Good anti-Imperium of Man fappery essays.

Sakuya Izayoi · Post by **Sakuya Izayoi** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:59 am

Do genestolen orks produce hybrids from their spores? That would be bad news if you intended to simply mop up the victor.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 7:42 am

I have always be baffled as to why the imperium wouldn't win the Tyrranid war, as they have cyclonic torpedoes and a (admittedly crap-ass backwards) war machine based on cosmically plentiful metals, while the Tyrranids are based on the thin layer of slime covering of a few dirtballs, cosmically speaking. Everything about the Tyrranids depends on biomass, remove it from the local space and they starve; better still to lure a hive fleet to land at a sacrificial planet and send a suicide squadron of escorts to double tap the crust with said cyclonic torpedoes, wasting even more of the hive fleet's biomass assets in the Emperor's incandescent fury. And AFAIK this is the in fluff tactic that is starving the hives, so good(?) on the inquisition and what-not.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 8:09 am

DSMatticus wrote:You defeat tyranids by preventing them from holding territory long enough to harvest it OR you glass planets until there is no usable biomass to harvest.

No you don't. Glassing your own planet isn't defeating them and holding the planet doesn't matter. If we accept that every nid you kill is just a future nid then it doesn't matter if you hold a planet for a thousand years and kill a trillion nids in the process. The day you lose the Tyranids get a trillion nids back. Unless you win with no break forever then Nid's win and expended nothing. If all their resources are completely fungible and neither travel, age, or war reduces those resources then only a war fought with no losses can ever defeat them.

To be clear, I'm aware that what I'm saying is retarded. I'm basically demanding to know the rate at which energy loss cause the tyranid recycling process to no longer be efficient. That is a ridiculous thing I'm doing. It's absurd and unanswerable and I know that but to make any of the fiction make sense it would actually be a good step to say that it has been noticed by people involved in the war that when a thousand gaunts die taking an outpost on a barren planet that the process involved in boiling them down and turning them into mycetic spores to launch back into space and turning them back into gaunts again to invade the next outpost means that the next outpost only has to fight 500 gaunts.

I like and dig the kill, consume, continue aspect of the Tyranids. I think they're one of the strongest concepts in GW fluff. It's just disingenuous of the fluff to say that both Tyranids and Orks multiply and come back stronger when you kill them because important events in the fluff like the war of Macragge or Armageddon just don't matter if that's true. If every war waged on the Tyranids has had them expend no biomass, and in fact come away with more biomass then when they started then the Tyranids are operating on a 100% win rate and that's all anyone in the fluff should ever be talking about.

Tangental question: Does anyone know any stories where someone spoke with a Tyranid in any way? A psycher or anything like that. I'd be interested to see how they portray Tyranids through the prism of a conversation of some kind.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 9:06 am

Dean wrote:No you don't. Glassing your own planet isn't defeating them and holding the planet doesn't matter. If we accept that every nid you kill is just a future nid then it doesn't matter if you hold a planet for a thousand years and kill a trillion nids in the process. The day you lose the Tyranids get a trillion nids back. Unless you win with no break forever then Nid's win and expended nothing. If all their resources are completely fungible and neither travel, age, or war reduces those resources then only a war fought with no losses can ever defeat them.

Those conclusions do not follow. Tyranids invest resources in conquest which they can reclaim upon success - that's it. If they throw a trillion nids at a planet and end up being forced to retreat, then their ranks are a trillion nids thinner and will be a trillion nids thinner until they successfully take that planet - and after losing a trillion nids attempting to do so that seems like a nontrivial requirement. If they throw a trillion nids at a planet and you glass it, then their ranks are a trillion nids thinner forever and ever. If they throw a trillion nids each at three different planets and you hold/glass two, then that is a net loss of two trillion nids (minus whatever additional biomass they get from the planet you lost). You can even lose battles and win the war. You just can't lose most of your battles - which is true of most wars.

Honestly, even if you end up losing a planet on which a trillion nids died a couple generations later, odds are good that a huge portion of the biomass dumped onto the planet in the form of tyranid corpses would have been converted back into inorganic materials by natural processes. The planet has a limited amount of biomass it can support, and that temporary influx almost certainly won't last. Yes, the tyranids have an immense strategic advantage. The ability to negate the costs of your victories is incredibly valuable. But it is not an automatic I-Win button - the gains from their victories still have to outpace their losses.

shlominus · Post by **shlominus** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 9:35 am

Dean wrote:Tangental question: Does anyone know any stories where someone spoke with a Tyranid in any way? A psycher or anything like that. I'd be interested to see how they portray Tyranids through the prism of a conversation of some kind.

there is a shortstory in an old white dwarf, but the tyranid is only a weapon (a fleshborer, if i remember correctly). i can't promise that it said anything interesting.

i'll try to dig it up when i get home.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 10:21 am

The rate and efficiency that Tyranids can convert biomass basically just doesn't even fucking matter. The actually important point is how well they can convert inorganic CO2 and N2 into sugars and proteins. The fact that they can eat trees and people and convert that into more Tyranid biomass is great for them and really evocative and shit, but it's wholly unimportant compared to how much energy it takes to run a space empire.

The bottom line is how much energy they lose just being a hive versus how much they can get back from locals suns; and how much biomass they convert into inorganics via respiration versus how much inorganics they can convert into biomass via photosynthesis.

All this carnivorism that they fap to all the time is pretty much meaningless to the total biomass, just as it is on Earth.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 10:29 am

I think it's pretty well established by now that the only experience GW have had with Science textbooks is stacking them up and draping green felt over them to make hills to place minis on.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 12:56 pm

DSMatticus wrote: But orks on the other hand... the idea that orks (who operate on much more conventional rules) could narrowly win a protracted war at great cost and come out stronger is stupid as fuck. I think the official explanation is that the Warboss in charge will instantly turn on the Imperium to keep his horde from falling apart due to infighting. But that doesn't change the fact that his horde will be beaten and bloodied by the tyranids, and every orc that flocked to fight the tyranids is an orc that flocked from somewhere else. Orks winning is a fantastic outcome. Tyranids winning is awful.

While more Orks swarming to the battlefield means fewer Orks elsewhere, it's not like the Orks elsewhere would necessarily be attacking the Imperium. Orks are only a real problem when a bunch of them are under a single leader.

I have always be baffled as to why the imperium wouldn't win the Tyrranid war, as they have cyclonic torpedoes and a (admittedly crap-ass backwards) war machine based on cosmically plentiful metals, while the Tyrranids are based on the thin layer of slime covering of a few dirtballs, cosmically speaking. Everything about the Tyrranids depends on biomass, remove it from the local space and they starve; better still to lure a hive fleet to land at a sacrificial planet and send a suicide squadron of escorts to double tap the crust with said cyclonic torpedoes, wasting even more of the hive fleet's biomass assets in the Emperor's incandescent fury. And AFAIK this is the in fluff tactic that is starving the hives, so good(?) on the inquisition and what-not.

There's a lot of Tyranids incoming, and burning a planet surrounded by the Hive Fleet is a non-trivial undertaking. Also, the Imperium has a finite supply of planets, and Hive Fleets don't lure that easily. I mean, it can be done, it's just that it takes kidnapping things that can rip through Terminator armor in seconds.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 4:01 pm

@name_here
Yeah, the Kryptman Gambit seems to have been one of the two i remembered.

The other is this:
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Tuska

Tuska, the "Daemon-Killa", is an Ork Warboss who, aided by many weirdboyz, managed to bypass the defenses around Cadia and led his Waaagh! in an invasion of the Eye of Terror, in search of Daemons to fight.[1]
History

Tuska made his mark in the Eye of Terror, by defeating the Daemon hordes on several Daemon Worlds, and seemed unstoppable until his Waaagh! crash-landed on a flesh planet. The planet belonged to a mighty Daemon Prince of Khorne[2] known as the Blood Prince, who soon led his Daemonic hordes against the invading Orks. In the battle that followed, Tuska suffered many deep wounds and his Boyz took heavy losses. Just as the Blood Prince was about to finish Tuska, his Weirdboyz managed to distract the Daemon using their psychic powers, giving Tuska enough time to impale the creature between its legs with his Power Klaw before being killed himself[1]. The Warboss’ vast horde was later eventually slain to an Ork by the wrathful Daemon Prince and his minions.[2]
However, the story did not end there for Tuska. Khorne had such joy in watching the murderous spectacle, that he ensured that Tuska's Waaagh! rose once more the very next dawn. Now, the Orks repeat the fight over and over again, for the Blood God was so impressed by their limitless battlelust that he took the Orks into his own domain. In the shadow of the Brass Citadel, his elite Bloodletter generals battle against Daemon-Killa’s undying horde on a daily basis[2]. This suits the Warboss just fine: he has finally found a good fight that never ends.[1]

shlominus · Post by **shlominus** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 4:18 pm

the short story is from wd130 (continued in wd131), here's a link

it's not a real conversation though, just the psycher reading the fleshborer's "mind", so i am not sure it's what you are looking for.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 6:59 pm

Awesome, no it's definitely the sort of thing I was looking for. Thanks.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 7:15 pm

Then there is of course the voice of the hivemind from Dawn of War 2 - Retribution maybe?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Oct 14, 2014 6:13 am

It's reasonable to assume that the voice in that is just for the benefit of the player. It never actually communicates with a non-tyranid, other than in the language of violence.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Oct 14, 2014 8:37 am

True.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 10:12 am

Why does Chaos suck so much at corrupting people on a per-capita basis? Is that due to GW not understanding scale or, more charitably, them making wry commentary on the Elennsar-like misguidedness of the Imperium of Man's anti-Chaos raison d'être?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 10:18 am

It's just them not thinking. As the plot requires, either one person suddenly snaps and turns to Chaos, or a whole world does all at once.

Although typically, if just one person does, they tend to be a high-ranking official who leads an army, or a powerful psyker, or something else that makes them a danger, so maybe Chaos is just restricted to point limits.

That's probably what it is. Balance inherently restricts Chaos with points limits, to make the narrative fair.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 3:07 pm

Because Chaos is Picky.
Only Unka Nurgle loves all.
Tzeentch - Is he Eldrad/Creed Level Bastardly? MINE!
Khorne - Is he Angry as fuck? MINE!
Slaanesh - Is he into excess? MINE!
Nurgle - Can he get sick? MINE!

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Tue Feb 03, 2015 3:44 pm

Well, Chaos is mostly only good at corrupting people when there's some actual major warp energy in the area or said person is a psyker. At least, that's where they get the runaway corruption where entire hive spires turn. When cults actually get established they can be pretty big too. The Adeptus Astra Telepathica keeps the psyker issue down by either training people as sanctionites, who usually can keep it together, or sticking them in the Black Ships and feeding them to the Astronomicon.

They've also got lots of people whose job description is preventing Chaos corruption and those people do actually accomplish things.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Sat Mar 28, 2015 12:50 pm

There are two problems with criticising IoM.

The first is that there are de-facto two IoM's portrayals that have little in common but trappings. The usual stuff from wargame supplements and books by authors who tried to make some sense of that shit, like Abnett and Mitchell, plus RPG supplements too.

The former is pointless to criticise because trying to seriously dissect the world of space supersoldier Viking werewolves supported by walking Gothic cathedrals fighting a horde of green football hooligans is just pretending to be retarded. Any and all world details are picked for being METAL, not for making sense, and I cannot hear your complaints over the sound of chainsaws. So below this paragraph I'm going to be speaking about the latter only.

The second problem is that people who are in the state of mind to try dissecting the later to begin with usually just have their kneejerk reflexes triggered by the first couple of setting details they see and start bashing what they imagine IoM should be, not what is actualy depicted. For example, not five posts in this thread, we have this:

TheFlatline wrote:To reinforce Frank's essay, I might point out that even Dan Abnett's Mary Sue Ravenor states that it's impossible to stay committed to the ideals of the Imperium and effectively serve the Imperium. He flat out states in Eisenhorn that it's inevitable that any Inquisitor who lives long enough is going to become a radical/borderline heretic.

Yeah, Ravenor in his books believes that slide into Radicalism is inevitable for any Inquisitor who lives long enough. Except the books made abundantly clear that "Radicalism" is not "effectively serving the Imperium", it is spouting how you act in the name of Imperium and greater good while being Chaos-mutated to the point of near-unrecognizability and killing people by tens of thousands to cover up a minor part of your plan. Or killing your last remaining friend and feeding his soul to a daemon because it is convenient and he is disagreeing with you.

Or, judging by that essay Flatline mentionsm, Frank apparently imagines that the Imperium is some totalitarian centralized structure. Top lel. The IoM is much, much less centralized that any of the modern states, not only the majority of planes are self-governed and can live however the fuck they want as long as they pay tributes and observe certain basic tenets of the imperial law, but the Marines, the Ecclesiarchy, the Mechanicus, and the Titan Legions all have jealously guarded privileges that make them essentially states-within-state. The IoM is quasi-feudal, not totalitarian.

But if you want to hear a criticism of what IoM-according-to-novels actually is here's one: IoM is an institution that, as a whole, is both massively arrogant and very immature in its approach to dealing with any sort of problems.

-IoM is short-sighted. It's no secret that abysmal living conditions on many worlds form a fertile ground for Chaos cults which, if not nipped in the bud, can and do fucking destroy or render useless your precious factory Hives, yet nobody cares enough to try reigning in the greed of local elites, as long as they continue to provide you with cheap goods and weapons right now. Similarly, lots of IoM worlds got their ecology so ruined by industry and mining that people can only live in sealed habitats. And let me tell you, sheer expense of living in an environment requiring a sealed habitat is the key reason why we aren't colonising space or oceans now.

-IoM is incapable of any sort of conscious self-reform. In large part because, as mentioned above, it is horribly disunited, and there are interest groups which are dead-set on blocking useful initiatives because those threated their privileges; Adeptus Mechanicus do actually invent shit and higher-ups have a good understanding of underlying science, but they will go medieval on your ass if you try to teach the masses how their technology actually works, for just one example.

-The second reason for this inability to reform itself is IoM, or at least its ruling body, being smug and conceited. As long as its ways kinda-sorta work and the situation remains generally stable, it remains supremely confident in correctness of those ways. Good luck if your proposition of reforms is not labeled actual heresy. And then, when new threats, like Tyranids and Necrons, inevitably come knocking, it still tries to do the same thing but harder. While Tau are not unlike a 1-st level adventurer who has killed a few giant rats and a couple of goblin bandits with his father's sword and now thinks that he's prepared to take on the Tomb of Horrors, you have to admit that they are at least trying to adapt to their situation.

-IoM is shaped by an ideology that mandates seeing the universe and its place in it in very childish black-and-white terms, and there is no better example of that than its absolute xenophobia. I'm not going to pontificate here on how xenophobia is morally bad. If all aliens were indeed as hellbent on harming humanity as the IoM believes that would be moot. Its problem lies in the fact that while you indeed cannot coexist with, say, Orcs (no, even if you somehow convince them not to fight you, which you usually only can do by providing another target, because not fighting is literally as difficult for them as not fucking for humans, they'll still shit up your biosphere just by passively being there), or with various alien races that smoke Chaos' cock, IoM is objectively wrong here. And is hurting itself by being wrong. Tau needed to explore only a small part of the Galaxy to find three races that, while not especially pleasant to be around, can enter something approaching mutal cooperation. Why IoM decided that all aliens need to die? Yeah, getting burned touching Orcs played a role, but the reason actually voiced boiled down to aliens looking out for themselves first and being willing to exploit humanity's moment of weakness (it is not clear if humanity during the Dark Ages of Technology was ever actually friendly to any other race, beyond not going out of its way to exterminate them). That is literally a childish tantrum, not any sort of a rational political decision. Even blatant military porn/HFY settings tend to know better than this.

-In short, IoM is pretty bad at its goal of ensuring humanity's survival, considering what sort of resource advantage it started with. Fuck, it created one of its worst enemies itself.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 6:17 am

Yeah, Ravenor in his books believes that slide into Radicalism is inevitable for any Inquisitor who lives long enough. Except the books made abundantly clear that "Radicalism" is not "effectively serving the Imperium", it is spouting how you act in the name of Imperium and greater good while being Chaos-mutated to the point of near-unrecognizability and killing people by tens of thousands to cover up a minor part of your plan. Or killing your last remaining friend and feeding his soul to a daemon because it is convenient and he is disagreeing with you.

Actually, one thing people keep forgetting about Ravenor's comment is that we in fact see numerous Inquisitors who don't end up radicals in the Abnett's book series - Commodus Voke for one literally served for centuries without ever getting corrupted and died a Puritan.

The premise of Eisenhorn, and to a lesser extent Ravenor, is to show the banality of evil and how someone can end up killing their best friend, using their best friend's corpse to contain a daemon, and then start relyng and listening to the said daemon over the next couple of years, all without seemingly turning evil. That people still think Eisenhorn is still a "good guy" by the conclusion of the series and that his evolution was "natural" only demonstrates how well Abnett managed to pull off the banality of evil trope.

In short, Ravenor isn't stating a fact by saying an Inquisitor eventually turns radical. He's just post-rationalizing the fall from grace of himself and his former master. Indeed, almost the entirety of Chaos fluff and literature can be taken as mere post-rationalization to justify atrocity; albeit the IoM's very reason for existence is pretty much this as well.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 10:07 am

Inquisitors, either "pure" or "corrupted", by 40K definition are always evil. Because either way they support a government system that gives no fucks about commiting genocide against their own population in a regular basis.

FatR wrote: Or, judging by that essay Flatline mentionsm, Frank apparently imagines that the Imperium is some totalitarian centralized structure. Top lel. The IoM is much, much less centralized that any of the modern states, not only the majority of planes are self-governed and can live however the fuck they want as long as they pay tributes and observe certain basic tenets of the imperial law, but the Marines, the Ecclesiarchy, the Mechanicus, and the Titan Legions all have jealously guarded privileges that make them essentially states-within-state. The IoM is quasi-feudal, not totalitarian.

That's a double lie. The IoM administratin can and will nuke/strip mine any one of their planets for any number of reasons, including but not limited to "somebody in charge woke up in a bad mood". The only self-governance you're allowed is the one you get under the IoM's radar, and even then the IoM expects you to send your children as sacrifice to a golden mummy so their space ships can be eaten by daemons.

You remember the Astral Claws? They tried to properly industrialize their home planet mass produce power armor. It was nuked into pieces and that chapter is now known as the Red Corsairs, because fuck the noise of the IoM.

Then there's countless cases of loyalist planets creating mutual benefit relationship benefits with nearby Tau colonies, allowing for their greater development, and the IoM administration droping by screaming "Lolno!" and nuke them back to an inneficient state or die trying.

TL:DR-The IoM doesn't allow you to live how you want. They only allow you to die as you want. When they're in a good mood. Often not even that (Imperial daily weather broadcast: orbital bombardments all day long because somebody told somebody a daemon may or may not be in your planet. Thanks for your loyalty citizen. As a reward your charred skull will be put in a cathedral.)

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 10:44 am

I don't know why there is even an argument here. The Imperium has always been presented as a comically repressive dystopia in the finest British tradition (see Judge Dredd or 1984 for other examples). Just look at the Imperial "Thoughts for the day" as a prime example of this type of black humour:

A small mind is easily filled with Faith

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment

The whole thing is a joke rooted in the finest British tradition, the faceless bureaucracy that grinds down those trapped within it. Add a splash of Dune and you have 40k in essence. Of course the Imperium aren't the good guys, they were never intended to be.

FatR · Post by **FatR** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 10:51 am

Can't hear you over the sound of chainsaws, maglag. Please go back to reread the first six phrases of my post.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 11:14 am

Red_Rob wrote:I don't know why there is even an argument here. The Imperium has always been presented as a comically repressive dystopia in the finest British tradition (see Judge Dredd or 1984 for other examples). Just look at the Imperial "Thoughts for the day" as a prime example of this type of black humour:
A small mind is easily filled with Faith

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment
The whole thing is a joke rooted in the finest British tradition, the faceless bureaucracy that grinds down those trapped within it. Add a splash of Dune and you have 40k in essence. Of course the Imperium aren't the good guys, they were never intended to be.

Lots of people on /tg/ are too stupid to pick up on this, and I think the lunatics may be running the asylum.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 11:30 am

Chainsaws? What sound of chainsaws? I can only hear the sound of a zillion innocents being killed by the dudes who claim to want to protect them.

Well, I guess they could be sacrificing the zillion innocents by killing them with chainsaws.

And the chainsaws are probably made of orphan bones, fueled by the blood of virgins, and oiled by the tears of the rest of their family.

So nope, fact is that, at their best, the IoM is a stagnant hell hole where their supposed super-everything dudes have been using the same wargear for the latest 10 000 years.

Think about that for a moment. It would be like our modern armies were still using wooden spears and sharp rocks as their main weapons, instead of, you know, rifles, tanks, aircraft, that sort of thing.

If the above isn't true, then chaos isn't a threat, eldar aren't a threat, necron aren't a threat, because the IoM had 10 000 freaking years to develop their tech and challenges that were dangerous back then should be a walk on the park now.

The only way that's possible is that the IoM works day and night to supress innovation at every possible level. Elitism is not enough to justify that. The IoM has got to be burning books and schools and anyone who raises their head around the clock to make that possible.

But go ahead, tell me of the great tech developments and scientific revolutions that the IoM has made over the last 10 000 years.

You can't. Even if you close your eyes to everything bad the IoM does, there's zero good stuff they did.

Also if you stopped trying so hard to listen to chainsaws over everything else, you would've noticed that many humans did create mutual benefit relationships with aliens. Heck, even with orks here and there. The IoM's answer to that has always been "KILLMAIMBURNKILLMAIMBURN!"