EPIC FAIL Master Races

[Simon_Jester]

Yes.

There was a long period when the dominant design aesthetic for naval vessels was to have two or four large, turreted guns, typically near the bow and stern... with a big central citadel built between them with a host of lighter broadside guns.

People only stopped doing that because of the dreadnought revolution, and the shift away from "heavy/medium/light" caliber weaponry towards uniform batteries of "heavy" complemented with tiny pivot-mounted "light."

In a 40k naval context, there may be no reason to have such a 'revolution.' Big guns may be so expensive that arming a ship with eight of them is not more cost-effective than arming them with two or four and a host of lighter weapons. Ships may be genuinely designed to fight broadside-on, which has a lot of advantages, such as making it much easier to control engagement range in combat... in which case there's no obvious reason why the guns designed to engage lighter targets shouldn't be mounted on the broadside in casemates rather than turrets.

Come to think of it, another factor- in space, only a small fraction of the surface of the ship can be used to mount gun turrets capable of firing to either side of the ship. If you're committed to having a ship with a well defined "top," "bottom," "left," and "right," rather than a cylindrically symmetric design... the only places you can mount turret guns capable of firing both 'left' and 'right' is on the spine or keel of the ship- near the middle of the dorsal and ventral surfaces.

That's a fine place to put a few heavy shipkiller guns, but it wastes the majority of the ship's hull space if you put all the smaller guns along the centerline like that. Studding the ship's flanks with guns in ball turrets, casemates, or even semi-fixed emplacements makes a lot more sense.

At the other extreme, superheavy antiship weapons may simply be too large to fit in a practical turret- you wind up with a turret so big you might as well bolt the engines to it directly and call it its own warship. The Imperium's biggest and baddest weapon, the nova cannon, probably falls into this category. That commits you to spinal armament.

[Shroom Man 777]

Everyone and his mother has space battleships with space turrets fighting space naval wars and everything. Honestly, the archaic and anachronistic aesthetics of 40k, and the fact that their spaceships look like fucking Gothic cathedrals encrusted with gargoyles and stained glass and golden sacraments to God and gratuitous pig latin actually makes it different from all the generic boring looking sci-fi out there with lame WW2 in space or modern naval warfare vessels in space aesthetic.

I'll keep my fucking space swords and banners on spikes with skulls on bannered spikeskulls with skull bannerspikes on spikeskull bannerskull spikeskulls, thank you very much. You can have all the "proper" tacticool looking military graphed no-VTOL no-glass canopy crappy aesthetics that look like lame boring unimaginative modern military crap transpositioned in SPAAAACE with Vietnam-era green berets fighting SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK technicolored haloid gremlinoids flying from all the dirt runways you want.

This is why we need less lame "modern military in space" Haloid crap and more Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune

Check this shit out:

In film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblem of the Atreides house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of the Bene Gesserit -, sent as concubine at the Duke to create a girl which would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto that she decides to jump a chain link and to create a son, Kwisatz Haderach, the saviour. By using her capacities of Bene Gesserit - once that the Duke, insanely in love with her, entrusts her with his sad secret - Jessica is inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and sees its meeting with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it fertilises it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his father but of his blood...

In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite the man or the machine...

In my version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The spice continuously produces the creation of the innumerable universes.

The Baron Harkonnen is an immense man of 300 kilogrammes. he is so fatty and heavy that, to move, he must make continuous use of antigravitational bubbles attached at his limbs... His delusion of grandeur does not have limits: he lives in a palace built like a portrait of itself... This immense sculpture is drawn up on a sordid and marshy planet... To enter the palace, one must wait until the colossus opens the mouth and draws a tongue from steel (landing strip...).

At the end of film, the wife of the Count Fenring leaps towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: "Too late, one cannot kill me... because...

- Because, Jessica with the voice of Paul continues, to kill the Kwisatz Haderach, you would have to also have killed me... "And each Fremen, each Atreides speaks now with the voice of Paul: "I am the collective man. He who shows the way "

Reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Plunge in the sand of planet: "I am the Earth which awaits the seed!" the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. Water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire.

Silver filaments emerge from spice. Create a rainbow. They form in a water cloud, produce a red "lava". Then vapor. Clouds. Rain. Rivers. Grass. Forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring surrounds planet now. It is divided. It produces more and more rings. Dune is now a world illuminated, which crosses the galaxy, which leaves it, which gives it light - which is Consciousness - to all the universe.

Now that is awesome. Salvador Dali as the mad Emperor. Pink Floyd doing the soundtrack. It's not hard sci-fi. It's hard acid sci-fi!

You can take your realism and shove it. As the esteemed Alejandro Jodorowsky says:

"I do not want that the man conquers space
In the ships of NASA
These concentration camps of the spirit
These gigantic freezers vomiting the imperialism
These slaughters of plundering and plunder
This arrogance of bronze and thirst
This eunuchoid science
Not the dribble of transistorised and riveted hulks
The divine one
The delirious one
The superb one
CHAOS
UNIVERSAL
I want magical entities, vibrating vehicles
To prolong to be to it abyss
Like fish of a timeless ocean. I want
Jewels, mechanics as perfect as the heart
Womb-ships anterooms
Rebirth into other dimensions
I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars... "

THIS is why they hired Chris Foss to do the concept art. If Chris FUCKING Foss followed any of y'all fringe world yokels' advice and drew boring ass lame ships like modern naval battleships, science fiction would be a poorer place reserved for only graph counters. Chris FUCKING Foss spits at your modern naval warship designs. Hummingbird Ornithopters propelled by the power cosmic need no turrets! FUCKERS!

[Black Admiral]

The Imperium has actually built what could be considered "all big-gun" ship classes; the Gothic-class heavy cruiser, armed with eight lance turrets (four in each broadside). On paper they're one of the more powerful of the Imperial Navy's heavy cruisers, but the practical experience has been (per the BFG rulebook) that a Gothic-class has to be paired up with another, more conventional cruiser or a squadron of escorts to be effective, as its lance batteries, while formidable, can't damage an opposing ship fast enough in single-ship actions.

[andrewgpaul]

Imperial tech looks like it's been issued by Space Russia to fight Space World War Two. Now there's a lot of things that come to mind when Russian tech in WW2 come up, but "ineffective" isn't one of them.

I'd prefer Imperial warships to look like they were there to fight Space Guadacanal or even Space Jutland, with the main battery in rotating turrets, not fixed and able to fire broadsides only.

In which case, there are plenty of other space combat games you may wish to look for,

It's space, with enemies able to attack from all directions, not the warp-damned Age of Sail.

No, sorry, you're wrong. 40K naval combat is the Age of Sail with plasma drives and space lasers. If you don't like it, find something else, and leave 40K for those of us that like it.

[NecronLord]

Shroom, serious question, are you using drugs?

That's out of nowhere, and while a bizzare brand of crazy... I cannot imagine that not being a terrible, awful, diabolically bad film.

David Lynch's dune is... at least trying to resemble the book.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think it would be unlike anything ever seen before, NecronLord, and it would've been the greatest thing ever.

[Batman]

I DO think it would be like nothing seen before, and I think it would be about as desirable as the Great Old Ones actually gaining dominion of the Earth.

[Whiskey144]

The Imperium has actually built what could be considered "all big-gun" ship classes; the Gothic-class heavy cruiser, armed with eight lance turrets (four in each broadside). On paper they're one of the more powerful of the Imperial Navy's heavy cruisers, but the practical experience has been (per the BFG rulebook) that a Gothic-class has to be paired up with another, more conventional cruiser or a squadron of escorts to be effective, as its lance batteries, while formidable, can't damage an opposing ship fast enough in single-ship actions.

I'll expand on the "all big-gun" classes by adding the following:

Endurance-class light cruiser (4 lance turrets, 2/side; AdMech variants can replace prow torps with a dorsal lance turret)
Executor-class grand cruiser (8 lance turrets, 2/side; grand cruiser-size power plant/mountings provide greater firepower, especially at range)*
Victory-class battleship (6 lance turrets, 3/side; long-distance lance power, predecessor of the Apocalypse)**
Apocalypse-class battleship (6 lance turrets, 3/side; short-range lance power, greater than Victory-class, can channel engine power to lance batteries; also carries a prow nova cannon)

*While found in the "Traitor Fleets" BFG PDF file on the GW site, the Executor class, like most Chaos ships, was first produced in Imperial shipyards.
**this ship is found in the Battlefleet Bakka PDF***, a supplement produced by the "High Admiralty", a GW-approved group of fans/reviewers. The PDFs were all submitted to GW, though at this point I'm guessing the BFG 2010 compedium PDFs won't be released. However, the Victory-class is specifically referred to as the predecessor of the Apocalypse.

***My Google-fu comes through, and gives me this: Linky

[The Yosemite Bear]

how about Niven's "Puppetmasters"? or the Pak/any protectors including human ones.

[Stofsk]

How are they failures? The Puppeteers were successful in virtually everything they did, AFAIK. The protectors were as well.

[The Yosemite Bear]

well the protectors tend to kill just about everything (no more Pak homeworld), and I thought the Puppeteers at one point did get something pear shaped from all their exceeding plans. Though getting others to move them in advance of the leading wave of a supernova is pretty impressive)

[Manus Celer Dei]

Just throwing out some things

Coordinators
Innovades
Spacenoids or whatever Zeon called themselves

Mutants seem to get genocided more often than not

It's kind of an important plot point that the Innovades were utterly mental. Plus there was, what, eight of them? Hardly a master race by any standards.

I mean, unless you count the Stabbity Suicide Squad. But that just loops back into the whole "Innovades were fucking fruit-loops" thing.

[Simon_Jester]

No, sorry, you're wrong. 40K naval combat is the Age of Sail with plasma drives and space lasers. If you don't like it, find something else, and leave 40K for those of us that like it.

Don't be silly; it's the Age of Steam with plasma drives and space lasers! The proper analogy is to the ironclads of the 1870s, complete with a mix of broadside and turret weapons, exchanges of naval gunfire easily taking many hours even at relatively close range, and the occasional use of ramming.

[Serafina]

No, sorry, you're wrong. 40K naval combat is the Age of Sail with plasma drives and space lasers. If you don't like it, find something else, and leave 40K for those of us that like it.

Don't be silly; it's the Age of Steam with plasma drives and space lasers! The proper analogy is to the ironclads of the 1870s, complete with a mix of broadside and turret weapons, exchanges of naval gunfire easily taking many hours even at relatively close range, and the occasional use of ramming.

That is actually quite accurate, i got to remember that.

[lance]

Just throwing out some things

Coordinators
Innovades
Spacenoids or whatever Zeon called themselves

Mutants seem to get genocided more often than not

It's kind of an important plot point that the Innovades were utterly mental. Plus there was, what, eight of them? Hardly a master race by any standards.

I mean, unless you count the Stabbity Suicide Squad. But that just loops back into the whole "Innovades were fucking fruit-loops" thing.

I think their were more, shown in the back ground in the first season, but its been a while.

[Ford Prefect]

I think it would be unlike anything ever seen before, NecronLord, and it would've been the greatest thing ever.

A lot of those things actually got some play in The Metabarons. The brother-sister Emperor duo live in a golden palace on a solid gold planet, the first Metabaron gets his groin destroyed in combat so he has to impregnate his wife through a drop of blood etc

I think their were more, shown in the back ground in the first season, but its been a while.

There are shitloads of Innovades, yeah. The end of the first season shows them all over the world, and A Wakening of the Trailblazer has one based on Anew Returner has chief of staff to Hilary Clinton President of Space. But they don't know they're Innovades: Veda just uses them to get a view of the world. They're of a different type to Ribbons and the skittle squad.

[Lord of the Abyss]

well the protectors tend to kill just about everything (no more Pak homeworld), and I thought the Puppeteers at one point did get something pear shaped from all their exceeding plans.

Their apparently successful breeding of a "lucky" strain of humans. They realize too late that their success means they've given a species of often violent omnivores (who have reason to dislike them if they found how the Puppeteers have manipulated things) what amounts to psychic control of history.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think it would be unlike anything ever seen before, NecronLord, and it would've been the greatest thing ever.

A lot of those things actually got some play in The Metabarons. The brother-sister Emperor duo live in a golden palace on a solid gold planet, the first Metabaron gets his groin destroyed in combat so he has to impregnate his wife through a drop of blood etc

I know man. It should be adapted into the big screen. It would be glourious!

[Simon_Jester]

well the protectors tend to kill just about everything (no more Pak homeworld), and I thought the Puppeteers at one point did get something pear shaped from all their exceeding plans.

Their apparently successful breeding of a "lucky" strain of humans. They realize too late that their success means they've given a species of often violent omnivores (who have reason to dislike them if they found how the Puppeteers have manipulated things) what amounts to psychic control of history.

By the time they realize this, they are already well on their way to leaving the galaxy.*

That said, all their previous machinations work fairly well. I think the standard for EPIC FAIL has to be more than "one plan with bad unintended consequences," because by the standards of real life that leaves us with nothing but EPIC FAIL to populate the universe.

*Granted, granted, people could still catch up with them.