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[Trekkin]

I think I already lamplit that this is what the imperium would have to do.  (stop outside the denial of service area, then cruise in on standard space engines.)

However,  that makes their presence known in the system long before they can arrive at their intended destination.  That gives plenty of time to organize a coordinated repulsive bombardment operation.

Only to the generators themselves, though. You're covering surface area, not volume -- which incidentally, still puts you at a massive disadvantage relative to your attackers, who need only make one hole -- so the distance they have to cross sublight is only the radius of effect of the generators, at which point they can reenter warp. And, again, these are surprisingly fast ships . If you'd care to specify a radius for your network I can give you a median trip time to Earth.

[GiglameshDespair]

More interestingly-- if purposefully cultivated psykers are the heart of the swarm, they could also be used offensively within their area of influence.  Billions of pychically adept minds working in unison would be a force to be reckoned with,

It certainly would be a thing.

That thing being "cataclysmic invasion of some kind", I imagine.

Psykers used by the Imperium are soul-bound to the Emperor to decease the change of them exploding into daemons, which you'd have to go without. Such a huge amount of psykers would also be a tasty buffet to Enslavers, I would imagine.

[nenjin]

Psykers used by the Imperium are soul-bound to the Emperor to decease the change of them exploding into daemons, which you'd have to go without. Such a huge amount of psykers would also be a tasty buffet to Enslavers, I would imagine.

Not all psykers. Only Astropaths for sure. But there are plenty of sanctioned battle psykers, inquisitorial psykers and other general day to day psykers that are not soul-bound.

[GiglameshDespair]

It was my understanding that all sanctioned psykers are soul-bound; the black ships take every psyker found to Terra, where they are processed as food for Big E or soul bound and made useful.

It's why they're sanctioned psykers rather than just psykers.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

No, soul binding is what makes one an astropath. Sanctioned psykers just go to, as someone once put it, Pain Hogwarts. You generally lose your ability to use non-astropathic powers once soul bound.

[wierd]

Since we are talking a totally heretical civ here, the use of AI to overwhelm/overpower enslaver compulsions, via the virtual reality network, seems like it might be a suitable alternative to Big E.

Failing that, an alternative to big E might be possible to synthesize, if knowledge of how to reincarnate a spirit is obtained. (the process by which Big E came to exist could be duplicated.)

another possible out is the 50 meter restriction.  Make the generator units 55meters across.

[Kot]

By the Emperor, I'm off for a bit to play a game and you again fill the thread with such insane amounts of absolutely wrong and other heresies. I don't even think I can reasonably reply to everything.

First, 40K is not a HFY setting. Just isn't.

Of course it is. HFY isn't about humanity being the best possible race, with best possible technology, with best possible everything, being best fucking Mary Sues, having everything given to you on a silver platter just because you're human, but about humanity fighting tooth and nail through immense odds and winning just because we don't give up. Warhammer humanity went through literally unimaginable piles of shit to still be the dominant race in Galaxy and has a real shot at actually surviving for long time yet. Warhammer humanity had to sacrifice so much, and the world seems so bleak and embody everything wrong about humanity, but the point of HFY is that there is nothing wrong about humanity. Through genocide, zealotry, ignorance, but also kindness, compassion and brilliance humanity continues to kick ass and take names, despite having literal Gods against them. Imperium of Man embodies Humanity Fuck Yeah, because they didn't have it easy, they had it the exact opposite, they were playing on the Hardestcore Ironman Permadeath Insanity mode with enemies having insane handicaps, and they're still going and they aren't going to stop, even if all hell comes loose upon them. Humanity Fuck Yeah is not about "heck yeah we're the best", it's about why we're the best. Which is fighting against all odds. It's about survival. And if there is one thing Warhammer humanity is good at, it's surviving. They should be, they're after like, few dozen events which threatened their complete extinction on Galactic scale.

Next, the Imperium may have a lot of mass behind them, but that doesn't translate to a linearly better force. They have systems and systems of resources, but are corrupt, selfish, zealous, incompetent, ignorant, stagnant, poorly managed, have poor communication, little centralized command, and little to no ability to actually replace any of their best stuff. Including space ships. You know, you get to the place where the fight is happening? They refuse to try advancing their technology or making new designs because grimdark. Humanity of 2018 has no such hangups.
The huge, untrained, uncoordinated brute with a sledgehammer does not win against a seasoned swordsman.

Calling humanity of 2018 a seasoned swordsman compared to humanity of 41000 is quite ironic. Imperium has systems and systems of resources, and are corrupt, selfish, zealous, incompetent, ignorant, stagnant, poorly managed, with poor communication and little centralized command, with little to no ability to actually replace any of their best stuff, just like modern day humanity. I bet in case of war with more advanced species which only real purpose would be making you believe in their god and pay tithe, humanity wouldn't be as united as they often are in movies. Zealotry is rampant in less developed parts of the world, and it has impacted the modern world in very serious manner (see, 9/11). Incompetence is also something that's often a thing, so is ignorance (Earth is flat so if you stand on the edge you can board Imperial spaceships), and humanity on global scale is extremely poorly managed and has anything but centralized command. The only real "advantage" is communication, but that's only because it's happening on planetary scale, while Imperium has to deal with interstellar communication, a feat at which they're also impossibly (as in, FTL communication by Psyker) better than we are currently.

The point of using nukes isn't to use them in ground combat. Ground combat is the very worst way to fight imperial forces. They'll just keep dropping bodies on you until you die, and if you survive that for long enough more elite units appear to punch your teeth in. No, nukes are for space combat.

Uh. Imperial ships slug nuke equivalents all the time, and have shields, interceptors and advanced point-defense. Whole supply of Earth's ICBMs might make a dent, but it's one use really.

What we're seeing here is a bunch of guardsmen being dropped onto a "primitive human splinter world", except they get defeated by tanks that actually work and infantry who use actual tactics. Once that initial ground force is defeated by the earthlings, the imperial navy has to order some replacement guardsmen. If that second wave arrives, the earthlings are pretty much doomed. But this is 40K grimdark verse we're talking about here, reinforcements take years to arrive. And while you're traveling through the warp, the earthlings are TRAINING.

Imperial tanks also work, and Imperial infantry, as weird is that is, also uses actual tactics. It's very easy to dismiss WH40k because it often focuses on Soviet-like strategies, and so on, but... the problem here is that Soviets won the war. Zhukov is regarded as the best commander of Second World War even by Western historians (a thing that never ceases to amaze me in the "how the fuck did that even happen) way, and he's the guy who literally said he uses infantry to clear out minefields. Even then, Imperium has ability to drop overwhelming forces anywhere on the planet, while Earth's forces would be spread out, incapable of any real interception and relatively slow to react. By the time US carrier groups get their shit together and armies across the world mobilize, Imperium controls White House, Kremlin, and literally any strategic location that allows them to dictate the war and disables Earth's nuclear arsenal. Even if the first wave fails, the Navy requesting the reinforcements probably won't be just orbiting around, they'd be shelling the fucking place to oblivion - they don't exactly care about environmental damage or even the local population.

They'll take every bit of IG tech they can get and study the crap out of it. Sort the useless barely-industrial crud out from the remaining glimmers of DAoT splendor. Scale it up, make it their own. That turns getting to space from hard and expensive to trivial. What did the guardsmen arrive in? Shuttles that can fly from orbit to the ground and back without refueling. We'll take those~

This is a very naive idea that implies Earth by itself has access to all the important stuff that's used in it. It would also require time which, unless you just outright think Imperium is absolutely useless (which I cannot really prove to you they aren't, because if you went that far you clearly are denying actual facts, so), they don't really have.

Now you have earthlings with easy access to space as well as nifty tech like efficient batteries upscaled from lasguns. We have a lot of nukes. A lot of them. Now we can put those in space for cheap. The imperium find it rather difficult to replace destroyed ships. It doesn't matter how many guardsmen or even space marines you cram into a ship if it takes 100 nukes

Which is essentially what regular space battles are in terms of Imperium, but whatever.

to the face the moment it jumps into the system. The imperium has countless bodies, mass produced armor, and mind-bogglingly deadly elite troops of a hundred different flavors. None of them can travel through space unaided. None of them will survive the ship they're riding disintegrating around them.

Of course they do. Marines survive stupid amounts of shit.

The obvious Achilles heel in 40k is the damn warp itself.

EVERYTHING about the warp is "It will kill you. Horribly."   A tiny imbalance in the engine while traveling through it, and oops, you are all dead. A loss of hull integrity while traveling through it and whoops-- all dead.


All you really need to do is set up a sufficiently long-distance perimeter around your system, such that any ship trying to traverse the warp to get there will experience engine trouble from purposefully induced instabilities. (Instead of reverse engineering a warp drive, you instead produce a denial of service perimeter using the technology used to enter/exit the warp. You dont want to rip reality apart, you just want it to be sufficiently abnormal from what the imperium's navigators and engineers expect that they experience unpexpected irregularities in transit, and whoop, the warp has their ship.)   They would have to exit far outside the system, in order to arrive safely.  They of course, would never know that, because they would attempt to enter the system in dropship range, and the difference in distance traveled would be tiny for people still traversing the warp. (Less than human reaction time.) As such, they could never alert the imperium of the blockade devices.

Result- Imperium does not know why all the ships they send there never return. Does not know why none of them even report leaving the warp.

Still "We dont go to sol."


All you need to do is slightly alter the normal fabric of reality in the direct vicinity of your system, such that normal warp travel is impossible.  For a highly isolationist world, this would be fine; They dont use warp travel anyway.

You can't. Humanity is non-psychic until like, quite a long time after, and while sure, Gellar Fields and other things can be operated without psykers, they're notably very power-hungry and have relatively small area of effect, and while there are various materials that work a bit like various blanks, they're rare even in terms of Imperium and again, don't work this way. Even if you had a giant fucking web of Gellar Fields around the Solar system, all it'd do is MAYBE drag Imperial Ships out of the Warp, but I don't think that's how it even works either, Warp is not equivalent to real space (except in Warp storms, kind of, still not really), which is why it's used as FTL and sometimes does stupid shit like time manipulation. You could probably somehow end inside that bubble without ever crossing the border, just like people end up in places they totally didn't want to go to, like Eye of Terror.

Yeah, I guess they could have said that their ships ran on prometheum or firewood instead.

Promethium is literally blanket term for all fuels. Some of them are advanced and are made from scooping up shit from stars, gas giants or so on, but it also includes regular diesel.

Also, any lore about why no one but Tyranids tries going extragalactic?

Navigation, mostly. It's fuckin' dark out there, and all the fluff implies that however weird and bad shit within known Imperial Space is, whatever is outside of it is probably worse.

Of course they do. According to Mechanicus tests, nearby void is filled with Orks. Silent King literally went on a voyage outside but he NOPE'd out when he found Tyranids on his way. Probably bunch more examples. It's somewhat rare, considering what it is, but yeah, it happens.
As far as humanity goes, I think /tg/ had this one fun thing, called "The Ship Moves".

[Madman198237]

I think if building a Dyson swarm of reality warping hellengines is your best defense, you've already lost.

He says to the B12'ers...

"Supreme Commander! The Imperium forces have breached the Cordon! The North flank is disintegrating! We've lost!" The breathless adjutant clattered to a stop, face red.

The Commander approached a computer and typed in a alphanumeric string. He began adjusting outputs and algorithms. The adjutant spoke again, shrill, "Sir! We must evacuate!"

The Commander finished typing. In extrasolar space, man-sized satellites filled with poorly-understood technology, reams of circuits, and genetically and technologically modified brains received a new order.

A gentle angel's hymn stopped, and was replaced with a murmur, a chant, then a howling shriek of rage. Space began to warp and distort around Sol...

"Sir, we have lost!" The adjutant cried, unaware his fate was sealed. The Warp was already spilling through, a sick sheen of unreality tainting everything.

The Supreme Commander nodded, and grinned grimly, "And now they learn our most cherished lesson... Losing is fun."

You forgot that we then proceed to introduce the demons to obsidian, checkerboards, armored killing machines, disease-bearing beasts from the bowels of the earth, and Dwarven Human Engineering.

[nenjin]

Careful Matt Ward, Kot is gunning for your title.

[Grim Portent]

I will point out that Imperial ships already have to enter the Sol system beyond Pluto because of how warp travel works, so building a device to prevent them translating in system would be pretty pointless. Warp travel only works on the rim of a system, any closer and you are likely going to get sucked into the local planets/star and crushed during the process of translating between realspace and the Warp. Never really understood why, but it's a thing. All non-Eldar* races are looking at days/weeks of final approach to the actual planets in a system, and Eldar only bypass that because they tend to appear closer into the system with webway gates.

If you had the range and accuracy you could start shooting at the fleet long before it can shoot back. In 40k this doesn't happen because most planet based weapons only reach a bit beyond orbit, the situation being more akin to age of sail ships trying to shoot a fortified naval port that shoots back with it's own cannons than anything else.

*Necrons depends on the version you're looking at, their FTL keeps getting tweaked.

[Kot]

Careful Matt Ward, Kot is gunning for your title.

I dunno. Matt Ward likes Smurfs, I like Imperial Guard. I don't think I could be Our Spiritual Liege if I just gave Guard all the cool things. And it's not like he doesn't write okay stuff from time to time. Also he works for GW, so there's an obvious conflict there because I think GW has absolutely no idea what they're doing nowadays and just keep fucking up perfectly good fluff.

[nenjin]

I will point out that Imperial ships already have to enter the Sol system beyond Pluto because of how warp travel works, so building a device to prevent them translating in system would be pretty pointless. Warp travel only works on the rim of a system, any closer and you are likely going to get sucked into the local planets/star and crushed during the process of translating between realspace and the Warp. Never really understood why, but it's a thing. All non-Eldar* races are looking at days/weeks of final approach to the actual planets in a system, and Eldar only bypass that because they tend to appear closer into the system with webway gates.

IIRC, gravity. Jumping in system near a planet's gravity well causes sheering forces beyond what ships can handle as you tear a hole in reality, and the effect that has local gravity.

Some novel even gave it a fancy title, that is the point beyond which it is safe to make a warp jump. I want to say it was called the Mandlebrot Point or something, but I am lazy and my casual google-fu fails me.

That being said, 40k writers happily overlook this on many occasions, especially when it comes to action sequences where dramatic escapes are called for. (That and unplanned warp jumps with no preparation also get hand-waved a lot. If you take the Rogue Trader table top game as an accurate bearing, it's basically suicide. But I can't remember many novels except that Horus Heresy novel The Flight of the Eisenstein that address it.) I honestly want to read more 40k novels that are "We entered the Warp trying to go to place X, and instead shit got all weird and we ended up at place 39guacamole. And that's where the actual story is. The Warp is just super inconvenient for plots because of how scary it is, and so shit conveniently always works out in stories. To be fair though, when running my Rogue Trader game I ran into the same problem: if you want the Warp to be punishing, you have to be ready for a Total Party Kill.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

(That and unplanned warp jumps with no preparation also get hand-waved a lot. If you take the Rogue Trader table top game as an accurate bearing, it's basically suicide.)

who the fuck is scraeming "BAN MUNCHKINS" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never ban munchkins

[Loud Whispers]

Dont be silly.  You use a constellation of small devices that each individually are not a threat to an imperial vessel.  It is only the combined, but subtle influence of the entire swarm of devices that causes the effect.  That's the thing here-- each device is very low power.  Since this is spacetime mechanics we are dealing with, energy will fall off at the inverse square of the distance.  Rather than create one giant device that can reach that big of a diameter, you create a shell of small devices that produce the desired level of disturbance, at the desired distance from your star system.

The warp drives of imperial ships produces a much bigger distortion; It is able to create literal holes into the warp from normal space.  We dont want that.  Instead, we want it to be "Space is thin, but not torn, and no holes poked in it".   

It would be very expensive to "mine" large areas. (lots of devices to service and maintain, lots of raw material invested to create the swarm, etc.)  But for a more constrained area it could be practical.

Yeah the Tau did this with their fleet. The armada of tiny warp drives without gellar fields opened up a mini eye of terror

[Kot]

If you want to do it like that I don't think there is a level at which the barrier between realspace and immaterium is weak enough to fuck with spaceships but strong enough to not result in DEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONSDEAMONS. I get the idea, but that's effectively not a problem or essentially covering yourself in artificially made warp storm. People survive on planets in warp storms sometimes, but yeah, taking it between joining Imperium or living inside a warp storm the former is more enticing, unless you're really into tentacle rape. The Gellar Field thing might be way safer if less effective.