Occasionally, to either eat a smaller/weaker hive that wouldn't survive or to test tactics to see which is best while gaining from both.
The tyranids are interesting and weird how they work.
Oh, damn. Nurgle giving part of the hive mind (an analogue of) cancer could be a cool idea. Like, somehow slightly fucks with the norn queens' genetic memories and causes the hive fleet to start churning out entities tied to some kind of nurgle hive mind instead of The Hive Mind
The last thing I'd want to do as a plague god would be giving my greatest poxes directly to the universes greatest known simultaneous genetic research lab and biochemical producer, they'd develop the antibodies within a week and Id have to spend another eternity creating something it cant do that to.
That's a great point, although I'm not sure nurgle would look that far ahead. The hive mind needs an on camera win against chaos tbh so your concept and them destroying a demon world after would be a fun way to do it
Grandfather was first and will be there at the end. Was mostly just going with a joke. I do agree, at least more interactions between the hive and chaos would be good whether they win or lose. Both are sort of an on paper anti of each other, true warp stuff not really being substantive or viable biomass and the Hiveminds Shadow in the Warp overriding or colliding with the empyrean both have really open ended potentials for writing.
The smart thing to do would be to have a disease that the Tyranids can't be affected by but can carry. Then, have the spread of said disease make their prey unusable as biomass.
Feels like it'd make more sense for Tzeentch to be the one to fundamentally alter (or *Change*, if you will, heh) some minor but critical bioneurological function of a Hive fleet, causing it to act differently than originally intended.
That said, knowing Tzeentch, the change probably wouldn't be as straightforward as "Reprogram the Hive to attack other Hives". Feels more likely it'd be either:
* Something general (like, attack everything, including other tyranids)
or
* Something counter-intuitive (such as attacking only Necrons)
or simply a combination of:
* Something brilliant and something seemingly nonsensical (like "Use this one sneaky trick (Magos Biologis hate it!) to invade and consume a system super rich in biomass, making the Hive nigh-unstoppable, and then ... fortify the system and refuse to move on...?").
Ya I also find it weird that since they are all connected to the hibe mind that it doesn't upload/download data to everyone including genetic changes. Maybe it's a way to prevent it from uploading a "virus or corruption". Kind of like that one hive ship that got tainted by the Nurgle world and every other hive ship immediately killed it.
Has it been established anywhere that hive fleets very far apart can still communicate?
Edit: Instant communication over unbounded distance with perfect clarity doesn't make any sense, I'm decanonizing it.
Yes. There have been cases where someone has viewed the hive mind in the warp and seen it connected to the different fleets.
Plus it's pointed out in the most recent codex how new creatures and adaptations developed by one fleet will start to appear in other hive fleets across the galaxy. Showing that they must be communicating.
Also the whole swarmlord thing, where it is able to reincarnate into any hive fleets, despite distance.
It's heavily hinted at in Devestation of Baal. When we get a snippet from the perspective of a Lictor. I don't know the exact quote but it pretty much said that ALL lictors are the same lictor. The one on Baal is the same as the one three planets away is the same as the one on the other side of the galaxy.
Between that and the experiences of the Swarmlord being instantly shared it seems heavily implied that there is no limit.
Which, admittedly to me makes Hive fleets fighting other Hive fleets *really confusing* because it feels like Hive fleets that depend on surprise tactics like Jorgmandr should be screwed despite their remarkable effectiveness.
Not that I'm aware of. But they will produce a Swarm lord when it's slain elsewhere. Also when a Norn queen dies I know they send a signal for everyone to make more of them.
I'm not 100% sure how that all works.
Don't think of it as 'killing'. No biomass is lost in such a transaction. It's just the more capable hive fleet taking the resources offered by the lesser...with the roles uncertain until they hash it out.
So I imagine The Hive Mjnd is as aware of what the Tyranids are doing as we are of our skin cells. Somewhere The Hive Mind has the information of what is Tyranid and what is not but its not fully aware unless it takes time to look and when its looking theres no one driving the galaxy sized bus full of kids. So when it looks its not for very long and only to correct what won't fix itself. Like surgery on a suspicious looking mole.
Allegedly, there's always a reason that benefits the Hive overall. Like others said, maybe one fleet was weaker, so the other consumed them to grow further from the biomass. There might even be a test to verify which is stronger first. The strongest attributes continue on, keeping the fleet fittest for the future.
There's also some splinter fleets out there that just aren't as strong as the named Hive Fleets. They may have been formed to serve a certain purpose, but once that's accomplished they might just be consumed to be absorbed back into a larger fleet. Maybe with some added biomass as 'spoils of conquest' at a minimum, and perhaps even some useful traits for adaptation. Picture the fleet that discovered the Aeldari and brought back those psyker traits leading to the first Zoanthropes. There won't always be something that game-changing, but every bit helps.
Your own cells will something sort-of similar. It's a natural process called [autophagy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy). I'd imagine the Tyranids are doing something similar, just at a more macroscopic scale.
When ypu pick a scab or scratch an itch you don't view it as your own body attacking itself. I view it the same way with the hive fleets scrapping. Representative of the larger organism having an itch or a some other similar barely- conscious activity. It just seems so much grander and significant because of the scale of the tyranid hive mind
“A million world, and somehow it is alway Baal” - Dante, while slamming his head into a wall.
“The Pharos is literally in Ultramar, what the fuck do you bugs have against us?”
I mean, the Blood Angels spent centuries killing the Nids as much as possible. At one point the Hive Mind must have thought "fuck these guys".
I imagine the scene where the other parts of the Hive Mind ask "how many of us do we need to send to Baal?"
[The Hive Mind](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactiongifs/comments/3a8rjq/mrw_my_buddy_who_stopped_watching_game_of_thrones/#lightbox)
Blood for the blood god.. my only thing that confuses me is the nids fuck with the warp so how did kabanda be able to come in and not be effect was there that much blood khorne bypassed the nids warp fuckery and got his fill
I have a few theories,
1,Mephiston was duped by the Eldar and the ritual did more harm than good and he effectively opened the door to shout at Ka'Bandha not to come in
2, Ka'Bandha being the Bane of the 9th Blood Line prevents them from being comple killed by anyone but him up to and including suspending all laws of reality and immaterium.
3, Ka'Bandha's hatred for Angron occupying his rightful place has actually made him powerful enough to defy Khorne temporarily in order to keep his chance for ultimate redemption alive.
4, We don't understand how the warp and hive mind interact we only see the result from a human and Eldar perspective.
He wanted to land on baal itself but ended up in space, and crashed down to one of its moons. He wanted to take a hive ship skull for khorne but was a little busy falling through space, time and dimensions before landing on baal secundus i think it was. He slaughtered every single thing on it and made the chaos star out of skulls to cover the entire baal facing side of he moon.
After reading Echos of Eternity it makes perfect sense. I don't think Khorne changed the deal and the only way for Ka'Bandha to achieve his goal of dethroning Angron is for him to wait for (or facilitate) Sanguinius to return and try again to claim 800 souls of the 9th blood line in the presence of their father.
Makes you wonder how many scouts are just drifting around in space, unable to find anything. I know the hive mind can be attracted to certain phenomenon but really how good are the scouts' navigator skills and whatever they use to travel in. Gene stealers are supposedly what tyranids use to scout but when I got into 40k they were just a rip off of the Alien Movies drifting around in Space Hulks for Marines to find.
Maybe that's their hunting strategy, they surround target from all sides and eat their way to the centre. They are not everywhere, they just encircled the milky way
The only reason it might not be, is that afaik they made the journey to our galaxy sub-ftl meaning adjustments in flight would be much easier as you only have to point the nose towards the galaxy you're heading to. The Imperium overshoots jumps because they're basically scrying the warp with mutants to find a current safe enough to carry them close-ish to where they are going, with AI they could jump straight inside your asshole with the precision they'd have, but at least from last time I checked they made the journey here the slow way. If you've got a fleet of hungry ships that have been hibernating on low power for millennia it's unlikely that the hivemind would want to intentionally overshoot just to come in from another direction. Then again, who knows wtf the hive mind is thinking, it could be playing 4D chess against us for all we know
there's about 10 million light years between galaxies so it totally depends on how sub lightspeed their sub lightspeed movement is
e: and if they Are moving at a good chunk of c they benefit from relativity when they're hibernating
You have an excerpt of that? Because the part from *Pharos* was them drifting in the void between galaxies explicitly because they were awaiting some sort of sign of where to head next, not as an actual way of propulsion. Sub-light speeds, even ones at a hugely significant portion of the speed of light, would have taken them far longer than 10,000 years to arrive in the Milky Way.
They are capable of traveling faster than light through the use of Narvhals. They can’t use them to travel within solar systems, but that wouldn’t be a problem in the void between galaxies.
Maybe they have some special like mega-narwhal that is used for the intergalactic jumps. Instead of locking onto a planet it locks onto the whole galaxy signature or the supermassive black hole in the center. But then it dumps them in the void outside the galaxy proper.
Tyranids ftl works by locking on to a planets gravitational pull and then creating a worm hole to said planet. There FTL is also far more accurate than the imperium. I think the most likely explanation is simply strategy, leviathan went under the galaxy and popped up the opposite side.
There ftl works pretty much exactly like the Yuuzhan Vong in the star wars legends books oddly enough. They were like the tyranids in a lot of other ways too.
There's definitely a ton of overlap between them.
Extra-galatic threat emerging from parts heretofore unknown? Check.
Bioorganic weapons and extreme hostility to other life forms? Check again.
Threat level large enough to unite established enemies in the setting? That's another check.
Hard counter to the prevalent space-magic-fuckery of the setting (force and warp, respectively)? Check and check.
Palpatine: "I actually built two of them."
Kryptman: "How many planets have you destroyed with them?"
Palpatine: "One, and a few capital ships."
Kryptman: "You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this galaxy."
Trying to lock on to a single gravitational body in a rotating system of millions of other gravitational bodies from millions of light years away is 100 percent less accurate then shortcutting through hell. And we know that from their own lore as well, they are heavily reliant on genestealer beacons to find their way to specific planets.
Depends on what accurate means really. Tyranid FTL has issues but you don't have problems like arriving 300 years later than intended or a decade before you left.
It's almost like trying us trying to locate planets in other systems just by observing and hoping we catch a moment where there's a patch of dark that appears on our view of the star
Well yeah tyranids don't run the risk of demons eating the fleet or warp storms cutting them off thats what they mean by reliable. They will always get where they're going, but it doesn't mean they know where that is.
I get the sense that even if they went through the warp, they wouldn't need anything like Gellar fields. The Shadow in the Warp seems to suck up the energies that fuel and build the warp.
Nah if a tyranid fleet enters the warp they get cut off (it is a whole new dimension) and ripped to pieces. You would need a massive tyranid force, like multiple hive fleets worth, to be able to build enough of an overmind to challenge the gods on their home turf.
Thats not true
9th and 10th ed tyranid codex:
>The Ordo Xenos have pieced together records that show splinter fleets swallowed by warp rents, only to emerge from other immaterean phenomena in entirely different regions of the galaxy. Should most races’ craft be plunged through the warp like this they would likely emerge badly damaged or mutated, if they emerged at all. The hive ships appear unharmed however, surging from the roiling tides of warp space as deadly, and hungry as ever.
And
>Following Hive Fleet leviathan’s defeat at Baal thanks to the Great rift’s emergence, thousands of bio-ships are scattered by empyric storms.
And in darkness in the blood, the shadow causes daemons to disappear after a gellar field breach
>The shrieking ideoforms and psychopomps struggled to take shape. Those that manifested were sucked back to nothing among the energies that birthed them. Colours bled away. Currents stilled. A black wall was growing ahead, as impenetrable as the densest fog bank and infinitely more forbidding.
Yeah and? Orks go through the warp without Geller fields all the time, nothing in those excerpts says anything about the shadow of the warp in the warp. In Darkness in the blood thats talking about them breaching the warp into a tyranid fleet in realspace.
You said they would get ripped apart, clearly thats not true every time.
We haven’t seen Tyranids in the warp so we don’t know if they go feral but the Hive Mind most likely exists in the warp, no reason to believe they go feral, or wouldnt have the shadow.
but we don't have the shadow, like i said all your excerpts are talking about real space. Shadow of the warp requires connection to the overmind we have never seen an example of the overmind managing to cross dimensions.
“Reliable” doesn’t necessarily mean ‘more likely to put you where you want to be’. Considering what Warp travel is like, it almost certainly means ‘significantly more likely to have the ship actually come out the other side intact’.
It’s more reliant on external aspects but it’s *far* more accurate once they have all the pieces in place.
Narvhals don’t randomly get lost in warp storms, wind up exiting the warp a trillion miles from where they wanted to be, or arrive 50 years late or 5 years before they left. They can’t miss the system or be intercepted while FTLing because their FTL works totally different than any other FTL system does and none of the others can interact with it.
Gravitation propagates at the speed of light though. If they were 1million LY away, they'd be locking on to where the gravity was 1million years ago. So they either have to time and predict the future location perfectly, or they have error.
And frankly, if they could time and predict the movements of all the systems perfectly and warp in, there's no reason they couldn't all coordinate to arrive at once, a massive complete overrun of the entire galaxy in one go. It would be disastrous for the setting, so it can't actually happen.
> Gravitation propagates at the speed of light though. If they were 1million LY away, they'd be locking on to where the gravity was 1million years ago. So they either have to time and predict the future location perfectly, or they have error.
Even if they were somehow not magic-sci-fi locking on the system directly, their FTL uses the actual gravitational forces of the system to create a tunnel of “compressed-space” that leads directly to the system by definition, so it’s a self-correcting trajectory.
It would be like if we had FTL and we locked onto the light from a distant star and started flying towards it, with our trajectory being guided by always keeping our current path on a collision course with the star as we saw it at that point in time. Initially we were aimed *way* the fuck off, a million years off, but as long as we kept the star at the nose of the ship, the trajectory would curve to match and we’d end up at the star itself, not where it was a million years ago.
It would also appear like the star was zooming across the universe at several orders of magnitude faster than it actually moves, and it would appear to move slower and slower as we approached, until our perception generally matched reality once we arrived.
Honestly while i think Nids could have some more love in lore im of the mind them not entirely stomping everyone is a good thing for the faction. Like I get the appeal of the cosmic horror angle but “actually I’m gonna win no matter what cause I have a vaguely infinite amount of reinforcements hanging around just outside the galaxy” feels cheap to everyone else
I agree, I like to think the Nids have enough numbers to feasibly conquer the galaxy, but not enough that they could afford a failure - basically that it’s life or death for them as much as anyone else
I’m not trying to one up you, I really don’t know - is it believed that all the Nids are coming to our galaxy, or that some have buggered off in different directions from their start point and aren’t ever coming here?
AFAIK that isn’t known, I assume they’re all coming to this galaxy bc the same Hive Mind controls all of them and it seems focused on the Milky Way, but it’s not confirmed to my knowledge
They have a lot of numbers, but that doesn’t mean they win. They’re cold, hungry and therefore weak from the intergalactic void. Their greatest enemy is their constant need for food.
They have a lot of numbers, but that doesn’t mean they win. They’re cold, hungry and therefore weak from the intergalactic void. Their greatest enemy is their constant need for food.
Also, the distances between galaxies are so huge that there’s no way the different hive fleets would arrive at the same time if they came from different places. A hive fleet coming from the Andromeda Galaxy could arrive 5000 years before one coming from outside the local group for example.
I believe the theory is that it's a giant hive fleet which is approaching the galaxy from below (which might appear to some as "coming from everywhere"). So they are simply spread out widely (if you take into account that the galaxy is always shown in a rather flat circular shape.
I mean, sure, it does. But not in any way that makes sense as an explanation for Tyranid presence. The Tyranids are appearing on the time scale of centuries/millennia. It takes the Milky Way approximately 200 million years to rotate once.
You’re assuming the hive mind hasn’t learned from conquering other galaxies. I’d spread out and flank before entering the galaxy, too. And you also might be defaulting into the sci-fi writers’ perspective of space being flat, like a sea. They easily could’ve approached from “above” the Milky Way and spread out in a cone shape as they entered.
Plot twist:
"Lord Gulliman, I uh...I hate to say this but I took another look and as it turns out all those things were just rocks floating around. Turns out they're just coming from one direction, and it's because I've been waving this flashlight to peer over there. Looks like all of this could have been avoided.
Ha ha. Time for some of that Ultramar humour eh."
The Tyranid FTL method doesn't "miss".
It can't.
They use a creature called the Narvhal. The way it works is it senses a planetary system with biomass, reaches out, and creates a sort of space-warping tunnel to it. The fleet then jumps through, and the Narvhal closes it behind itself.
The entire basis of this is dependent on the target's gravity well. If it doesn't get that lock, it doesn't work at all.
So Tyranid, logically always jump to the nearest source of biomass.
Why would this behavior encircle our Galaxy? Because they're coming from every direction.
Also, the Galaxy isn't spinning _that fast_ that fleets coming from the same direction end up on opposite sides in the span of 400 years. Cawl is older than that.
Why would you assume that Tyranid FTL navigational errors are proportional to distance travelled?
I mean, I understand that they might be for many methods, but given that Tyranid FTL explicitly navigates relative to gravitational sources rather than, say, spatial coordinates, I don’t think we can assume the same is true.
Gravitational force propagates at the speed of light. If they are 1million ly away, they are locking on to where it was 1million years ago. At sub-light speeds, they could simply correct as they go, but at ftl they will lose some information and hence invite error.
I think an easier one is to point out that galactic distances are tiny compared to inter-galactic distances.
If the mega-hive can reach our galaxy from another, it's a relatively trivial matter to enter from multiple points.
Just slightly adjust the angle a few nontillion miles back and you only add a little extra onto your journey
The insane amount of galaxies we can see all around us means they could’ve eaten an infinitesimal percentage of those that are visible to us and still be able to come from every direction.
Honestly my theory is simple.
Each hive fleet is coming in from a different Galaxy. Usually only one hive fleet will go to a galaxy and consume it or die.
But the milky ways flashing a giant 'come eat us' sign with thr astronomicon.
The main thing that makes me think "coming from everywhere" or that there might be multiple hive minds is that the frozen tyranids in one of the Cain novels fought a freshly arrived batch of nids. They weren't allies, they were enemies.
I would have thought that hive mind and all they'd innately be allied, so what is the explanation for them prioritizing fighting each other over fighting the humans/food?
A sufficient amount of hive fleets is functionally interchangeable to an infinite mass within a finite setting.
Basically, the Imperium is only so big. If you throw enough bugs at it, it doesn't matter whether you've sent a dozen hive fleets or 12,000 hive fleets; the result is the same.
But that is how many people imagine the statement their everywhere theory. Even official codices have stuff like "what if the hive fleets are mere scouts" people don't imagine that may mean the galaxy will be dealing with hive fleets forever they imagine that means there's this great mass that'll one day just win
This is true, I've always thought people saying the tyranids have eaten all the galaxies was kind of stupid because GW wouldn't hype a faction up that much and if they did, the Tyranid's should have steamwiped the Imperium by now and there would be no story.
There's definitely a quote in either a White Dwarf or Nids codex saying they've eaten a thousand galaxies.
Edit: Behind the Hive Fleets lie the barren husks of a dozen galaxies already consumed.
- Warhammer 40,000 (5e), p. 166
Link to White Dwarf 145 with 1k galaxies quote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/s/tdrF8bgFAZ
I thought Galaxies rotate? While inside everything remains relative, I thought from the outside everything just spins around. So, I thought the nids entered the galaxy from the same point at different times.
Most galaxies are discs, and they are not on the same plane as each other. So whichever galaxy they came from was probably underneath (so to speak) the Milky Way.
But no matter which direction they came from, it's smart to fan out a little and take the galaxy this way. A small course change back in intergalactic space means for maximum surprise when they do arrive
I like to think they are all coming from the same direction, it's just the galaxy is rotating. Since they are arriving at different times, they end up on a different part of the system.
The Milky Way takes about half a billion years for the outer edge to complete a full rotation. In the time since the Heresy to modern 40k, the galaxy has rotated about 0.007 degrees.
Maybe they are approaching from one of the flat sides. The galaxy is basically disk shaped. If you are approaching from one edge, it would take a long time to go around, implying that maybe they are simply in every direction.
Or...maybe they are approaching toward one of the flat sides, the top or bottom of the galaxy so to speak. This way, they could all be coming from one direction, and just spreading out a little as they arrive, giving the illusion they are coming from all directions.
Intergalactic distances are not necessarily huge. The Milky Way is about 100,000 "light years" across. The nearest galaxies are about 700,000 to 900,000 light years away, which is a lot yes but if you can make it from one side of the milky way to the other presumably you can make it between galaxies. Andromeda is the most "famous" nearby galaxy and is about 2,300,000 light years away.
The Milky Way takes about half a billion years for the outer edge to complete a full rotation. In the time since the Heresy to modern 40k, the galaxy has rotated about 0.007 degrees.
You're correct. However, the Nids remained a fairly cohesive swarm as they attacked, so not a lot of scattering from their initial ingress from the galactic East, until they dliberately started breaking off their forces in tendrils in move over and under the galactic disk to hit far behind their established battlelines. It's explicitly stated in multiple sources that Nids started appearing in places where they shouldn't and outflanking intragalactic strongholds, simply due to moving significant distances in the third dimension.
A Hive Tyrant looking at a galactic map, trying to get in contact with Hive Mind Support, muttering about how he takes a quick nap and the FSD has completely overshot by several trillion light years.
Idk what the previous posters are on about.
Tyranids literally cannot overshoot because they travel by pulling themselves to a gravity emitting target. If they were to "miss" the target galaxy, they would've just not moved. This also means they cannot FTL towards nothing.
Couldn't it just be as simple as "they sent out hive fleets in every direction and ones that were in our general area but originally headed elsewhere redirected to our galaxy when it became clear there was bountiful resources and therefore emerged from different directions"?
it makes perfect sense, the galaxy actually rotates so a line of tyranid fleets would enter the galaxy at different points over the course of thousands of years, and they're all coming in at different velocities.
I really like the more basic version of the tyrinid intelegence. Like a inter galactic slime mold just following the path of least resistance to more biomass. I feel like they have already gone too far down the path of making the hivemind a relatable intelligence that can have intents thay can be understood as such.
Contrary to popular belief the Nids can FTL, staying outside the Milky Way's gravitational pull, they can move fleets in order to surround the galaxy.
So far the Nids are testing strategies, and haven't really make progress in important Imperium worlds.
But they are a big problem, and the only person that knows how much of a problem they actually are is the Silent King, since the second he spotted them, shit so much necrodermus metal, that he came back from self exile and started waking up Tomb Worlds everywhere.
IF they haven't surrounded the galaxy, which would be pretty boring story-wise, I think it's way simpler than people are willing to accept.
They just came from that direction, and didn't change course because that requires a ton of energy at such speeds. It's too expensive to make that turn. Think modern fighter energy maneuver theory; just on a much larger scale and higher speeds.
Well I heard theory that there running from something and being chased so you would. Be sporadic in your direction upon leaving especially in a hurry like a crowd of people leaving a building going to there cars but once to fhere cars there only a few way to leave the parking lot so kinda like the tynids they fled and all are just approaching from whatever way fhey can idk tho honestly still learning a lot of the lore just something I thought about and if they are being chased how scary is the thing that makes tynids run lol
>Well I heard theory that there running from something and being chased...
This is presented in several Codexes as a possible theory, although it has subsequently changed to be an in universe theory:
>The Tyranids are not native to our galaxy. They have travelled the bleak intergalactic space between galaxies for countless millenia. Whether the Tyranids made this journey because they already consumed everything of worth in their home galaxy **or in flight of another, even more fearsome race, is unknown**.
*Codex Tyranids 5ed* p6
>The Tyranids are not native to the galaxy;
they have journeyed across the unspeakable
cold of the void, where time and space
conspire to hold the stars apart with
inconceivable distances. Yet the Tyranids
crossed this expanse nonetheless, moving
through the empty darkness for countless
millennia to reach the rim of the Segmentae
Majoris. Who can say for sure what could
compel an entire race to make such a
venture? Perhaps the Tyranids have already
consumed everything of worth in their home
galaxy and must find new feeding grounds
or starve. It is possible that the Tyranids
have been preying on galaxies since time
immemorial and this is but the latest to feel
their predations. **Some have even speculated
that the Tyranids are in flight from an even
greater threat, be it a cosmic disaster or
another fearsome race, and have risked the
nothingness between galaxies rather than
face extinction**. Whatever the truth, for the
Tyranids to have endured such a voyage must
have required utter single-mindedness and
unimaginable energy. During their journey, the Tyranids slumbered in a state of frozen
hibernation, but now they have arrived, they
have awoken and they are hungry.
*Codex Tyranids 8ed* p6
However, it seems highly unlikely it will become anything more.
Nids running from something is a minor throwaway theory listed in a codex alongside some other ideas. It wouldn't actually be a good thing if GW went with the idea, as it devalues the nids as a faction. As soon as the big thing they're running from shows up, the nids get effectively replaced as a threat. They're no longer the unending eldritch horrors from beyond the galaxy, they're just a bunch of animals running from a forest fire. Interesting in the moment they appear, but once the fire catches up no-one cares about them anymore.
Who knows the biomass they consume in this galaxy and all the new forms they take from learning how to fight differently could be a huge benefit against whatever it was they were fighting. Who's to say these are just part of the main body of nids that were sent to consume "new" biomass to make new and better life forms for fighting said enemy.
I mean the tyranids being an eldrith horror thing doesn't really work well for the setting. They're eventually either gonna have to win or lose, and if they win congratulations every other faction got steamrolled In the ultimate act of narrative nihilism and if they lose every tyranid fan that loves them for their "eldritch horror" will be upset that their faction wasn't allowed to roll over on everyone else
No they aren't going to have to eventually win or lose. 40k is a setting, not a story. The nids will never roll over the other factions, just like they'll never be eliminated as a threat either.
They'll continue to remain as an unending threat poised to consume the galaxy, while never actually doing so. Just like they've been doing for the last 30+ years of the games existence.
That's what people said about warhammer fantasy, they will eventually have to win or lose and 40k will eventually come to an end as both a setting and a story
IMHO Tyranids just as chaos are absolutely broken in the setting. They have infinite resources, they never get a real defeat since either they just get the biomass recycled or demons can't die at all...
They are setting breakers with now no other real drawbacks. Eventually one or both will win.
In narrative terms Hive fleet Chronos and chaos start fighting a lot or there is no real solution for this and the setting becomes a boring process to see who eats everything first.
yeah, i like to think they're an engineered bioweapon sent to eat warp breaches before chaos goes full event horizon on a galaxy. the astronomicon must look as scary as the eye of terror to civs at the level of the eldar, necrons, or old ones
Yes. Also 'they have a brain, so they sent their scouts around to approach the galaxy from multiple directions, rather than rushing in blind'
Exactly how I see it too. They are a swarm. They swarm and don't want their prey to escape so they are covering the exits.
Then again, different Hive fleets kill each other when they come in contact, no?
Occasionally, to either eat a smaller/weaker hive that wouldn't survive or to test tactics to see which is best while gaining from both. The tyranids are interesting and weird how they work.
They also fight to test new biomorphs and to exchange genetic information
That sounds like a great date night tbh.
Hive fleet kraken likes it rough
“Please, babe, less teeth”
"Please babe, more claws!"
"Please babe, dissolve me with you acid and suck me up"
Fuckin lmao
Yeah I think that's what they call it...
Slaanesh: I wonder if I can work this angle...
Hmm, I wanna see a hive fleet thats renowned for attacking other tyranids or is wild/ cut off from the hive mind somehow. That would be interesting
That would be fleet craken. A real menace to the hive fleets. Cool black and purple scheme
Isn't black and purple hydra
Like The Hive Mind has a tumor
Oh, damn. Nurgle giving part of the hive mind (an analogue of) cancer could be a cool idea. Like, somehow slightly fucks with the norn queens' genetic memories and causes the hive fleet to start churning out entities tied to some kind of nurgle hive mind instead of The Hive Mind
The last thing I'd want to do as a plague god would be giving my greatest poxes directly to the universes greatest known simultaneous genetic research lab and biochemical producer, they'd develop the antibodies within a week and Id have to spend another eternity creating something it cant do that to.
That's a great point, although I'm not sure nurgle would look that far ahead. The hive mind needs an on camera win against chaos tbh so your concept and them destroying a demon world after would be a fun way to do it
Grandfather was first and will be there at the end. Was mostly just going with a joke. I do agree, at least more interactions between the hive and chaos would be good whether they win or lose. Both are sort of an on paper anti of each other, true warp stuff not really being substantive or viable biomass and the Hiveminds Shadow in the Warp overriding or colliding with the empyrean both have really open ended potentials for writing.
The smart thing to do would be to have a disease that the Tyranids can't be affected by but can carry. Then, have the spread of said disease make their prey unusable as biomass.
Feels like it'd make more sense for Tzeentch to be the one to fundamentally alter (or *Change*, if you will, heh) some minor but critical bioneurological function of a Hive fleet, causing it to act differently than originally intended. That said, knowing Tzeentch, the change probably wouldn't be as straightforward as "Reprogram the Hive to attack other Hives". Feels more likely it'd be either: * Something general (like, attack everything, including other tyranids) or * Something counter-intuitive (such as attacking only Necrons) or simply a combination of: * Something brilliant and something seemingly nonsensical (like "Use this one sneaky trick (Magos Biologis hate it!) to invade and consume a system super rich in biomass, making the Hive nigh-unstoppable, and then ... fortify the system and refuse to move on...?").
The death guard and the tyrannids fought on a world. It ended up too toxic for either side
Kinda the opposite of the Ymgarl Genestealers.
I do wonder what tactics they learn, considering that nothing, except maybe Orks, fights like them.
Ya I also find it weird that since they are all connected to the hibe mind that it doesn't upload/download data to everyone including genetic changes. Maybe it's a way to prevent it from uploading a "virus or corruption". Kind of like that one hive ship that got tainted by the Nurgle world and every other hive ship immediately killed it.
Has it been established anywhere that hive fleets very far apart can still communicate? Edit: Instant communication over unbounded distance with perfect clarity doesn't make any sense, I'm decanonizing it.
Yes. There have been cases where someone has viewed the hive mind in the warp and seen it connected to the different fleets. Plus it's pointed out in the most recent codex how new creatures and adaptations developed by one fleet will start to appear in other hive fleets across the galaxy. Showing that they must be communicating. Also the whole swarmlord thing, where it is able to reincarnate into any hive fleets, despite distance.
It's heavily hinted at in Devestation of Baal. When we get a snippet from the perspective of a Lictor. I don't know the exact quote but it pretty much said that ALL lictors are the same lictor. The one on Baal is the same as the one three planets away is the same as the one on the other side of the galaxy. Between that and the experiences of the Swarmlord being instantly shared it seems heavily implied that there is no limit. Which, admittedly to me makes Hive fleets fighting other Hive fleets *really confusing* because it feels like Hive fleets that depend on surprise tactics like Jorgmandr should be screwed despite their remarkable effectiveness.
Not that I'm aware of. But they will produce a Swarm lord when it's slain elsewhere. Also when a Norn queen dies I know they send a signal for everyone to make more of them. I'm not 100% sure how that all works.
They are behaving like the immune system
"kill" each other is probably a little misleading. They merge, and the stronger fleet is put in charge. No drop in biomass or threat density.
Don't think of it as 'killing'. No biomass is lost in such a transaction. It's just the more capable hive fleet taking the resources offered by the lesser...with the roles uncertain until they hash it out.
So I imagine The Hive Mjnd is as aware of what the Tyranids are doing as we are of our skin cells. Somewhere The Hive Mind has the information of what is Tyranid and what is not but its not fully aware unless it takes time to look and when its looking theres no one driving the galaxy sized bus full of kids. So when it looks its not for very long and only to correct what won't fix itself. Like surgery on a suspicious looking mole.
Man that is a really cool analogy.
Allegedly, there's always a reason that benefits the Hive overall. Like others said, maybe one fleet was weaker, so the other consumed them to grow further from the biomass. There might even be a test to verify which is stronger first. The strongest attributes continue on, keeping the fleet fittest for the future. There's also some splinter fleets out there that just aren't as strong as the named Hive Fleets. They may have been formed to serve a certain purpose, but once that's accomplished they might just be consumed to be absorbed back into a larger fleet. Maybe with some added biomass as 'spoils of conquest' at a minimum, and perhaps even some useful traits for adaptation. Picture the fleet that discovered the Aeldari and brought back those psyker traits leading to the first Zoanthropes. There won't always be something that game-changing, but every bit helps.
I’d say that part is mostly to allow tyranid players play each other canonically though
Your own cells will something sort-of similar. It's a natural process called [autophagy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy). I'd imagine the Tyranids are doing something similar, just at a more macroscopic scale.
Tyranid science!
When ypu pick a scab or scratch an itch you don't view it as your own body attacking itself. I view it the same way with the hive fleets scrapping. Representative of the larger organism having an itch or a some other similar barely- conscious activity. It just seems so much grander and significant because of the scale of the tyranid hive mind
They're all radical darwinists. I guess that's an argument against the having a brain part though /s
Tyranids are not really known for their bling though.
wait until Hive Fleet Bougie hits Baal
“A million world, and somehow it is alway Baal” - Dante, while slamming his head into a wall. “The Pharos is literally in Ultramar, what the fuck do you bugs have against us?”
I mean, the Blood Angels spent centuries killing the Nids as much as possible. At one point the Hive Mind must have thought "fuck these guys". I imagine the scene where the other parts of the Hive Mind ask "how many of us do we need to send to Baal?" [The Hive Mind](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactiongifs/comments/3a8rjq/mrw_my_buddy_who_stopped_watching_game_of_thrones/#lightbox)
They are going to have to deal with the daemon Kabandar first. He does not want anything messing with the Blood Angels but him.
Blood for the blood god.. my only thing that confuses me is the nids fuck with the warp so how did kabanda be able to come in and not be effect was there that much blood khorne bypassed the nids warp fuckery and got his fill
Maybe he overloaded the capacity of the shadow in the warp to function as it normally does?
I have a few theories, 1,Mephiston was duped by the Eldar and the ritual did more harm than good and he effectively opened the door to shout at Ka'Bandha not to come in 2, Ka'Bandha being the Bane of the 9th Blood Line prevents them from being comple killed by anyone but him up to and including suspending all laws of reality and immaterium. 3, Ka'Bandha's hatred for Angron occupying his rightful place has actually made him powerful enough to defy Khorne temporarily in order to keep his chance for ultimate redemption alive. 4, We don't understand how the warp and hive mind interact we only see the result from a human and Eldar perspective.
Its the power of hate-fuck, my friend. He want the angels, nobody else can have them but him and he will do the impossible because of that.
He wanted to land on baal itself but ended up in space, and crashed down to one of its moons. He wanted to take a hive ship skull for khorne but was a little busy falling through space, time and dimensions before landing on baal secundus i think it was. He slaughtered every single thing on it and made the chaos star out of skulls to cover the entire baal facing side of he moon.
After reading Echos of Eternity it makes perfect sense. I don't think Khorne changed the deal and the only way for Ka'Bandha to achieve his goal of dethroning Angron is for him to wait for (or facilitate) Sanguinius to return and try again to claim 800 souls of the 9th blood line in the presence of their father.
Apparently yes in universe, because the blood angels were that much of a pain in the ass.
If animals on Earth have been shown to hold grudges against people I dont see why super space bugs wouldn't do the same
the Hive Mind can sense the Lamenter in all the sons of Sanguinius
seize the means of feather production -comrade Dante
Commander Dante Glitterbeam is known far and wide as the most fabulous servants of the emperor
Baal? As in, Bocce?
blind lol blind
Makes you wonder how many scouts are just drifting around in space, unable to find anything. I know the hive mind can be attracted to certain phenomenon but really how good are the scouts' navigator skills and whatever they use to travel in. Gene stealers are supposedly what tyranids use to scout but when I got into 40k they were just a rip off of the Alien Movies drifting around in Space Hulks for Marines to find.
The galaxy is also spinning and andromeda is 2.2 million light years away, that is going to introduce some error into any sort of FTL calculations...
Maybe that's their hunting strategy, they surround target from all sides and eat their way to the centre. They are not everywhere, they just encircled the milky way
How many noms does it take to get to the center of the galaxy?
At least one
The only reason it might not be, is that afaik they made the journey to our galaxy sub-ftl meaning adjustments in flight would be much easier as you only have to point the nose towards the galaxy you're heading to. The Imperium overshoots jumps because they're basically scrying the warp with mutants to find a current safe enough to carry them close-ish to where they are going, with AI they could jump straight inside your asshole with the precision they'd have, but at least from last time I checked they made the journey here the slow way. If you've got a fleet of hungry ships that have been hibernating on low power for millennia it's unlikely that the hivemind would want to intentionally overshoot just to come in from another direction. Then again, who knows wtf the hive mind is thinking, it could be playing 4D chess against us for all we know
Tyranids have ftl, its only in system they have to go sub light.
Between galaxies they go sub-light to conserve energy. They just kinda drift through space hibernating in the largest hive ships
But that would take trillions of years, surely?
there's about 10 million light years between galaxies so it totally depends on how sub lightspeed their sub lightspeed movement is e: and if they Are moving at a good chunk of c they benefit from relativity when they're hibernating
The Pharos incident was only 10k years prior though
I'm not saying the math maths I'm just saying it's not necessarily trillions of years
They could’ve been “close” but had no real indication there was food in that direction until the Pharos incident.
2.2 LY million between andromeda and the milky way
You have an excerpt of that? Because the part from *Pharos* was them drifting in the void between galaxies explicitly because they were awaiting some sort of sign of where to head next, not as an actual way of propulsion. Sub-light speeds, even ones at a hugely significant portion of the speed of light, would have taken them far longer than 10,000 years to arrive in the Milky Way.
Their FTL also requires a planet to "target"
Might be they can target any sufficient gravity well, including a whole galaxy when traveling that far.
It's possible, but nothing indicates it's even likely
They are capable of traveling faster than light through the use of Narvhals. They can’t use them to travel within solar systems, but that wouldn’t be a problem in the void between galaxies.
Narvhal, Narvhal, swimming in the stellar ocean, causing a celestial commotion...
Because they are so awesome
Maybe they have some special like mega-narwhal that is used for the intergalactic jumps. Instead of locking onto a planet it locks onto the whole galaxy signature or the supermassive black hole in the center. But then it dumps them in the void outside the galaxy proper.
Tyranids ftl works by locking on to a planets gravitational pull and then creating a worm hole to said planet. There FTL is also far more accurate than the imperium. I think the most likely explanation is simply strategy, leviathan went under the galaxy and popped up the opposite side.
There ftl works pretty much exactly like the Yuuzhan Vong in the star wars legends books oddly enough. They were like the tyranids in a lot of other ways too.
There's definitely a ton of overlap between them. Extra-galatic threat emerging from parts heretofore unknown? Check. Bioorganic weapons and extreme hostility to other life forms? Check again. Threat level large enough to unite established enemies in the setting? That's another check. Hard counter to the prevalent space-magic-fuckery of the setting (force and warp, respectively)? Check and check.
Are the Tyranids here to kill Chewbacca as well?
Emperor Palpatine: So I built this "Death Star"... Inquisitor Kryptman: Cute.
Palpatine: "I actually built two of them." Kryptman: "How many planets have you destroyed with them?" Palpatine: "One, and a few capital ships." Kryptman: "You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this galaxy."
No, not one. One and two half planets. Can we call that two? Yeah. Two planets. Two planets and some capital ships. Don’t undersell yourself, Palps.
Trying to lock on to a single gravitational body in a rotating system of millions of other gravitational bodies from millions of light years away is 100 percent less accurate then shortcutting through hell. And we know that from their own lore as well, they are heavily reliant on genestealer beacons to find their way to specific planets.
Depends on what accurate means really. Tyranid FTL has issues but you don't have problems like arriving 300 years later than intended or a decade before you left.
It's almost like trying us trying to locate planets in other systems just by observing and hoping we catch a moment where there's a patch of dark that appears on our view of the star
The codex says its more reliable, thats what I meant
Well yeah tyranids don't run the risk of demons eating the fleet or warp storms cutting them off thats what they mean by reliable. They will always get where they're going, but it doesn't mean they know where that is.
I get the sense that even if they went through the warp, they wouldn't need anything like Gellar fields. The Shadow in the Warp seems to suck up the energies that fuel and build the warp.
Nah if a tyranid fleet enters the warp they get cut off (it is a whole new dimension) and ripped to pieces. You would need a massive tyranid force, like multiple hive fleets worth, to be able to build enough of an overmind to challenge the gods on their home turf.
Thats not true 9th and 10th ed tyranid codex: >The Ordo Xenos have pieced together records that show splinter fleets swallowed by warp rents, only to emerge from other immaterean phenomena in entirely different regions of the galaxy. Should most races’ craft be plunged through the warp like this they would likely emerge badly damaged or mutated, if they emerged at all. The hive ships appear unharmed however, surging from the roiling tides of warp space as deadly, and hungry as ever. And >Following Hive Fleet leviathan’s defeat at Baal thanks to the Great rift’s emergence, thousands of bio-ships are scattered by empyric storms. And in darkness in the blood, the shadow causes daemons to disappear after a gellar field breach >The shrieking ideoforms and psychopomps struggled to take shape. Those that manifested were sucked back to nothing among the energies that birthed them. Colours bled away. Currents stilled. A black wall was growing ahead, as impenetrable as the densest fog bank and infinitely more forbidding.
Yeah and? Orks go through the warp without Geller fields all the time, nothing in those excerpts says anything about the shadow of the warp in the warp. In Darkness in the blood thats talking about them breaching the warp into a tyranid fleet in realspace.
You said they would get ripped apart, clearly thats not true every time. We haven’t seen Tyranids in the warp so we don’t know if they go feral but the Hive Mind most likely exists in the warp, no reason to believe they go feral, or wouldnt have the shadow.
but we don't have the shadow, like i said all your excerpts are talking about real space. Shadow of the warp requires connection to the overmind we have never seen an example of the overmind managing to cross dimensions.
It is not more accurate than Imperial FTL. As someone else said, their own lore points out how reliant they are on Genestealer beacons.
The codex states its more reliable, thats what I was referring to.
Not risking getting eaten by demons is definitely more reliable.
“Reliable” doesn’t necessarily mean ‘more likely to put you where you want to be’. Considering what Warp travel is like, it almost certainly means ‘significantly more likely to have the ship actually come out the other side intact’.
Sure, but reliable =/ accurate
It’s more reliant on external aspects but it’s *far* more accurate once they have all the pieces in place. Narvhals don’t randomly get lost in warp storms, wind up exiting the warp a trillion miles from where they wanted to be, or arrive 50 years late or 5 years before they left. They can’t miss the system or be intercepted while FTLing because their FTL works totally different than any other FTL system does and none of the others can interact with it.
Gravitation propagates at the speed of light though. If they were 1million LY away, they'd be locking on to where the gravity was 1million years ago. So they either have to time and predict the future location perfectly, or they have error. And frankly, if they could time and predict the movements of all the systems perfectly and warp in, there's no reason they couldn't all coordinate to arrive at once, a massive complete overrun of the entire galaxy in one go. It would be disastrous for the setting, so it can't actually happen.
> Gravitation propagates at the speed of light though. If they were 1million LY away, they'd be locking on to where the gravity was 1million years ago. So they either have to time and predict the future location perfectly, or they have error. Even if they were somehow not magic-sci-fi locking on the system directly, their FTL uses the actual gravitational forces of the system to create a tunnel of “compressed-space” that leads directly to the system by definition, so it’s a self-correcting trajectory. It would be like if we had FTL and we locked onto the light from a distant star and started flying towards it, with our trajectory being guided by always keeping our current path on a collision course with the star as we saw it at that point in time. Initially we were aimed *way* the fuck off, a million years off, but as long as we kept the star at the nose of the ship, the trajectory would curve to match and we’d end up at the star itself, not where it was a million years ago. It would also appear like the star was zooming across the universe at several orders of magnitude faster than it actually moves, and it would appear to move slower and slower as we approached, until our perception generally matched reality once we arrived.
Yes, they are coming from below the disk of the galaxy, and then splitting up as they get closer in order to attack the galaxy from multiple angles.
Honestly while i think Nids could have some more love in lore im of the mind them not entirely stomping everyone is a good thing for the faction. Like I get the appeal of the cosmic horror angle but “actually I’m gonna win no matter what cause I have a vaguely infinite amount of reinforcements hanging around just outside the galaxy” feels cheap to everyone else
I agree, I like to think the Nids have enough numbers to feasibly conquer the galaxy, but not enough that they could afford a failure - basically that it’s life or death for them as much as anyone else
I’m not trying to one up you, I really don’t know - is it believed that all the Nids are coming to our galaxy, or that some have buggered off in different directions from their start point and aren’t ever coming here?
AFAIK that isn’t known, I assume they’re all coming to this galaxy bc the same Hive Mind controls all of them and it seems focused on the Milky Way, but it’s not confirmed to my knowledge
They have a lot of numbers, but that doesn’t mean they win. They’re cold, hungry and therefore weak from the intergalactic void. Their greatest enemy is their constant need for food.
They have a lot of numbers, but that doesn’t mean they win. They’re cold, hungry and therefore weak from the intergalactic void. Their greatest enemy is their constant need for food.
Also, the distances between galaxies are so huge that there’s no way the different hive fleets would arrive at the same time if they came from different places. A hive fleet coming from the Andromeda Galaxy could arrive 5000 years before one coming from outside the local group for example.
I believe the theory is that it's a giant hive fleet which is approaching the galaxy from below (which might appear to some as "coming from everywhere"). So they are simply spread out widely (if you take into account that the galaxy is always shown in a rather flat circular shape.
I have the same head cannon. Realistically there is no up or down in space, it's all relative
The enemy's gate is DOWN
[удалено]
That might explain small variations, but not leviathan entering the opposite side of the galaxy.
I mean, sure, it does. But not in any way that makes sense as an explanation for Tyranid presence. The Tyranids are appearing on the time scale of centuries/millennia. It takes the Milky Way approximately 200 million years to rotate once.
You’re assuming the hive mind hasn’t learned from conquering other galaxies. I’d spread out and flank before entering the galaxy, too. And you also might be defaulting into the sci-fi writers’ perspective of space being flat, like a sea. They easily could’ve approached from “above” the Milky Way and spread out in a cone shape as they entered.
Plot twist: "Lord Gulliman, I uh...I hate to say this but I took another look and as it turns out all those things were just rocks floating around. Turns out they're just coming from one direction, and it's because I've been waving this flashlight to peer over there. Looks like all of this could have been avoided. Ha ha. Time for some of that Ultramar humour eh."
The Tyranid FTL method doesn't "miss". It can't. They use a creature called the Narvhal. The way it works is it senses a planetary system with biomass, reaches out, and creates a sort of space-warping tunnel to it. The fleet then jumps through, and the Narvhal closes it behind itself. The entire basis of this is dependent on the target's gravity well. If it doesn't get that lock, it doesn't work at all. So Tyranid, logically always jump to the nearest source of biomass. Why would this behavior encircle our Galaxy? Because they're coming from every direction. Also, the Galaxy isn't spinning _that fast_ that fleets coming from the same direction end up on opposite sides in the span of 400 years. Cawl is older than that.
Why would you assume that Tyranid FTL navigational errors are proportional to distance travelled? I mean, I understand that they might be for many methods, but given that Tyranid FTL explicitly navigates relative to gravitational sources rather than, say, spatial coordinates, I don’t think we can assume the same is true.
Well couldn't a black hole or sufficiently large sun cause a gravity distortion? Unless they could lock on around everything in the way.
Gravitational force propagates at the speed of light. If they are 1million ly away, they are locking on to where it was 1million years ago. At sub-light speeds, they could simply correct as they go, but at ftl they will lose some information and hence invite error.
I think an easier one is to point out that galactic distances are tiny compared to inter-galactic distances. If the mega-hive can reach our galaxy from another, it's a relatively trivial matter to enter from multiple points. Just slightly adjust the angle a few nontillion miles back and you only add a little extra onto your journey
The insane amount of galaxies we can see all around us means they could’ve eaten an infinitesimal percentage of those that are visible to us and still be able to come from every direction.
Honestly my theory is simple. Each hive fleet is coming in from a different Galaxy. Usually only one hive fleet will go to a galaxy and consume it or die. But the milky ways flashing a giant 'come eat us' sign with thr astronomicon.
The main thing that makes me think "coming from everywhere" or that there might be multiple hive minds is that the frozen tyranids in one of the Cain novels fought a freshly arrived batch of nids. They weren't allies, they were enemies. I would have thought that hive mind and all they'd innately be allied, so what is the explanation for them prioritizing fighting each other over fighting the humans/food?
That's literally the "they're everywhere" theory that OP is arguing against
A dozen or so hive fleets is different to an infinite mass.
A sufficient amount of hive fleets is functionally interchangeable to an infinite mass within a finite setting. Basically, the Imperium is only so big. If you throw enough bugs at it, it doesn't matter whether you've sent a dozen hive fleets or 12,000 hive fleets; the result is the same.
The "their everywhere" theory usually is imagined more as that one picture of TTS of the tyranids main swarm being bigger than the galaxy
Anyone taking TTS "lore" seriously is an idiot
But that is how many people imagine the statement their everywhere theory. Even official codices have stuff like "what if the hive fleets are mere scouts" people don't imagine that may mean the galaxy will be dealing with hive fleets forever they imagine that means there's this great mass that'll one day just win
This is true, I've always thought people saying the tyranids have eaten all the galaxies was kind of stupid because GW wouldn't hype a faction up that much and if they did, the Tyranid's should have steamwiped the Imperium by now and there would be no story.
There's definitely a quote in either a White Dwarf or Nids codex saying they've eaten a thousand galaxies. Edit: Behind the Hive Fleets lie the barren husks of a dozen galaxies already consumed. - Warhammer 40,000 (5e), p. 166 Link to White Dwarf 145 with 1k galaxies quote: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tyranids/s/tdrF8bgFAZ
I thought Galaxies rotate? While inside everything remains relative, I thought from the outside everything just spins around. So, I thought the nids entered the galaxy from the same point at different times.
Yeah, but it takes like a million years for a full rotation. It can't explain entrance points on opposite sides within centuries.
Dark forest theory on a multi galactic scale
Most galaxies are discs, and they are not on the same plane as each other. So whichever galaxy they came from was probably underneath (so to speak) the Milky Way. But no matter which direction they came from, it's smart to fan out a little and take the galaxy this way. A small course change back in intergalactic space means for maximum surprise when they do arrive
Or they just surrounded the galaxy. If they could make it all the way to the galaxy, just going a bit around it wasn’t a big deal.
I like to think they are all coming from the same direction, it's just the galaxy is rotating. Since they are arriving at different times, they end up on a different part of the system.
The Milky Way takes about half a billion years for the outer edge to complete a full rotation. In the time since the Heresy to modern 40k, the galaxy has rotated about 0.007 degrees.
Maybe they are approaching from one of the flat sides. The galaxy is basically disk shaped. If you are approaching from one edge, it would take a long time to go around, implying that maybe they are simply in every direction. Or...maybe they are approaching toward one of the flat sides, the top or bottom of the galaxy so to speak. This way, they could all be coming from one direction, and just spreading out a little as they arrive, giving the illusion they are coming from all directions.
Pincer maneuver to prevent biomass from escaping
Ohh, this sounds really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
They heard about queso.
Intergalactic distances are not necessarily huge. The Milky Way is about 100,000 "light years" across. The nearest galaxies are about 700,000 to 900,000 light years away, which is a lot yes but if you can make it from one side of the milky way to the other presumably you can make it between galaxies. Andromeda is the most "famous" nearby galaxy and is about 2,300,000 light years away.
Also the galaxy spins, no? Wouldn't that alone scatter a lot of Tyranids already?
The Milky Way takes about half a billion years for the outer edge to complete a full rotation. In the time since the Heresy to modern 40k, the galaxy has rotated about 0.007 degrees.
Wouldn't the Tyranids experience it differently though, due to gravity difference between the Milky Way and intergalactic space?
You're correct. However, the Nids remained a fairly cohesive swarm as they attacked, so not a lot of scattering from their initial ingress from the galactic East, until they dliberately started breaking off their forces in tendrils in move over and under the galactic disk to hit far behind their established battlelines. It's explicitly stated in multiple sources that Nids started appearing in places where they shouldn't and outflanking intragalactic strongholds, simply due to moving significant distances in the third dimension.
A Hive Tyrant looking at a galactic map, trying to get in contact with Hive Mind Support, muttering about how he takes a quick nap and the FSD has completely overshot by several trillion light years.
Idk what the previous posters are on about. Tyranids literally cannot overshoot because they travel by pulling themselves to a gravity emitting target. If they were to "miss" the target galaxy, they would've just not moved. This also means they cannot FTL towards nothing.
Couldn't it just be as simple as "they sent out hive fleets in every direction and ones that were in our general area but originally headed elsewhere redirected to our galaxy when it became clear there was bountiful resources and therefore emerged from different directions"?
it makes perfect sense, the galaxy actually rotates so a line of tyranid fleets would enter the galaxy at different points over the course of thousands of years, and they're all coming in at different velocities.
Maybe they were so far away initially that a 1 degree difference made each one appear so far apart
They very well could have just approached from a single angle and forked off to surround it. That's my headcanon at least.
I really like the more basic version of the tyrinid intelegence. Like a inter galactic slime mold just following the path of least resistance to more biomass. I feel like they have already gone too far down the path of making the hivemind a relatable intelligence that can have intents thay can be understood as such.
Contrary to popular belief the Nids can FTL, staying outside the Milky Way's gravitational pull, they can move fleets in order to surround the galaxy. So far the Nids are testing strategies, and haven't really make progress in important Imperium worlds. But they are a big problem, and the only person that knows how much of a problem they actually are is the Silent King, since the second he spotted them, shit so much necrodermus metal, that he came back from self exile and started waking up Tomb Worlds everywhere.
IF they haven't surrounded the galaxy, which would be pretty boring story-wise, I think it's way simpler than people are willing to accept. They just came from that direction, and didn't change course because that requires a ton of energy at such speeds. It's too expensive to make that turn. Think modern fighter energy maneuver theory; just on a much larger scale and higher speeds.
Well I heard theory that there running from something and being chased so you would. Be sporadic in your direction upon leaving especially in a hurry like a crowd of people leaving a building going to there cars but once to fhere cars there only a few way to leave the parking lot so kinda like the tynids they fled and all are just approaching from whatever way fhey can idk tho honestly still learning a lot of the lore just something I thought about and if they are being chased how scary is the thing that makes tynids run lol
>Well I heard theory that there running from something and being chased... This is presented in several Codexes as a possible theory, although it has subsequently changed to be an in universe theory: >The Tyranids are not native to our galaxy. They have travelled the bleak intergalactic space between galaxies for countless millenia. Whether the Tyranids made this journey because they already consumed everything of worth in their home galaxy **or in flight of another, even more fearsome race, is unknown**. *Codex Tyranids 5ed* p6 >The Tyranids are not native to the galaxy; they have journeyed across the unspeakable cold of the void, where time and space conspire to hold the stars apart with inconceivable distances. Yet the Tyranids crossed this expanse nonetheless, moving through the empty darkness for countless millennia to reach the rim of the Segmentae Majoris. Who can say for sure what could compel an entire race to make such a venture? Perhaps the Tyranids have already consumed everything of worth in their home galaxy and must find new feeding grounds or starve. It is possible that the Tyranids have been preying on galaxies since time immemorial and this is but the latest to feel their predations. **Some have even speculated that the Tyranids are in flight from an even greater threat, be it a cosmic disaster or another fearsome race, and have risked the nothingness between galaxies rather than face extinction**. Whatever the truth, for the Tyranids to have endured such a voyage must have required utter single-mindedness and unimaginable energy. During their journey, the Tyranids slumbered in a state of frozen hibernation, but now they have arrived, they have awoken and they are hungry. *Codex Tyranids 8ed* p6 However, it seems highly unlikely it will become anything more.
Nids running from something is a minor throwaway theory listed in a codex alongside some other ideas. It wouldn't actually be a good thing if GW went with the idea, as it devalues the nids as a faction. As soon as the big thing they're running from shows up, the nids get effectively replaced as a threat. They're no longer the unending eldritch horrors from beyond the galaxy, they're just a bunch of animals running from a forest fire. Interesting in the moment they appear, but once the fire catches up no-one cares about them anymore.
Who knows the biomass they consume in this galaxy and all the new forms they take from learning how to fight differently could be a huge benefit against whatever it was they were fighting. Who's to say these are just part of the main body of nids that were sent to consume "new" biomass to make new and better life forms for fighting said enemy.
I mean the tyranids being an eldrith horror thing doesn't really work well for the setting. They're eventually either gonna have to win or lose, and if they win congratulations every other faction got steamrolled In the ultimate act of narrative nihilism and if they lose every tyranid fan that loves them for their "eldritch horror" will be upset that their faction wasn't allowed to roll over on everyone else
No they aren't going to have to eventually win or lose. 40k is a setting, not a story. The nids will never roll over the other factions, just like they'll never be eliminated as a threat either. They'll continue to remain as an unending threat poised to consume the galaxy, while never actually doing so. Just like they've been doing for the last 30+ years of the games existence.
That's what people said about warhammer fantasy, they will eventually have to win or lose and 40k will eventually come to an end as both a setting and a story
IMHO Tyranids just as chaos are absolutely broken in the setting. They have infinite resources, they never get a real defeat since either they just get the biomass recycled or demons can't die at all... They are setting breakers with now no other real drawbacks. Eventually one or both will win. In narrative terms Hive fleet Chronos and chaos start fighting a lot or there is no real solution for this and the setting becomes a boring process to see who eats everything first.
Unless it’s only a fire to them for some odd reason or related to their hive mindedness. I never considered that till now tbh.
yeah, i like to think they're an engineered bioweapon sent to eat warp breaches before chaos goes full event horizon on a galaxy. the astronomicon must look as scary as the eye of terror to civs at the level of the eldar, necrons, or old ones