its people wasted by starvation and famine, but it's military capacity will also be diminished to make any future attempt at invasion easier. This is what I'm proposing the GE will do. They'll probably have to do this for YEARS before the IoM will be soft enough for a successful invasion/conquest/occupation.

Either that or they drop an A-bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Edo. Or, in GE vs. IoM terms, Death Star Terra.

This means that the Imperium forces are heavily diluted across the IoM territories, then?

Yes. They are. On the other hand, there's a ridiculous number of those forces, because the Imperium has been heavily militarized for so long. The total size of the Imperium fleet is very high, partly because their strategic mobility is so poor. They could probably get away with having a lot fewer ships if they could count on being able to move those ships to trouble spots as fast as the Empire does.

What are the numbers we're dealing with? Because in the Cain books, which are my primary 40k reading materials, a LOT of IoM worlds have paltry fleet assets, man. This is why all sorts of Chaos/Ork/whatever forces can get away with raiding so many IoM worlds. I'm not sure the IoM's fleet is THAT pervasive on as many IoM worlds as you make it out to be.

The Galactic Empire can assault any point in the galaxy within hours. An IoM response will take weeks or months. This means that for the Imperium, the GE's assault will be super bloody fast like greased lightning. The GE can send a hundred ships to assault an Imperium system defended by several dozen ships, the GE can destroy those dozens of IoM ships, and then bombard the IoM planet.

Yes, yes, OK, I understand this. Believe it or not, I do know what the words "hit and run" and "strategic mobility" mean.

The catch for the Empire is that in the process of destroying dozens of Imperium ships, they're going to lose some. They need either absolutely overwhelming force at each point of contact, or the ability to fight a long attrition campaign. In an attrition campaign their mobility advantage drops, because they wind up having to fight each Imperium task force sooner or later. They wind up taking casualties more in line with the damage they're doing. If they mass overwhelming forces for each super-mobile raiding attack, they take fewer casualties... but also do a lot less damage because they can't hit nearly as many targets at once.

Both. For well-defended targets, they can mass overwhelming forces for each super-mobile raiding atack, take fewer casualties, and still do a whole lot of damage because they can attack anywhere in the galaxy much faster than the IoM can defend themselves. For less-defended targets, they can send a couple of ISDs to fuck a planet up and hyper outm and fuck up another less-defended target on the other side of the galaxy the next day. Yes, I guess it makes it slow, but since the IoM is even slower, eh, the GE will still have the advantage.

My point is that this war is totally going to suck for the IoM.

Well, of course. It's a grim dark universe. All wars suck for the Imperium; this one just sucks in a new and exciting way.

Seriously, I get what you're saying. My point is that to really "kill" the Imperium, the Empire will need to accept fairly heavy losses attacking hard targets, or spend a very long time knocking out secondary targets and waiting for the whole system to fall apart (because the effects of that kind of strategic bombing aren't felt overnight).

If the GE is willing to go all in like how the Republic and CIS went in the Clone Wars, they can accept fairly heavy losses by attacking hard targets.

But since the IoM has no way to retaliate at the GE, the GE can also reserve the option to spend a long time knocking out secondary targets and waiting for the whole system to fall apart. They have all the time in the world!

Meanwhile, for all we know, they can also fund proxies and rebellions in the IoM. I am sure a lot of oppressed masses in the IoM would think that the GE are totally harbringers of freedom and human rights. For all we know, disenfranchised alien minorities like the Squat might become GE allies because the GE is totally against racism and for desegregation and stuff.

Turns out, compared to the IoM, the GE will totally look like the good guys for once.


My point though, is that the GE doesn't need to "kill" the Imperium. "Hurting them very badly" is satisfactory for me. Especially when the GE can "hurt hem very badly" while the IoM can't return the favor at all.