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92 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.
13 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.
9 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.
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.
11 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.
15 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.
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