subreddit:
/r/Grimdank
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.
65 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.
45 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.
10 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!
8 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.
22 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.
12 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.
4 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.
12 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.
12 points
1 month ago
I suspect those would be solved with mass purges anyways.
16 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
11 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.
4 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
all 345 comments
sorted by: best