Meta: Because this is a setting about dudes on the ground fighting each other, not ships nuking planets from orbit.
In - universe:
* Planets often have shields, orbital defense batteries, or warp nonsense that make it difficult or impossible to bombard from orbit. Punching through just enough to get a titan on the ground can make a big difference in battle.
* Shooting things from orbit is imprecise and can cause collateral damage. While Titan's aren't exactly precision weapons, it helps to be able to minimize the risk to stuff you don't want to break.
* Ships are often engaged in combat of their own as fighting wages on the ground. They can't always be ready to provide fire support, so it helps having dedicated support directly on the ground.
> Meta: Because this is a setting about dudes on the ground fighting each other, not ships nuking planets from orbit.
This really is the true answer. Warhammer is not and should not try to be military sci fi, it's fantasy in space.
If it was trying to be military sci fi, orbital bombardment would be far more prevalent, melee combat would be so rare as to be essentially non existent, and giant angry super men would be of at best situational use. But super knights having chainsword fights is cool, and that's why we all like Warhammer.
They talk about it a bit in the gothic war books, accuracy is a real problem not to be discounted (in 40k, in 30k they absolutely can and do use lots of orbital bombardment).
In that they talk about a captain so exceptional at ground bombardment that he's rarely more than a *few kilometers* off and can walk impact to a target (because that doesn't take so long their position in orbit/planet spin has changed things).
That kind of put it in perspective for me, in 40k they can hit a city *every time* but it's probably got shields and orbital batteries, a fortress *maybe*, if it's a good captain and it's big enough (or they've got enough time and no collateral around to worry about), a titan *no*. It's not explained anywhere I've read why it's that bad compared with 30k (this disparity also lets Chaos strikes be conveniently accurate if they need to be) but I'd guess they've lost some computerized atmosphere correction tools or something.
Conversely, a Titan can hit a Titan at near its max ranges just about every time.
EDIT: I should note this is with lances, Macro Cannons would be a whole other thing (which I have to imagine because they didn't talk about it, but I imagine... bad).
I remember this also being mentioned in a Space Marine novel.....maybe a Uriel Ventris one? They made I think just two shots with a bombardment cannon to begin their assault, which had to be extremely precise because.....well otherwise you've nuked to shit out of something else entirely.
That's also why the Bombardment Cannons on Space Marine vessels are *Bombardment Cannons*. Because they're *accurate enough to bombard with*. There's no lack of power to them, they use them against other ships.
A lot of people I think make a minor mistake of going "Ground warfare happens because we like it" when it's that AND "They want those cities intact/places intact."
It's one of the fun missions in Darktide, you go to stop a factory from melting down. Why, when there are so many others? Because they don't want to risk the heretics simply rebuilding the power plant and starting to make tanks of their own.
It's actually Servitors, but the sextant thing isn't far from true. According to Dark Imperium, they line up the area and make the onboard guiding servitors do the rest. And this was how they did it with extremely rare, difficult to replace anti-psycher munitions that HAD to hit.
Lances seem to be more accurate than bombardment cannons and macro cannons - in Traitor By Deed a strike cruiser is able to target an individual Farseer while he's in combat on the ground.
That's why I assume it's something to do with the atmosphere, because in space it's nowhere near that bad (but still pretty bad, lances have a max range of \~30,000km or roughly the distance from the UK to australia and back again, while a nova cannon or torpedo has a range of only about 600,000km, about from earth to the moon and half way back, all really short ranges for space combat).
In that regard is funny how t'au are the less fantasy and more scifi militaristic of the factions and are (or were) kinda baffled at the amount of melee combat the whole universe around them likes to do
I've kinda liked the in joke of Tau logically stating why an idea is stupid, only to be horrified when they find out everyone else is doing it anyway.
They did the same thing with titans, by pointing out how titans are clearly idiotic propaganda tools that don't actually exist, as the concept has numerous logical flaws, and then they were actually attacked by titans.
And then it gets worse when you find out *there's actually a good reason sometimes.* Like, there's loads of stuff out there that's tough enough, or fast enough, or numerous enough that you will indeed end up with a face full of claws as a regular thing.
This is brought up a lot, but we also have a canon example of titans quite easily gunning down mantas too from The Exodite now. Which, fair enough, it's a big target for an aircraft and titans have void shields.
Yeah for sure. I think the main difference is an entire generation of Earth Caste didn't whisper the entire hopes and dreams into the Manta's exhaust port each night for 25 years.
I imagine any commander would happily look at the ROI on trading a squadron of mantas for a titan, and happily sign off on the mission. You just don't tell the pilots that.
It's a bizarre one given that those are the same mantas used by the Tau fleet, which can destroy an escort with their heavy railguns and which can individually take on entire wings of thunderhawk fighters which are armed with titan grade weaponry. They're so much bigger than other factions' bombers that they almost considered ships and can be used for interstellar travel in extremis.
I feel like they should have made the atmosphere-use heavy dropships a different vessel than the fleet ones, which seem vastly bigger and more powerful.
Its funny how they were scoffing at Titans and waving their Mantas and Tigersharks around.... but now they are fielding Stormsurge and the Taunar Supremacy Armour.
To be fair the Earth Caste guy who came up with those was noted to be an oddball. And they were largely designed to be largely defensive units, with some mobility to walk around in order to reposition, rather than invasion units. But yeah, it is funny to see them go the "may as well join in on the madness."
Makes sense since a big reason why most other forces field titan equivalents is because the others guys have them. God help them if they ever have to fight a Necron Megalith on the field though.
Kinda a trope of the whole universe. Like everything is ridiculous, but then kinda makes sense. Saying prayers at your machines is silly, but when random pieces of code may he infected by the shards of a random God like entity well maybe those prayers actually help. Being all ick annihilate the planet seems over the top until one considers a gate into the warp opening around the planet due to enough chaos chicanery. Using random human brains instead of just using computers is nuts until you find out apparently the ai can be corrupted by chaos Ala men of iron. The Tau are just an excellent vehicle for the tropes to hit, because their shtick is that while they're "better" than alot of the other far less friendly factions, they only are because they're so naive they don't get how truly fucked everything is.
Tbh kinda surprised there isn't a story about one of the absorbed human worlds managing to have a full on demon incursion yet.
The Tau serve two tropes simultaneously from a narrative perspective;
1) they show us “this is how the average human federation looks through an alien lens”. They act like how we expect humans to be in Star Trek or other sci fi universes. The logical and reasonable organization that protects the innocent, innovates their technology, and wants to unite all under one banner of peace and prosperity. The irony is that they’re ridiculously out of place and this is the one sci fi universe where that approach doesn’t work.
2) They’re almost the most newcomer friendly for the franchise. Books from a Tau POV allow a reader to see the Imperium and the wider galaxy piece by piece and understand just *how* fucked up the Imperium is in a way Imperial POV books don’t really touch on. Like, Cain glosses over the existence of servitors because he takes them for granted, but a Water Caste guy next to him was horrified at seeing one. Maybe if the Tau were focused on earlier in the setting they could’ve been used as a way to break in the setting for all of us and they’d be a more narratively balanced faction.
Unfortunately the Tau are relatively new to the setting so they couldn’t be focused on earlier (even though I think they have been around longer then not). They definitely help as an introductory pov though
It's been years since I've read any of it, but I have vague memories that it's linked to the introduction of the Tau Manta, as the Manta was specifically introduced to be a counter for Imperial titans.
At a guess it'd be in the old Imperial Armour series, but I wouldn't put money on me remembering that correctly.
The Manta is an orbital drop ship that just so happens to have a weapon big enough to hurt titans. It was the modified Tiger Sharks, which were given two of the same weapons to use as Titan hunters.
Yeah that's one of my favorite ideas that I've only ever heard second hand here and never the excerpts themselves but that they went "That's obviously propaganda" to "oh, SHIT, that's a walking cathedral with guns" brings me great joy
Close combat is only becomes bad when ranged wepons outstrip armour. In 40k at least in the lore power armour is resistant to most man portable ranged wepons. So it makes sense melee still happens. It should happon less then it does but its not unbelievable at all.
Iirc that was one of the main original concepts of the lore when it came to the tech. Modern day ranged weapons have far surpassed any form of armor, in 40k it’s the opposite, ranged weapons are playing catch up.
Also the symbolism, innit? Both in and out of universe. It's cool to see a big armored figure holding a sword, and then in universe, other than armor and logistics, it also works better against daemons cause symbolism, right?
Except it makes no sense that even the world's strongest chainsaw would have more power than a large gun at penetrating armour. IF anything, armour would protect *more* against melee.
Not necessarily true, there's different physical considerations to stopping a blade and stopping a bullet, you can make armor that's generally OK for blocking both but to truly be proof against one or the other a choice needs to be made. Like in real life, a kevlar weave will protect against stabs and small calibers, but it won't protect against a hunting rifle. On the flip side, ceramic plates can stop a hunting rifle, but they won't stop an ice pick.
There is, but ranged threats are various, and the setting does not distinguish protection against ballistic hits and energy hits for example. If armor is good, it's somehow good against everything, and vise versa
I think it's a matter of the right materials and continuous application of force through them. Bolters seem just as if not more effective than chainswords when firing repeatedly, and the exceptions that come to mind can probably be explained by a chainsword allowing its user to target armor seals and other weaknesses more easily.
And, assuming you consider your team better at melee than their team, it's a quicker battle with less attrition from stray shots to close into melee and just be done with it, than sitting behind rocks a km out taking shots "in the direction" of the enemy knowing 90% of shots will miss and 90% of hits won't kill/disable
Bolters aren't even true "guns" either, by function they're just handheld automatic grenade launchers(AGLs). Their caliber's oversized but otherwise pretty much the same as many modern militaries already strap to their aircraft.
No, they're true guns. Their ammo just activates a rocket motor after the usual powder charge kicks them out of the barrel at normal gun velocity to achieve greater than normal gun velocity.
Well I think it works similarly to the idea that a stab-resistant vest ain't great against a bullet and a bullet resistant vest ain't great against stabbing.
Sure you can have a large round going several thousand feet per second but it's not the same as a dude running at you with a spear.
Also to paraphrase someone else, Gun run out of Bang but Sword no run out of Stab
There is absolutely no way you can swing a sword/axe/hammer harder than a high-tech gun can fire. Armour capable of resisting a high-powered bullet/shell/energy-blast will easily be able to resist a sword swing. Melee just doesn't make sense logically, other than maybe some extremely niche specialised situations.
But that's okay, 40k is rule-of-cool, not cold hard logic.
> But that's okay, 40k is rule-of-cool, not cold hard logic.
Pretty much, I don't need a long winded justification, to enjoy the clearly silly premise that future combat will involve swordfighting. It's cool and that's more than enough for me.
Even then, there are more efficient ways to make use of a power-field than on a sword. Why does it even need to be sword-shaped if the field is what's doing all the work?
If this was tech that actually existed, someone would figure out a way to allow a power-field to be employed at long-range (or, at least, longer than a sword length).
And this is to say nothing of all the non-powered melee weapons, which are the majority.
Choppas are the best way to hack through power armor because Orks say they are the best way to hack through power armor.
Force weapons and daemon weapons are psychically powered so need to be melee.
Tyranids just haven't evolved to put rending claws on a launched bio-seed.
Regular melee weapons can... Better target gaps in armor?
Maybe power fields have the same problem (just in reverse) as the shields from Dune, where they only work at low velocity, and anything that can adjust its speed to go low velocity enough at the terminal phase requires AI or other missing tech or is just not very effective in the end when it can just be parried.
Yah, it's all bs, but it's nice to have that vaguely believable bs :p
I would argue even realistically there wouldn't be that much orbital bombardment.
You can bomb it, burn it, turn it into glass, poison it, kill billions in a nanosecond but it ain't yours until your troops are standing there and the enemy's isn't. Also you can't always use orbital bombardment cause that's seems like no escalation, which militaries don't like, and also if you want those facilities instead of rubble, you can't reasonably keep shooting from orbit.
I kinda agree with you if we're talking about how orbital bombardment would affect the real world. I think they'd be somewhat analogous to nukes in the position they hold, with perhaps less of an emotional stigma around using it, leading to greater use of orbital bombardment in situations where one side holds them and the other does not.
If one side has the ability to strike from orbit, then the ground based force has no real way to achieve victory. Their options are surrender, or hope that the orbital force feels some compunction about wiping them off the map.
If both sides can strike from orbit then any war between them would be suicidal. If a side starts to lose a conventional war, then they have no incentive to play nice and observe a taboo on escalation. Which is pretty much how mutually assured destruction plays out with existing nukes.
Of course the logic of all this hinges on both sides being rational actors, with a serious stake in the current state of the planets surface. If the situation was an invasion force attacking a planet they don't control, then I think there'd be liberal use of tactical bombardment. They don't need to level every city, but they also have no incentive to leave a single airfield of military base intact.
When it comes to Warhammer rationality goes out the window. Liberally bombarding a planet makes perfect sense when the surface is crawling with Orks/Nids/Heretics. There nay be a handful of key facilities worth preserving, but most of the planets surface won't be missed if it got a low kiloton lance strike.
Many planets also have ground defenses capable of engaging low orbit starships which is where you’d have to be to have any reasonable accuracy. If all you care about is removing the planet from existence you don’t even have to be in the same system. The Mechanicum have gravity anchors they use to grab asteroids and move them around. On more than one occasion they’ve redirected an asteroid toward another system so it blows up a planet for them.
Bombarding the enemy from orbit works until anything on the ground is wanted.
Resources, factories, relics, anything.
The moment something on the surface is desired, one side can build up and camp ontop of it waiting for you to land and charge.
I think a lot of people place too much focus on orbital bombardment/space control, and not enough thought into having to control the ground, especially if you want assets there.
"Nuke them from orbit" is fine, as long as you don't want the factories/mines/farms/cities there. Why wage decades long wars over a planet in 40k? Because both sides want those resources and to use them.
Hell, IIRC there is an entire ground war (or was) on a stranded battleship between Imperium and Tau, because both sides want the ship even though it's warp engines got destroyed.
> "Nuke them from orbit" is fine, as long as you don't want the factories/mines/farms/cities there. Why wage decades long wars over a planet in 40k? Because both sides want those resources and to use them.
The problem with that is that waging a decades long ground war doesn't preserve anything.
The Astartes swooping in and taking the site on the first day of the war might be preferable to bombardment. But the guard turning the place into a giant Stalingrad just does the same as a lance strike, but slower.
That's where the 40k aspect of it comes into play.
Yes at that point it's not as rational, but neither side will concede defeat and will fight until the very end.
Nah I don't think cocaine made it to the Midlands until the 1990s. It would have been Snakebite (half cider half lager with blackcurrant cordial on top), cheap lager (probably Fosters) and cheap cigarettes (Marlboro lights or B&H maybe) from my experiences of Nottingham. Weed probably hashish blocks too. Possibly speed looking at Noise Marines.
I actually think a Warhammer game about logistics, subterfuge, security, etc would be awesome. Imagine a dark eldar raid screwing up an agriworld administratum center and the neighboring hiveworld falls to chaos due to cults springing up from desperation/starvation
That's true from one perspective, but nevertheless the story would be worse if there were no explanation for why starships don't win all ground battles by bombardment. Fantasy in space where the naval characters forget to use their weapons... That would be inferior to canon.
I agree with everything you said, but I feel like Space Marines would still be super useful. Especially in space, as the ability to quickly take out the bridges of enemy ships and assassinate high priority targets is a great strength.
My favourite is when people ask the most obscure questions like there is a perfectly reasonable scientific answer and then people will break themselves trying to formulate as scientific an answer as possible rather than just say “because it’s a fictional universe”. Everyone knows in real life Titans would cost ridiculous amounts of resources but would topple over on the slightest undulating surface not to mention how easy they would be to knock down but why let that stop you from having them wield the galaxy’s largest chain saw. Can you imagine if Star Wars fixed a giant flick-knife onto the front of an AT-AT.
That's not bad. A sledgehammer can still hit a nail if handled properly. Generally speaking, orbital bombardment would be more akin to swinging a wrecking ball from the back of a moving truck.
>orbital bombardment would be more akin to swinging a wrecking ball from the back of a moving truck.
Depends on the ship perhaps. From the Horus Heresy trailer, a lance strike from the Vengeful Spirit was able to take out a titan, and everything else within a few kilometre radius. In other words, you'll hit the nail, broke the table and cracked the floor.
That's fair. Though someone else pointed out that 30k ships seemed to have better accuracy than 40k ships. And of course the VS isn't your average ship
Yeh, ive got a mate who's an amateur blacksmith, he can swing one with accuracy that I could hardly lift even before I had a hernia. You can be very accurate with a sledgehammer and a skilled person can definitely use one to crack a nut.
Orbital Bombardment tends to cause irreversible damage to a planet's atmosphere/capability for supporting life.
Titans have more localized/less fundamentally damaging impacts to planets.
From a purely military standpoint...sure. But keep in mind, our first real indication of Titans came from post-Mechanicum Mars. There were religious components to the Titans. They were walking places of worship. Once Titans got folded into the greater Imperium and the Ministorum was established, the Titans became "avatars" more or less for the Emperor.
To say something different than what other said but still address the point of causing a lot of damage:
Stuff falling from space to a planet's surface has a metric FUCK TON of energy behind it, doesn't even have to have a warhead or w/e, if it's anything of size, it's going to wipe out whatever it hits that isn't heavily shielded.
On Earth, the atmosphere is quite thin compared with the size of the planet. And Mars has even thinner atmosphere
Also, Earth is probably the biggest terrestrial planet outside of super Earths (that shouldn't be habitable by normal humans)
If it's not in the STC, it doesn't go on the ship. Mechanicus will flay you alive and make you a servitor.
Most, if not all, imperial naval vessels are primarily designed for one thing. Void warfare.
There are a handful of ship classes still in service but very few in number that can do precision bombardment. They almost can't be replaced, and they are under a tight leash by fleet admirals and above. You have better luck getting a titan legion to deploy.
Your standard line ship is loaded with macro cannons that do fuckall to ground targets and are beyond inaccurate. There are no targeting computers or ai to help adjust aim. That shit is almost entirely done manually. You're more likely to hit your own troops than the enemies. There is a reason imperial warships prefer to broadside in void warfare. Easy to see, easy to hit.
>Your standard line ship is loaded with macro cannons that do fuckall to ground targets and are beyond inaccurate. There are no targeting computers or ai to help adjust aim. That shit is almost entirely done manually. You're more likely to hit your own troops than the enemies. There is a reason imperial warships prefer to broadside in void warfare. Easy to see, easy to hit.
This is just nonsense. Void warfare is done over hundreds of kilometeres of space, with occasional close quarters ramming or boarding actions. No targeting computers means that nobody should ever hit anything at all, because both you and your enemy are too far away and moving too quickly to be shot by eye.
This was my reasoning as well. Void combat is at much greater ranges than orbital, vs moving targets. Bombarding a city sized target with a lance weapon should be easy enough. Collateral damage is the issue.
Just finished reading Gaunts Ghosts: His Last Command. They have the ability, and would prefer, to orbital strike the city, but they think it might be holy somehow and ground assault it. Then they change their mind and dig a kilometer deep crater where the city used to be.
So they can, and they can do it well. Just there isn't much left after.
> or using ammo with less explosive power
My brother in Christ these things lob shells the size of camper vans and several times the weight ON THE LOW END.
There is going to be a metric fuck ton of damage done no matter the payload simply because of how physics work.
I guess that volume of TNT is roughly of the same destructive power of some weapons smaller than a titan
If they are filled with anti-matter on the other hand... well...
Yes but it’s 40k. As a commenter above said, this is fantasy in space, not military fiction. It’s dumb, it’s silly, and that’s the entire premise of the setting
except even in 40k void warfare is done hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. The guy above is just saying his own bullshit and passing it as official lore.
Thats the thing with 40k. You dont expect it to be realistic but it somehow manages to to do it in a non intentional way.
I've always kinda sighed when people get so hung up on distance numbers, but yeah... this is true.
Same with the idea of unguided munitions being the main weapon. The most "realistic" for the setting explanation I saw was lance weapons are the long range beams, then as ships get closer to each other macrocannons start opening up.
If you get close enough, then boarding torpedos and other craft.
Some of them had good points actually. But yes, sometimes I feel that I'm hurting the head canon of others with my own head canon. Even if I'm still under the regular framework that GW created. I'm not even talking about female space marines
I guess many people had the same mistake understanding my comment. Or perhaps their understanding of orbital bombardment always equals to exterminatus
But let's remember that one particular form of exterminatus requires many ships firing against the planet for a long time, everywhere on the surface. So I guess that fewer ships, for a limited time, in a particular region, don't cause an exterminatus on a global scale
You don’t need smaller vessels. Lance weapons have variable power settings. You can set it to boil an ocean, destroy a city block, or blow up a single building.
“What is the purpose being having tanks when you have aerial bombardment”. It was a genuine question considered by Allied war planners when they absolutely shredded German tank divisions with fighter-bombers - and there was a very similar question that recently has been asked when the Ukrainians used MANPATS to shred Russian tanks. The answer to both questions was that the tank serves a role that the others don’t.
The Halo franchise posits the same question - why would you ever have ground combat when you can just glass a planet from orbit and move on? The answer in Halo was that sometimes the covenant need to land on a planet to recover Forerunner artefacts.
So why do 40k armies bother with ground combat at all, let alone deploying titans? Well the simple non-lore answer is cause it’s cool. The in-lore reasons are myriad. First is that ground combat often happens when something important is located planetside - be it the Emperor’s Palace, some highly fortified bunkers, an ancient relic like Necron pylons, a population centre that needs to be taken somewhat intact or some other reason. Next is the fact that total orbital superiority is not always achieved - lots of battles from Calth to Terra to the most recent Battle of Idolatros, will have armies fighting over land while their is a concurrent battle in space; here the navy doesn’t have the ability to do orbital bombardment so deploying titans brings firepower without orbital supremacy. We also have the fact that Titans are a morale statement just as much a fighting unit - iirc the Tau shat themselves when they realised that the Imperium is such a bloated monstrosity that it can just deploy these colossal mechs that are extremely costly and not that efficient. Finally we see that titans are effective (yes realistically it would be a poor design, but remember the imperial guard’s main tank is a ww1 tank chassis with a ww2 turret on top) - we see titan legions deal colossal damage to their enemies, absolutely shredding through regular armies and bloodying even Space Marine Legions.
So ultimately, Titans are a tool for a different task to the navy. Orbital bombardment can Exterminatus a planet, but often you need to deal less damage - and sometimes you need that damage to be less indiscriminate than firing a weapon from space and then having it travel through the atmosphere.
To add a bit to this, I believe it was Templin Institute that did a video covering why futuristic militaries still have standing armies when they can just orbitally bombard stuff.
To add to the Morale component-
Probably the Imperium’s most consistent, reliable enemy on the battlefield are Orks. There will always be more Orks, and they will always be spoiling for a fight- and against Orks specifically, the massive size and profile of titans is uniquely effective
Halo franchise is a brilliant example of the whole "orbital control means you've won" nonsense so many scifi fans push without thinking at all.
Orbital control is important, but then you have to answer the following question: Do you want anything on the planet surface? If the answer is yes, you deploy ground troops.
Relics, resources, factories/cities, anything of importance on the ground can be camped on by defenders because you won't nuke that site from orbit. And thus you must deploy ground troops.
Halo and 40k basically do this a lot. In halo, the Covenant could just bombard/glass locations from orbit and win the second they obtained orbital security. But if they wanted relics from the surface they'd get stuck in ground battles, which could last long enough reinforcing UNSC fleets could arrive to kick them from orbit. Same thing for 40k. It's the whole basis of the first Space Marine game as I recall. "Giant ork wave on surface, do we bombard? Negative, Titan factories on surface with completed/nearly completed titans inside. We cannot risk those. Deploy space marines."
Naval bombardment can't walk through a void shield and destroy the target and also cause massive psychological warfare. Also losing air space supremacy or having it in equal measure means you lose that superiority to begin with let alone if you're run off like what happened in the 2nd and 3rd war for Armageddon
Void shield don't stop phisical objects? I remember that on the gaunt's stories they blocked rain and another time they blocked the ghosts from retreating (and cut someone in half).
They stop things that have enough energy be it kinetic or otherwise. You can walk through most void shields unless it’s tuned up to be something like a force field.
Maintaining a solid wall of void shield over a hive would block everything, including the air and rain, and would be insanely energy consuming.
So basically if you go slow enough you can get through them but it’s unpleasant. Go over the tigger point for kinetic energy or otherwise and it shunts that energy into the warp.
They do as described many times in the Siege of Terra Series, it depends on the object itself and the speed it's going through things like projectiles will be stopped while weather is also stopped and other times it doesn't stop ect.
There's a wide variety of descriptions of void shields
>There's a wide variety of descriptions of void shields
I just assume that it's how much energy you use on the shield. For the most part very large shields won't have enough energy to become a force field.
They're able to be adjusted. The highest setting is a hard wall, blocking everything including light from penetrating the shield. It creates a blinding hazy effect, makes a terrible smell, and consumes enough power that it's only sustainable for a short period of time. On the lower setting it's sensitive to things moving at high speeds. Plasma cannons, laser batteries, and ballistic macro cannons all get flickered into the warp. Slow torpedoes and boarding pods can pass through the field.
"Fire from the sky" sounds imho like something with it's own share of psychological warfare. As for void shields thats a valid point, though it depends how many resources for bombarding there are. Bombard target protected by void shields with enough weapons with high heat output (thermonuclear, plasma etc) and target will simply sink under the surface due to geological melting, possibly destroying void generators and/or target along the way. Obviously though that's not a desirable outcome if target area has high value.
To be fair in our own experience in real life air power never lives up to the theoretical idea of scaring the people being bombed into surrender. This was a serious chain of thought in the development of early air warfare, but it turns out that in reality "fire from the sky" makes people made more than frightened and just makes them even more determined to fight. See: Japan WW2, Ukraine Now, Afghanistan for decades, etc.
Air power is less scary than a large physical object right inside your line of sight. So Titans would absolutely be scarier and induce surrender more than bombings.
Air power's purpose in modern militaries is as an element that can enable decisive manoeuvre through the use of heavier munitions against enemy strong points, and to suppress the enemies capabilities and ability to manoeuvre, not attempting to directly induce surrender.
The russian military just lacks the capability to attempt it from what we xan see, for who knows what reason. Afghanistan was used as fire support, not a method of inducing surrender/enabling manoeuvre on large unit scale.
What makes a titan so dumb is you would just strike it with artillery if not air power if not from orbit. It's a huge slowass target any reasonable force should beable to destroy or immobilise. But I love them and think thry perfectly represents why the imperium is a dying power.
Warhound titans are quick, the others have powerful void shields. They deploy in groups to cover each others weaknesses. They're situational but I wouldn't call them inefficient.
If you can put that level of energy on a target you can probably just break the void shield through brute force lol (smack it until the generator powering it is overwhelmed)
No they're not. If the target is heavily fortified with void shields and anti-orbital weaponry, then your ships are not going to be able to damage it without being threatened by the ground defenses. In that case you need a ground assault to disable those defenses. If the target is also heavily fortified from ground attacks, then you need Titans to make a breach on the ground.
It's like asking why we use tanks and infantry when we have planes and artillery. Planes can get shot down by ground units, and artillery can flatten the target but if you do that then all you'll have won is a very impressive pile of rubble. Not exactly ideal when what you're flattening is something like an irreplaceable factory that produces equipment that the Admech doesn't know how to make anymore. At any rate you'll still have to occupy the area you've conquered with ground units, who will get attacked by any surviving units that were entrenched in the area.
To summarize the above, a Titan can bring ship-grade weaponry inside of planetary or regional void shields while the ships themselves can only fire futiley at said void shields from low orbit.
Also titans are far less lethal than bombardment. A few lance barrages can cause a mass extinction event and ruin the biosphere for decades.
Think of a titan as opposed to a ship barrage like an MLRS or TOS-1 Thermobaric delivery system compared to an ICBM
It is simple enough to clear a staging area for landing titans and other ground forces. It is not so simple to conduct orbital bombardments in contested voidspace
I'd say that if the space around the planet is contested, then a landing is even more difficult. So in my opinion, space battles need to be won in order to launch a planned ground campaign on the planet. Except when dropping a few marines from orbit for a very specific target
Plus naval weaponry have the advantage of covering the planet surface faster than the speed of a titan's movement. I mean, the ship orbits the planet way faster
Yes and you take years to do so, and if the enemy wins local air/space supremacy, even for a couple of hours, they can bombard your troops (that are far away form their real target).
A couple of hours is not enough to breach theater void shields. During the attack on Gorkograd during the War of the Beast, they made their breach by coordinating orbital attack with ground attacks.
The whole Siege of Terra has orbital firepower to support infantry. Infantry attack and bring down shields (or sections thereof) and then open up orbital attack. That was when the triators had the luxury of uncontested orbital superiority. Orbital bombardment weakened the palace shields to allow for slow moving aircraft to enter and make the first attacks.
History shows it possible to launch ground forces even when your enemies have air superiority. It won't make much difference with void superiority.
As others stated, you either drop them somewhere where it's safer and have them march towards the objective. Or in an opening of the enemies defenses.
or, as you stated, drop a specialized group that's meant to target anti-air anti-void weapons. Clearing a larger, more reasonable LZ to drop more larger forces in to contest the ground battle.
In both cases, the air force is usually executating interception runs and/or distractions. With the goal to limit other planes and anti-air weapons from shooting the ground assualt down. Though their will be losses, which are accounted for when the plans are being drafted.
I think what you're forgetting is if your navy is fighting the enemies navy. Then the enemies navy is more focused on fighting your navy. Both sides temporarily lose the superiority when engaging their counterpart. So, while that's going on, you start landing as many resources on the ground as you can. Such as a walking fortresses church with equivalent firepower to a navy ship. This is, of course, all the while your enemy is most likely resupplying and reinforcing their ground forces as well. So both sides are playing a game of stopping them from doing what they want.
If the ground battle is won, then two things can happen.
1. You have all the big guns that can shoot into space. Giving your navy the advantage.
2. The enemy no longer has a reason to stick around. They retreat to limit their loses and to regroup onto a different front or counter attack.
Just because a Navel ship may be better at a task than a Titan doesn't always mean it's the right tool for the job. When you don't have access to one, then you may still have access to the other. Just as theirs times when you'll have access to neither. It is better to have a wider range of tools at your disposal than to rely on just a catch-all.
Mate, people have given you well thought out answers and backed it up with real life military analogues as well as in-universe information. Yet you keep repeating the same points. Not a healthy way to ask a question or debate a position.
I'm trying to reply to many people that use the same points over and over again. So excuse me if I lose the perspective of the debate. It isn't easy on my end either
Hundreds of notifications to manage
Orbital bombardment doesn’t work as well when you are defending a planet.
Or if you’ve lost the void battle.
Or if there are orbital defenses or planetary shields that are protecting key targets from being bombarded.
Accuracy would be my best guess. They can bombard your general direction, but however big titans are supposed to be, it's still a microscopic needle to orbital vessels.
Also, if you are defending or lost the void battle, you may still have void shields to prevent orbital bombardment, so titans would be safe even with perfect accuracy.
What's the point of a scalpel when you have a cleaver?
Or, maybe more accurately,
Why carpet bomb a city when nukes exist?
The answer to these sorts of questions is always the same: scale of destruction matters.
The same reason modern armies still use tanks and armored fighting vehicles in a world where they have aerial bombardment and attack helicopters:
Tanks/AFVs can take and **hold ground**, Airplanes and helicopters cannot.
That same reason is also why soldiers are trained to do things with smaller arms and cqc; a tank can’t go into a building and clear it of insurgents. An airplane can’t do a pat down at a security checkpoint. A Titan can’t handle a hostage situation- well actually…
Honestly, because it's metal as fuck. 40k is not worried about actual logical logistics, and will invent whatever defenses are needed to deter orbital bombardment to justify Engine War.
You don’t seem to actually want people to answer this question, but instead are hoping they will agree with your clearly already decided opinion that Titans are worthless.
In the context of providing close support: They don't want to destroy hive cities or ground forces unnecessarily.
Putting some rough back of the page numbers together based on an Earth sized planet:
If you were providing overwatch in geostationary orbit, and you had a Laser (basically instantaneous), and you aim at a particular point, and you miss by 0.1 degrees, you miss by 60km. 0.01 degrees you miss by 6 km.
A titan will hit things to the meter accuracy. Given a lot of fighting is armies basically on top of eachother, missing by even a few km either misses or fries your own forces.
In the context of softening forces up prior to invasion or basically destroying the forces in the midle of nowhere: They do that.
They do use orbital bombardment: [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Orbital\_Strike](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Orbital_Strike)
The astartes have a ship specialized for it: [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Battle\_Barge](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Battle_Barge)
And drop pods with astartes are a sort of bombardment as well.
Also to add void shield might cover the entire planet or enough of the engagement area stopping orbital bombardedment but the titan can get within the bubble which is the battlefields you play on.
Then once you have them why wouldn't you use them for other stuff.
Rule of cool was the main thing practicality doesn't matter when you have magic level science for all intents and purposes to us with the made up name dropped items.
Psychological impact. When a fortress starts walking towards you and half the mountain you’re hiding on suddenly explodes, you tend to not want to fight anymore
Titans are also more accurate than orbital bombardment
Titans are akin to WW1/2 Siege artillery, theyre useful when you need to crack a fortress to assault a heavily defended position. They bring heavy firepower beyond what most ground targets can resist on a mobile platform and are well protected themselves with their void shields and armament. There are fortresses which can’t be cracked by lesser engines so they bring up Titans to deal with them.
Why not just use a void ship? Economy of force and proportionality. Real estate is valuable and a void ship bombardment can crack a planet is ways you don’t want or you run into a place you can’t crack with voidship batteries either on a good time table or it can shoot back with guns powerful enough that you can’t risk your fleet against them. Titans might be hard to make but I guarantee they’re cheaper than even a Cobra class Destroyer (which is about the size of a Venator Class Star Destroyer, 1.2km long)
This is 40k, we left realism and logic behind a long time ago.
This reminds me of the Tau not believing Titans existed because such a thing is such a massive waste of resources and a logistical nightmare to manage, surely no one would be dumb enough to build such a thing...Then they saw those walking churches in the distance...
The largest titan is massively smaller then then smallest warship. The tallest are listed at most 100m tall, versus, a sword frigate with is at least 1.5 km long, a titan is actually proportionally more armed and armoured then a void ship per metre. Void ships have to carry cargo, hangers and stores. Titans are pure war machine.
Emplaced weapons capable of holing a starship will have a relatively broad arc of fire, when pointed up at the sky. Titans approach on a horizontal plane, meaning that relatively few weapons can enagage then at one time,
as such they are more precise weapons. Titans are comparatively maneuvrable, compact weapons platforms which can be deployed on a limited front, whereas warships are even more valuable then titans, more easily engaged by the right weapons and more vulnerable during orbital bombardment,
The same reason we still use infantry despite nuclear bombs exist.
Orbital Bombardment only works if you want to kill something, and don't care about any of the collateral.
See: the Virus Bombing of Istvaan III. Horus virus bombed the planet with all the Loyalist members of the traitor legions, because he just wanted to kill them all. However, the marines were warned, so many were able to survive.
He was just going to blast them from orbit, but Angron went Angron and decided to drop onto the planet to kill the remaining loyalists... So now Horus couldn't bombard the loyalists without possibly attacking the World Eaters.
Perhaps for punching through lines and/or destroying massed enemy armour to secure a strategic objective.
If the front lines are close in a meatgrinder campaign then orbital bombardment is too likely to cause friendly-fire casualties or damage the objective. If the friendly side withdraws prior to the strike then they may be routed into a retreat, or be too slow to capitalise on the damage caused to the front.
Having a walking murdercity smash through the lines with an army following its wake is more likely to cause permanent strategic change.
Titans are the status symbol, the pinnacle and pride of the Imperium as well as Admech, and you can say the same for the other races too. let's just say there're probably some people voicing their concern about the dubious use of resource to make a Titan, but in the end the titans always win, the Imperium got immeasurable amount of resource to make them anyway.
orbital bombardment is for enemy fortresses, and planets that wont comply, titans are for holding ground in a fight, and claiming ground.
titans have a war-horn that is "godlike" and it puts fear and respect of the imperium/mechanicus into the hearts and minds of civvies.
Any ship with a lance weapon or macrobattery can perform an orbital bombardment.
So even a frigate can do that if it has a lance weapon.
Both can devastate an entire area and wipe out a small hive city in one blow. A Titan can only do that if it fires for a long time...a very long time. Guns on ships are terribly inaccurate. On average, their hits are off by kilometres. This can also be the own regiment or the target. In contrast, a Titan fires much more accurately.
Titans are siege engines, they can knock down the walls of hive cities on the ground to make a breach. Ship weapons are also unsuitable for this.
I think part of it is that they already have them on hand and as others have pointed out in order for an orbital bombardment to work you need A) a ship that's not otherwise engaged, B) a spotter on the ground and C) communications and D) you need all of those coordinated at the exact moment you need the bombardment done. Whereas with a titan all you'd need is to have some point put a titan on the ground. Hot dropping one onto an active battlefield is of questionable utility vs orbital bombardment but if you brought one in a month ago it can just hang out until you need it.
Long story short: because that isn't interesting to read.
The 40K universe has acknowledged the argument you've put forward: void superiority means that you usually win the battle planetside.
Example: In the Dark Imperium series, Ultramarines and allied Imperial forces are fighting the Death Guard on the surface of a planet. Meanwhile the Novamarines space fortress above the planet is attempting to repel enemy boarding parties. Both Guilliman and another main character (Frater Mathieu) state that no matter what happens planetside, whoever controls the space fortress at the end of the day will use it to scour the other faction from the planet's surface. Without trying to spoil the book for anyone I will say this: that is exactly what happens.
Warhammer novels (in my experience) go to extreme lengths to create battles where orbital bombardments can't happen. Xenos dark tech or Dark Age planetary shields, planetside gun batteries, warp storms, opposing naval fleets, important resources/relics planetside that can't be damaged at any cost, ideological motivations, etc are all plot devices to prevent orbital bombardments from stealing the show. The authors seem to believe that the books would be less interesting to read if they all ended: ..."and then X faction orbitally bombarded the planet into the stone age. The end." And I agree.
I wouldn't think too hard about what X faction should do, or what the most logical course of action for Y faction would be. Those will always come second to telling a good story.
Moreover, a large part of the Imperium's characterization is that they make decisions that are short sighted and illogical. They are the ignorant remnants of a dying race whose best days are behind them. The train wrecks they get themselves into for no good reason are an integral part of the setting.
The same reason why air power can’t/won’t win wars now- you can bomb the shit out of whatever you want to, but at the end of the day, you’ve gotta have dicks in the dirt and (in the case of warhammer 40k) 100ft tall walking cathedral mechs to actually seize ground and win.
Look at M2. We have planes, jets, arty, rockets yet infantry is on the ground doing the work. A city is taken, when Infantry plants a flag. Not if it is bombarded enough, or leveled to dust. Now, all the other things are just as important in waging a successful war. But you can't just min/max it.
Now imagine during the Age of Strife some super scary big Xenos, or weird ground-tech construct, or something else. Infantry will want to upgrade to counter these things. Maybe they are really fast and have more of a CQC role. You can't always call in a lance strike...you need something to counter it on the ground.
The whole shield argument has also been mentioned.
I point out that Prospero could stand up to orbital bombardment, so the Space Marines had to go in and get them personally.
A lot of the time, you can't just bomb it from orbit. You want whatever they have, not just to leave a crater.
Sometimes, the enemy has anti-ship guns: Orbital bombardment leaves the ships vulnerable as they move into position, so it's not the go-to answer.
The titans at least before the Horus heresy did more for destroying enemy morale than ships ever did. It evokes a instinctual sense of dread when you see a figure walking over mountains with fire and death as it’s only companion
I look at it the same way as I look at why Star Wars has dogfighting in space. They have technology to traverse the galaxy in single cockpit fighter ships and yet they’re still engaging in WWII style dogfighting they should have certainly have weapons that can lock on to the enemy and destroy them from extreme distances. Unfortunately that doesn’t look as cool so we get all these scenes of massive space battles and starfighters dogfighting.
It’s the same reason why people use mechs in Battletech: Because it looks rad as hell.
Practically speaking, mechs are completely outmatched by tanks and helis. The most realistic possible role for mechs is heavy infantry, with an emphasis on infantry.
Hard Sci-Fi very quickly devolves into nuke fests, with ships shooting nukes and near c projectiles at each other while using [nukes as propulsion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)), nukes as flashbangs, and [using nukes to make lasers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser). Because nukes are the most efficient energy source unless you are messing with large quantities of antimatter.
>The most realistic possible role for mechs is heavy infantry, with an emphasis on infantry.
Mostly this
And W40K already mastered in with the astartes, since both the body and the armor are peak technology
The same reason that any setting with giant robots uses to explain it; mechs are cool.
In real life, bipedal war machines on that scale are a profoundly bad idea for all sorts of practical reasons, but they're cool.
I totally get where you're coming from! I think the main appeal of gigantic titans might be the psychological impact they have on enemies. Sure, orbital bombardment is super effective, but seeing a massive titan marching towards your defenses would be absolutely terrifying. Plus, they can engage in close-quarters combat if needed. But yeah, logistically, it's a bit of a head-scratcher!
Everyone who uses the contradictory and convoluted lore misses the primary and sole reason there are titans. That GW wanted big stompy robots.
If warhammer was supposed to make sense titans *wouldnt* be feasible. But warhammer is not supposed to make sense and the in-world reasoning only works for as long as you dont think about it. GW doesnt spend a lot of energy making their lore consistent and neither should you. Just enjoy it for what it is.
Honestly tho real world tactics don’t explain titans, but they explain the need for ground based weapons platforms.
It’s basically asking « why have artillery when we have helicopters and planes ».
You can ask that question about basically any fictional giant robot. Gypsie Danger had a gun on its arm capable of fucking a Kaiju up. Probably would have been more effective to just build a bunch of tucking tanks to put those guns on
Orbital bombardment is viewed as a nuclear options in many settings, and titans bring a level of power and sway that can be used to win battles without the point and click adventure gun sitting in high orbit.
The more relevant question to ask is why use Titans and knights when you can use tanks? What can they do that tanks can't?
There already are tanks larger than knights and few about the same size as smaller Titans (some HH tanks are actually bigger than even Imperator Titans). They are way more stable and don't require a guy melting his brain with the machine spirit.
In lore many Titan weapons are already fitted in the tanks, best examples are quake and volcano cannons fitted on baneblades.
The only reason Knights and Titans exist is for the rule of cool. If you're a space fantasy/scifi franchise started after the 90s you are obligated to have giant mecha walkers.
Meta: Because this is a setting about dudes on the ground fighting each other, not ships nuking planets from orbit. In - universe: * Planets often have shields, orbital defense batteries, or warp nonsense that make it difficult or impossible to bombard from orbit. Punching through just enough to get a titan on the ground can make a big difference in battle. * Shooting things from orbit is imprecise and can cause collateral damage. While Titan's aren't exactly precision weapons, it helps to be able to minimize the risk to stuff you don't want to break. * Ships are often engaged in combat of their own as fighting wages on the ground. They can't always be ready to provide fire support, so it helps having dedicated support directly on the ground.
> Meta: Because this is a setting about dudes on the ground fighting each other, not ships nuking planets from orbit. This really is the true answer. Warhammer is not and should not try to be military sci fi, it's fantasy in space. If it was trying to be military sci fi, orbital bombardment would be far more prevalent, melee combat would be so rare as to be essentially non existent, and giant angry super men would be of at best situational use. But super knights having chainsword fights is cool, and that's why we all like Warhammer.
They talk about it a bit in the gothic war books, accuracy is a real problem not to be discounted (in 40k, in 30k they absolutely can and do use lots of orbital bombardment). In that they talk about a captain so exceptional at ground bombardment that he's rarely more than a *few kilometers* off and can walk impact to a target (because that doesn't take so long their position in orbit/planet spin has changed things). That kind of put it in perspective for me, in 40k they can hit a city *every time* but it's probably got shields and orbital batteries, a fortress *maybe*, if it's a good captain and it's big enough (or they've got enough time and no collateral around to worry about), a titan *no*. It's not explained anywhere I've read why it's that bad compared with 30k (this disparity also lets Chaos strikes be conveniently accurate if they need to be) but I'd guess they've lost some computerized atmosphere correction tools or something. Conversely, a Titan can hit a Titan at near its max ranges just about every time. EDIT: I should note this is with lances, Macro Cannons would be a whole other thing (which I have to imagine because they didn't talk about it, but I imagine... bad).
I remember this also being mentioned in a Space Marine novel.....maybe a Uriel Ventris one? They made I think just two shots with a bombardment cannon to begin their assault, which had to be extremely precise because.....well otherwise you've nuked to shit out of something else entirely. That's also why the Bombardment Cannons on Space Marine vessels are *Bombardment Cannons*. Because they're *accurate enough to bombard with*. There's no lack of power to them, they use them against other ships.
A lot of people I think make a minor mistake of going "Ground warfare happens because we like it" when it's that AND "They want those cities intact/places intact." It's one of the fun missions in Darktide, you go to stop a factory from melting down. Why, when there are so many others? Because they don't want to risk the heretics simply rebuilding the power plant and starting to make tanks of their own.
Frankly given 40k, I would assume missles are aimed by hand using a fucking sextant and several slaves.
May the machine god guide you to better understanding and watch over the functioning of your machine
It's actually Servitors, but the sextant thing isn't far from true. According to Dark Imperium, they line up the area and make the onboard guiding servitors do the rest. And this was how they did it with extremely rare, difficult to replace anti-psycher munitions that HAD to hit.
Every time they fire it kills 100 Slaves
Not for any pracitical purpose, mind you, they just need those slave juices to lube up the gun's barrel.
I believe the just put a lobotomized human in the front
Lances seem to be more accurate than bombardment cannons and macro cannons - in Traitor By Deed a strike cruiser is able to target an individual Farseer while he's in combat on the ground.
A lot easier if you don't only need to hit the Farseer...
If it’s that bad, how does 1 moving ship ever hit another one?
That's why I assume it's something to do with the atmosphere, because in space it's nowhere near that bad (but still pretty bad, lances have a max range of \~30,000km or roughly the distance from the UK to australia and back again, while a nova cannon or torpedo has a range of only about 600,000km, about from earth to the moon and half way back, all really short ranges for space combat).
In that regard is funny how t'au are the less fantasy and more scifi militaristic of the factions and are (or were) kinda baffled at the amount of melee combat the whole universe around them likes to do
I've kinda liked the in joke of Tau logically stating why an idea is stupid, only to be horrified when they find out everyone else is doing it anyway. They did the same thing with titans, by pointing out how titans are clearly idiotic propaganda tools that don't actually exist, as the concept has numerous logical flaws, and then they were actually attacked by titans.
And then it gets worse when you find out *there's actually a good reason sometimes.* Like, there's loads of stuff out there that's tough enough, or fast enough, or numerous enough that you will indeed end up with a face full of claws as a regular thing.
Don't forget that post-Heresy one of the best reasons to maintain Titans is "the other guys have them"
I mean, that's how nukes work IRL so
To be fair the kinda walloped the titans with aircraft. Space marines in melee on the other hand ☠️
This is brought up a lot, but we also have a canon example of titans quite easily gunning down mantas too from The Exodite now. Which, fair enough, it's a big target for an aircraft and titans have void shields.
Yeah for sure. I think the main difference is an entire generation of Earth Caste didn't whisper the entire hopes and dreams into the Manta's exhaust port each night for 25 years.
I imagine any commander would happily look at the ROI on trading a squadron of mantas for a titan, and happily sign off on the mission. You just don't tell the pilots that.
Nearly spit out my coffee laughing, thank you!
It's a bizarre one given that those are the same mantas used by the Tau fleet, which can destroy an escort with their heavy railguns and which can individually take on entire wings of thunderhawk fighters which are armed with titan grade weaponry. They're so much bigger than other factions' bombers that they almost considered ships and can be used for interstellar travel in extremis. I feel like they should have made the atmosphere-use heavy dropships a different vessel than the fleet ones, which seem vastly bigger and more powerful.
Its funny how they were scoffing at Titans and waving their Mantas and Tigersharks around.... but now they are fielding Stormsurge and the Taunar Supremacy Armour.
To be fair the Earth Caste guy who came up with those was noted to be an oddball. And they were largely designed to be largely defensive units, with some mobility to walk around in order to reposition, rather than invasion units. But yeah, it is funny to see them go the "may as well join in on the madness." Makes sense since a big reason why most other forces field titan equivalents is because the others guys have them. God help them if they ever have to fight a Necron Megalith on the field though.
Kinda a trope of the whole universe. Like everything is ridiculous, but then kinda makes sense. Saying prayers at your machines is silly, but when random pieces of code may he infected by the shards of a random God like entity well maybe those prayers actually help. Being all ick annihilate the planet seems over the top until one considers a gate into the warp opening around the planet due to enough chaos chicanery. Using random human brains instead of just using computers is nuts until you find out apparently the ai can be corrupted by chaos Ala men of iron. The Tau are just an excellent vehicle for the tropes to hit, because their shtick is that while they're "better" than alot of the other far less friendly factions, they only are because they're so naive they don't get how truly fucked everything is. Tbh kinda surprised there isn't a story about one of the absorbed human worlds managing to have a full on demon incursion yet.
The Tau serve two tropes simultaneously from a narrative perspective; 1) they show us “this is how the average human federation looks through an alien lens”. They act like how we expect humans to be in Star Trek or other sci fi universes. The logical and reasonable organization that protects the innocent, innovates their technology, and wants to unite all under one banner of peace and prosperity. The irony is that they’re ridiculously out of place and this is the one sci fi universe where that approach doesn’t work. 2) They’re almost the most newcomer friendly for the franchise. Books from a Tau POV allow a reader to see the Imperium and the wider galaxy piece by piece and understand just *how* fucked up the Imperium is in a way Imperial POV books don’t really touch on. Like, Cain glosses over the existence of servitors because he takes them for granted, but a Water Caste guy next to him was horrified at seeing one. Maybe if the Tau were focused on earlier in the setting they could’ve been used as a way to break in the setting for all of us and they’d be a more narratively balanced faction.
Unfortunately the Tau are relatively new to the setting so they couldn’t be focused on earlier (even though I think they have been around longer then not). They definitely help as an introductory pov though
Ha! That sounds awesome! I’ve not read any Tau books but that sounds great. What book is that from?
It's been years since I've read any of it, but I have vague memories that it's linked to the introduction of the Tau Manta, as the Manta was specifically introduced to be a counter for Imperial titans. At a guess it'd be in the old Imperial Armour series, but I wouldn't put money on me remembering that correctly.
The Manta is an orbital drop ship that just so happens to have a weapon big enough to hurt titans. It was the modified Tiger Sharks, which were given two of the same weapons to use as Titan hunters.
Yeah that's one of my favorite ideas that I've only ever heard second hand here and never the excerpts themselves but that they went "That's obviously propaganda" to "oh, SHIT, that's a walking cathedral with guns" brings me great joy
Oh which story is this from?
Close combat is only becomes bad when ranged wepons outstrip armour. In 40k at least in the lore power armour is resistant to most man portable ranged wepons. So it makes sense melee still happens. It should happon less then it does but its not unbelievable at all.
Iirc that was one of the main original concepts of the lore when it came to the tech. Modern day ranged weapons have far surpassed any form of armor, in 40k it’s the opposite, ranged weapons are playing catch up.
Also the symbolism, innit? Both in and out of universe. It's cool to see a big armored figure holding a sword, and then in universe, other than armor and logistics, it also works better against daemons cause symbolism, right?
Except it makes no sense that even the world's strongest chainsaw would have more power than a large gun at penetrating armour. IF anything, armour would protect *more* against melee.
Not necessarily true, there's different physical considerations to stopping a blade and stopping a bullet, you can make armor that's generally OK for blocking both but to truly be proof against one or the other a choice needs to be made. Like in real life, a kevlar weave will protect against stabs and small calibers, but it won't protect against a hunting rifle. On the flip side, ceramic plates can stop a hunting rifle, but they won't stop an ice pick.
There is, but ranged threats are various, and the setting does not distinguish protection against ballistic hits and energy hits for example. If armor is good, it's somehow good against everything, and vise versa
I think it's a matter of the right materials and continuous application of force through them. Bolters seem just as if not more effective than chainswords when firing repeatedly, and the exceptions that come to mind can probably be explained by a chainsword allowing its user to target armor seals and other weaknesses more easily.
And, assuming you consider your team better at melee than their team, it's a quicker battle with less attrition from stray shots to close into melee and just be done with it, than sitting behind rocks a km out taking shots "in the direction" of the enemy knowing 90% of shots will miss and 90% of hits won't kill/disable
Bolters aren't even true "guns" either, by function they're just handheld automatic grenade launchers(AGLs). Their caliber's oversized but otherwise pretty much the same as many modern militaries already strap to their aircraft.
No, they're true guns. Their ammo just activates a rocket motor after the usual powder charge kicks them out of the barrel at normal gun velocity to achieve greater than normal gun velocity.
Well I think it works similarly to the idea that a stab-resistant vest ain't great against a bullet and a bullet resistant vest ain't great against stabbing. Sure you can have a large round going several thousand feet per second but it's not the same as a dude running at you with a spear. Also to paraphrase someone else, Gun run out of Bang but Sword no run out of Stab
There is absolutely no way you can swing a sword/axe/hammer harder than a high-tech gun can fire. Armour capable of resisting a high-powered bullet/shell/energy-blast will easily be able to resist a sword swing. Melee just doesn't make sense logically, other than maybe some extremely niche specialised situations. But that's okay, 40k is rule-of-cool, not cold hard logic.
> But that's okay, 40k is rule-of-cool, not cold hard logic. Pretty much, I don't need a long winded justification, to enjoy the clearly silly premise that future combat will involve swordfighting. It's cool and that's more than enough for me.
Unless that sword has a "power field" whatever the fuck those are
Even then, there are more efficient ways to make use of a power-field than on a sword. Why does it even need to be sword-shaped if the field is what's doing all the work? If this was tech that actually existed, someone would figure out a way to allow a power-field to be employed at long-range (or, at least, longer than a sword length). And this is to say nothing of all the non-powered melee weapons, which are the majority.
Choppas are the best way to hack through power armor because Orks say they are the best way to hack through power armor. Force weapons and daemon weapons are psychically powered so need to be melee. Tyranids just haven't evolved to put rending claws on a launched bio-seed. Regular melee weapons can... Better target gaps in armor? Maybe power fields have the same problem (just in reverse) as the shields from Dune, where they only work at low velocity, and anything that can adjust its speed to go low velocity enough at the terminal phase requires AI or other missing tech or is just not very effective in the end when it can just be parried. Yah, it's all bs, but it's nice to have that vaguely believable bs :p
I would argue even realistically there wouldn't be that much orbital bombardment. You can bomb it, burn it, turn it into glass, poison it, kill billions in a nanosecond but it ain't yours until your troops are standing there and the enemy's isn't. Also you can't always use orbital bombardment cause that's seems like no escalation, which militaries don't like, and also if you want those facilities instead of rubble, you can't reasonably keep shooting from orbit.
I kinda agree with you if we're talking about how orbital bombardment would affect the real world. I think they'd be somewhat analogous to nukes in the position they hold, with perhaps less of an emotional stigma around using it, leading to greater use of orbital bombardment in situations where one side holds them and the other does not. If one side has the ability to strike from orbit, then the ground based force has no real way to achieve victory. Their options are surrender, or hope that the orbital force feels some compunction about wiping them off the map. If both sides can strike from orbit then any war between them would be suicidal. If a side starts to lose a conventional war, then they have no incentive to play nice and observe a taboo on escalation. Which is pretty much how mutually assured destruction plays out with existing nukes. Of course the logic of all this hinges on both sides being rational actors, with a serious stake in the current state of the planets surface. If the situation was an invasion force attacking a planet they don't control, then I think there'd be liberal use of tactical bombardment. They don't need to level every city, but they also have no incentive to leave a single airfield of military base intact. When it comes to Warhammer rationality goes out the window. Liberally bombarding a planet makes perfect sense when the surface is crawling with Orks/Nids/Heretics. There nay be a handful of key facilities worth preserving, but most of the planets surface won't be missed if it got a low kiloton lance strike.
Many planets also have ground defenses capable of engaging low orbit starships which is where you’d have to be to have any reasonable accuracy. If all you care about is removing the planet from existence you don’t even have to be in the same system. The Mechanicum have gravity anchors they use to grab asteroids and move them around. On more than one occasion they’ve redirected an asteroid toward another system so it blows up a planet for them.
Bombarding the enemy from orbit works until anything on the ground is wanted. Resources, factories, relics, anything. The moment something on the surface is desired, one side can build up and camp ontop of it waiting for you to land and charge.
Yeah Warhammer and certain political leaders don't seem like rational actors. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction
I think a lot of people place too much focus on orbital bombardment/space control, and not enough thought into having to control the ground, especially if you want assets there. "Nuke them from orbit" is fine, as long as you don't want the factories/mines/farms/cities there. Why wage decades long wars over a planet in 40k? Because both sides want those resources and to use them. Hell, IIRC there is an entire ground war (or was) on a stranded battleship between Imperium and Tau, because both sides want the ship even though it's warp engines got destroyed.
> "Nuke them from orbit" is fine, as long as you don't want the factories/mines/farms/cities there. Why wage decades long wars over a planet in 40k? Because both sides want those resources and to use them. The problem with that is that waging a decades long ground war doesn't preserve anything. The Astartes swooping in and taking the site on the first day of the war might be preferable to bombardment. But the guard turning the place into a giant Stalingrad just does the same as a lance strike, but slower.
That's where the 40k aspect of it comes into play. Yes at that point it's not as rational, but neither side will concede defeat and will fight until the very end.
40K is a bunch of shit that sounded cool to British nerds in the 80s.
I REALLY hope cocaine was involved. I only take it as read cause it was the 80s
Nah I don't think cocaine made it to the Midlands until the 1990s. It would have been Snakebite (half cider half lager with blackcurrant cordial on top), cheap lager (probably Fosters) and cheap cigarettes (Marlboro lights or B&H maybe) from my experiences of Nottingham. Weed probably hashish blocks too. Possibly speed looking at Noise Marines.
TIL
I actually think a Warhammer game about logistics, subterfuge, security, etc would be awesome. Imagine a dark eldar raid screwing up an agriworld administratum center and the neighboring hiveworld falls to chaos due to cults springing up from desperation/starvation
That's true from one perspective, but nevertheless the story would be worse if there were no explanation for why starships don't win all ground battles by bombardment. Fantasy in space where the naval characters forget to use their weapons... That would be inferior to canon.
I agree with everything you said, but I feel like Space Marines would still be super useful. Especially in space, as the ability to quickly take out the bridges of enemy ships and assassinate high priority targets is a great strength.
My favourite is when people ask the most obscure questions like there is a perfectly reasonable scientific answer and then people will break themselves trying to formulate as scientific an answer as possible rather than just say “because it’s a fictional universe”. Everyone knows in real life Titans would cost ridiculous amounts of resources but would topple over on the slightest undulating surface not to mention how easy they would be to knock down but why let that stop you from having them wield the galaxy’s largest chain saw. Can you imagine if Star Wars fixed a giant flick-knife onto the front of an AT-AT.
Im gonna nitpick but Titans are as about as precise as a sledgehammer. If you were worried about collateral Astartes would be the better choice no?
That's not bad. A sledgehammer can still hit a nail if handled properly. Generally speaking, orbital bombardment would be more akin to swinging a wrecking ball from the back of a moving truck.
>orbital bombardment would be more akin to swinging a wrecking ball from the back of a moving truck. Depends on the ship perhaps. From the Horus Heresy trailer, a lance strike from the Vengeful Spirit was able to take out a titan, and everything else within a few kilometre radius. In other words, you'll hit the nail, broke the table and cracked the floor.
That's fair. Though someone else pointed out that 30k ships seemed to have better accuracy than 40k ships. And of course the VS isn't your average ship
Yeh, ive got a mate who's an amateur blacksmith, he can swing one with accuracy that I could hardly lift even before I had a hernia. You can be very accurate with a sledgehammer and a skilled person can definitely use one to crack a nut.
Orbital Bombardment tends to cause irreversible damage to a planet's atmosphere/capability for supporting life. Titans have more localized/less fundamentally damaging impacts to planets.
You can fit weaponry of any size to a sufficiently large ship. I'm sure there are smaller vessels
From a purely military standpoint...sure. But keep in mind, our first real indication of Titans came from post-Mechanicum Mars. There were religious components to the Titans. They were walking places of worship. Once Titans got folded into the greater Imperium and the Ministorum was established, the Titans became "avatars" more or less for the Emperor.
There were titans in the daot, although they were a bit different from the titans that came after that
To say something different than what other said but still address the point of causing a lot of damage: Stuff falling from space to a planet's surface has a metric FUCK TON of energy behind it, doesn't even have to have a warhead or w/e, if it's anything of size, it's going to wipe out whatever it hits that isn't heavily shielded.
There's still an issue of accuracy. It's easier to hit something 3 kilometers away from you as opposed by being 100km away in orbit or something.
And you’d have to take into account atmospheric entry resistances throwing off your aim
On Earth, the atmosphere is quite thin compared with the size of the planet. And Mars has even thinner atmosphere Also, Earth is probably the biggest terrestrial planet outside of super Earths (that shouldn't be habitable by normal humans)
The other ship is actively trying not to get hit and moving. Hitting a city that isn't moving should be trivial.
If it's not in the STC, it doesn't go on the ship. Mechanicus will flay you alive and make you a servitor. Most, if not all, imperial naval vessels are primarily designed for one thing. Void warfare. There are a handful of ship classes still in service but very few in number that can do precision bombardment. They almost can't be replaced, and they are under a tight leash by fleet admirals and above. You have better luck getting a titan legion to deploy. Your standard line ship is loaded with macro cannons that do fuckall to ground targets and are beyond inaccurate. There are no targeting computers or ai to help adjust aim. That shit is almost entirely done manually. You're more likely to hit your own troops than the enemies. There is a reason imperial warships prefer to broadside in void warfare. Easy to see, easy to hit.
>Your standard line ship is loaded with macro cannons that do fuckall to ground targets and are beyond inaccurate. There are no targeting computers or ai to help adjust aim. That shit is almost entirely done manually. You're more likely to hit your own troops than the enemies. There is a reason imperial warships prefer to broadside in void warfare. Easy to see, easy to hit. This is just nonsense. Void warfare is done over hundreds of kilometeres of space, with occasional close quarters ramming or boarding actions. No targeting computers means that nobody should ever hit anything at all, because both you and your enemy are too far away and moving too quickly to be shot by eye.
This was my reasoning as well. Void combat is at much greater ranges than orbital, vs moving targets. Bombarding a city sized target with a lance weapon should be easy enough. Collateral damage is the issue. Just finished reading Gaunts Ghosts: His Last Command. They have the ability, and would prefer, to orbital strike the city, but they think it might be holy somehow and ground assault it. Then they change their mind and dig a kilometer deep crater where the city used to be. So they can, and they can do it well. Just there isn't much left after.
>Collateral damage is the issue. And I'm pretty sure that you can power your lances with less energy, or using ammo with less explosive power
> or using ammo with less explosive power My brother in Christ these things lob shells the size of camper vans and several times the weight ON THE LOW END. There is going to be a metric fuck ton of damage done no matter the payload simply because of how physics work.
I guess that volume of TNT is roughly of the same destructive power of some weapons smaller than a titan If they are filled with anti-matter on the other hand... well...
Yes but it’s 40k. As a commenter above said, this is fantasy in space, not military fiction. It’s dumb, it’s silly, and that’s the entire premise of the setting
except even in 40k void warfare is done hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart. The guy above is just saying his own bullshit and passing it as official lore. Thats the thing with 40k. You dont expect it to be realistic but it somehow manages to to do it in a non intentional way.
I've always kinda sighed when people get so hung up on distance numbers, but yeah... this is true. Same with the idea of unguided munitions being the main weapon. The most "realistic" for the setting explanation I saw was lance weapons are the long range beams, then as ships get closer to each other macrocannons start opening up. If you get close enough, then boarding torpedos and other craft.
Remember that standard line ships are * kilometers * in length. So the scale is relative.
You are getting down voted for logic. Welcome to 40k.
Some of them had good points actually. But yes, sometimes I feel that I'm hurting the head canon of others with my own head canon. Even if I'm still under the regular framework that GW created. I'm not even talking about female space marines
https://youtu.be/pvXSeWcA9Ns
dunno why you are downvoted, when the commenter you are answering to makes orbital bombardments sound like Exterminatus
I guess many people had the same mistake understanding my comment. Or perhaps their understanding of orbital bombardment always equals to exterminatus But let's remember that one particular form of exterminatus requires many ships firing against the planet for a long time, everywhere on the surface. So I guess that fewer ships, for a limited time, in a particular region, don't cause an exterminatus on a global scale
You don’t need smaller vessels. Lance weapons have variable power settings. You can set it to boil an ocean, destroy a city block, or blow up a single building.
“What is the purpose being having tanks when you have aerial bombardment”. It was a genuine question considered by Allied war planners when they absolutely shredded German tank divisions with fighter-bombers - and there was a very similar question that recently has been asked when the Ukrainians used MANPATS to shred Russian tanks. The answer to both questions was that the tank serves a role that the others don’t. The Halo franchise posits the same question - why would you ever have ground combat when you can just glass a planet from orbit and move on? The answer in Halo was that sometimes the covenant need to land on a planet to recover Forerunner artefacts. So why do 40k armies bother with ground combat at all, let alone deploying titans? Well the simple non-lore answer is cause it’s cool. The in-lore reasons are myriad. First is that ground combat often happens when something important is located planetside - be it the Emperor’s Palace, some highly fortified bunkers, an ancient relic like Necron pylons, a population centre that needs to be taken somewhat intact or some other reason. Next is the fact that total orbital superiority is not always achieved - lots of battles from Calth to Terra to the most recent Battle of Idolatros, will have armies fighting over land while their is a concurrent battle in space; here the navy doesn’t have the ability to do orbital bombardment so deploying titans brings firepower without orbital supremacy. We also have the fact that Titans are a morale statement just as much a fighting unit - iirc the Tau shat themselves when they realised that the Imperium is such a bloated monstrosity that it can just deploy these colossal mechs that are extremely costly and not that efficient. Finally we see that titans are effective (yes realistically it would be a poor design, but remember the imperial guard’s main tank is a ww1 tank chassis with a ww2 turret on top) - we see titan legions deal colossal damage to their enemies, absolutely shredding through regular armies and bloodying even Space Marine Legions. So ultimately, Titans are a tool for a different task to the navy. Orbital bombardment can Exterminatus a planet, but often you need to deal less damage - and sometimes you need that damage to be less indiscriminate than firing a weapon from space and then having it travel through the atmosphere.
I'm so happy I looked up MANPATS before going ahead with correcting you. 😂 Incidentally in Danish "pat" means "tit" singular.
I will admit I did use MANPATS cause I think it’s a funny word, glad to know it actually is
To add a bit to this, I believe it was Templin Institute that did a video covering why futuristic militaries still have standing armies when they can just orbitally bombard stuff.
War is still all about taking and/or holding ground and only infantry can do that reliably.
To add to the Morale component- Probably the Imperium’s most consistent, reliable enemy on the battlefield are Orks. There will always be more Orks, and they will always be spoiling for a fight- and against Orks specifically, the massive size and profile of titans is uniquely effective
Halo franchise is a brilliant example of the whole "orbital control means you've won" nonsense so many scifi fans push without thinking at all. Orbital control is important, but then you have to answer the following question: Do you want anything on the planet surface? If the answer is yes, you deploy ground troops. Relics, resources, factories/cities, anything of importance on the ground can be camped on by defenders because you won't nuke that site from orbit. And thus you must deploy ground troops. Halo and 40k basically do this a lot. In halo, the Covenant could just bombard/glass locations from orbit and win the second they obtained orbital security. But if they wanted relics from the surface they'd get stuck in ground battles, which could last long enough reinforcing UNSC fleets could arrive to kick them from orbit. Same thing for 40k. It's the whole basis of the first Space Marine game as I recall. "Giant ork wave on surface, do we bombard? Negative, Titan factories on surface with completed/nearly completed titans inside. We cannot risk those. Deploy space marines."
Naval bombardment can't walk through a void shield and destroy the target and also cause massive psychological warfare. Also losing air space supremacy or having it in equal measure means you lose that superiority to begin with let alone if you're run off like what happened in the 2nd and 3rd war for Armageddon
Void shield don't stop phisical objects? I remember that on the gaunt's stories they blocked rain and another time they blocked the ghosts from retreating (and cut someone in half).
They stop things that have enough energy be it kinetic or otherwise. You can walk through most void shields unless it’s tuned up to be something like a force field. Maintaining a solid wall of void shield over a hive would block everything, including the air and rain, and would be insanely energy consuming. So basically if you go slow enough you can get through them but it’s unpleasant. Go over the tigger point for kinetic energy or otherwise and it shunts that energy into the warp.
So essentially, the slow blade penetrates the shield?
May your blade chip and shatter!
By the God Emperor, the Spice must flow
There is only one Emperor, and his name is Shai Hulud
So don't sneeze
They do as described many times in the Siege of Terra Series, it depends on the object itself and the speed it's going through things like projectiles will be stopped while weather is also stopped and other times it doesn't stop ect. There's a wide variety of descriptions of void shields
>There's a wide variety of descriptions of void shields I just assume that it's how much energy you use on the shield. For the most part very large shields won't have enough energy to become a force field.
Yeah I think that is something brought up in one of the guants ghost novels where the shield is so weak it barely keeps out the dust storms
I imagine it works differently when the physical object penetrating the shield is wrapped in its own void shields.
They're able to be adjusted. The highest setting is a hard wall, blocking everything including light from penetrating the shield. It creates a blinding hazy effect, makes a terrible smell, and consumes enough power that it's only sustainable for a short period of time. On the lower setting it's sensitive to things moving at high speeds. Plasma cannons, laser batteries, and ballistic macro cannons all get flickered into the warp. Slow torpedoes and boarding pods can pass through the field.
"Fire from the sky" sounds imho like something with it's own share of psychological warfare. As for void shields thats a valid point, though it depends how many resources for bombarding there are. Bombard target protected by void shields with enough weapons with high heat output (thermonuclear, plasma etc) and target will simply sink under the surface due to geological melting, possibly destroying void generators and/or target along the way. Obviously though that's not a desirable outcome if target area has high value.
To be fair in our own experience in real life air power never lives up to the theoretical idea of scaring the people being bombed into surrender. This was a serious chain of thought in the development of early air warfare, but it turns out that in reality "fire from the sky" makes people made more than frightened and just makes them even more determined to fight. See: Japan WW2, Ukraine Now, Afghanistan for decades, etc. Air power is less scary than a large physical object right inside your line of sight. So Titans would absolutely be scarier and induce surrender more than bombings.
Air power's purpose in modern militaries is as an element that can enable decisive manoeuvre through the use of heavier munitions against enemy strong points, and to suppress the enemies capabilities and ability to manoeuvre, not attempting to directly induce surrender. The russian military just lacks the capability to attempt it from what we xan see, for who knows what reason. Afghanistan was used as fire support, not a method of inducing surrender/enabling manoeuvre on large unit scale. What makes a titan so dumb is you would just strike it with artillery if not air power if not from orbit. It's a huge slowass target any reasonable force should beable to destroy or immobilise. But I love them and think thry perfectly represents why the imperium is a dying power.
Warhound titans are quick, the others have powerful void shields. They deploy in groups to cover each others weaknesses. They're situational but I wouldn't call them inefficient.
What if these comments would not apply to a modern day cruiser? They’re big targets that don’t move incredibly fast.
If you can put that level of energy on a target you can probably just break the void shield through brute force lol (smack it until the generator powering it is overwhelmed)
I still see the advantages as very situational
No they're not. If the target is heavily fortified with void shields and anti-orbital weaponry, then your ships are not going to be able to damage it without being threatened by the ground defenses. In that case you need a ground assault to disable those defenses. If the target is also heavily fortified from ground attacks, then you need Titans to make a breach on the ground. It's like asking why we use tanks and infantry when we have planes and artillery. Planes can get shot down by ground units, and artillery can flatten the target but if you do that then all you'll have won is a very impressive pile of rubble. Not exactly ideal when what you're flattening is something like an irreplaceable factory that produces equipment that the Admech doesn't know how to make anymore. At any rate you'll still have to occupy the area you've conquered with ground units, who will get attacked by any surviving units that were entrenched in the area.
To summarize the above, a Titan can bring ship-grade weaponry inside of planetary or regional void shields while the ships themselves can only fire futiley at said void shields from low orbit. Also titans are far less lethal than bombardment. A few lance barrages can cause a mass extinction event and ruin the biosphere for decades. Think of a titan as opposed to a ship barrage like an MLRS or TOS-1 Thermobaric delivery system compared to an ICBM
It is simple enough to clear a staging area for landing titans and other ground forces. It is not so simple to conduct orbital bombardments in contested voidspace
I'd say that if the space around the planet is contested, then a landing is even more difficult. So in my opinion, space battles need to be won in order to launch a planned ground campaign on the planet. Except when dropping a few marines from orbit for a very specific target Plus naval weaponry have the advantage of covering the planet surface faster than the speed of a titan's movement. I mean, the ship orbits the planet way faster
You can clear a patch of space on the ground or even on the other side of the planet and fight your way through.
Yes and you take years to do so, and if the enemy wins local air/space supremacy, even for a couple of hours, they can bombard your troops (that are far away form their real target).
A couple of hours is not enough to breach theater void shields. During the attack on Gorkograd during the War of the Beast, they made their breach by coordinating orbital attack with ground attacks. The whole Siege of Terra has orbital firepower to support infantry. Infantry attack and bring down shields (or sections thereof) and then open up orbital attack. That was when the triators had the luxury of uncontested orbital superiority. Orbital bombardment weakened the palace shields to allow for slow moving aircraft to enter and make the first attacks.
History shows it possible to launch ground forces even when your enemies have air superiority. It won't make much difference with void superiority. As others stated, you either drop them somewhere where it's safer and have them march towards the objective. Or in an opening of the enemies defenses. or, as you stated, drop a specialized group that's meant to target anti-air anti-void weapons. Clearing a larger, more reasonable LZ to drop more larger forces in to contest the ground battle. In both cases, the air force is usually executating interception runs and/or distractions. With the goal to limit other planes and anti-air weapons from shooting the ground assualt down. Though their will be losses, which are accounted for when the plans are being drafted. I think what you're forgetting is if your navy is fighting the enemies navy. Then the enemies navy is more focused on fighting your navy. Both sides temporarily lose the superiority when engaging their counterpart. So, while that's going on, you start landing as many resources on the ground as you can. Such as a walking fortresses church with equivalent firepower to a navy ship. This is, of course, all the while your enemy is most likely resupplying and reinforcing their ground forces as well. So both sides are playing a game of stopping them from doing what they want. If the ground battle is won, then two things can happen. 1. You have all the big guns that can shoot into space. Giving your navy the advantage. 2. The enemy no longer has a reason to stick around. They retreat to limit their loses and to regroup onto a different front or counter attack. Just because a Navel ship may be better at a task than a Titan doesn't always mean it's the right tool for the job. When you don't have access to one, then you may still have access to the other. Just as theirs times when you'll have access to neither. It is better to have a wider range of tools at your disposal than to rely on just a catch-all.
They’re cool.
True
Mate, people have given you well thought out answers and backed it up with real life military analogues as well as in-universe information. Yet you keep repeating the same points. Not a healthy way to ask a question or debate a position.
Repeating? Are you sure you aren't mistaking me with someone else?
He’s really not. You keep bringing up the same points over and over again.
I'm trying to reply to many people that use the same points over and over again. So excuse me if I lose the perspective of the debate. It isn't easy on my end either Hundreds of notifications to manage
Orbital bombardment doesn’t work as well when you are defending a planet. Or if you’ve lost the void battle. Or if there are orbital defenses or planetary shields that are protecting key targets from being bombarded.
What stops the titan from just getting orbital striked in 2 of those 3 cases.
Accuracy would be my best guess. They can bombard your general direction, but however big titans are supposed to be, it's still a microscopic needle to orbital vessels. Also, if you are defending or lost the void battle, you may still have void shields to prevent orbital bombardment, so titans would be safe even with perfect accuracy.
How many shots can they land on a relatively tiny target in rapid enough succession to break the titan's void shields?
The Titan can fight under a city’s void shields
What's the point of a scalpel when you have a cleaver? Or, maybe more accurately, Why carpet bomb a city when nukes exist? The answer to these sorts of questions is always the same: scale of destruction matters.
The same reason modern armies still use tanks and armored fighting vehicles in a world where they have aerial bombardment and attack helicopters: Tanks/AFVs can take and **hold ground**, Airplanes and helicopters cannot.
That same reason is also why soldiers are trained to do things with smaller arms and cqc; a tank can’t go into a building and clear it of insurgents. An airplane can’t do a pat down at a security checkpoint. A Titan can’t handle a hostage situation- well actually…
>A Titan can’t handle a hostage situation- well actually… \- Stop, I have hostages here (Imperial Vegeta smugness)
“DON’T MOVE OR I’LL BLAST EM!” *FOGHORN* “Nevermind. You win.”
Honestly, because it's metal as fuck. 40k is not worried about actual logical logistics, and will invent whatever defenses are needed to deter orbital bombardment to justify Engine War.
Necessary only to satisfy the Rule of Cool...
You don’t seem to actually want people to answer this question, but instead are hoping they will agree with your clearly already decided opinion that Titans are worthless.
In the context of providing close support: They don't want to destroy hive cities or ground forces unnecessarily. Putting some rough back of the page numbers together based on an Earth sized planet: If you were providing overwatch in geostationary orbit, and you had a Laser (basically instantaneous), and you aim at a particular point, and you miss by 0.1 degrees, you miss by 60km. 0.01 degrees you miss by 6 km. A titan will hit things to the meter accuracy. Given a lot of fighting is armies basically on top of eachother, missing by even a few km either misses or fries your own forces. In the context of softening forces up prior to invasion or basically destroying the forces in the midle of nowhere: They do that. They do use orbital bombardment: [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Orbital\_Strike](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Orbital_Strike) The astartes have a ship specialized for it: [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Battle\_Barge](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Battle_Barge) And drop pods with astartes are a sort of bombardment as well.
Also to add void shield might cover the entire planet or enough of the engagement area stopping orbital bombardedment but the titan can get within the bubble which is the battlefields you play on. Then once you have them why wouldn't you use them for other stuff. Rule of cool was the main thing practicality doesn't matter when you have magic level science for all intents and purposes to us with the made up name dropped items.
Why do just orbital bombardment at range when instead you can do it up close and personal?
Psychological impact. When a fortress starts walking towards you and half the mountain you’re hiding on suddenly explodes, you tend to not want to fight anymore Titans are also more accurate than orbital bombardment
Titans are akin to WW1/2 Siege artillery, theyre useful when you need to crack a fortress to assault a heavily defended position. They bring heavy firepower beyond what most ground targets can resist on a mobile platform and are well protected themselves with their void shields and armament. There are fortresses which can’t be cracked by lesser engines so they bring up Titans to deal with them. Why not just use a void ship? Economy of force and proportionality. Real estate is valuable and a void ship bombardment can crack a planet is ways you don’t want or you run into a place you can’t crack with voidship batteries either on a good time table or it can shoot back with guns powerful enough that you can’t risk your fleet against them. Titans might be hard to make but I guarantee they’re cheaper than even a Cobra class Destroyer (which is about the size of a Venator Class Star Destroyer, 1.2km long)
This is 40k, we left realism and logic behind a long time ago. This reminds me of the Tau not believing Titans existed because such a thing is such a massive waste of resources and a logistical nightmare to manage, surely no one would be dumb enough to build such a thing...Then they saw those walking churches in the distance...
Because impossibly fuckhuge god machines are way cooler than orbital bombardment
The largest titan is massively smaller then then smallest warship. The tallest are listed at most 100m tall, versus, a sword frigate with is at least 1.5 km long, a titan is actually proportionally more armed and armoured then a void ship per metre. Void ships have to carry cargo, hangers and stores. Titans are pure war machine. Emplaced weapons capable of holing a starship will have a relatively broad arc of fire, when pointed up at the sky. Titans approach on a horizontal plane, meaning that relatively few weapons can enagage then at one time, as such they are more precise weapons. Titans are comparatively maneuvrable, compact weapons platforms which can be deployed on a limited front, whereas warships are even more valuable then titans, more easily engaged by the right weapons and more vulnerable during orbital bombardment,
The same reason we still use infantry despite nuclear bombs exist. Orbital Bombardment only works if you want to kill something, and don't care about any of the collateral. See: the Virus Bombing of Istvaan III. Horus virus bombed the planet with all the Loyalist members of the traitor legions, because he just wanted to kill them all. However, the marines were warned, so many were able to survive. He was just going to blast them from orbit, but Angron went Angron and decided to drop onto the planet to kill the remaining loyalists... So now Horus couldn't bombard the loyalists without possibly attacking the World Eaters.
Perhaps for punching through lines and/or destroying massed enemy armour to secure a strategic objective. If the front lines are close in a meatgrinder campaign then orbital bombardment is too likely to cause friendly-fire casualties or damage the objective. If the friendly side withdraws prior to the strike then they may be routed into a retreat, or be too slow to capitalise on the damage caused to the front. Having a walking murdercity smash through the lines with an army following its wake is more likely to cause permanent strategic change.
Titans are the status symbol, the pinnacle and pride of the Imperium as well as Admech, and you can say the same for the other races too. let's just say there're probably some people voicing their concern about the dubious use of resource to make a Titan, but in the end the titans always win, the Imperium got immeasurable amount of resource to make them anyway.
orbital bombardment is for enemy fortresses, and planets that wont comply, titans are for holding ground in a fight, and claiming ground. titans have a war-horn that is "godlike" and it puts fear and respect of the imperium/mechanicus into the hearts and minds of civvies.
WH40k obeys the rule of cool. Meaning, if giant mecha are cool, bring it on!
Agree
Any ship with a lance weapon or macrobattery can perform an orbital bombardment. So even a frigate can do that if it has a lance weapon. Both can devastate an entire area and wipe out a small hive city in one blow. A Titan can only do that if it fires for a long time...a very long time. Guns on ships are terribly inaccurate. On average, their hits are off by kilometres. This can also be the own regiment or the target. In contrast, a Titan fires much more accurately. Titans are siege engines, they can knock down the walls of hive cities on the ground to make a breach. Ship weapons are also unsuitable for this.
I think part of it is that they already have them on hand and as others have pointed out in order for an orbital bombardment to work you need A) a ship that's not otherwise engaged, B) a spotter on the ground and C) communications and D) you need all of those coordinated at the exact moment you need the bombardment done. Whereas with a titan all you'd need is to have some point put a titan on the ground. Hot dropping one onto an active battlefield is of questionable utility vs orbital bombardment but if you brought one in a month ago it can just hang out until you need it.
Its ok for you to not like titans, OP.
It's both okay to like them and not like them I admit that I would want to have an imperial knight mini someday
Long story short: because that isn't interesting to read. The 40K universe has acknowledged the argument you've put forward: void superiority means that you usually win the battle planetside. Example: In the Dark Imperium series, Ultramarines and allied Imperial forces are fighting the Death Guard on the surface of a planet. Meanwhile the Novamarines space fortress above the planet is attempting to repel enemy boarding parties. Both Guilliman and another main character (Frater Mathieu) state that no matter what happens planetside, whoever controls the space fortress at the end of the day will use it to scour the other faction from the planet's surface. Without trying to spoil the book for anyone I will say this: that is exactly what happens. Warhammer novels (in my experience) go to extreme lengths to create battles where orbital bombardments can't happen. Xenos dark tech or Dark Age planetary shields, planetside gun batteries, warp storms, opposing naval fleets, important resources/relics planetside that can't be damaged at any cost, ideological motivations, etc are all plot devices to prevent orbital bombardments from stealing the show. The authors seem to believe that the books would be less interesting to read if they all ended: ..."and then X faction orbitally bombarded the planet into the stone age. The end." And I agree. I wouldn't think too hard about what X faction should do, or what the most logical course of action for Y faction would be. Those will always come second to telling a good story. Moreover, a large part of the Imperium's characterization is that they make decisions that are short sighted and illogical. They are the ignorant remnants of a dying race whose best days are behind them. The train wrecks they get themselves into for no good reason are an integral part of the setting.
Because fuck you dropping a walking cathedral that blares organ music is cool as fuck - the imperium, probably.
Jimmy Space went on a bender and it inspired him.
Shock and awe?
The same reason why air power can’t/won’t win wars now- you can bomb the shit out of whatever you want to, but at the end of the day, you’ve gotta have dicks in the dirt and (in the case of warhammer 40k) 100ft tall walking cathedral mechs to actually seize ground and win.
Ask it to the guys that thought nukes would make everything else obsolete how it went for them.
Titans are sacred as Machine's God incarnations. Their superior firepower fills enemies of the Omnissiah with shock and awe.
Look at M2. We have planes, jets, arty, rockets yet infantry is on the ground doing the work. A city is taken, when Infantry plants a flag. Not if it is bombarded enough, or leveled to dust. Now, all the other things are just as important in waging a successful war. But you can't just min/max it. Now imagine during the Age of Strife some super scary big Xenos, or weird ground-tech construct, or something else. Infantry will want to upgrade to counter these things. Maybe they are really fast and have more of a CQC role. You can't always call in a lance strike...you need something to counter it on the ground. The whole shield argument has also been mentioned.
I point out that Prospero could stand up to orbital bombardment, so the Space Marines had to go in and get them personally. A lot of the time, you can't just bomb it from orbit. You want whatever they have, not just to leave a crater. Sometimes, the enemy has anti-ship guns: Orbital bombardment leaves the ships vulnerable as they move into position, so it's not the go-to answer.
The starship troopers novel answers this question pretty good.
The same reason why a butcher has more than one type of knife or cleaver.
The titans at least before the Horus heresy did more for destroying enemy morale than ships ever did. It evokes a instinctual sense of dread when you see a figure walking over mountains with fire and death as it’s only companion
I look at it the same way as I look at why Star Wars has dogfighting in space. They have technology to traverse the galaxy in single cockpit fighter ships and yet they’re still engaging in WWII style dogfighting they should have certainly have weapons that can lock on to the enemy and destroy them from extreme distances. Unfortunately that doesn’t look as cool so we get all these scenes of massive space battles and starfighters dogfighting.
It’s the same reason why people use mechs in Battletech: Because it looks rad as hell. Practically speaking, mechs are completely outmatched by tanks and helis. The most realistic possible role for mechs is heavy infantry, with an emphasis on infantry. Hard Sci-Fi very quickly devolves into nuke fests, with ships shooting nukes and near c projectiles at each other while using [nukes as propulsion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)), nukes as flashbangs, and [using nukes to make lasers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pumped_laser). Because nukes are the most efficient energy source unless you are messing with large quantities of antimatter.
>The most realistic possible role for mechs is heavy infantry, with an emphasis on infantry. Mostly this And W40K already mastered in with the astartes, since both the body and the armor are peak technology
The Imperium is stupid and insane.
That's always the default explanation
Because they're cool.
The same reason that any setting with giant robots uses to explain it; mechs are cool. In real life, bipedal war machines on that scale are a profoundly bad idea for all sorts of practical reasons, but they're cool.
I totally get where you're coming from! I think the main appeal of gigantic titans might be the psychological impact they have on enemies. Sure, orbital bombardment is super effective, but seeing a massive titan marching towards your defenses would be absolutely terrifying. Plus, they can engage in close-quarters combat if needed. But yeah, logistically, it's a bit of a head-scratcher!
Everyone who uses the contradictory and convoluted lore misses the primary and sole reason there are titans. That GW wanted big stompy robots. If warhammer was supposed to make sense titans *wouldnt* be feasible. But warhammer is not supposed to make sense and the in-world reasoning only works for as long as you dont think about it. GW doesnt spend a lot of energy making their lore consistent and neither should you. Just enjoy it for what it is.
Look if you try to apply real world tactics to basically any fictional story, especially sci fi, it all falls apart.
Honestly tho real world tactics don’t explain titans, but they explain the need for ground based weapons platforms. It’s basically asking « why have artillery when we have helicopters and planes ».
You can ask that question about basically any fictional giant robot. Gypsie Danger had a gun on its arm capable of fucking a Kaiju up. Probably would have been more effective to just build a bunch of tucking tanks to put those guns on
Orbital bombardment is viewed as a nuclear options in many settings, and titans bring a level of power and sway that can be used to win battles without the point and click adventure gun sitting in high orbit.
I'm pretty sure that you can use a smaller ship, or lower the power used by the weapons
The more relevant question to ask is why use Titans and knights when you can use tanks? What can they do that tanks can't? There already are tanks larger than knights and few about the same size as smaller Titans (some HH tanks are actually bigger than even Imperator Titans). They are way more stable and don't require a guy melting his brain with the machine spirit. In lore many Titan weapons are already fitted in the tanks, best examples are quake and volcano cannons fitted on baneblades. The only reason Knights and Titans exist is for the rule of cool. If you're a space fantasy/scifi franchise started after the 90s you are obligated to have giant mecha walkers.
The correct question would be. Why titans instead of small ordinatuses?
The age-old question of mechs vs tanks
It's because James Workshop sells troops/mecha minis and don't forget that all the lore stuff is made to maximize their minis revenue