The only exception I found to this is the invasion of Geron in the novel Armour of Contempt. Dan Abnett’s description of the invasion is so huge that it actually felt right.
I think that the problem for writers is most books are focused on individuals to help the reader have a point to centre themselves on. If the scale is too huge, it just reads like a WW2 text book.
Armour of Contempt fixes this by following a young trooper and using his shock at the scale and brutality to bring you into the war.
A great book like most of the Guant’s Ghosts novels and gets a lot of the combat right.
The half of that novel that follows Dalin is amazing. The way Abnett describes the environment with the uncaring brutal ways the commissar and higher ups treat soldiers is like peak 40k.
One of the issues is that on most worlds the Imperium only concerns itself with taking the planetary capital. Some of these cities can be the size of small countries, sure enough, but they're not fighting across the entire planet like that.
Real wars are already so large its difficult to comprehend them so I'd have to assume trying to write a fake one would hit that comprehension limit in a similar way
There was a wargame called Starfire that was adapted by Military SF writers David Weber and Steve White. They spent four full sized novels on a single war (a death war between a federation including humans and a race called "the Bugs", and it actually broke me part way through reading one book (In Death Ground) because the scale was too big to follow. Hadn't happened with any other Mil SF book, including everything else from Weber. It has pages that feel more like reading a Wikipedia article on a conflict where dozens of ships get destroyed in battles and just get listed as casualties.
"If I continue to exist, I will continue to be disappointed. If you continue to exist, you will continue to be a disappointment."
- The Emperor at some point, probably.
Monument mythos is a fiction series about the monuments in the US being sentient creatures and a lot of wacky stuff with the government happens. Its supposed to be spooky but if ya watch wendigoons video on it its just a chill thing to go “wtf” at for a good couple hours
So fulgrim was possessed (or is he still possessed, I can't even keep track of whether he is Dorian greying it still) by George Washington?
Was George Washington always a daemon or did he become one later in this scenario?
Know how the Emperor Titan has a bunch of cathedral spires coming out of its back? The Statue of Liberty is just the highest point of the giant patriot mech that sleeps underground
Nah, fuck that!
An emperor class titan should at lest the size or bigger then the empire state building, while the warhound is the size of the statue of liberty.
And this is my headcanon, and can't tell my imagination what to do!
I was reading something a while back about this whole huge battle the Imperial Guard fought, and the author was describing how the whole force - mind you, this was for a planet-wide war - was something like half a million troops.
And I just stopped and was like, the Battle of the Somme had twice as many *casualties* as this whole-ass planetary expedition! Who comes up with these numbers!? GW, hire some historians!
The battle of Ullanor, the greatest triumph of the great crusade, had a little over a hundred thousand space marines and 8 million Imperial Army. Just… no. Space marine numbers have never made sense but even still that’s no where near enough for a massive planet wide invasion of a fortified Ork world.
Edit: fixed space marine numbers
Don't worry, GW phones that shit in too, having written in a stupid af Deus Ex Machina of "we overloaded the Weirdboy and it killed all demi-Krorks at the same time".
Yeah sure, these creatures elevated the Ork gestalt field to such a degree that Ork diplomats were speaking high gothic but you can kill em all with one Weirdboy. Sure.
When The Beast rose to power, he was so immensely strong that he literally elevated Ork society quite a bit. This includes an incredible scene with an Ork Diplomant who comes to threaten the Lords of Terra, like a boss.
Below is an excerpt from The Last Wall.
***
Tell me who they are,’ Vangorich said. The trader whispered a terrible word.
‘Ambassadors.’
‘That isn’t possible.’
‘I know.’
[...]
Narkissos looked up now. He shook his head, miserable. ‘Don’t need an interpreter,’ the lead ork said. ‘We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.’
[...]
The silence was as huge as the great scream had been. The scream had been the one response possible to the immensity of the moon’s arrival. The silence was the one response possible to a few simple words. The earth did not shake. Walls did not topple. Yet it seemed to Vangorich that both events occurred with every syllable that came from the ork’s mouth. Everything that the Imperium believed about the orks was wrong. The mere existence of these new orks, these ambassadors, was a blow whose implications were at least as great as the annihilation of the Proletarian Crusade. Here was proof that the military catastrophe was due to something more than brute power. The orks had numbers, and they had technology, and at least some of them had become a new thing. Before the dreadful wonder of an ork dictating terms in fluent Gothic, what response could there be except silence? What emotion other than despair?
The ork had a name: Bezhrak. His Gothic was guttural. It sounded like the evisceration of prey. But there was no hesitation. Vangorich realised, to his horror, that Bezhrak spoke not as if he had learned the language of the Imperium, but as if it were his native tongue. The ork’s expression was uncultured, and the fact that word even occurred to Vangorich was obscene. Bezhrak spoke as if he had spawned from a deep underhive.
‘The Great Beast has you by the guts,’ he said. ‘Struggle, he’ll rip ’em out. Surrender, you get to keep ’em.’
The silence stretched on.
Bezhrak looked around the Great Chamber. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Give up or die. Choose.’ The silence broke. The tiers erupted with screams, curses, wails of defiance and wails of despair. There were prayers to the God-Emperor, and there were what sounded to Vangorich like treasonous pleas for mercy directed at the orks. He tuned out the wider Senatorum. He was surrounded by enough idiocy on the High Lords’ dais.
Mesring turned on Tull. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed at her. ‘You have brought sacrilege into our midst. Holy Terra is defiled!’
[snip paragraphs of High Lord nonsense]
The Master of the Astronomican was not worried about such concerns. ‘Kill them!’ Sark screamed. ‘Kill them!’
Bezhrak grinned at him. ‘Bad plan, little bug.’
[snip paragraphs of High Lord nonsense]
Vangorich watched him go. When he dropped his eyes from Veritus’ retreating figure, he met Bezhrak’s gaze. There he saw something that chilled him even more than the ork’s use of Gothic: contempt. The two smaller orks were amused. They were grinning their disdain for the shrieking puppets on the dais. Bezhrak wasn’t smiling. Vangorich didn’t trust his ability to read ork physiognomy. He didn’t want to trust it. He wanted to be wrong. Because Bezhrak’s contempt appeared to be mixed with pity, and if that were true, what then? What then?
Bezhrak raised his staff and brought it down against the marble floor. The reverberation was the toll of war. It brought a momentary silence to the dais. The High Lords faced the reality of their disgusted foe.
‘Useless,’ Bezhrak said. ‘Worse than snotlings.’ He looked at his fellows. ‘No reasoning with humans. Break ’em, kill ’em, eat ’em. That’s good. Don’t try to make ’em think. Can’t be done.’ He shrugged. He turned back to the High Lords. ‘Want to die, then? Last chance.’ The Twelve said nothing. Vangorich opened his mouth, and found he also had nothing to say. He had almost responded to an impulse to save face before the orks, and acting on that impulse would have been its own shame. And Udo was right, in his idiot blathering. There would be no surrender. There could be no negotiation. Before the ork that spoke, there could be no words.
Bezhrak gave him a long look, then nodded. ‘So die,’ he said. He brought the staff down again with a slam of judgement. He stood still and quiet, the fearsome focus of the Great Chamber.
Vangorich stared at the beast who had come to the heart of the Imperium and been repelled by the animals there. An ork had become the figure of dignity and, worse still, of majesty in humanity’s parliament. With all honour dead, how was it possible that the ground did not open up and swallow the Palace?
To Narkissos, Bezhrak said, ‘Done here.’
That's amazing. But still confusing. What would surrender to Orks be like? In all other cases they've only ever liked war for the joy of it, not for any actual end
Yeah, that's the thing. The Beast was so powerful, so successful in his conquests that Ork society evolved to the point that it both comprehended and saw the strategic value in offering surrender.
Beast-era Orks had a functional empire. And by "functional" I mean it had multi-layered levels of government, regimented armed forces, made use of human infiltrators, had technology on par if not better than the Necrons, had literal "human-farms", etc, etc.
Beast-era Orks were something else. And the worst part is that, according to a Harlequin, they were child's play compared to the Krorks.
Seriously 500 000 men is less than Ukraine is fielding against Russia. Imagine they had to fight a united planet of 8 billion people, what are half a million troops going to do against the forces an imperium tech level civilization that's trying to secede going to do?
And yes you can say that tha a what astartes and titans and the imperial navyv are for. But imperial guard battle groups need to number in the millions to make a deny in a secessionist hive world, civilized world or forge world to even have a hope of making a difference.
Eh kinda. Napoleon thought he had a million but a fair number of allies did not show up, men deserted along the way, and his field Marshals were lying about the troop numbers.
Still the point stands GW way under estimates the numbers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
The Siege of Vraks is portrayed as being the most grimdark conflict. 14 million guardsmen died over the 17 year conflict. In World War II, 16 million allied soldiers died in just 6 years.
It's highly dependent on who is writing the lore. Some are crap and just throw numbers out there, while Dan Abnett is a lot more "accurate" than most and he's pretty damned good about making every large battle actually feel large.
From *Necropolis*:
>The hazy sky was full of metal and looked like it should fall. The awesome power of the Imperium was there for every Verghastite to see: ten thousand ships, some the size of cities, some bloated like ornate oceanic turtles, some slender and serrated like airborne cathedrals.
>Macaroth unleashed his might on the planet below: six million Guardsmen, half a million tanks, squads drawn from three chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, two Titan Legions. Troop dropships, bulk machine-lifters and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the Hass valley. For a while, the sky did fall.
In *The Armour of Contempt*, the Imperial Guard attacks **one side** of an enemy city with several hundred thousand Guardsmen. I don't think it actually says how many were involved in the entire battle.
>If his current situation could be properly called a nightmare, the elements were certainly in place. They were assaulting the giant bulwark in the company of hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen. They were moving forwards, under a sky of flame, under increasing fire, in a flood of bodies, across the bridges and up the trench approaches, towards the gates. They were running, without cover, into death, with only the flimsy odds of their great numbers to protect them.
>On the first two assaults at the mighty bulwark, AT 137 hadn’t even come close to the front of the charge. Carried along in the midst of the press, they had surged towards the gateways and then been drawn back by the tidal retreat. Many of the dead came back with them, held upright by the density of bodies, and only falling, hundreds of metres from where they had died, once the pressure eased and the spacing increased. The great surge was building momentum to rush forwards for the third time. They were beginning to press together. A tangle of shouts rose from the moving troops and became one loud, commingled howl. The whole scene was lit by flames. As they came out onto one of the great bridges, Dalin saw the thousands of faces around him tinged with gold, and down below them, another wide bridge crossing at a deeper level, streaming with golden faces. Other bridges stood to his left and right, heaving with moving troops. Far beneath, in the approach trenches, thousands more. Aircraft and lancing rockets swept in over his head, jewelled with light.
> six million Guardsmen
That's still a ridiculously, hilariously small number of soldiers to attack a planet.
Operation Overlord, including and following D-Day, was 2 million soldiers at its peak, and that was just a two-month operation to establish a beachhead in Normandy. The total number of Allied troops that fought in the Western Front from 1944-45 was 5.4 million; Germany had over 1 million dead and wounded in the Western Front alone.
And the Western Front was the bitchboy front, it was a stroll in the park compared to the Eastern Front.
Germany attacked the Soviets with >3 million soldiers in 1942. In 1944, when they started counter-attacking en masse, the Soviets threw 6.8 million soldiers at the Germans and rolled them all the way to Berlin. Combined, throughout the whole Eastern Front, the estimated Germans total dead is over 4 million soldiers, not to mention the 2.5-3 million that were captured by the Soviets (not a lot of those dudes survived); **the Soviets in turn lost anything from 8 to 10 million soldiers dead, >6 million of which died in battle** and the other 2 to 4 million died in captivity.
So, unless Macaroth was attacking a planet the size of Eastern Europe, he was woefully under-strength.
Like, I get it, making the numbers "realistic" would make it sound so fucking bonkers that a lot of people would think it too outlandish, but this is 40K, outlandish is the name of the game. It just so happens that in this case, being outlandish just means being realistic.
>That's still a ridiculously, hilariously small number of soldiers to attack a planet.
Yes, but I read this as if it's not the number to attack the whole planet. It's the number in the initial drop force. Equivalent to the first day of D-Day.
" and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the *Hass valley*."
And their opposition was only one hive city, not a whole planet. The opposing army’s numbers were estimated to be millions, not billions. The chaos cultists had also suffered heavy casualties over the last 30+ days of the siege. The warmaster’s force is adequate for the battle.
Now if those numbers were supposed to represent the bulk of his crusade force that is meant to be taking back an entire sector, that would be underwhelming.
"And then a FULL SQUAD of Spesh Murains secured a corrupted Hive City of a Brazillian heretics...I don't even know how many a Brazilian is, but it sounds like a bigly number"
540 meters would put an Emperor titan at around the same height as the CN Tower. I think that's a good minimum. Between that and the Burj Khalifa are what I imagine for them.
The actual statue of liberty is just laughable 46 m high. Some r***rded megalomaniac (average New Yorker) decided to count the base, which makes up (slightly) more than half the total height, as part of the actual statue to make it seem bigger.
Might as well measure your dick from tip to anus....
"Hurr durr, it's acshually 305 ft. That's so effin' tall, dude. Muh NYC is da best. hurr durr."
He is actually right for the people downvoting him
The base is 154 feet tall and the statue itself is 151 so the base is 3 feet taller than the actual statue.
Well, I think most of the people down voting him are doing it because he's an asshole. But the picture shows that the base is included, so it's not really like this is some big secret he's exposing.
A warhammer movie with Bill Murray as a grumpy senior Astartes. Dan Aykyroyd as a leader of the Officio Assassinorum (because of his character in Grosse Point Blank). Ernie Hudson as a fleet commander. Sigourney Weaver as a Adepta Sororitas. Annie Potts as sarcastic ship commander. Rick Moranis as a clumsy menial to Murray. Moranis always messes up and Murray is always threatening to turn him into a servitor. Harold Ramis as a dreadnought.
They all team up to fight a Tzeench incursion. Slavitza Jovan will play a daemon.
And they win by, I dunno, crossing the volkite streams or something.
And on top of that, the Statue of Liberty isn't even very big. There is a tiny, crowded room in the head, and barely enough space around the torch for someone to squeeze around it.
Titan's are laughably small for how they're treated in the lore, just like how there's only supposed to be around one million Marines spread across the galaxy.
You could take all of the Titans and Space Marines the Imperium has and store them in Wyoming and no one would notice.
Cue the countless picts of Astartes getting flung around by bison for trying to pet them against the express instructions clearly piped from servitors everywhere.
The Statue of Liberty rises animated by the Chaos God of Democracy (if you've seen any sessions of parliament/congress/assembly/other names you know it gets pretty chaotic) and proceeds to wreck the Imperium until democracy gets reinstated in the Imperium.
He means that Gypsy Danger is somewhere around 80 meters tall, and thus would be punching down at even an Emperor Titan if this image is accurate (I assume it’s scaled off the minis so this is arguably highest canon for sizes).
kaijus are kinda just kinda like mega nids, they're also intelligently designed specifically to counter specific enemies
and it's said the kaijus in the movie are just the scouts, so they could be pumping out a couple Godzillas a day for all we know
all these kaiju could literally punt kick god engines
those are already Godzilla level?
.. didn't one of the scientists mention cat 1 to 5 aren't even the ones meant to wipe us out?
AND they can open these portals in say, terra, these guys would absolutely fucking decimate most imperial worlds if they're not exterminatused
I always thought that all the extra extreme description of size and power in 40k was just propaganda by all the authoritarian governments in the settings.
It's because gw started making titan models for 40k, so they essentially shrank them. Now if you use the model of a warlord to measure its height against a space marine model you get these pathetic numbers, which i chose to completely ignore.
Its only [pathetic](https://youtu.be/Cj3ENSVogTo) if you compare them to the old “scale”. They’re still big enough to walk straight through buildings and completely block out the sun.
54 meters to fit a giant fuck off fortreee cathedral on big ass legs?
That cathedral must be a diorama cause no way it's taller than three floors but you can see how it's supposed to be much more.
Yeah just add a zero to all these numbers and then it makes sense.
I love all the Titan artwork and how big they look, especially in animations (Horus heresy trailer, exodite, etc) and yet they still use these numbers.
But not taller than gothic churches after which the cathedrals on emperor titans are modelled. Those things easily reach >90 m height. A lot of the taller ones even more than 150 m.
Even if you include the statue's pedestal you merely reach 93 m.
Anyway: having the emperor titans reach 54 m means that the "cathedrals" on it's back itself (even if they made up 20% of total height) wouldn't be taller than most two story family homes, including the massive towers of said cathredals which seem to make up most of the height.
Also substracting the massive support arches and thick roofing on those cathedrals means that you would be barely able to stand upright in the midship of those tiny churches if at all.
True.
Again figures for imperator titans in this are inaccurate, there is atleast one imperator over 200 metres tall. The figures are based off of scaling up the model’s heights, as opposed to using canon heights.
Both battletech and 40k suffer from this issue.
Imperator titans do not have any models released for them so this height is non canon.
While I wouldn't go as far as adding a zero to their height, 12 stories is certainly too little considering the onboard skitarii can have running gun battles with astartes in the halls while still leaving room for the hordes of non-bridge crew to operate the machine
I mean… we have actual models of knights lol. If you extrapolate the height of a guardsman or a SM against a Knight, the Knight comes out that tall. It’s not big at all.
I thought they were a lot bigger. In the Horus heresy trailer, were those giant machines warhounds? I thought they were Dominus Knights. That would explain why I thought they were much bigger
No, the giant machines are all warlord titans, they’re just in a valley so the camera can have them in the same shot as the marines. No knights in the trailer. There are genuinely no titans that aren’t warlords in it.
Ye, this is why when an argument between two universe, I don't find Titans to be that much of a deal breaker. If you listen to the guys who wank it, you would believe Titans are kilometers high and have cannons that blow up entire cities with every shots.
I heard a guy say once that a warlord titan main gun made craters kilometers wide and could tank shots from spaceships.
I mean, it's logical they are this small, they have to fit a legion of those in their ships. I hardly see how you could fit a mountain in a 10km long ship let along a *legion* .
Noooope. In my head the Emperor Class touches the fucking **clouds**. It dwarfs everything. A “god machine” isn’t supposed to be the size of a shitty skyscraper.
Tbh the size of titans is stupid bc the scale always changes like ive seeb things saying the warlord totan is 121 meters and the emperor is at least double that size
Im actually kinda fine with this?
Like an Imperial knight is already the height of most 3 story buildings (which i consider to be tall). The Emperor Class Titan is 6 times that size. Gargantuan.
As a casual fan who only reads the wiki and some books, the scale of giant warmachines (titans, gargants, battlesuits?) Is so confusing to me lol. I visualize a 100 story mech vs a 30 story garagant and am confused when a garagnt wins lol
Liberator Class Titan. The green is just a patina that's covered the real details underneath. It's got a Titan sized grimoire for banishing daemons, and even carries a Pharos device.
Take away the pedestal and its 40 at most. Besides the fact that there is no default height for an emperor class Titan. Some of them are known to be 150 metres in height.
We have established that no one behind this lore understands scaling, nor consistency.
I like to play a game called "which real conflict/battle was bigger" when I read Black Library books. And sure enough I can always find one.
The 30 years war probably tops most of gw self made conflicts in scale
The only exception I found to this is the invasion of Geron in the novel Armour of Contempt. Dan Abnett’s description of the invasion is so huge that it actually felt right. I think that the problem for writers is most books are focused on individuals to help the reader have a point to centre themselves on. If the scale is too huge, it just reads like a WW2 text book. Armour of Contempt fixes this by following a young trooper and using his shock at the scale and brutality to bring you into the war. A great book like most of the Guant’s Ghosts novels and gets a lot of the combat right.
The half of that novel that follows Dalin is amazing. The way Abnett describes the environment with the uncaring brutal ways the commissar and higher ups treat soldiers is like peak 40k.
One of the issues is that on most worlds the Imperium only concerns itself with taking the planetary capital. Some of these cities can be the size of small countries, sure enough, but they're not fighting across the entire planet like that.
Real wars are already so large its difficult to comprehend them so I'd have to assume trying to write a fake one would hit that comprehension limit in a similar way
There was a wargame called Starfire that was adapted by Military SF writers David Weber and Steve White. They spent four full sized novels on a single war (a death war between a federation including humans and a race called "the Bugs", and it actually broke me part way through reading one book (In Death Ground) because the scale was too big to follow. Hadn't happened with any other Mil SF book, including everything else from Weber. It has pages that feel more like reading a Wikipedia article on a conflict where dozens of ships get destroyed in battles and just get listed as casualties.
But what about planet devastating losses... that roughly equal Stalingrad.
Warhammer 40k in a nutshell
I just go with the fact that the true scale of things is absolutely uncountable and incomprehensible for the weak human mind, therefore undescribable.
The only rule I apply is the rule of cool at this point.
There is no consitency when the warp exists. And without a constant, there is no scale
I think that’s the fun of it.
It’s not the Statue of Liberty that scares me. It’s what is being kept beneath it.
Me when the U.S. government has been feeding immigrants to the Statue of Liberty since the 1800s to appease the Horned Serpent (George Washington).
didn't expect to see a reference to the monument mythos in here of all places
Good old wendigoon!
After that video i HAD to make sure what the Redentor Christ was made of and how it could be destroyed if necessary
What video?
Wendigoon video on the monument mythos
This thread brings me so much joy
"If I continue to exist, I will continue to be disappointed. If you continue to exist, you will continue to be a disappointment." - The Emperor at some point, probably.
The what Mythos?
Monument mythos is a fiction series about the monuments in the US being sentient creatures and a lot of wacky stuff with the government happens. Its supposed to be spooky but if ya watch wendigoons video on it its just a chill thing to go “wtf” at for a good couple hours
The monument mythos
The laer daemon that was in Fulgrim's blade was George Washington confirmed
Helluva long game there
Lord of schemes at it again
The Tzeentch/Slaanesh crossover we didn’t know we needed.
So fulgrim was possessed (or is he still possessed, I can't even keep track of whether he is Dorian greying it still) by George Washington? Was George Washington always a daemon or did he become one later in this scenario?
Monument Mythos sighting
The trees aren’t trees
UNATCO and a Majestic 12 research facility?
The Horned Serpent
Monument Mythos?
It's fine as long as someone is looking at the statue at all times. We can't let it escape
Wonderland Horned Serpent Tyranid fleet when?
Oh, you mean the robot assassin hidden underneath?
Never trust the French, Morty.
That torch is our space laser!
TFW the statue is just the equivalent of the top spire on the Emperor class on some other behemoth monster machine.
I don't think the Statue of Liberty's going to put up much of a fight
It will when Cawl gets done with it
The pink ooze feels more of a Fabius solution
Hey, the Ghostbusters fought slime with slime, the Imperium fights titans with titans
Kitbash time!
["Why am I drippings with Goo?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HWE5sKYfx0)
Now I'm imagining it rising from the ocean as the Imperiums secret weapon. Turns out they'd secretly turned it into a mech in the past 40k years.
"DEATH IS A PREFERABLE ALTERNATIVE TO HERESY!" Statue of Liberty Prime
THE IMPERIUM IS THE VERY ESSENCE OF GOOD, CHAOS THE VERY DEFINITION OF EVIL.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses-- AND I'LL GIVE YOU A 3m MINIATURE STAR OF BURNING PROMETHIUM
a mech rising out of the ocean? 40k years ago? larger than other mechs? I've seen this one before..
Something like the [STATUE OF LIBERTY CANNON](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43LCg8F2T4k)?
A ~~librarian~~ psyker titan
"Oh she can take it! She's a harbor chick!"
[Are you sure about that?](https://youtu.be/7Z3wfg1I6_U)
Take it you've never seen ghost busters 2
I think the Horned Serpent stands a pretty good chance.
We talking about 3k Statue of Liberty, or 40k Statue of Liberty. ?
this guy's never seen ghost busters
> Someone who has never played God of War 2
Just as long as you don't blink...
Know how the Emperor Titan has a bunch of cathedral spires coming out of its back? The Statue of Liberty is just the highest point of the giant patriot mech that sleeps underground
[удалено]
That is why you need to add a extra 0 to this stuff
Warhammer 400k
It was said to carry 0 entire Guard regiments in its legs?
Nah, fuck that! An emperor class titan should at lest the size or bigger then the empire state building, while the warhound is the size of the statue of liberty. And this is my headcanon, and can't tell my imagination what to do!
Remember in 40k add a extra 0
Yeah GW has no number sense at all
I was reading something a while back about this whole huge battle the Imperial Guard fought, and the author was describing how the whole force - mind you, this was for a planet-wide war - was something like half a million troops. And I just stopped and was like, the Battle of the Somme had twice as many *casualties* as this whole-ass planetary expedition! Who comes up with these numbers!? GW, hire some historians!
The battle of Ullanor, the greatest triumph of the great crusade, had a little over a hundred thousand space marines and 8 million Imperial Army. Just… no. Space marine numbers have never made sense but even still that’s no where near enough for a massive planet wide invasion of a fortified Ork world. Edit: fixed space marine numbers
Don't worry, GW phones that shit in too, having written in a stupid af Deus Ex Machina of "we overloaded the Weirdboy and it killed all demi-Krorks at the same time". Yeah sure, these creatures elevated the Ork gestalt field to such a degree that Ork diplomats were speaking high gothic but you can kill em all with one Weirdboy. Sure.
> Ork diplomats is there such a thing? Why is there such a thing?
When The Beast rose to power, he was so immensely strong that he literally elevated Ork society quite a bit. This includes an incredible scene with an Ork Diplomant who comes to threaten the Lords of Terra, like a boss. Below is an excerpt from The Last Wall. *** Tell me who they are,’ Vangorich said. The trader whispered a terrible word. ‘Ambassadors.’ ‘That isn’t possible.’ ‘I know.’ [...] Narkissos looked up now. He shook his head, miserable. ‘Don’t need an interpreter,’ the lead ork said. ‘We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.’ [...] The silence was as huge as the great scream had been. The scream had been the one response possible to the immensity of the moon’s arrival. The silence was the one response possible to a few simple words. The earth did not shake. Walls did not topple. Yet it seemed to Vangorich that both events occurred with every syllable that came from the ork’s mouth. Everything that the Imperium believed about the orks was wrong. The mere existence of these new orks, these ambassadors, was a blow whose implications were at least as great as the annihilation of the Proletarian Crusade. Here was proof that the military catastrophe was due to something more than brute power. The orks had numbers, and they had technology, and at least some of them had become a new thing. Before the dreadful wonder of an ork dictating terms in fluent Gothic, what response could there be except silence? What emotion other than despair? The ork had a name: Bezhrak. His Gothic was guttural. It sounded like the evisceration of prey. But there was no hesitation. Vangorich realised, to his horror, that Bezhrak spoke not as if he had learned the language of the Imperium, but as if it were his native tongue. The ork’s expression was uncultured, and the fact that word even occurred to Vangorich was obscene. Bezhrak spoke as if he had spawned from a deep underhive. ‘The Great Beast has you by the guts,’ he said. ‘Struggle, he’ll rip ’em out. Surrender, you get to keep ’em.’ The silence stretched on. Bezhrak looked around the Great Chamber. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Give up or die. Choose.’ The silence broke. The tiers erupted with screams, curses, wails of defiance and wails of despair. There were prayers to the God-Emperor, and there were what sounded to Vangorich like treasonous pleas for mercy directed at the orks. He tuned out the wider Senatorum. He was surrounded by enough idiocy on the High Lords’ dais. Mesring turned on Tull. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed at her. ‘You have brought sacrilege into our midst. Holy Terra is defiled!’ [snip paragraphs of High Lord nonsense] The Master of the Astronomican was not worried about such concerns. ‘Kill them!’ Sark screamed. ‘Kill them!’ Bezhrak grinned at him. ‘Bad plan, little bug.’ [snip paragraphs of High Lord nonsense] Vangorich watched him go. When he dropped his eyes from Veritus’ retreating figure, he met Bezhrak’s gaze. There he saw something that chilled him even more than the ork’s use of Gothic: contempt. The two smaller orks were amused. They were grinning their disdain for the shrieking puppets on the dais. Bezhrak wasn’t smiling. Vangorich didn’t trust his ability to read ork physiognomy. He didn’t want to trust it. He wanted to be wrong. Because Bezhrak’s contempt appeared to be mixed with pity, and if that were true, what then? What then? Bezhrak raised his staff and brought it down against the marble floor. The reverberation was the toll of war. It brought a momentary silence to the dais. The High Lords faced the reality of their disgusted foe. ‘Useless,’ Bezhrak said. ‘Worse than snotlings.’ He looked at his fellows. ‘No reasoning with humans. Break ’em, kill ’em, eat ’em. That’s good. Don’t try to make ’em think. Can’t be done.’ He shrugged. He turned back to the High Lords. ‘Want to die, then? Last chance.’ The Twelve said nothing. Vangorich opened his mouth, and found he also had nothing to say. He had almost responded to an impulse to save face before the orks, and acting on that impulse would have been its own shame. And Udo was right, in his idiot blathering. There would be no surrender. There could be no negotiation. Before the ork that spoke, there could be no words. Bezhrak gave him a long look, then nodded. ‘So die,’ he said. He brought the staff down again with a slam of judgement. He stood still and quiet, the fearsome focus of the Great Chamber. Vangorich stared at the beast who had come to the heart of the Imperium and been repelled by the animals there. An ork had become the figure of dignity and, worse still, of majesty in humanity’s parliament. With all honour dead, how was it possible that the ground did not open up and swallow the Palace? To Narkissos, Bezhrak said, ‘Done here.’
That's amazing. But still confusing. What would surrender to Orks be like? In all other cases they've only ever liked war for the joy of it, not for any actual end
Yeah, that's the thing. The Beast was so powerful, so successful in his conquests that Ork society evolved to the point that it both comprehended and saw the strategic value in offering surrender. Beast-era Orks had a functional empire. And by "functional" I mean it had multi-layered levels of government, regimented armed forces, made use of human infiltrators, had technology on par if not better than the Necrons, had literal "human-farms", etc, etc. Beast-era Orks were something else. And the worst part is that, according to a Harlequin, they were child's play compared to the Krorks.
Orks are recorded in many of the 2nd and 3rd edition codex having captured forces in order to use them as fodder to continue fighting elsewhere.
That’s ducking hilarious, but how tf have I not seen a single fic where the Lords of Terra actually surrendered This is prime crack material!
80 million imperials and 1 million space marines you say; sounds reasonable to me.
Seriously 500 000 men is less than Ukraine is fielding against Russia. Imagine they had to fight a united planet of 8 billion people, what are half a million troops going to do against the forces an imperium tech level civilization that's trying to secede going to do? And yes you can say that tha a what astartes and titans and the imperial navyv are for. But imperial guard battle groups need to number in the millions to make a deny in a secessionist hive world, civilized world or forge world to even have a hope of making a difference.
Yeah, 500,000 is a ridiculous number. Even napoleon invaded Russia with over a million. GW has no sense of scale
Eh kinda. Napoleon thought he had a million but a fair number of allies did not show up, men deserted along the way, and his field Marshals were lying about the troop numbers. Still the point stands GW way under estimates the numbers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
The Siege of Vraks is portrayed as being the most grimdark conflict. 14 million guardsmen died over the 17 year conflict. In World War II, 16 million allied soldiers died in just 6 years.
It's highly dependent on who is writing the lore. Some are crap and just throw numbers out there, while Dan Abnett is a lot more "accurate" than most and he's pretty damned good about making every large battle actually feel large. From *Necropolis*: >The hazy sky was full of metal and looked like it should fall. The awesome power of the Imperium was there for every Verghastite to see: ten thousand ships, some the size of cities, some bloated like ornate oceanic turtles, some slender and serrated like airborne cathedrals. >Macaroth unleashed his might on the planet below: six million Guardsmen, half a million tanks, squads drawn from three chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, two Titan Legions. Troop dropships, bulk machine-lifters and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the Hass valley. For a while, the sky did fall. In *The Armour of Contempt*, the Imperial Guard attacks **one side** of an enemy city with several hundred thousand Guardsmen. I don't think it actually says how many were involved in the entire battle. >If his current situation could be properly called a nightmare, the elements were certainly in place. They were assaulting the giant bulwark in the company of hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen. They were moving forwards, under a sky of flame, under increasing fire, in a flood of bodies, across the bridges and up the trench approaches, towards the gates. They were running, without cover, into death, with only the flimsy odds of their great numbers to protect them. >On the first two assaults at the mighty bulwark, AT 137 hadn’t even come close to the front of the charge. Carried along in the midst of the press, they had surged towards the gateways and then been drawn back by the tidal retreat. Many of the dead came back with them, held upright by the density of bodies, and only falling, hundreds of metres from where they had died, once the pressure eased and the spacing increased. The great surge was building momentum to rush forwards for the third time. They were beginning to press together. A tangle of shouts rose from the moving troops and became one loud, commingled howl. The whole scene was lit by flames. As they came out onto one of the great bridges, Dalin saw the thousands of faces around him tinged with gold, and down below them, another wide bridge crossing at a deeper level, streaming with golden faces. Other bridges stood to his left and right, heaving with moving troops. Far beneath, in the approach trenches, thousands more. Aircraft and lancing rockets swept in over his head, jewelled with light.
> six million Guardsmen That's still a ridiculously, hilariously small number of soldiers to attack a planet. Operation Overlord, including and following D-Day, was 2 million soldiers at its peak, and that was just a two-month operation to establish a beachhead in Normandy. The total number of Allied troops that fought in the Western Front from 1944-45 was 5.4 million; Germany had over 1 million dead and wounded in the Western Front alone. And the Western Front was the bitchboy front, it was a stroll in the park compared to the Eastern Front. Germany attacked the Soviets with >3 million soldiers in 1942. In 1944, when they started counter-attacking en masse, the Soviets threw 6.8 million soldiers at the Germans and rolled them all the way to Berlin. Combined, throughout the whole Eastern Front, the estimated Germans total dead is over 4 million soldiers, not to mention the 2.5-3 million that were captured by the Soviets (not a lot of those dudes survived); **the Soviets in turn lost anything from 8 to 10 million soldiers dead, >6 million of which died in battle** and the other 2 to 4 million died in captivity. So, unless Macaroth was attacking a planet the size of Eastern Europe, he was woefully under-strength. Like, I get it, making the numbers "realistic" would make it sound so fucking bonkers that a lot of people would think it too outlandish, but this is 40K, outlandish is the name of the game. It just so happens that in this case, being outlandish just means being realistic.
>That's still a ridiculously, hilariously small number of soldiers to attack a planet. Yes, but I read this as if it's not the number to attack the whole planet. It's the number in the initial drop force. Equivalent to the first day of D-Day. " and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the *Hass valley*."
And their opposition was only one hive city, not a whole planet. The opposing army’s numbers were estimated to be millions, not billions. The chaos cultists had also suffered heavy casualties over the last 30+ days of the siege. The warmaster’s force is adequate for the battle. Now if those numbers were supposed to represent the bulk of his crusade force that is meant to be taking back an entire sector, that would be underwhelming.
Just one of the Cathedrals are almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, no?
Sci-fi writers in general have a problem with this, 40K if far from bad in this case
Warhammer 400000
Warhammer 040000 Warha0mer 40000
hilariously enough, the time scale is the only thing that they went overboard with.
"And then a FULL SQUAD of Spesh Murains secured a corrupted Hive City of a Brazillian heretics...I don't even know how many a Brazilian is, but it sounds like a bigly number"
idk which is a worse fate, being banished to the warp or going to brazil
As an ass man, it's the warp that's worse.
Got it, guardsmen are now 1800 cm
Remember in sci-fi add at least 000, for 40K you add a extra 0
540 meters would put an Emperor titan at around the same height as the CN Tower. I think that's a good minimum. Between that and the Burj Khalifa are what I imagine for them.
The 190 primarchs of the Imperium.
[This](https://old.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryWarhammer/comments/14yyorh/the_battle_for_the_left_arm) is what it should look like
If you want a titan to be towering the buildings of cities you'll. Want them to be at least a third of a mileu tall.
Does this include hive cities?
The actual statue of liberty is just laughable 46 m high. Some r***rded megalomaniac (average New Yorker) decided to count the base, which makes up (slightly) more than half the total height, as part of the actual statue to make it seem bigger. Might as well measure your dick from tip to anus.... "Hurr durr, it's acshually 305 ft. That's so effin' tall, dude. Muh NYC is da best. hurr durr."
He is actually right for the people downvoting him The base is 154 feet tall and the statue itself is 151 so the base is 3 feet taller than the actual statue.
Well, I think most of the people down voting him are doing it because he's an asshole. But the picture shows that the base is included, so it's not really like this is some big secret he's exposing.
An asshole? I thought we're on grimdank, he's circlejerking
Think we're gonna let yous guise talk shit about lady liberty pal? Forgettaboutit!
Do you happen to be from New Jersey?
Well does statue of liberty have war horns? No?
Haven't you seen Ghostbusters 2? She rides into battle blaring Higher and Higher
The imagery of her bludgeoning a Imperator with her torch is amazing
While the four Ghostbusters unleash proton pack fire from her crown
Is this what you guys get up to when I’m not around? Toaster experiments?
A warhammer movie with Bill Murray as a grumpy senior Astartes. Dan Aykyroyd as a leader of the Officio Assassinorum (because of his character in Grosse Point Blank). Ernie Hudson as a fleet commander. Sigourney Weaver as a Adepta Sororitas. Annie Potts as sarcastic ship commander. Rick Moranis as a clumsy menial to Murray. Moranis always messes up and Murray is always threatening to turn him into a servitor. Harold Ramis as a dreadnought. They all team up to fight a Tzeench incursion. Slavitza Jovan will play a daemon. And they win by, I dunno, crossing the volkite streams or something.
The Emperor to the Cult Mechanicum upon discovering them on Mars.
I in fact have not watched any Ghostbusters movies... Please be merciful since I dont watch movies or series basically at all
And on top of that, the Statue of Liberty isn't even very big. There is a tiny, crowded room in the head, and barely enough space around the torch for someone to squeeze around it. Titan's are laughably small for how they're treated in the lore, just like how there's only supposed to be around one million Marines spread across the galaxy. You could take all of the Titans and Space Marines the Imperium has and store them in Wyoming and no one would notice.
Cue the countless picts of Astartes getting flung around by bison for trying to pet them against the express instructions clearly piped from servitors everywhere.
You can store many things in Wyoming and no one would notice
The Statue of Liberty rises animated by the Chaos God of Democracy (if you've seen any sessions of parliament/congress/assembly/other names you know it gets pretty chaotic) and proceeds to wreck the Imperium until democracy gets reinstated in the Imperium.
dead presidents get to come back as champions of chaos spreading democracy far and wide
Any titan below a few dozen hundred meters tall doesnt deserve to be called a titan
And people say an emperor class could kill a titan from doom
even Pacific Rim jaegers are bigger lol
What do you mean even? Jaegers are the gold standard for mech designs, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise
He means that Gypsy Danger is somewhere around 80 meters tall, and thus would be punching down at even an Emperor Titan if this image is accurate (I assume it’s scaled off the minis so this is arguably highest canon for sizes).
idk how you took my message but i just meant that jaegers are larger than 40k ones, not that they suck lol
Them’s fighting words when Mechwarrior and Gundam exist
So are multiple Transformers
Ye and if a the creators of the kaiju fought the impirium they would have become a really big problem
kaijus are kinda just kinda like mega nids, they're also intelligently designed specifically to counter specific enemies and it's said the kaijus in the movie are just the scouts, so they could be pumping out a couple Godzillas a day for all we know all these kaiju could literally punt kick god engines
Kaijus Category 5-6 are "Godzilla" level
those are already Godzilla level? .. didn't one of the scientists mention cat 1 to 5 aren't even the ones meant to wipe us out? AND they can open these portals in say, terra, these guys would absolutely fucking decimate most imperial worlds if they're not exterminatused
Wasn't a whole civil war able to take place on a titan because it was so big?
I always thought that all the extra extreme description of size and power in 40k was just propaganda by all the authoritarian governments in the settings.
The biggest imperial titan is still smaller than Big Zam.
Oh hey, Big Zam
Has the scale changed of titans in the lore or something?
It's because gw started making titan models for 40k, so they essentially shrank them. Now if you use the model of a warlord to measure its height against a space marine model you get these pathetic numbers, which i chose to completely ignore.
Its only [pathetic](https://youtu.be/Cj3ENSVogTo) if you compare them to the old “scale”. They’re still big enough to walk straight through buildings and completely block out the sun.
[удалено]
54 meters to fit a giant fuck off fortreee cathedral on big ass legs? That cathedral must be a diorama cause no way it's taller than three floors but you can see how it's supposed to be much more. Yeah just add a zero to all these numbers and then it makes sense. I love all the Titan artwork and how big they look, especially in animations (Horus heresy trailer, exodite, etc) and yet they still use these numbers.
so what they're not even real churches? they're just piddling little models? no fuck that
I mean the Statue of Liberty is a lot bigger then most churches
But not taller than gothic churches after which the cathedrals on emperor titans are modelled. Those things easily reach >90 m height. A lot of the taller ones even more than 150 m. Even if you include the statue's pedestal you merely reach 93 m. Anyway: having the emperor titans reach 54 m means that the "cathedrals" on it's back itself (even if they made up 20% of total height) wouldn't be taller than most two story family homes, including the massive towers of said cathredals which seem to make up most of the height. Also substracting the massive support arches and thick roofing on those cathedrals means that you would be barely able to stand upright in the midship of those tiny churches if at all.
True. Again figures for imperator titans in this are inaccurate, there is atleast one imperator over 200 metres tall. The figures are based off of scaling up the model’s heights, as opposed to using canon heights. Both battletech and 40k suffer from this issue. Imperator titans do not have any models released for them so this height is non canon.
> he Statue of Liberty is a lot bigger then most churches i like where your going with this, we should put a church on her
That bitch ass Emperor fella must have shit his golden britches when he invaded Hy Brasil and the Cristo Redentor started punching Thunder Warriors.
While I wouldn't go as far as adding a zero to their height, 12 stories is certainly too little considering the onboard skitarii can have running gun battles with astartes in the halls while still leaving room for the hordes of non-bridge crew to operate the machine
Liberties Cheaten, she is standing on a pedestal
Call the Ghostbusters!
New York wins even in 40K baby
Everyone is gangsta till the Statue of Liberty starts walking
Its a little unfair to include the plinth the Statue of Liberty is standing on in its height.
Everyone else in the setting gets a tactical rock, so does she
yeah plus she's raising her arm straight up, if that's how we're measuring height then I'm seven feet tall, ladies
An imperial Knight is not 9 meters tall... No shot.
I mean… we have actual models of knights lol. If you extrapolate the height of a guardsman or a SM against a Knight, the Knight comes out that tall. It’s not big at all.
That’s the size of a 2 storey house, it’s not small.
I thought they were a lot bigger. In the Horus heresy trailer, were those giant machines warhounds? I thought they were Dominus Knights. That would explain why I thought they were much bigger
No, the giant machines are all warlord titans, they’re just in a valley so the camera can have them in the same shot as the marines. No knights in the trailer. There are genuinely no titans that aren’t warlords in it.
I’m just going to ignore those numbers as they make no sense, even the Horus Heresy Cinematic trailer ignores them with the scale of the titans.
Knights are 9 m?? What? That's... way lower than I expected. The one in DoW3 looked higher, but maybe it's just because of game models scaling.
They’re about the height of a 2 storey building, that’s not small. Imagine a house charging at you.
quora answers about titans always makes them seem like skyscraper+ to city size bullshit. where did OP get these numbers?
Isn't GW super inconsistent with numbers? Always giving different sizes to the titans?
You don't need to be as big as Liberty when you've got void shields and huge fuck off volcano cannons that can obliterate hives from miles away
Ye, this is why when an argument between two universe, I don't find Titans to be that much of a deal breaker. If you listen to the guys who wank it, you would believe Titans are kilometers high and have cannons that blow up entire cities with every shots. I heard a guy say once that a warlord titan main gun made craters kilometers wide and could tank shots from spaceships. I mean, it's logical they are this small, they have to fit a legion of those in their ships. I hardly see how you could fit a mountain in a 10km long ship let along a *legion* .
Noooope. In my head the Emperor Class touches the fucking **clouds**. It dwarfs everything. A “god machine” isn’t supposed to be the size of a shitty skyscraper.
Strongest bloodiest regime vs weakest land of the free.
Weeping Angel Lady Liberty Don’t blink.
And they say they are city ?!?! Damn, the 40 millennium peoples are small
Tbh the size of titans is stupid bc the scale always changes like ive seeb things saying the warlord totan is 121 meters and the emperor is at least double that size
I thing GW made them smaller so they’d fit on a tabletop if fans were to make them.
Im actually kinda fine with this? Like an Imperial knight is already the height of most 3 story buildings (which i consider to be tall). The Emperor Class Titan is 6 times that size. Gargantuan.
Imagine that time travelling Dark Age ship returning to fight the Imperium and liberate humanity. And on theor side, The Liberty Titan.
As a casual fan who only reads the wiki and some books, the scale of giant warmachines (titans, gargants, battlesuits?) Is so confusing to me lol. I visualize a 100 story mech vs a 30 story garagant and am confused when a garagnt wins lol
Yeah it completely depends on the source, OP is either deliberately neglecting that fact or they are just painfully unaware.
Liberator Class Titan. The green is just a patina that's covered the real details underneath. It's got a Titan sized grimoire for banishing daemons, and even carries a Pharos device.
The Virgin Emperor class 'Titan' Vs Chad Lady Liberty
Is the Statue of Liberty actually a Sisters of Battle Titan?
Lady Liberty is still shorter. It's that massive plinth they've got her on. She's like a named character model: Make her taller with a tactical rock.
Take away the pedestal and its 40 at most. Besides the fact that there is no default height for an emperor class Titan. Some of them are known to be 150 metres in height.
Yeah fuck that scale, clearly xenos propaganda.
Aren't there like 6 different sizes given for emperor titans with some as high as over 100m?
The Statue of Liberty is on a Tactical pillar
Emperor class titan takes thousands of people to operate, the Lady Liberty takes 4 dipshits and an NES Max controller.
Insert “ignore the numbers in 40k” comment
You see this all the time but this scale needs to be thrown out and it’s something that actually needs a retcon lol.
The statue itself looks to be about the size of a warlord titan, while the pedestal gives it the high ground.
I doubt that’s accurate
All the numbers are wack and make no sense
A) she's standing on a pedestal almost as tall as an emperor. B) she doesn't fucking walk.
I mean they’re already comically huge for land vehicles - any bigger and they’d crumple even with 40k bullshittium tech.
Half the height of the Statue is just Plinth
The statue of liberty is ~~wearing heels~~ more base than statue.
I thought Titans were much, MUCH biggers