Episky wrote:Na I will give them that Warhammer has special technobabble weapons which can destroy planets atmosphere's or the planets themselves.
Although they are completely useless against ships which doesn't stop people on SB from trying to use that as evidence.
Much of the problem on SB.com in WH40k debates is that virtually nobody, including the pro-WH40k crowd, is familiar with more than a handful of cherry-picked examples.
If they were, they would know that WH40k's firepower levels are severely inconsistent - and that the closest thing resembling a consistent order of magnitude for WH40k weapons is
megatons.
In some cases, the florid rhetoric underlies a fundamentally unimpressive yield. E.g.,
The great Sky Fortress bore Rogal Dorn and the remnants of the Imperial Fists to the inner palace. The loyal old general was determined to stand and die with his Emperor in the final hour. The Sky Fortress raced away from the palace in a desperate attempt to reach Jhagatai Khan and return him to the palace. It was destroyed by a blaze of fire fron the Death ́s Heads Titan Legions. Even in death its commander wrought havoc on the enemy, bringing the crippled vehicle down into the entre of the Chaos Horde. It seemed as if a new sun was born on Earth as the plasma reactor exploded, blasting out a crater three kilometres across. Those within the palace knew they were cut off; now they were truly alone. Only a miracle could save them.
This is a Sky Fortress; it's supposed to be something really impressive by WH40k standards. And yet the detonation of its plasma reactor only brews up in the megaton range.
Another major problem is that Titans can successfully threaten warships; even the most inflated Titan figures struggle to give them megatons.
Yet another is that we have very specific statements tying specific thicknesses of adamantium to warship hulls; which ties the warship weapons yield range to the ground weapons yield range.
If a warship with a hull mere metres thick can shrug off gigaton level fire, then it would take something like a megaton nuke to take down a Space Marine or Leman Russ - orders of magnitude above even the most inflated figures I've seen proposed by Connor on SDN.
The fact is that any
in-depth examination of the WH40k figures reveals that they are being overstated by several orders of magnitude.
The same with the speed examples. The same handful of cherry-picked examples are cited, without any respect for the vast number of contradictory figures. Sometimes contradictory figures within the same novel, at that. Mr. Oragahn's
detailed threads are recommended reading.
(There are a lot of them. Type in "WH40k" in our forum search engine with "Mr. Oragahn" in the author field and select "Display threads." Most of the frequently-used WH40k sources are covered in critical detail in one or more of the threads.)
The simple fact is that it's terribly easy to get good counterexamples to argue with for WH40k. It's just that in general, almost nobody who isn't
really really into WH40k has ever bothered to read any of these sources. I'm generally disappointed by ST/WH40k debates on SB.com not just because the Saxtonite line is accepted and enforced by moderators; but because nobody bothers to exercise much critical thought or apply a rational standard of evidence to WH40k in those debates.
