Gniops wrote:It's a pity we were talking about Smoke Jaguar.
I can tell you for a start that Comstar explicitly did have reserve divisions in the cities targeted by Nova Cat, in fact the opposition facing Nova Cat was the 7th army vets (6 divisions presumably) and the green remnants of the 12th army split between the two cities. Two divisions for each presumably, as two veteran Comstar divisions had been split off to fight Jade Falcon and Wolf, with the 6 divisions of the 7th army to engage the Nova Cats in the field. (Invading Clans Sourcebook, Clan Nova Cat, Battle of Tukkyid)
But the information on whether or not the Com Guards had reserve divislons in the Smoke Jaguar targets
at the time the Jaguars landed are missing.
I'm suggesting it was probably SOP for all the Com Guard deployments to start off with at least a division in each city until enemy forces actually landing, based on the deployment the Nova Cats met when they came screaming right in.
Where are you getting your information from ?
Mainly the websites mentioned above.
Drop-Pods aren't ballistic, they are controlled from orbit and with onboard guidence systems. (Epic Armageddon, Imperial Armour)
Hence why they aren't easy to track and target, and also happen to be fairly tough.
Hence why they are described as "at their most vulnerable" (to quote the Codex Titanicus fluff text again)
So what ? This sort of assault is completely beyond the ken of Comstar, they aren't going to have guys in each city waiting for an assault like this.
Battletech does combat drops too, actually.
Perhaps not as often or with the sort of total force commitment you describe, and it would probably come as a mild surprise, but you can bet that there will be about a division of mobile units, possibly more, along with any static air defenses the Comstars have.
I've always thought that little segment odd, since drop-pods are actually most vulnerable when they are sitting still on the ground with their armoured shells open.
I'm amused to see that you carefully avoided posting the following sentence, which mentioned the Landers and Drop-pods were under fire from 3 Warlord Titans.
And being under fire from two hundred mechs will be much better?
I'd also like to point out that you are looking at very old rules. Rules that are 20 years old in fact. Epic Armageddon and Imperial armour state that drop-pods "count as" being lost when they land on impassable terrain, can actually physically destroy vehicles they land in, and have sophisticated and "highly accurate" guidance systems that mean if they are going to land on a building or units for example, they move to the nearest clear space.
This is simply an interesting addendum to the examples of drop pods smashing into the ground as kinetic energy weapons, killing hundreds in the process, or deploying slow enough to allow normal humans to survive.
Thank you for the correction. I don't have the more recent rules on hand at the moment. As I've said before, I'm not an expert on WH40K - which is why I like your occasional visits to come argue with me about it.
Terminal guidance that avoids buildings
does mean lower drop casualties. Now they mainly have to worry about being shot at, which is still a problem. Counting decoys, I think we're talking about less than 1,000 pods, correct? So if
half the mobile units manage to peg a pod on its way down, or while it is in the process of opening up, that's 10+% percent casualties right off the bat "free" - 20% if we have 500 pods dropping in each city. This is then followed by a street-to-street fight between whatever was stationed in the city and the slightly weakened chapter, while the rest of the Com Guard army converges to try and reinforce/recover the area. Sound reasonable?
Comstar took out the Nova Cat dropship because they had achieved local air superiority, due to outnumbering the dumbass Nova Cats, and then a suicide run with a Hammerhead fighter.
If you think this event is meant to support your static city defences claim, I'm sorry, but it doesn't, the Nova Cat dropships didn't LAND in the initial assault, they descended low enough to avoid having to "hotdrop" i.e drop with heat shields, then deployed jump-equipped mechs and got ass-raped by aerospace fighters, losing almost an entire Cluster to the suiciding Hammerhead
The "hotdrop" with heat shields sounds a lot like the older drop pod descriptions from the Codex Titanicus to me. As I said, the BT people will not be unfamiliar with screaming pods from the sky that will disgorge enemies.
It also goes back to the obvious to anybody but you point, that the Clanners were tradition bound morons, who under-bid their forces in a political strategy to try and nerf Clan Wolf, as well as being heavily Mech-oriented and doctrinally akin to a warband of blokes issuing individual challenges on a battlefield.
Hence why they ended up without air-superiority in their own drop-zone, despite having a bunch of dropships with them. It even states this in the first dozen pages of the sourcebook IIRC.
Oh, and giant hovering dropships, disgorging plasma spewing battlemechs ?
Not exactly the same thing as hundreds of pods, landers and fightercraft, or the heavily armed thousand meter long Titan transports, or indeed the craziness that is a Titan drop-pod.
closest thing that comes to mind for the imperials in this scenario is a bunch of Broadsword dropships with anti-grav generators deploying the Cadian Shock without parachutes, as even the Imperial Guard assault dropships don't sit gently in the air waiting to get kamikazied.
The whole "bid" process may have been a spectacularly stupid idea strategically, and the Clans definitely made some stupid mistakes - but the Imperium forces aren't engaging the Clans. Nor would anybody say that the Clan mechs are not dangerous; poorly commanded, perhaps, and poorly deployed, perhaps, but quite dangerous war machines by BT standards.
What do you base these claims on ?
The deployment distances listed on that website, and the speeds listed in mech stat-blocks, which seem to be widely available online.
Heh, so now the aerospace fighters are back in the game ?
Aerospace fighters are one of the reasons why the
Clans mostly chose to drop further away. I'm not really interested in going into the aerospace comparison, as it's going to have to involve dealing with several more systems, nor have I been talking about the aerospace fighters regarding the Space Marine drops.
Otherwise I would be positing heavier casualties for the combat drops. Coming in with a division shooting up at your drop pods, plus any static defenses the Com Guards might have, is not great.
The Space Wolves don't really like using teleporters anyway, they'll assault the cities directly, or one after the other if forced by OP fiat to fight like the Clans.
No reason they can't split their forces.
And what do you mean, "even that" is a moderate help ?
Even being able to teleport a few squads - unseen and unheard - into any location of your choosing can be of help.
Especially if one of those locations is, say, a munitions depot or headquarters.
Then its highly doubtful the Imperial forces would deploy as seperate disparate "armies", although to be honest, its a pretty ludicrously unlikely scenario to begin with, 10k uncontrollable barbarian ogres with sharp sticks, 2 entire marine chapters? zero airsupport beyond the Marine thunderhawks ?
Its a mess.
So was the original, right? Q-fiated trial by combat. Six essentially separate engagements, testing six different pieces of the Imperium war machine against the Comstar standard-bearers.
If they land and quickly garrison unoccupied Spanac, yes, Sororitas can do dogged defence.
If they fight as part of a combined Imperial offensive, all bets are off.
Ok.
*shrug* how many do you want there to be ? Codex Titanicus describes the troops of a Titan legion at war thusly, Emperor Class titans are command units, Warlord weight Battle Titans form the bulk of the force, usually in groups of three Reaver weight Battle Titans tend to operate in a long range support role, again in groups of three, Scout class titans...scout and provide telemetry, usually in pairs.
Imperial Knight households (Battlemechs essentially) and Tech-Guard (heavily mechanised cyborg Imperial Guard regiments, with access to higher overall tech but smaller regiments) operate in support of these forces. Occasionally the Centurio Ordinatus gets involved, but since Comstar doesn't get access to nuclear weapons, its probably a touch unfair.
I think Comstar probably
does have access to nuclear weapons, but I think rules of engagement barring nuclear weapons are appropriate. The goal is to take the cities, not destroy them.
I'm beginning to get the impression that you are a tremendous prat, who has read one 20 year old rulebook, and thinks that the rules for Void shields have remained the same for the last near two decades.
The most current ruleset is one point of damage per shield, regardless of what inflicts that point of damage, then in each end phase, the highest roll of 2D6 is allocated for raising shields. This contrasts with Titan Legions which required a saving throw modifier before shields could be dropped, or Codex Titanicus.
So how many shields on average are being raised? Are we talking about 1-6 (top weighted), or do the D6 rolls have a particular target to raise a shield, or what? I'm curious.
As I said however, Dark Apostle makes it fairly clear that 12 shields is enough to hold off the offensive firepower of a Word Bearer Host.
And Warlords typically have six, and scouts two, right? It was a scout whose shields were dropped temporarily on the low end from twelve lascannons. We can quantify this using several models, not necessarily just through game mechanics.
I think the Titans do have a very powerful advantage here, and probably would even if they deployed
ala the Clan, but I'd like to run the figures on what the Com Guard would have to do to take a Warlord down.
Except that we have an example from, y'know, the last 15 years in Imperial Glory, with a 3.5 ton landspeeder hitting a Gargant Power field, (exactly the same as Void shields, except more unreliable) at full whack, and not even bringing it down.
My god, are you selectively reading Codex Titanicus ? "warlords incinerating hundreds in fusion fire" (thats hundreds of power armoured marines) and blokes exploding into clouds of superheated steam ?
A gigawatt of power ? Don't take the piss. Particularly when the effects on movement and other weapons have been removed from the rules except for the Plasma Destructor.
It's a good thing they have. Because a gigawatt should
not make a difference for a Titan scale plasma weapon.
Never mind trying to scale up the old "beetleback" version of the Warlords for this...this..nonsense . Did you seriously look at the front cover of Codex Titanicus and think, " hmm, this scales proportional to a human!"
It's a very rough approximation.
Unless they've been made on Bumfuck Alpha, in the Armpit sector, they don't use normal steel, and Imperial plasteel isn't exactly the same as our "conventional steel armour". Predator hulls have 55mm of bonded unobtanium, impregnated with heat dissipation mesh on their hulls.
Bonded unobtanium? Actual term used?
Because of the heat generated, or because heat was being generated everywhere and it was unable to drain off heat?
Because it was drenched in burning fuel....?
I'll put that one down as unclear, and revisit it if you change your mind about knowing
why that posed a heat problem.
The dreaded Mackie test, written from the perspective of the guy who built a sensor for the mech , and performed by Merkava's using armour piercing shells with IIRC one third of their actual, real world penetration capabilties, and controlled by guys who pissed themselves while playing what amounts to a computer game.
The less said about that little gem the better I think!
Really?
Pardon ?
What makes you think the Cadians have a 30 tonne vehicle for every 6 troopers ? The basic troop transport is the Chimera, which transports 12!
Shock regiments have also been known to use heavy tanks according to the Lexicanum.
They need a 30 ton vehicle per 12 groundpounders, and those probably have a crew of 2-3, which is more like 15 troops for one thirty ton vehicle, but I'm under the impression they also have other vehicles.
So how many tons of vehicles
would the average 6,000 strong (full complement) Cadian shock regiment have with them?
Where on earth do you get your numbers for any of the 40k and B-tech stuff anyway ?
Mysteeeeerious... Lexicanum, Games Workshop website, assorted fansites and reference sites, SB.com archives.
Since I didn't claim it was out done in tonnage, whats your point ?
You did say grossly
outnumbered, to be fair, and talked about tonnage re: the Imperial Guard in the same link. I'll hope you forgive me for connecting the two.
No, a Lascannon is a heavy weapon, included under that aegis are many different weapons. A heavy anti-tank weapon in 40k is a turbo-laser or something similar.
I was under the impression that Lascannons were some of the best crew-served (or Space Marine-wielded) ranged weapons for use against enemy armor units.
These are the same lasers which have to be supercharged to set wooden buildings on fire right ?-
Or te same armour which can be chewed off by machine guns.
Not familiar with the wooden building reference. I do believe that accidental fires are possible collateral damage from BT weaponry. I doubt that it's difficult for a mech to demolish heavy industrial buildings given they're slinging around gigajoule-range weapons.
I also believe that BT has borrowed the "overloading phaser" mechanism from Star Trek. Would you like me to look into that?
BT armor is destroyed by both kinetic and thermal attacks, although a quick search shows that there's serious dispute on how high the velocity is on BT mech-scale kinetic weapons.
Remind me what this is all based on again? the melting of half a ton of armour, which provides you with ?
Which, given that BT armor is at least as hard to slag as steel, gives us around 600 megajoules to melt a half ton on the low end. Given that it's designed to resist these sorts of attacks, it could easily be up to twice that. I've read several threads on SB.com hashing over that figure.
The lascannon, you may remember, I ballparked many posts ago as being probably one order of magnitude better than a lasgun, which are generously placed at 19 megajoules. Note that this should produce noticeable blast effects on the ground on a close infantry scale. That gives us three [maybe up to six] lascannon hits for the BT laser. It is certainly not a stronger weapon.
I can see that this is the
large laser we're talking about, by the way. There seems to be an important difference, which has bearing in the next section.
As far as I recall, to build a battle armour using the rules to build a mech, a battle armour actually can't mount the laser, or the heat sinks required, as well as the armour tonnage.
I recommend you examine the official battle armors listed on Chaosmarch.com. Almost all of them mount one or more lasers, and almost all, it appears, can take the 8-damage hit of the
large BT laser. However, they only mount the
small and
medium lasers.
It appears the
small BT laser does about one third the damage of a
large BT laser, which means that the
small BT laser mounted on the Clan Elemental is roughly equivalent to the lascannon a Space Marine can carry. The Elemental needs to be hit four times by a small laser to die, making its expected value vs the roughly equivalent lascannon four hits.
The Cavalier performs similarly, but is missing a missile pack that the Elemental carries.
That should tell you everything you need to know about battle armours, they don't actually work legitimately in their own ruleset, whichever version you are using.
They appear to indeed. My apologies for any confusion regarding different sizes of BT lasers.
You realise when you work from a mish-mash of two different game systems, then stir in some bull-shit, the end result is still bull-shit right ?
We have officially arrived at "farce" again.
The "half ton of armor melted" is neither unreasonable nor game mechanics, and remains a very adequate benchmark. It is that benchmark - not the details of game mechanics, or coming up with a conversion to illustrate that gap - that tells us BT stuff has in general more firepower and more durability than WH40K stuff of the same size.
Although, now that you mention it, I think one of the SB.com threads mentioned something about game mechanics actually being the high canon of BT. I can go dig it up and see if it had an actual quote, but it's not going to help us nail down the WH40K side of the equation. Might be of some help on the BT side, though.
As I said, for them to be about on par, we need the
lascannon to match the BT large laser, and indications are that it falls short of that yield. By how
much, I'm not really sure, but my guess would be a factor of 3-6. It's more matching the BT
small laser, if even that.
We could benchmark the lasgun directly, since we know its yield better than the lascannon (even if 19 MJ is a highball figure). A little quick math gets us a lasgun being worth 1/32 of the BT large laser.
Want the mechanics? At 8 damage points for the large laser on a linear scale, that's a quarter damage per lasgun. Unfortunately, it seems that BT conventional unarmored laser infantry get a
half damage each if they hit ("rifle" infantry get a quarter point each). It's not as dramatic as calculating the WH40K AV for a BT PBA suit, but the comparison still favors the BT side.
I'm in particular
not seeing how we can justify your earlier claim that, regarding the fairly conventional forces of the Imperial Guard:
equal tonnage in armour and equal numbers of personnel is a win for the Imperials
The balance seems to be tipped the other way.
