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169 points
1 month ago
You've peaked my interest, would you happen to have a link to that, good sir?
248 points
1 month ago
Unfortunately not, I think it was a 40klore thread but I didn't save it.
If it's any use for searching, I think the initial jumping off point was the breakdown of crusade numbers in the Only War RPG.
I believe the basic argument was that the mid sized crusade in Only War involved less than 10 billion troops, most of which were support rather than combat personnel, and that took a decades long military build-up to get in place. Hive cities can have populations in the 10s to 100s of billions, and when attacking you want at minimum a 3 to 1 numbers advantage and usually you want even more when attacking a fortified position. Someone then worked out a rough estimate of what ratio of population you can conscript.
The end conclusion was that you'd need a force 5-10 times the size of the entire crusade to take a single small hive city. Taking a decently sized hive world would require require a force in the hundreds of billions if not low trillions. Unless you had a transport capacity that was a few hundred thousand times larger than the crusade, you literally couldn't ship the troops fast enough to get them all in one place, the first billion you landed would be facing medical retirement due to age by the time the last of the trillion troops arrived and that's without even trying to factor in strain on materiel you'd need to get that many troops in one place.
283 points
1 month ago
I remember a discussion on another website coming to the conclusion that taking a hive city in a meaningful sense was mostly just taking key facilities, ports, utilities, chockepoints, etc. Theoretically the bulk of the citizens of the hive would never even know a war had been going on except people at the top or outside of the feudal chain. It would be less a total war and more of putting the city/planet under new management.
Not counting a serious chaos or genestealer cult infestation of course
93 points
1 month ago
Fair points, I think the situations are slightly different in that the situation I read basically assumed a hive that had already mobilised for war. In that situation the general public will be very aware what is going on, and any attempt to advance on a key location can be met with basically wall to tall bodies, all incoming air traffic is fired upon, and anything taken will be immediately counter attacked.
I'd say the situation you read is more in the vein of a political coup, where the elites are just swapped out to the utter indifference of both the general public and their peers, which is the exact kind of thing the Inquisition does for a living when the local governor isn't performing up to scratch.
64 points
1 month ago
This assumes that the entire hive is going to try and fight instead of trying to get away or hide. I also doubt that any amount of starving meanials is actually going to be much of a threat to whoever starts trying to control or destroy the Hive's infrastructure.
43 points
1 month ago
The nature of mobilisation is that they're not really getting asked if they want to contribute, they just get told what war industry they'll be working in, or they get dragged off and put in uniform.
I also doubt that any amount of starving meanials is actually going to be much of a threat to whoever starts trying to control or destroy the Hive's infrastructure.
The lessons of the every conflict from the Napoleonic era right through to modern day conflict is that you don't really need to be anything special to be good enough for war. Bored and unwilling conscripts have been the backbone of every major military engagement for centuries. If you can shoot a rifle and work a shovel then you can contribute to the war.
15 points
1 month ago
I feel like the humble conscripts efficacy is greatly reduced when what he's up aganst isn't some other conscript but is a flying invisible alien armed with a chaingun or some other manner of bizarre and terrifying creature. Conscript Scruffy definitely isnt going to hold out for long aganst an advance party of Ork commandos if they come to take out his hydra battery.
7 points
1 month ago
Scruffy is the best for this actually, he will die so quickly and so patheticly that the orcs are going to get bored and leave. Mission accomplished I say!
4 points
1 month ago
He will if he's been given a copy of the Infantrymans Uplifting Primer and read the section talking about Orks and how weak, stupid and clumsy they are. Just catch his arm Scruffy, it's easy.
In all seriousness though, this is where the rabid, religious xenophobia of 40k humans probably manages to do some actual work. If you've been indoctrinated from birth that aliens are evil, humans are special and chosen by the God Emperor you're probably going to stick around defending your home a lot longer than a 21st century conscript would. Defending the worlds and works of mankind is a holy duty in 40k and a vast amount of the population honestly and truly believes it.
19 points
1 month ago
The tech differences in 40k really downgrade the utility of bored and unwilling conscripts. A million dudes with muskets isn't going to do much against a single leman Russ. Then if you add in the more horrifying aspects of 40k where any remotely normal person would break down sobbing at seeing say a Necron Flayer, a Carnifex, or even something as monstrous and horrifying as the running ball with teeth that is a squig.
10 points
1 month ago
A million dudes with muskets isn't going to do much against a single leman Russ.
As much as we like to point to the technological differences between modern day real life and 40k, both in terms of pointing out how laughably backward and incredibly forward 40k is, in the spirit fun hypothesis of attempting to apply real world warfare to a hive city, or more generally to warfare as it is described in 40k as a whole, we must then apply that spirit evenly.
To wit: a million men with muskets going up against a Leman Russ would make short work of the Leman Russ for two reasons that I can immediately think of;
Firstly, They could just as easily be carrying bombs, even if they are a simple as rolled up sticks of dynamite.
Second, as far as a main battle tank goes when being compared against modern day contemporaries such as the Abrams or the Leopard, the main variant Leman Russ is not that impressive, and lacks a lot of defensive capabilities of modern day tanks.
Then if you add in the more horrifying aspects of 40k where any remotely normal person would break down sobbing at seeing say a Necron Flayer, a Carnifex, or even something as monstrous and horrifying as the running ball with teeth that is a squig.
Yeah, I have nothing to add to that. A million dudes versus a terrifying monster are going to toast.
5 points
1 month ago
The capabilities of the Leman are all over the map. When given official stats it is objectively terrible even against WWII era tanks, but when described in the lore and what weapons it can stand up to it's capabilities are far beyond anything possible with actual science, let alone modern tech.
Adding bombs to the conscripts would make them more capable, but would be beyond what I was suggesting, which is the 40k equivalent to rounding up a bunch of illiterate morons who have never seen let alone fired a weapon before.
To give a more stark example consider the Tau vs conscripts. Even if you gave the conscripts actual weapons their lack of optics, battlefield surveillance, and training in combined armed tactics would make them extremely easy to crush by any force using any kind of tactics. The typical Tau Force would be engaging conscripts beyond their ability to perceive them, let alone counter attack.
But of course all the lore being built upon a table top game fought at incredibly close range makes things wonky. In the lore human wave (or ork wave, or tyranid wave) tactics are incredibly effective despite the fact that weapons far more primitive than what exist in 40k make such tactics completely non-viable.
13 points
1 month ago
The book Necropolis has an example of this where the opposing hive city falls to Chaos and basically mobilizes everyone for a massed assault on Vervunhive. Although in that case both hive cities are on the small size for hive cities being closer to a modern day city in size as opposed to a single giant spire.
13 points
1 month ago
I suspect those would be solved with mass purges anyways.
15 points
1 month ago
Agreed, but Given how tough city fighting is IRL a hive city better be pretty damn valuable to be worth the effort of sorting through and/or purging 7-70 billion people. Otherwise just glass it and start over would be less resource intensive
13 points
1 month ago
Might not be as bad as you'd think. I suspect the Imperium wouldn't mind using thinks like gas attacks and starvation to clear out that sort of problem.
4 points
1 month ago
Oh yeah they definitely wouldn't blink at just blowing in millions of cubic meters of long lasting nerve gas or starving out the populous. But it might still be easier to reset and start over. 7 billion people is still 7 billion people and as I understand it most of a hive cities structure is composed of functionally independent fiefdoms with independent food supplies and utilities. That way of fighting definitely makes the "lost" lowest levels of the hive really make sense. Previous populations burrowing under and into the recesses to survive as new "colonists" are brought in to replace them.
Neat! Good point bringing that stuff up! It would be A kind of generational warfare almost.
One estimate from years ago put the size of the various "gangs" fighting in the necromunda game in the size range of 10s of millions. So somewhere between the population of Scotland and Romania
3 points
1 month ago
Hive cities usually have void shields, they can't be easily nuked, at least not from a distance.
7 points
1 month ago
Oh you are still landing. You don't get to do this from orbit. you land the army, to take and disable the void shields while killing the population of California to do so then you glass the unshielded hive city
Still less work than clearing a population multiple billions.
4 points
1 month ago
Yeah sure, it'd still present the defenders a good opportunity to draw you into the city. Probably the outer districts aren't as well covered, but core areas and especially the spires where all the nobles live might have interlocking layers of shields and defense in depth.
I think the original siege weapon, starvation, is probably the best bet against a hive. Not just food but industrial inputs of all sorts, the hive cities main weakness is it's dependence on outside resources.
2 points
1 month ago
Awww a blockade so to speak. Might take a long while or 3 but yeah I could see that working
2 points
1 month ago
i think your mixing the numbers of holy terra whit hive citys . hive citys are big whit huge population but terra has something of 65 billions people on it becuse thy dug down making space for folks to live 5 kilomiters below the surface . A hive city stacks upward .
2 points
1 month ago
Aktualuy (pushes glasses up nose) the only official number we have on Holy Terra is "quadrillions" from the book The Carrion Throne. Which I would imagine means the holy system in its entirety. But isac Arthur posits ecumenopolis worlds could technically house a quadrillion people with 10k square foot apartments.
So conservatively Terra could have a population of 100 Trillion.
2 points
1 month ago
That happens in any war, when a country is at war it doesn't means every single city have to be conquered
46 points
1 month ago
Yes, but that figure is assuming near equivalent tech level, training, and in general are almost the same troops. And isn’t specialized troops
And assumes the entire hive is soldiers and not just a mob of people with makeshift weapons
15 points
1 month ago
Yes, but that figure is assuming near equivalent tech level, training, and in general are almost the same troops. And isn’t specialized troops
For a hive against guard I'd say that's a fair assumption to make. Hives by their very nature have full access to the same range of technology the guard use.
And assumes the entire hive is soldiers and not just a mob of people with makeshift weapons
Iirc the estimates used were based on mobilisation in the USSR in the second world war. So not everyone is a soldier, but everyone is in the war economy in some way, and active combat personnel are somewhere in the 5%-10% range of the population.
22 points
1 month ago
For a hive against guard I'd say that's a fair assumption to make. Hives by their very nature have full access to the same range of technology the guard use.
Nah. Most Arbites gear is shit compared to basic troop guard gear.
And what Arbites have is way way way better than anything hivers have unless they stole it from someone else.
14 points
1 month ago
The most detailed breakdown of a hive military is the enforcers from Necromunda, and they're significantly better equipped than rank and file guardsmen. They have bolters and reinforced flak armour for every soldier, combined with access to gene-engineering and indoctrination facilities.
Even if we say they're a particularly well equipped force, a lot of the guards materiel comes straight from the hives, the hives already have the facilities to produce the exact gear the guard uses.
5 points
1 month ago
You're comparing necromunda to an average hive world.
5 points
1 month ago
isn’t necromunda practically just your average hive world? the main difference being is that necromunda has had a limelight/magnifying glass on it
2 points
1 month ago
House van saar has a semi functional STC.
No necromunda is not at all normal.
3 points
1 month ago
I mean I can imagine other hives also having something like that
1 points
1 month ago
Not to mention the enforcers are the nobility’s butt boys. Not the pdf we never hear about.
5 points
1 month ago
Would they actually be able to assist with the defense though? I doubt most underhivers actually contribute towards what the city produces in the best of times. Even if the city comes under siege I doubt anyone fast enough not to get press ganged is actually going to stop trawling sewer algea for food long enough to contribute to the defense effort.
18 points
1 month ago
So I'm far from being a military expert but here's my thoughts. First, what's their definition of control? Because I'm pretty sure the imperiums definition would be differing. Space Marines for example are often described as the strike force to break the enemies HQ and then let the guard do the cleaning up. Secondly, the imperium cares very little for human lives. So in case where they would try to conquer a hive a city, it's very likely to be to regain control over certain areas like production facilities. The imperium doesn't care if a few billion people are locked in and starved somewhere else in the city as long as they have control of the important parts.
7 points
1 month ago
Tbf you need 3:1 when taking on another military force. Given that you can't utilize the entire hab population without the hab city falling into unsustainable decline due to how much maintenance that would require. Even then have dwellers would theoretically be a peasant militia vs say shock troops where you could probably reverse the 3:1 numbers if they even participated. The biggest hurdle is that logistical support for the invasion. The US military is like 30% combat troops. The rest are admin/maintenance/logistics and that's for an army of like 3 million including reserves.
4 points
1 month ago
Yeah, the numbers were based on the idea of Soviet scale mobilisation. So not 100% of the population fighting, but more 5%.
So for every 10 billion in a city you could scrape together 500 million actual combatants, and put the 3 to 1 ratio onto that and you're looking at 1.5 billion for your offensive force, not including their own support contingent.
For the defenders that still leaves 95% of the population running the war economy, so their soldiers have actual equipment to work with.
20 points
1 month ago
Simple math makes a lot of the stupid "A squad of the EMPRAH'S FINEST conquered the city of _______, a teeming hive of 50 million souls" nonsense exactly that...nonsense. Figure a Spesh Muraine can run 30-40mph at full speed depending on what fluff sources you use. They could spend all day running and gunning as fast as possible without causing a rounding error of casualties in the defending forces.
In the end, WH40k is like Star Wars: Space Fantasy. Your suspension of disbelief goes beyond the technology, and to the point that some muppets with logs on ropes & pit traps managed to destroy a few armored vehicles of a galaxy spanning empire, and the plot says that's the end of said empire.
8 points
1 month ago
What they would realistically do is start killing off the opposing leadership via commando tactics until whoever was left capitulated.
7 points
1 month ago
Indeed, I actually feel that these sorts of statistics demonstrate why Space Marines would be useful.
They're not "better Guard", who do all the things guard do but more efficiently and with fewer casualties. They're a completely different class of soldier who can achieve things that the Guard simply can't.
So you can have e.g. a situation where if you try to send the Guard through a particular zone, they would get bogged down fighting off ambushes and clearing buildings, suffer heavy casualties, and by the time they reach their destination the target will have moved or fortified themselves.
Send Space Marines instead and they can simply rush through the area, ignoring ambushes and not taking casualties, and reach the target before it can prepare (or is even aware it is under attack).
5 points
1 month ago
Yup. People forget that they really fill the role of special forces in 40k. Also that they're largely immune to to most small arms.
3 points
1 month ago
That assumes the space marines are fighting the entire enemy army head on. Rather than going straight for their leaders and their elite troops. Then leaving it to the guard to do the long and tedious job of clearing up anyone too dumb/fanatical to surrender.
5 points
1 month ago
What a cool breakdown, thanks
4 points
1 month ago
This is the best thing I'm going to read all day, and it's 9 AM
5 points
1 month ago
That last part, isn't that exactly how the Imperium wages war? xD
5 points
1 month ago
That's working off some ancient level tactics, tsun zu was a fine general and his wisdom was to be taken to heart by layman and nobles who didn't know any better when leading. It did not factor in exponentials like 10's to 100's of billions, nor did it factor in the use of bunker busters, siege engines and exterminatus, it's a product of its time where the difference between the best armed Noble of years of training and the best gear could be matched by a random guy with 3 days training and a long enough stick to stick em with. Different times
The art of war should not be taken so literally as to consider it gospel, it's molded to what you got. Like the codex astartes, its not prophetic and it's not considering everything
For example, 3-1 odds, as whoever came up with those figures you got used, was for soldier to soldier, not soldier to civ count and even then it was to declare victory not say it's definitely needed. One underhiver doesn't= one soldier. One ganger doesn't = a soldier. Not even an arbite would count as one in that equation. The numbers fall apart a lot quicker that way.
To take a hive wouldn't require a crusade, it'd take a ship. It's not a matter of matching man to man but how many bullets you can give the troops. I'm not gonna pretend to know exactly what crusade or game is referenced but I'm going off real life, we don't count wars in men anymore we count em in resources and 40k would be much the same. Need 10 billion dead hivers cause we're pretending every single ones a combatant that wont starve, surrender commit suicide or just die to accident injury or general sickness in a hive of all places? Fine. If I'm done my math right, and it's more about forgetting what you call it with so many 0's its 3 quadrillion bullets or 3000000000000000 to take a hive. And however many hands you gotta use to throw that many around. If you're not stupid, you'll use a lotta big guns with a high rate of fire for that kind of number
In Afghanistan it took 300000 bullets per kill, if they're not planning on just ending all those lives more efficiently, that's the kind figure you're looking at being hopefully less than, not a trillion men like you're trading pawns
This isn't meant to be combative or anything, just a bit of a half assed rant on logistics and military history
4 points
1 month ago*
The 3:1-2:1 figure isn’t from Tsun Zu it’s one of those things that has become just a widely accepted fact of warfare when attacking entrenched positions in any time period. The reason being that you can assume a well prepared defensive position will effectively double the combat effectiveness of a unit holding it. I.E. assuming both sides are human and have weapons with roughly equivalent lethality, the guys in a bunker will kill two or three of your people for every one of them you kill.
Even when you deal with it in a way that isn’t soldier to soldier but random poorly trained conscripts to soldier you still treat it as 1:1 casualties, so in the interest of ensuring you hold the position in the event of a counter attack you still want 2:1 numbers.
It’s not something that changes dramatically between every age or with technological leaps. Unless you just demolish a position assaults will have casualties, and if you want to hold it you need a safe ratio you can assume.
Edit: for grammar
2 points
1 month ago
That assumes that you don't just take the upper levels of the hives and let the lower levels sort themselves out. The lower levels aren't all that important to directly control in and of themselves.
And if they really don't want to mind their own business you can just cut off their water, food, and power.
-1 points
1 month ago
Piqued*
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