The main point about WHY they had to engage en masse on the ground: on a heavily irradiated surface that is described, soldiers and their lives were a very finite resource. If you deploy a troop to the surface, they will be GONE in a month. Maybe two if you properly switch them in and out. It doesn't matter if you allow them to partake in a low risk engagement or shove them into a meatgrinder, you are on a timer. So the idea is: utilize them in the most efficient manner and don't bother if they survive the ordeal or not, as long as they gain SOMETHING. Because they are dead men walking anyway, you've already killed them when you've assigned them to the top, and the worst thing you can do to them: to spend what is left of their lives in vain. I don't claim it's smart. But that's how it is.
It is actually reminiscent of soviet plans for full scale war in Europe. It was determined that anyone deployed there would be essentialy dead man walking so they counted on overwhelming any defenses by massive attacks so they dont get bogged down in contaminated areas.
@@NorthernNorthdude91749 you won't get results (at least the ones you want) if all your men are all too dead give you it you're the one who doesn't get it mate.
declaring independence from the imperium is actually possible, a single world is nothing and humanity has no troops to spare. it is still risky as f, but it might take the imperium a few hundred years to react and sadly a lot of politicians seem to favour short term gains over long term ones.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646This is how I see it. When rebelling worlds are nearby actual serious threats needing serious amounts of bodies thrown at them like Ork Waaaghs, Tyranid biofleets, and burgeoning Dark Eldar corsairs; and those rebelling worlds are so unlikely to hamper Imperial operations; they can pretend to be independent for a little, up until they give other worlds ideas. Not to mention that any threat on Imperial radar can take anywhere from a month to a century to be responded with, what with politics, unreliable long-distance communication, even less reliable long-distance travel, and Imperial tendency to monitor the severity of threats by seeing how long it takes for mass casualties to be reported.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 well the imperium is always at war somewhere, so there isn't really an army just sitting around somewhere. to retake krieg you first need to win another war to free up enough troops and not have something more pressing like an ork waaagh or a genestealer uprising to combat. a single world that refuses to pay taxes is not really high on the priority list.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 bodies, yes. trained troops? no. the imperium is engaged in thousands of battles daily, its military power is stretched pretty thin. you have to remember the majority of the galaxy is still in imperial hands, even if it is being nibbled to death.
"We're the Death Korps of Krieg, son. Did you think that was just a pretty name? We never retreat. We fight and we die, that's the Krieg way." Lieutenant Konarski, 933rd Death Korp of Krieg
Pre rebellion Krieg was self sustaining, which I guess means it was an autarchy at the planetary scale,fun fact the craftworld eldar leaders are also called autarchs and those craftworlds are also pretty much self sufficient
"Krieg doesn't raise regiments - Krieg raises *armies*" The fact that Krieg nuked itself, waged war with itself for five centuries non-stop and still had the industry, population and resources to become the biggest planet in terms of military force output makes it in my opinion inferior only to Cadia, Ultramar and very few other places outside Segmentum Solar. If the Guardsmen ever get a new "poster boy" faction, Krieg would be the topmost choice, for they echo if not embody the two most common quotes of the verse - "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war" and "Only in Death does Duty end."
In canon it is rumored that the soldiers are actually not born regularly, but are instead clones. There's some incidental evidence for this, like how they all wear masks, and how they don't have names but rather they have identifying numbers. This is how they keep their population up even though they are so suicidally expendable.
They had a shelf life on soldiers from radiation, therefore large gains had to be made before the soldiers died from radiation in order to send fresh soldiers with a new expiration date to exploit the advance. They had little time for anything else.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 Because the secessionists still fought on the surface, and they couldn't risk letting their trench lines penetrated or the loyalist positions encircled from around and above. Leaving the surface vulnerable is a death sentence on any scale, as it would leave either side vulnerable to another's assault, cornering their troops in the tunnels below.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 What are you going to send? Technology is pretty rare in this universe, so no drones or robots are used. You send wave after wave of dudes, the imperium have trillions of them.
@@jamie_d0g978 Technology isn’t rare in fact it in abundance if the 40k books are anything to go by the only thing that rare when it comes to technology is innovation because it been labelled as tech-heresy by the machine cult and things like robots are used solely by the mechanicus because why would they give up such a powerful monopoly. The problem with using human wave tactic (besides being very stupid) neither the loyalists or separatists on kraig have trillions of men to throw into the meat Grindr even if both introduce compulsory procreation they both are going to struggle to keep the birth rates higher than the death rates. Another thing to bear in mind is this war goes on for hundreds of years and when the imperium returns to Kraig the planet already has multiple regiments ready to go which I find very hard to Believe and equally ridiculous is that neither the loyalists or separatists ever called for peace like no one ever question why this conflict even being fought anymore.
38:37 You misunderstood. Kriegsmen operated basically like Chernobyl's liquidators. Once they were deployed in an attack, they were on the clock. They *will* all either die from combat, or from radiation exposure, unless they manage to reach and capture enemy bunkers. Dead men walking. Hence, it makes sense for them to take the biggest risks possible, so that *when* they die, the expenditure of their lives gained something of value and they weren't just lost to radiation. And assaults have to be huge so that the few survivors who manage to dig in inside enemy lines will be able to resist a counter-attack until reinforcements arrive.
"It's one thing to clear a house with small arms, but it would be another thing entirely... to..." Guardsman! Yes sir! Reposition your crew, I want howitzer fire down that tunnel!
Kreigsman Commander: Belay that order, continue tunneling. Kreigsman 1: What are the higher ups thinking? Reposition where? Kreigsman 2: Like I could live with the dishonor of not being on the front. Howitzer shell goes off barely 20 feet away, several Kreigsman thrown to the ground, 2 dead, 1 buried alive All the Kreigsman: ~happy gasmask noises~ :In unison: Ahhh... reminds me of home. Kreigsman Commander: WHO TOLD YOU TO STOP DIGGING!? YOU CAN STOP DIGGING WHEN YOU DIE! AND SOMEONE DIG OUT 45972! By the Emperor that's the third time this cycle.. Kreigmen: :in unison: Yes'sir!
So here's the thing. A scratch regiment could be put together in a few months with the supplies and necessary material to help support the resistance under Colonel Jurten. Such actions are actually common for what the Imperium would consider a scouting force to a potential or known invasion, but the Imperium was already in contact with the good Colonel, they were briefed that this was a single world insurrection, and Imperial loyalists on Krieg might be dead before they can even get the men together, let alone ship them through space; a process that can take months or even years, even with the FTL capabilities afforded by Warp travel. Gambling that Colonel Jurten's resistance movement could survive while isolated, vastly outnumbered, and in all due likelihood significantly outgunned was not a move Imperial High Command would consider making, doubly so because the secessionists probably controlled enough of the orbital defenses and AAA batteries that the exception of Ferrograd would not open up a noticeable gap in its defenses, or at least not one that could be adequately exploited by a relief force. And again, that's assuming the relief force could get there before the forces they were relieving were killed or captured. So, by the reckoning of Imperial High Command, Krieg was well and truly lost, and it would take many years and a significant allocation of resources, human or otherwise, to retake the world; something which the Imperium may no longer consider profitable enough to be worth the effort. Colonel Jurten would be on his own, and access to the nuclear cache hidden below Ferrograd would be his only support, and it would be up to him and the loyalists to retake Krieg from the Council of Autarchs. And considering the Imperium wrote the world off for about 500 years and didn't even bother to check if Colonel Jurten had nuked Krieg back to the Stone Age, I'm fairly certain the Imperium did not give enough of a shit about whatever was on Krieg at the time to have considered supporting Colonel Jurten unless the situation was reversed. To give you a better idea of how insignificant the Krieg insurrection was on an Imperial scale, the Imperium treated Krieg like the US treated the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone last year. And I think even that comparison is being too generous to how much the Imperium cared about Krieg...
As a few other people have mentioned the problem with the Imperium invading or even giving aid to the Kreig loyalists is that Kreig had an orbital weapon satellite network above it meaning that basically anything short of a huge invasion fleet would have little if any chance of breaking orbit and Kreig was very arguably just not worth it.
Plus Krieg had a sizable fleet stationed in orbit too. And I’d be safe to say they probably had ground based defenses too like defense lasers which would also combat any invasion fleet. So probably the best solution would’ve been to requisition some astartes forces, which would’ve possibly taken years, to be attached to a larger fleet to retake the planet. They’d have to break through both the hostile fleet and the orbital defense satellites and probably use drop pods to deploy a sizable force of astartes to create a big enough foothold and hope that the ground defense don’t destroy the astartes on descent. Then once they have secured a sizable foothold they have to sit there and hope that the fleet was able to destroy the orbital defenses to a point where loyalist ships can land and deploy troops unharassed. By this point Ferrograd would’ve been lost meaning the imperial army has no local loyalist support and a massive nuclear arsenal.
@williampg gois yeah I don’t really know the size or quality of their pdf, but Krieg was very rich and put a lot of that money into their pdf so it would’ve taken 100% gone on for at least one decade. Imagine vraks but with pdf that’s more well trained, has better equipped, and possibly even a larger numbers too.
If I had to guess then the reason why the over-ground assaults had to be so massive is because you cant rely on progressing the battle a step at a time since you cant necessarily secure a new trench like normal and prepare for another push. Instead, if you wanted to make any sort of realistic progress you needed to get to the next set of safe environments which probably means the enemy underground bunker complex on the opposite side of their trench. After all, if you just made an assault on their trench and made a breech, even if you exploited this breech during the attack you would still need to pull back all the way to the start once your time on the surface is up. The only meaningful gain would be a significant step forward to a location you can actually hold indefinitely. As for fighting a battle of attrition and trying to get an upper hand, considering this took 500 years already, it does not appear that crazy to think that might just drag out the conflict almost indefinitely.
It's because the men are already dead due to radiation, you might as well use them, their survival is unnecessary if they're going to suffer from radiation sickness anyway and become unfit for combat. Better to use them before they are useless. But if you are going to send them to die, you HAVE to make it worth the price. Because throwing away tons of men every Sunday ain't gonna work when you are living on mushrooms and rats in bunkers. You send massive waves very infrequently rather than a steady stream. When the numbers reduce your population can strengthen itself and take time to enjoy the now less scarce food resources, and repopulate for your next wave. So long as you are winning a dozen miles every time, and you are willing to fight for a few hundred years like they are, you will win.
The problem with making planets dependent on external resources is the unreliability of warp travel. Warp storms can leave planets cut off for a century. Where possible planets have to be able to meet their own minimum needs. Tunnels were very important in World War One. Both sides would dig tunnels under no-man's land to excavate large spaces beneath enemy trenches. These would then be packed with tons of explosives that would be detonated to blast a hole in the lines. The digging of these tunnels could be detected with listening equipment and counter tunnels dug to try and cut the enemy off before they could finish their work, resulting in some pretty vicious close combat fighting underground. Fun facts: Not all of these mines went off as they were supposed to and there may still be some huge bombs left under Belgium just waiting to go off if a worm digs in the wrong place. One of the ones that did go off (on June 7, 1917) used almost 1,000,000lbs of explosives and was loud enough to be heard in London.
The Age of Strife showed that problem very clearly. After birth of Slaanesh the Warp was supremely dangerous for travel and entire fleets were going missing only to best case scenario reappear in real space centuries later. Entire solar systems that were dependent on interstellar trade for basic necessities of life were either completely wiped out or regressed massively. Earth was the prime example of that as it went from the most important planet in the galaxy to a medieval backwater ruled over by warlords with access to whatever technology they could salvage, and it would remain like that or be conquered by some outside force if not for the Emperor stepping in. That's why most systems in the modern Imperium at least try to be self sufficient, with one planet doing most of the industrial production and others feeding it's massive population.
The planet is surrounded by numerous orbital defense platforms with enough firepower to blast a battleship to bits before they even get near the planet. Hence why the resistance forces cannot receive additional help. There is simply no secure way to deliver said help.
Probably matters more that this was the time of the Horus Heresy. The Imperium was busy with a massive civil war between LEGIONS of space marines and attendant forces. If a cry for help came out, even a swift response wouldn't be there in time. And a swift response wasn't possible considering the earthshattering civil war that sterilized entire sectors, wiped out information on other sectors and caused a galaxy-wide regression that could just barely be compared to what happened at the end of the Dark Age of Technology.
The area surrounding ferrograd would be crawling with anti aircraft weapons, in space you have orbital defense platforms shooting down any small aircraft to your lightly armed and armored transport ships, as well as the time it takes to unload all of the troops and their supplies vs the entirety of Krueger PDF who are very well armed and equipped with equipment equivalent to that of the guard.
Everything that can provide any kind of battlefield data, from sound to imagery to spectral analysis, radar, ladar, or mere movement sensors are called auspex. Basically anything that provides battlefield data outside on the mere sensory limitations of a human beeing is called an auspex.
Don’t forget about the orbital defense platforms which could easily destroy even a battleship with some problems and a few losses as well as the platforms being shielded and heavily armed and armored with a given ration of five to one five being the defense platforms and the one being an imperial ship, and then there’s the problem of either, landing a ship the size of a city into geosynchronous order and make a hot landing and at the same time carrying several regiments and their support assets ie 1 million troops ten thousand tanks and half a million support personnel and if the ship were to be shot down not only will the loss of manpower be wasted and could have been better spent elsewhere but you also have a massive ship falling from orbit as well as the loss of resources and materials, alternatively you could use small drop ships like the Valkyrie gunship or the sky talon drop ship, however trying to land these assets would eventually clog up the space ports and landing field as well as taking on heavy enemy anti aircraft weapons, as well as the fact that a Valkyrie can only carry ten men and a sky talon can only carry one vehicle at a time, yes you could try a more tactful approach however when a group of people who have complete control over the military, police and citizens as well as having the people’s loyalty, it’s not going to be easy, imagine going to say Palestine or somewhere in the Middle East and try to convert someone to Christianity, it’s doable however it’s very unlikely. And when you are reminded just how shit life in the imperium was there’s no going back and whilst yes a small insurgency group of loyalists can do some damage again it’s akin to trying to commit terrorism in America, doable but highly unlikely
while i get the point you were making, i take issue with the statement; "akin to trying to commit terrorism in America, doable but highly unlikely" the definition of terrorism is the use of violence, threats, and intimidation for political ends. anti-fa have been regularly 'committing terrorism' for 5 years now. i mean hell, one of your 2 primary political parties spent most of 2020 actively, and very publicly, supporting it. you vote a pro terrorist party into power, after years of escalating violence from the terrorist groups they support, and you think terrorism is 'highly unlikely'? has it even paused at all in the last 18 months? 'perpetually ongoing' would be the more accurate term. terrorism in America is hardly unlikely. i know you people are very enthusiastic about freedom, but c'mon. law and order is important too, ya know.
38:00 he is saying that if you are going to send soldiers to fight they will die from environment anyway, so might as well use them to gain some ground, instead of waiting up until they die from radiation.
But this begs the question what if the assault fails you just wasted your men and now your lines on the surface is untenable because you have too few men holding the Trenches or no men at all and more over what even the point of continuing the war on the surface?
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 the point is that I'd you send anybody to the surface they will die, there is this anything to hold by people that will die from cancer, so might as well make them kill something before they die
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 mhm and whilst you are fighting underground they will send soldiers over all your underground entrenchments, on the surface and attack you in the back or dig right down where you are not expecting. So you would need to send some people too.
@@russiandoomer945 no they won’t because as clearly stated the radiation will kill them very quickly and the city was already sealed up when the nukes fall so don’t unseal it, and even if they break in and take a section of the city again those men are already weak and dying so it wouldn’t be that difficult to push them back or take a defensive stance and wait for them to die.
i dont agree about the low risk engagement, we are talking about a planet so ravaged by nuclear weaponry which probably makes our real life equivilent look pathetic any engagement no matter the risk those men would probably die very quickly to radiation for little gain also there is another thing that might factor in the quicker you win the war the qucker you can return to the imperium which may give you help etc
that still doesn't make much sense if your men on the surface are dead men walking and you want to make them last as long as possible before they die then why on god's green earth would you have lots of your guys charge to certain death for little gain, and trying to rush to victory is just dumb.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 thing is with the amount of radiation any combat even if it lasted max a hour or so those mens lives are listed in days maybe even hours and be in agonising pain as their bone marrow and cells die triggering critical organ fialier , for example the scene of the workers in chenobyl series their deaths with the radiation but we are probably taking way way more intense and quickier
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 thing is with radiation in goes into the ground sought of like if you pour water on dirt if we are going by 40k standards they would need many meters thick concrete and lead equivilent in 40k and fighting underground is actively as worse i would say any heavy weapons will risk a severe roof collapse plus the war would take significantly longer adding the risk of of chaos coming in or something else plus the traitor side the longer you give them will replenish their losses actually making the war longer which is not a good thing as you want to finish the war as quick as you can possibly to get help from imperial planets etc
I think you're really missing an important part of this when you view the 500 yr war "rationally", because it was never "rational" from the day the nukes launched until the day the last rebel died. It was for all intents and purposes a religious war between both sides that hated each other with a bitter and undying passion that only grew and grew. The Loyalists HATED the Rebels for betraying the Imperium and turning the Emperors' light from them and the Rebels' hated the Loyalists for their murder of billions of innocents with the use of those nukes. As others have said, this war was scouting and grand attacks to crush the enemy which makes perfect sense based on how much they wanted to destroy the other. One last thing; all of the Krieg "culture" during the 500yrs was training (with live ammunition) to be a fearless soldier to get the god-emperor's forgiveness for their "sin".
I LOVE that video by Arch !! Sometimes I put it on to go to sleep to at night, the wry humor and presentation is just fun to listen to. Tuska Demon-Killa is a shorter but a riot listen at times.
SO happy you are finally checking out Arch, that Norwegian waffle got me into 40K Love his attention to detail and his Siege of Vraks series is just insane
The soldiers HAD to gain grounds because, by being deployed on surface level, their life was inevitably spent. The radiations were on a level way too high for sustainance of human life. Rotating them in and out was not to safeguard their life, it was to extend the length of time in wich they could be alive, hence operational. That is why. Once you assign people above ground, they HAVE to gain ground, because win or lose regardless, their life is lost. Either from the enemy, or from radiation. As you can immagine, such losses are heavy, and HAVE to be compensated by some form of gain. This is also why the war was fought mainly underground, with surface operations veing limited to massive efforts. Because only those massive efforts could guarantee gaining ground and compensating for the life of ALL those involved.
and then theres Mount Pinatubo, a stratovolcano in the Philippines, cooled global temperatures for about 2-3 years, Krakatau 1883 around 4 years and 1783 Laki and Grímsvötn among others
The idea during the Krieg Civil War was that they'd rather their soldiers die trying to capture an objective than them dying of just exposure to the surface. Once the dudes were deployed to the surface, they *had* to be used for something or they would just end up being wastes.
1) what if one of those human wave assaults fails now you have a hole or a much weakened line that the enemy can exploit. 2) what the point of continuing the war on the surface if it’s so hostile to human life that the loyalists have to resort to human wave assaults it just seems like a waste of time, lives and resources.
I really like your content my guy, you're incredibly well informed and able to convey that, for real life. 40k communication and transportation is vastly, vastly underdeveloped compared to everything else. Also the makeup of The Imperium needs to be understood, even if the Administratum decided to transfer small amounts of troops and supplies to Kreig, it is likely that The Imperial Navy wouldn't go for it, deeming their recourses better used elsewhere.
There's probably a ton of moments somewhere in the lore where EMPs were used to disable stuff, but tbh that could be clocked up to writers not knowing that there are ways to protect electronics from it. There's a ton of way more consistantly written series that seem to forget that EMPs aren't a guaranteed kill all the electronics around them.
Hey Paul, Just wanted to recommend a new setting to look into. Battletech is another tabletop based game that has a great lore, plus it spawned the MechWarrior games . This has a bit more realistic lore but is still crazy, I would recommend the Tex talks Battletech: The Amaris Civil War, part 1&2. he covers a lot of the major events in the lore. if u like crazy Russian generals and a hint of mad BASTARDS like the black watch u might love it. Love everything ur doing now but just wanted to send this recondition.
21:40 you're forgetting how long it takes to get anywhere in 40k. putting aside the time needed to assemble everything you are going to send them you also have to account for the uncertainties of warp travel, which while fast is not the most reliably or predictable means of transportation. It probably would have been years before anything arrived and that's basically hauling ass. The Imperium is always weighing where to devote it's limited resources and in the case of Krieg they probably figured the chances of Jurten surviving long enough for any fast tracked support to not only reach him safely but actually help turn the tide were too low to be worth the investment. At which point you may as well just write the planet off and leave it for a later date when you can really set things up and get together a proper force.
WW1 saw some terrifying tunnel warfare too. Engineers would tunnel out from the trenches and try to plant explosives underneath the opposing trench line. Sometimes engineers from each side would accidentally (or purposefully) dig into enemy tunnels and it would devolve into force hand to hand (pickaxe to shovel) fighting before explosives were irises to block the tunnels
The winterberg tunnel is the best example how risky it was. Even the engineers could often not properly stabilize the tunnel and in this case ... the mountain demanded more than 250 lives in one instant
Minor correction, the civil war was already in full swing well before the end of WW1 and the reds only executed the Tzar and his family when the Czechoslovak legion made such astonishingly rapid progress that they were afraid that they'd actually launch and succeed in a rescue attempt Lindybiege has an excellent vid on the subject if you want to scope it out Oh and those sort of tunnel engagements are even older than the Vietnam war, there's a good movie made about it called "beneath hill 60"
Auspex is sort of an anything device in 40k, much like the scanners from Star trek. In my opinion Auspex is a short version of "All Spectrum" which to me means it can visualize the whole electromagnetic spectrum, giving anything from infrared night via to ultraviolet vision and even visualizing x-ray and gamma rays. A very handy tool.
Unfortunately when you’re fighting on something equivalent to the surface of the moon and having to say capture defensive lines or say an orbital landing site, you need to ensure that the mission is fully completed and whilst yes smaller raiding forces could hold out ie the bridges during ww2 however again you’re attacking a well defended target filled with bunkers, machine gun nests, pillboxes, mine fields, well trained and equipped enemies as well as being limited to half an hour and whilst a chimera APC is capable of getting you there, it’s getting the numbers of troops as well as holding onto the objective, think of D DAY where you could say that only a few dozen men could have captured the entirety of the Normandy coast and maybe however unlike the actual D DAY you have to deal with German counter attacks all the while ships are unloading and under enemy fire.
An “Auspex” is I believe kind of a catch all term for sensors that pick up external activity. Humanoid sized elements or heat signature for Space Marines, probably tuned differently for emplaced anti space defenses or whatever.
On the subject of EMP in 40k, I'm not sure it is addressed in the books, but in the tabletop, the Tau empire specifically has a few EMP weapons that deal extra damage to vehicles. So I would assume some things are shielded and others are not.
To give a little on the geography of the Krieg surface war. We are talking about "habitable" zones about the size of Isreal. And by "Habitable" we still mean next to the reactor in Chernobyl "habitable" continued exposure ensures a horrible death, and even with severely limited exposure the risk of radiation poisoning and cancer is still much much higher than what 99.9% of humanity is acceptable with.
Dude you forgot about one small tiny piece of information namely THE DEFENSE SILOS IN ORBIT the would render your covert op of supporting the rebels null and void as they can’t get past them. Awesome love your videos keep them coming!
9:45 Correction here: The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar. That (February Revolution) was a coalition of various parties of which the Bolsheviks were one of the smallest contributors (the progressive Bloc and Mensheviks outnumbered them by a wide margin). After which a interim Government was established until an official election could be held. The Bolsheviks then overthrew that government during the October Revolution. They did kill the Tsar(and the entire royal family) but by that point he was already a prisoner.
15:37 what you have too keep in mind is space is so big and information and ships travel so slow and the imperium is so disorganized, a simple rounding error from one of the leaders in Tera could delete hundreds of worlds from record
26:25 That's Krakatoa, the 1883 eruption caused the summer to turn into winter that year. Even as a kid with my friends we would pretend to be Dragonball Z fighters and the "Krakatoa" was my signature move, my "Kamehameha."
From the 82nd here and I can say without a doubt we didn't have cbrn officers or dedicated cbrn personnel. We had one nco (infantry) pulled from a platoon in our company who was sent to short training that literally just signed out mop gear. Maybe it was different in your unit.
The mass assaults on the surface were needed because the men partaking in them were already dead. The moment they stepped onto the surface, they were going to die. Didn't matter if they were a part of an assault on the enemy trenches, sitting in their own running supplies, or even spent a day up top before going back underground. They. Were. Going To. Die. Due to that fact, the most logical move would be to use their limited time to gain the most ground they could before they died, whether to enemy fire or radiation.
20:00 - About here you missed something. The Rebels had control of the orbital defenses. If the imperium diverted say a single regiment, it would never reach the surface to reinforce the loyalist. 39:00 - Dude. The entire planet is a radioactive wasteland. There were no "low risk" engagements. There were "Dying from radiation or dying from the enemy" engagements.
29:05 I believe that a brief glimpse of those weapons was given in the Horus Heresy series when a character explained that the "Cybernetic Revolt" was a mess that put the Horus Heresy, from "sun-snuffers" (weapons designed to devour the stars themselves), passing through "Omnivores" that could a planed barren and finally I remember some talks in various comments about weapons that could literally _erase_ things from existence.
I like the point you make at 15:00 about Cold War rebellions. That's why pretty much the only rebellions against the Imperium that have ever been successful have been either converts to the Greater Good who could count on Tau support, Chaos rebellions who could summon support from the warp, or Genestealer Cults that only rise up when they expect a Tyranid hive fleet to show up soon (although you could argue just how "successful" a Genestealer rebellion really is even when they win.) One thing the video didn't mention is that the autarchs had additional reason to expect little to no reprisal from the Imperium because they timed their rebellion to occur at the same time the Imperium was tied up with several other crises.
I have to say, I enjoy your style of reaction content. Far too many reaction channels simply absorb the information and give a few words at the end. You seem to prefer to add real-world context to the lore as it's presented, which I do appreciate. Furthermore, Arch lore videos in particular have a nostalgic quality for me, as I've watched pretty much every one of them as they came out. They're cozy.
21.12 The problem with that. Isn't just a matter of communication but also travel. Warp travel can take weeks to months over very short distances, and that's assuming you have ships and troops ready to deploy right now. Not to mention that even communication isn't your only issue but so it bureaucracy. It would probably take years for the imperiums local (realitivly) goverment to even realize what's going on. In any case. By which point the rebels would almost certainly be dead or dying.
after the age of strife taking out all interstellar travel trying to make your planet as self sufficient as possible made a lot more sense while it is impossible to fully feed a hive world from locally grown produce, it is still smart to try and most hive planets do try with things like efficient recycling from corpses to waste fed algae farms and just about any other thing that can be sqeezed for resources trade routes arnt stable since they go trough the warp
From the wiki "In 433.M40, the end came for Krieg in the form of the High Autocrat of Krieg's largest hive, the Chairman of the Council of Autocrats and the de facto Planetary Governor, (a man so hated that his name has been purged from all Imperial records by an Edict of Obliteration) who declared planetary-wide martial law and that Krieg was now independent of the Imperium of Man. "
I think coups tend to be very successful at first because they have surprise and can pick the time and place where they kick off. Tactical and strategic surprise combined is quite an advantage. Assuming that the plot isn't discovered before they are ready, that is.
the thing about the massed assaults was that as soon as you went outside the radiation would kill you not instantly, but fast enough that returning home was useless everyone who fought was dead from the start, even if they never got shot at so if your men are lost anyway, better to make the loss worth it and make sure you claimed something usable in the assault now if he was smarter you could probably come up with something like using small groups of infiltrators to strike at vulnerable areas and take out things like air filtration being even more reliable with your men being already dead so being able to add suicide terrorist to their arsenal, but those arnt the kind of tactics the imperium teaches to the pdf regularly
to be fair. one other example of what you mention with outside help is a little known stellar power in 40K called the severan dominate. their leader, a former warhero and rogue trader i believe, had essentially become governor of a rather wide area. like. a subsector basically. but obviously he gets a few power hungry ideas. the thing is he didn't turn to chaos. no. he asked the dark eldar for help. in exchange for helping the severan dominate he would help them locate worlds, xenos or human, imperial or otherwise, to raid. aside from that he also had the benefit of being one of the most industrialised sub-sectors in a sector in the ass-end of the imperium. combine that with how difficult warp travel and communication is (something the council on Krieg had banked on too) and that the imperium can sometimes take a generation to deal with a rebellion and it becomes easy to see why they thought they could succeed. espesically if they had near 100 percent control of the planet and the orbital defenses and thus likely also the planetary defense fleet. they didn't have to win. they just had to make it too much of a nuisance to retake Krieg but too difficult to drop a cyclonic torpedo on the planet. and they almost succeeded if not for the. you know. mass nuclear holocaust.
If i'm not mistaken, the main reason Krieg could have gotten away with the rebellion was because their orbital defenses (setup to stop invading forces in their tracks) were strong enough to actually pose a major obstacle to Imperium forces trying to retake the planet (as in, if what I found wasn't exaggerating, their orbital defenses were enough to stop entire fleets, not even counting their own possible fleet or ground defenses) Edit: the part about the landing zone only works once they breach into the atmosphere, the orbital defenses were fully in control of the rebellion and were designed to cover the entire planet
Dying in mass assaults probably had more to do with cultural reasons, plus some practical ones. Skirmishing as an idea was viable: underground. Tunnel fighting tended to operate on skirmishing because skirmishes assume long deployments. A basic attack has a limited period of operation. Scouts were almost certainly used on the surface but were probably dead men walking. Anyone doing that sort of thing on foot on in a light vehicle would need to be in very advanced gear. Much better candidates would be augmented humans or some kind of drone. I think this kind of warfare assumes some kind of imperfect information because getting accurate details would be pretty difficult. When soldiers would go on the offensive, they would probably have gone over their time limit too. Which means they only had a slow death from radiation related illness to look forward to. Imagine you're a mother on Krieg and the next assault leads to tens of thousands of terminal soldiers coming back and dying slowly. It's almost better for them to go out and die, even in large numbers, and gain some kind of ground, rather than come back and then be a constant demoralizing force for everyone else. In that sense it's almost ritualistic. The tunnel fighting and dangerous scouting would be the bread and butter of actual combat with real tactics. But the major operations would in a sense be ritualized. We're taking back a secessionist base or we're capturing this town or we're going to seize an important radiation resistant bunker complex on the way to the next hive we have to seize. In an ideal world you would use proper tactics, with scouting, feints, maneuver, etc. But when your time is so limited on the surface, having a period of training and preparation followed by a big offensive is almost better for a war fighting population. Yes, they could have dug in and expended minimum numbers of casualties, but they were also in a losing fight. The secessionists still had the numbers advantage. Plus, it was almost certainly a point of pride to retake the rest of the planet and a long term goal keeping the population from going insane. Yes, maneuver and tactics were important, but when the operational time was so small, tactics gives way to the greater picture. The seizing of food production facilities and suitable places to expand your population, the seizing of arms, ammunition and defensible positions and the moral victories that inspire the greater war story, those I think are more important than the lives themselves. You can have the equivalent of Earth fighting seasons, with spring and summer especially as the main fighting seasons and other times of the year focused on food production, population growth, etc. In that way you can have a big offensive with a certain number of your troops, win or lose and then hunker down again while the population recovers and the next units salvage the equipment of the destroyed or damaged units. In this case the big tactical decision isn't how to fight, it's where to fight. Figuring out the correct and most useful areas to capture or hold would be way more important of a decision than the individual maneuvers, which would involve lots of tunneling to support the ground offensive and some limited scouting and maybe even a few sneaky tricks, rather than grand battles of maneuver. Figuring out the resource and morale value of various objectives and the impact on your population would probably be the single biggest decision for the military commanders. Because at the end of the day, they were in this for the long haul.
Two things I reacted to. 1 the orbital defence silos would stop any lesser help the imperium tried to send, and they were not neceserily knockd out during the nuking of the planet. 2 the math for sending huge numbers of people should go like this; A - send 500 to take a position, they have to retreat and then die from the hazardus wasteland or the radiation. Now the position might be reinforced and you might not posess the manpower to take it at all, and might loose thousands in this little skirmish. B - send 2000 to take a position, they likely take it by the enemy drowning in your mens blood. You have lost 4x as many men but hold the position.
Thr thing is after the heresy they were essentially lost on maps because of where it was and how bad things were beyond imperial space at the time but they could have repelled and possibly gotten away with it for a few decades...
39:59 No. Warfare was NEVER ritualized in any place on earth. The medieval europeans (of which we have the most data on) didn't run at low level of casualties to preserve their numbers, or any other SANE reason, but because war was fought face to face and they just ran from the screaming men killing their mates. Simple Instincts that were sometimes overridden and made legends, but most times were kept and relied upon. Also in any historical battle if a force is retreating, they suffered horrifying casualties. Tactical retreat wasn't really feasible when your main armament is an iron tipped stick and you just couldn't engage your enemies WHILST fleeing. It was either or, so generals either left sacrificial units to hold the enemy whilst they withdraw with the main force(didn't work most times), or just scattered enough so the enemy can't run all of them down, either organized or disorganized. Whilst the napoleonic era did see military change, it was because the new type of weaponry, the mass conscript armies, and the fact that generals actually did a god damn school for their positions (or sometimes at least), and military knowledge CONGREGATED, instead of being kept on via tradition. Medieval commanders were just as willing to do high risk maneuvers as napoleonic ones, blatant example would be the famous charge of the french cavalry in any battle basically, and the risk of such actions can be seen from the results of those charges being quite 50/50, sometimes resulting in catastrophies such as in the battle of agincourt. The only ritualization of conflict would occur in-house, such as with the knightly tournaments that went from melee to bashing fancy statues off heavily armored bloke's head, or the dueling tradition which went from blatant assault to folks occasionally fighting naked to first blood. People NEVER (or at least not enough times to be the norm) did such things when the security of their community was on the line. There was just not enough trust between the belligerents to faciliate such behaviour.
I think the point is if you are exposing them to lethal doses of radiation by fighting on the surface you gotta go all in and get something out of it. Its like the sunken cost fallacy which is typically a fallacy but sometimes its the right course of action if more is needed to complete the task.
The Auspex scanners are the WH 40 000 version of the more advanced radars and thermoscan systems we have nowadays... Some auspex scan devices are able to even spot warp entities or similar stuff.
I think the point about surface battles on Kreig is basically that any soldiers committed to them were guaranteed to die from radiation poisoning so regardless of if the battle was won or lost the men where not coming back as such you had absolutely better win somthing or not bother at all.
It’s worth noting that up until very recently technology and industry in the Imperium has been in steep regression. While generic equipment like lasguns, carapace armor, and the less valuable tanks and artillery pieces can be produced in obscene quantity, more complex energy weapons, heavy and super heavy vehicles, shields, etc will always be slowly suffering from attrition. Human beings however are in insanely numerous supply, hive cities contain what we would consider an entire planet’s population and worlds like Krieg play host to several up to tens of these megalopoli. For your average Krieg commander if you had to choose between losing ten thousand infantrymen in a massed charge or losing like, a single baneblade or some other heavy tank, you’d expend the men because your reserves are probably in the tens of millions of men, but your heavy tanks and Titans may be literally irreplaceable, or at least so costly to refurbish that major damage will take them out of play for weeks or months.
Let's remember the "Tsar bomb" detonated in 1961. It was designed with a yield of above 100 Mt but during the test the final stage of the bomb was omitted to reduce radioactive fallout. The bomb still reached at yield of around 50 Mt. The bomb was detonated at a height of 4km above ground and the fireball reached a diamter of 8km but it didn't touch ground because the shockwave of the detonation bounced back of the ground and pushed off the fireball. The shockwave from the blast traveled three times around the entire globe (although the third time took some rather sensitive equipment to notice). The flare of the blast could be seen from 1.000 km away, the mushroom cloud reached a height of 67km which means it punched straight through the ozone layer which is only at around 25km height. A village located 55km from the blast zone was completly destroyed and in another village located 780km from the explosion the shockwave still shattered glass. The ionization of the atmosphere caused interference in all radio communication within a 400km radius. And finally, the explosion caused a seismic shockwave in the earths crust that circled the globe three times. And that's just a bomb we can build right now. Just think about how unimaginably destructive dark age of technology nuclear devices would be.
To note Auspex is the 40k equivalent to Radar/GPS/motion trackers. It’s a cover all word. A lot of Imperial Guard Vehicles have them and even troops will be assigned them to help detect enemies while on patrol or in battle - tho rarer for standard infantry to get one tho they have been made down in size (think like the ones you see the colonial marines use in Aliens but different appearance)
The main point about WHY they had to engage en masse on the ground: on a heavily irradiated surface that is described, soldiers and their lives were a very finite resource. If you deploy a troop to the surface, they will be GONE in a month. Maybe two if you properly switch them in and out. It doesn't matter if you allow them to partake in a low risk engagement or shove them into a meatgrinder, you are on a timer. So the idea is: utilize them in the most efficient manner and don't bother if they survive the ordeal or not, as long as they gain SOMETHING. Because they are dead men walking anyway, you've already killed them when you've assigned them to the top, and the worst thing you can do to them: to spend what is left of their lives in vain.
I don't claim it's smart. But that's how it is.
It is actually reminiscent of soviet plans for full scale war in Europe. It was determined that anyone deployed there would be essentialy dead man walking so they counted on overwhelming any defenses by massive attacks so they dont get bogged down in contaminated areas.
Agree
it still dumb and rans counter to the idea of trying to kept those men alive as long as possible.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 You don't get it. Individual lives don't matter, just results.
@@NorthernNorthdude91749 you won't get results (at least the ones you want) if all your men are all too dead give you it you're the one who doesn't get it mate.
declaring independence from the imperium is actually possible, a single world is nothing and humanity has no troops to spare. it is still risky as f, but it might take the imperium a few hundred years to react and sadly a lot of politicians seem to favour short term gains over long term ones.
Coronel commissar Cain….you will keep those pesky opinions to yourself
'humanity has no troops to spare' not meaning to come off as rude but I call bull on that.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646This is how I see it.
When rebelling worlds are nearby actual serious threats needing serious amounts of bodies thrown at them like Ork Waaaghs, Tyranid biofleets, and burgeoning Dark Eldar corsairs; and those rebelling worlds are so unlikely to hamper Imperial operations; they can pretend to be independent for a little, up until they give other worlds ideas. Not to mention that any threat on Imperial radar can take anywhere from a month to a century to be responded with, what with politics, unreliable long-distance communication, even less reliable long-distance travel, and Imperial tendency to monitor the severity of threats by seeing how long it takes for mass casualties to be reported.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 well the imperium is always at war somewhere, so there isn't really an army just sitting around somewhere. to retake krieg you first need to win another war to free up enough troops and not have something more pressing like an ork waaagh or a genestealer uprising to combat. a single world that refuses to pay taxes is not really high on the priority list.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 bodies, yes. trained troops? no. the imperium is engaged in thousands of battles daily, its military power is stretched pretty thin. you have to remember the majority of the galaxy is still in imperial hands, even if it is being nibbled to death.
"We're the Death Korps of Krieg, son. Did you think that was just a pretty name? We never retreat. We fight and we die, that's the Krieg way."
Lieutenant Konarski,
933rd Death Korp of Krieg
The men of Krieg have numbers, not names.
@@frankg2790 if I remember correctly, officers do get names, nco’s and the regular enlisted don’t
Or else we are zhe space germans
As in most civil societies, you "earn" your name.
@@deusvult6164 nein on da muun base.
Pre rebellion Krieg was self sustaining, which I guess means it was an autarchy at the planetary scale,fun fact the craftworld eldar leaders are also called autarchs and those craftworlds are also pretty much self sufficient
Have we met before?
@@Just_call_me_Billy yes, that comment thread dissapeared though, you didn't delete the original comment did you?
I accidentally deleted it
How are things
@@Just_call_me_Billy pretty good, just doing my thing, commenting, arguing, and occasionally shitposting
"Krieg doesn't raise regiments - Krieg raises *armies*"
The fact that Krieg nuked itself, waged war with itself for five centuries non-stop and still had the industry, population and resources to become the biggest planet in terms of military force output makes it in my opinion inferior only to Cadia, Ultramar and very few other places outside Segmentum Solar.
If the Guardsmen ever get a new "poster boy" faction, Krieg would be the topmost choice, for they echo if not embody the two most common quotes of the verse - "In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war" and "Only in Death does Duty end."
and quite often, not even then.
In canon it is rumored that the soldiers are actually not born regularly, but are instead clones. There's some incidental evidence for this, like how they all wear masks, and how they don't have names but rather they have identifying numbers. This is how they keep their population up even though they are so suicidally expendable.
"inferior only to Cadia" 🤮
Death before dishonor also fits them like a gas mask
They had a shelf life on soldiers from radiation, therefore large gains had to be made before the soldiers died from radiation in order to send fresh soldiers with a new expiration date to exploit the advance. They had little time for anything else.
question why send men to fight on the surface at all?
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 Because the secessionists still fought on the surface, and they couldn't risk letting their trench lines penetrated or the loyalist positions encircled from around and above. Leaving the surface vulnerable is a death sentence on any scale, as it would leave either side vulnerable to another's assault, cornering their troops in the tunnels below.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 What are you going to send? Technology is pretty rare in this universe, so no drones or robots are used. You send wave after wave of dudes, the imperium have trillions of them.
@@jamie_d0g978 Technology isn’t rare in fact it in abundance if the 40k books are anything to go by the only thing that rare when it comes to technology is innovation because it been labelled as tech-heresy by the machine cult and things like robots are used solely by the mechanicus because why would they give up such a powerful monopoly.
The problem with using human wave tactic (besides being very stupid) neither the loyalists or separatists on kraig have trillions of men to throw into the meat Grindr even if both introduce compulsory procreation they both are going to struggle to keep the birth rates higher than the death rates.
Another thing to bear in mind is this war goes on for hundreds of years and when the imperium returns to Kraig the planet already has multiple regiments ready to go which I find very hard to Believe and equally ridiculous is that neither the loyalists or separatists ever called for peace like no one ever question why this conflict even being fought anymore.
38:37 You misunderstood. Kriegsmen operated basically like Chernobyl's liquidators. Once they were deployed in an attack, they were on the clock. They *will* all either die from combat, or from radiation exposure, unless they manage to reach and capture enemy bunkers. Dead men walking. Hence, it makes sense for them to take the biggest risks possible, so that *when* they die, the expenditure of their lives gained something of value and they weren't just lost to radiation. And assaults have to be huge so that the few survivors who manage to dig in inside enemy lines will be able to resist a counter-attack until reinforcements arrive.
"It's one thing to clear a house with small arms, but it would be another thing entirely... to..."
Guardsman!
Yes sir!
Reposition your crew, I want howitzer fire down that tunnel!
Kreigsman Commander: Belay that order, continue tunneling.
Kreigsman 1: What are the higher ups thinking? Reposition where?
Kreigsman 2: Like I could live with the dishonor of not being on the front.
Howitzer shell goes off barely 20 feet away, several Kreigsman thrown to the ground, 2 dead, 1 buried alive
All the Kreigsman: ~happy gasmask noises~ :In unison: Ahhh... reminds me of home.
Kreigsman Commander: WHO TOLD YOU TO STOP DIGGING!? YOU CAN STOP DIGGING WHEN YOU DIE! AND SOMEONE DIG OUT 45972! By the Emperor that's the third time this cycle..
Kreigmen: :in unison: Yes'sir!
I wonder what would be his reaction to the HH war under the surface of Calth
So here's the thing. A scratch regiment could be put together in a few months with the supplies and necessary material to help support the resistance under Colonel Jurten. Such actions are actually common for what the Imperium would consider a scouting force to a potential or known invasion, but the Imperium was already in contact with the good Colonel, they were briefed that this was a single world insurrection, and Imperial loyalists on Krieg might be dead before they can even get the men together, let alone ship them through space; a process that can take months or even years, even with the FTL capabilities afforded by Warp travel. Gambling that Colonel Jurten's resistance movement could survive while isolated, vastly outnumbered, and in all due likelihood significantly outgunned was not a move Imperial High Command would consider making, doubly so because the secessionists probably controlled enough of the orbital defenses and AAA batteries that the exception of Ferrograd would not open up a noticeable gap in its defenses, or at least not one that could be adequately exploited by a relief force. And again, that's assuming the relief force could get there before the forces they were relieving were killed or captured.
So, by the reckoning of Imperial High Command, Krieg was well and truly lost, and it would take many years and a significant allocation of resources, human or otherwise, to retake the world; something which the Imperium may no longer consider profitable enough to be worth the effort. Colonel Jurten would be on his own, and access to the nuclear cache hidden below Ferrograd would be his only support, and it would be up to him and the loyalists to retake Krieg from the Council of Autarchs. And considering the Imperium wrote the world off for about 500 years and didn't even bother to check if Colonel Jurten had nuked Krieg back to the Stone Age, I'm fairly certain the Imperium did not give enough of a shit about whatever was on Krieg at the time to have considered supporting Colonel Jurten unless the situation was reversed.
To give you a better idea of how insignificant the Krieg insurrection was on an Imperial scale, the Imperium treated Krieg like the US treated the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone last year. And I think even that comparison is being too generous to how much the Imperium cared about Krieg...
As a few other people have mentioned the problem with the Imperium invading or even giving aid to the Kreig loyalists is that Kreig had an orbital weapon satellite network above it meaning that basically anything short of a huge invasion fleet would have little if any chance of breaking orbit and Kreig was very arguably just not worth it.
Plus Krieg had a sizable fleet stationed in orbit too. And I’d be safe to say they probably had ground based defenses too like defense lasers which would also combat any invasion fleet.
So probably the best solution would’ve been to requisition some astartes forces, which would’ve possibly taken years, to be attached to a larger fleet to retake the planet. They’d have to break through both the hostile fleet and the orbital defense satellites and probably use drop pods to deploy a sizable force of astartes to create a big enough foothold and hope that the ground defense don’t destroy the astartes on descent. Then once they have secured a sizable foothold they have to sit there and hope that the fleet was able to destroy the orbital defenses to a point where loyalist ships can land and deploy troops unharassed. By this point Ferrograd would’ve been lost meaning the imperial army has no local loyalist support and a massive nuclear arsenal.
@williampg gois yeah I don’t really know the size or quality of their pdf, but Krieg was very rich and put a lot of that money into their pdf so it would’ve taken 100% gone on for at least one decade. Imagine vraks but with pdf that’s more well trained, has better equipped, and possibly even a larger numbers too.
If I had to guess then the reason why the over-ground assaults had to be so massive is because you cant rely on progressing the battle a step at a time since you cant necessarily secure a new trench like normal and prepare for another push. Instead, if you wanted to make any sort of realistic progress you needed to get to the next set of safe environments which probably means the enemy underground bunker complex on the opposite side of their trench.
After all, if you just made an assault on their trench and made a breech, even if you exploited this breech during the attack you would still need to pull back all the way to the start once your time on the surface is up. The only meaningful gain would be a significant step forward to a location you can actually hold indefinitely. As for fighting a battle of attrition and trying to get an upper hand, considering this took 500 years already, it does not appear that crazy to think that might just drag out the conflict almost indefinitely.
It's because the men are already dead due to radiation, you might as well use them, their survival is unnecessary if they're going to suffer from radiation sickness anyway and become unfit for combat. Better to use them before they are useless. But if you are going to send them to die, you HAVE to make it worth the price. Because throwing away tons of men every Sunday ain't gonna work when you are living on mushrooms and rats in bunkers. You send massive waves very infrequently rather than a steady stream. When the numbers reduce your population can strengthen itself and take time to enjoy the now less scarce food resources, and repopulate for your next wave. So long as you are winning a dozen miles every time, and you are willing to fight for a few hundred years like they are, you will win.
The problem with making planets dependent on external resources is the unreliability of warp travel. Warp storms can leave planets cut off for a century. Where possible planets have to be able to meet their own minimum needs.
Tunnels were very important in World War One. Both sides would dig tunnels under no-man's land to excavate large spaces beneath enemy trenches. These would then be packed with tons of explosives that would be detonated to blast a hole in the lines. The digging of these tunnels could be detected with listening equipment and counter tunnels dug to try and cut the enemy off before they could finish their work, resulting in some pretty vicious close combat fighting underground. Fun facts: Not all of these mines went off as they were supposed to and there may still be some huge bombs left under Belgium just waiting to go off if a worm digs in the wrong place. One of the ones that did go off (on June 7, 1917) used almost 1,000,000lbs of explosives and was loud enough to be heard in London.
The Age of Strife showed that problem very clearly.
After birth of Slaanesh the Warp was supremely dangerous for travel and entire fleets were going missing only to best case scenario reappear in real space centuries later.
Entire solar systems that were dependent on interstellar trade for basic necessities of life were either completely wiped out or regressed massively.
Earth was the prime example of that as it went from the most important planet in the galaxy to a medieval backwater ruled over by warlords with access to whatever technology they could salvage, and it would remain like that or be conquered by some outside force if not for the Emperor stepping in.
That's why most systems in the modern Imperium at least try to be self sufficient, with one planet doing most of the industrial production and others feeding it's massive population.
The planet is surrounded by numerous orbital defense platforms with enough firepower to blast a battleship to bits before they even get near the planet. Hence why the resistance forces cannot receive additional help. There is simply no secure way to deliver said help.
Probably matters more that this was the time of the Horus Heresy. The Imperium was busy with a massive civil war between LEGIONS of space marines and attendant forces.
If a cry for help came out, even a swift response wouldn't be there in time. And a swift response wasn't possible considering the earthshattering civil war that sterilized entire sectors, wiped out information on other sectors and caused a galaxy-wide regression that could just barely be compared to what happened at the end of the Dark Age of Technology.
@@EricZakh I think you got the timelines mixed up, krieg happened within a millennia of 'curent day' warhammer not 10,000 years before.
@@codyarcher3263 You know, I think you are right. Whoopsie-doodle.
@@EricZakh All good, WH lore can be convoluted at best
In any case, then it could just be chalked up to good old-fashioned help being too far away or the Administratum losing the files.
The area surrounding ferrograd would be crawling with anti aircraft weapons, in space you have orbital defense platforms shooting down any small aircraft to your lightly armed and armored transport ships, as well as the time it takes to unload all of the troops and their supplies vs the entirety of Krueger PDF who are very well armed and equipped with equipment equivalent to that of the guard.
Welcome to the Death Corps, here's your number, run towards the light.
"But that's artillery flack."
Run towards the light faster.
Guardsman: is 4 alot
The average krieg soldier: depends heretics no. Suicidal charges YES YESYES YES. yES
Krieg guardsman pokes his head out: "Did someone say die for the Emperor!!?
A lot of reactors just go “wtf wow”.
I love how much extra depth you add.
I think Paul should rename his channel as Combat veteran analyses or Combat veteran assessors.
an AUSPEX is pretty much the same thing as both RADAR/LADAR
In short, sensors.
@@gokbay3057 Pretty much
more complicated than that but basically yeah
Everything that can provide any kind of battlefield data, from sound to imagery to spectral analysis, radar, ladar, or mere movement sensors are called auspex. Basically anything that provides battlefield data outside on the mere sensory limitations of a human beeing is called an auspex.
@@lamehick7511 so if I bring a dog and he smells the enemy ... he is not just a good boy but an AUSPEX unit?
Don’t forget about the orbital defense platforms which could easily destroy even a battleship with some problems and a few losses as well as the platforms being shielded and heavily armed and armored with a given ration of five to one five being the defense platforms and the one being an imperial ship, and then there’s the problem of either, landing a ship the size of a city into geosynchronous order and make a hot landing and at the same time carrying several regiments and their support assets ie 1 million troops ten thousand tanks and half a million support personnel and if the ship were to be shot down not only will the loss of manpower be wasted and could have been better spent elsewhere but you also have a massive ship falling from orbit as well as the loss of resources and materials, alternatively you could use small drop ships like the Valkyrie gunship or the sky talon drop ship, however trying to land these assets would eventually clog up the space ports and landing field as well as taking on heavy enemy anti aircraft weapons, as well as the fact that a Valkyrie can only carry ten men and a sky talon can only carry one vehicle at a time, yes you could try a more tactful approach however when a group of people who have complete control over the military, police and citizens as well as having the people’s loyalty, it’s not going to be easy, imagine going to say Palestine or somewhere in the Middle East and try to convert someone to Christianity, it’s doable however it’s very unlikely. And when you are reminded just how shit life in the imperium was there’s no going back and whilst yes a small insurgency group of loyalists can do some damage again it’s akin to trying to commit terrorism in America, doable but highly unlikely
while i get the point you were making, i take issue with the statement; "akin to trying to commit terrorism in America, doable but highly unlikely"
the definition of terrorism is the use of violence, threats, and intimidation for political ends. anti-fa have been regularly 'committing terrorism' for 5 years now.
i mean hell, one of your 2 primary political parties spent most of 2020 actively, and very publicly, supporting it. you vote a pro terrorist party into power, after years of escalating violence from the terrorist groups they support, and you think terrorism is 'highly unlikely'? has it even paused at all in the last 18 months? 'perpetually ongoing' would be the more accurate term.
terrorism in America is hardly unlikely. i know you people are very enthusiastic about freedom, but c'mon. law and order is important too, ya know.
@@AK48smoker too true and whilst yes you are correct however I find it odd how antifa despite their actions aren’t considered by the fbi as terrorists
Krieg didn't had Defense platforms, only ground-based missile launchers.
38:00 he is saying that if you are going to send soldiers to fight they will die from environment anyway, so might as well use them to gain some ground, instead of waiting up until they die from radiation.
But this begs the question what if the assault fails you just wasted your men and now your lines on the surface is untenable because you have too few men holding the Trenches or no men at all and more over what even the point of continuing the war on the surface?
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 the point is that I'd you send anybody to the surface they will die, there is this anything to hold by people that will die from cancer, so might as well make them kill something before they die
@@russiandoomer945 then don’t send people to the surface continue the fight underground where they won’t get cancer.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 mhm and whilst you are fighting underground they will send soldiers over all your underground entrenchments, on the surface and attack you in the back or dig right down where you are not expecting.
So you would need to send some people too.
@@russiandoomer945 no they won’t because as clearly stated the radiation will kill them very quickly and the city was already sealed up when the nukes fall so don’t unseal it, and even if they break in and take a section of the city again those men are already weak and dying so it wouldn’t be that difficult to push them back or take a defensive stance and wait for them to die.
i dont agree about the low risk engagement, we are talking about a planet so ravaged by nuclear weaponry which probably makes our real life equivilent look pathetic any engagement no matter the risk those men would probably die very quickly to radiation for little gain also there is another thing that might factor in the quicker you win the war the qucker you can return to the imperium which may give you help etc
that still doesn't make much sense if your men on the surface are dead men walking and you want to make them last as long as possible before they die then why on god's green earth would you have lots of your guys charge to certain death for little gain, and trying to rush to victory is just dumb.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 thing is with the amount of radiation any combat even if it lasted max a hour or so those mens lives are listed in days maybe even hours and be in agonising pain as their bone marrow and cells die triggering critical organ fialier , for example the scene of the workers in chenobyl series their deaths with the radiation but we are probably taking way way more intense and quickier
@@afriendlycadian9857 then why have men on the surface at all then?
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646 thing is with radiation in goes into the ground sought of like if you pour water on dirt if we are going by 40k standards they would need many meters thick concrete and lead equivilent in 40k and fighting underground is actively as worse i would say any heavy weapons will risk a severe roof collapse plus the war would take significantly longer adding the risk of of chaos coming in or something else plus the traitor side the longer you give them will replenish their losses actually making the war longer which is not a good thing as you want to finish the war as quick as you can possibly to get help from imperial planets etc
@@afriendlycadian9857 wait if the radiation is going underground then everyone should be dead then.
“Rational form of action on vraks.” 😂
Commander says fire all artillery everywhere for like 9 days straight no stopping.
I think you're really missing an important part of this when you view the 500 yr war "rationally", because it was never "rational" from the day the nukes launched until the day the last rebel died. It was for all intents and purposes a religious war between both sides that hated each other with a bitter and undying passion that only grew and grew. The Loyalists HATED the Rebels for betraying the Imperium and turning the Emperors' light from them and the Rebels' hated the Loyalists for their murder of billions of innocents with the use of those nukes.
As others have said, this war was scouting and grand attacks to crush the enemy which makes perfect sense based on how much they wanted to destroy the other.
One last thing; all of the Krieg "culture" during the 500yrs was training (with live ammunition) to be a fearless soldier to get the god-emperor's forgiveness for their "sin".
Wild as to how it shows how far devotion can reach. And the price for 'repentance' in the eyes of the Imperial Cult can be incredibly damn grim.
I'm so glad that there are people willing to do Arch-related content.
I LOVE that video by Arch !! Sometimes I put it on to go to sleep to at night, the wry humor and presentation is just fun to listen to. Tuska Demon-Killa is a shorter but a riot listen at times.
SO happy you are finally checking out Arch, that Norwegian waffle got me into 40K
Love his attention to detail and his Siege of Vraks series is just insane
The soldiers HAD to gain grounds because, by being deployed on surface level, their life was inevitably spent. The radiations were on a level way too high for sustainance of human life. Rotating them in and out was not to safeguard their life, it was to extend the length of time in wich they could be alive, hence operational. That is why. Once you assign people above ground, they HAVE to gain ground, because win or lose regardless, their life is lost. Either from the enemy, or from radiation. As you can immagine, such losses are heavy, and HAVE to be compensated by some form of gain. This is also why the war was fought mainly underground, with surface operations veing limited to massive efforts. Because only those massive efforts could guarantee gaining ground and compensating for the life of ALL those involved.
The Volcano you are looking for is Tambora which caused The Year without a summer.
and then theres Mount Pinatubo, a stratovolcano in the Philippines, cooled global temperatures for about 2-3 years, Krakatau 1883 around 4 years and 1783 Laki and Grímsvötn among others
The idea during the Krieg Civil War was that they'd rather their soldiers die trying to capture an objective than them dying of just exposure to the surface. Once the dudes were deployed to the surface, they *had* to be used for something or they would just end up being wastes.
1) what if one of those human wave assaults fails now you have a hole or a much weakened line that the enemy can exploit.
2) what the point of continuing the war on the surface if it’s so hostile to human life that the loyalists have to resort to human wave assaults it just seems like a waste of time, lives and resources.
@@thesmilinggun-knight9646
A) What if your entire defensive line dies of overexposure and causes both 1 and 2
Auspets are what we would call radar I think, kinda like how Vox is a radio equivalent.
similar idea, but much more sensitive
@@Rembanspellsong ah I see.
Not just radar, it’s all kinds of sensors acting in concert
I really like your content my guy, you're incredibly well informed and able to convey that, for real life. 40k communication and transportation is vastly, vastly underdeveloped compared to everything else. Also the makeup of The Imperium needs to be understood, even if the Administratum decided to transfer small amounts of troops and supplies to Kreig, it is likely that The Imperial Navy wouldn't go for it, deeming their recourses better used elsewhere.
There's probably a ton of moments somewhere in the lore where EMPs were used to disable stuff, but tbh that could be clocked up to writers not knowing that there are ways to protect electronics from it.
There's a ton of way more consistantly written series that seem to forget that EMPs aren't a guaranteed kill all the electronics around them.
With the Death Korps of Krieg being experts in trench warfare I am surprised they are not issued the lasrifle version of a trench sweeper.
Hey Paul, Just wanted to recommend a new setting to look into. Battletech is another tabletop based game that has a great lore, plus it spawned the MechWarrior games . This has a bit more realistic lore but is still crazy, I would recommend the Tex talks Battletech: The Amaris Civil War, part 1&2. he covers a lot of the major events in the lore. if u like crazy Russian generals and a hint of mad BASTARDS like the black watch u might love it. Love everything ur doing now but just wanted to send this recondition.
21:40 you're forgetting how long it takes to get anywhere in 40k. putting aside the time needed to assemble everything you are going to send them you also have to account for the uncertainties of warp travel, which while fast is not the most reliably or predictable means of transportation. It probably would have been years before anything arrived and that's basically hauling ass. The Imperium is always weighing where to devote it's limited resources and in the case of Krieg they probably figured the chances of Jurten surviving long enough for any fast tracked support to not only reach him safely but actually help turn the tide were too low to be worth the investment. At which point you may as well just write the planet off and leave it for a later date when you can really set things up and get together a proper force.
Status report krieg is under invasion by orks currently, the initial wave was 6 million orks.
6 million? They're under estimating the kriegsmen at that point send the orks into the tyranid fleet
I think it's a pretty powerful statement for the imperium to state that planets people must eat the emperors meat and only his meat.
You have to appreciate Arch's sarcastic delivery.
It's a shame people don't seem to get sarcasm nowadays
WW1 saw some terrifying tunnel warfare too. Engineers would tunnel out from the trenches and try to plant explosives underneath the opposing trench line. Sometimes engineers from each side would accidentally (or purposefully) dig into enemy tunnels and it would devolve into force hand to hand (pickaxe to shovel) fighting before explosives were irises to block the tunnels
The winterberg tunnel is the best example how risky it was.
Even the engineers could often not properly stabilize the tunnel and in this case ... the mountain demanded more than 250 lives in one instant
make part 2 this week please
This day for emperor's sake!
Minor correction, the civil war was already in full swing well before the end of WW1 and the reds only executed the Tzar and his family when the Czechoslovak legion made such astonishingly rapid progress that they were afraid that they'd actually launch and succeed in a rescue attempt
Lindybiege has an excellent vid on the subject if you want to scope it out
Oh and those sort of tunnel engagements are even older than the Vietnam war, there's a good movie made about it called "beneath hill 60"
More people need to react to Arch Warhammer.
Auspex is sort of an anything device in 40k, much like the scanners from Star trek. In my opinion Auspex is a short version of "All Spectrum" which to me means it can visualize the whole electromagnetic spectrum, giving anything from infrared night via to ultraviolet vision and even visualizing x-ray and gamma rays. A very handy tool.
It I a whole planet. I think there could be a fairly good self-sufficient economy
Unfortunately when you’re fighting on something equivalent to the surface of the moon and having to say capture defensive lines or say an orbital landing site, you need to ensure that the mission is fully completed and whilst yes smaller raiding forces could hold out ie the bridges during ww2 however again you’re attacking a well defended target filled with bunkers, machine gun nests, pillboxes, mine fields, well trained and equipped enemies as well as being limited to half an hour and whilst a chimera APC is capable of getting you there, it’s getting the numbers of troops as well as holding onto the objective, think of D DAY where you could say that only a few dozen men could have captured the entirety of the Normandy coast and maybe however unlike the actual D DAY you have to deal with German counter attacks all the while ships are unloading and under enemy fire.
Auspexs are the 40K equivalent to radar a codgutator is a fancy word for a computer
Cogitator
A codgutaor calculates fish
An “Auspex” is I believe kind of a catch all term for sensors that pick up external activity. Humanoid sized elements or heat signature for Space Marines, probably tuned differently for emplaced anti space defenses or whatever.
I believe Arch ment *autarch* not *autark.*
This is actually the video about Krieg, which you should have viewed first, before any other videos about Krieg.
On the subject of EMP in 40k, I'm not sure it is addressed in the books, but in the tabletop, the Tau empire specifically has a few EMP weapons that deal extra damage to vehicles. So I would assume some things are shielded and others are not.
To give a little on the geography of the Krieg surface war. We are talking about "habitable" zones about the size of Isreal. And by "Habitable" we still mean next to the reactor in Chernobyl "habitable" continued exposure ensures a horrible death, and even with severely limited exposure the risk of radiation poisoning and cancer is still much much higher than what 99.9% of humanity is acceptable with.
Holy Primis that's slot of stuff about the Death Korps of Krieg
Dude you forgot about one small tiny piece of information namely THE DEFENSE SILOS IN ORBIT the would render your covert op of supporting the rebels null and void as they can’t get past them.
Awesome love your videos keep them coming!
surely the imperium would have countermeasures for that.
They wouldn't show up in time was the main problem
9:45 Correction here: The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar. That (February Revolution) was a coalition of various parties of which the Bolsheviks were one of the smallest contributors (the progressive Bloc and Mensheviks outnumbered them by a wide margin). After which a interim Government was established until an official election could be held.
The Bolsheviks then overthrew that government during the October Revolution. They did kill the Tsar(and the entire royal family) but by that point he was already a prisoner.
15:37 what you have too keep in mind is space is so big and information and ships travel so slow and the imperium is so disorganized, a simple rounding error from one of the leaders in Tera could delete hundreds of worlds from record
US soldier: "I cant wear my NBC gear all the time." Death Corps of Krieg soldier: "Am I nothing to you?"
Kriegsman, did I just watch you remove your gas mask? that's 15 months duty on the rear lines, get to them and think about your screw up NOW!
To be fair I bet Imperial NBC gear is a hell of a lot better than 21st century kit.
26:25 That's Krakatoa, the 1883 eruption caused the summer to turn into winter that year. Even as a kid with my friends we would pretend to be Dragonball Z fighters and the "Krakatoa" was my signature move, my "Kamehameha."
2:45 speaking of Honesty, Russian Tsars literally officially called themselve "Autocrats"
From the 82nd here and I can say without a doubt we didn't have cbrn officers or dedicated cbrn personnel. We had one nco (infantry) pulled from a platoon in our company who was sent to short training that literally just signed out mop gear. Maybe it was different in your unit.
The mass assaults on the surface were needed because the men partaking in them were already dead. The moment they stepped onto the surface, they were going to die. Didn't matter if they were a part of an assault on the enemy trenches, sitting in their own running supplies, or even spent a day up top before going back underground. They. Were. Going To. Die.
Due to that fact, the most logical move would be to use their limited time to gain the most ground they could before they died, whether to enemy fire or radiation.
20:00 - About here you missed something. The Rebels had control of the orbital defenses. If the imperium diverted say a single regiment, it would never reach the surface to reinforce the loyalist.
39:00 - Dude. The entire planet is a radioactive wasteland. There were no "low risk" engagements. There were "Dying from radiation or dying from the enemy" engagements.
The year without summer would be the result of the Tambora eruption.
Well kids, never name your planet WAR
I must say your content has grown fast in quality. And I find myself enjoying it more an more.
The guys the with nuclear weaponry were basically like: "Beep Boop, we got a nuke"
And I was like: *wheezing*
29:05 I believe that a brief glimpse of those weapons was given in the Horus Heresy series when a character explained that the "Cybernetic Revolt" was a mess that put the Horus Heresy, from "sun-snuffers" (weapons designed to devour the stars themselves), passing through "Omnivores" that could a planed barren and finally I remember some talks in various comments about weapons that could literally _erase_ things from existence.
34:54 Well you play METRO if you wanna experience fighting in tunnels and exploring the rad infested frozen wasteland it was Moscow.
I like the point you make at 15:00 about Cold War rebellions. That's why pretty much the only rebellions against the Imperium that have ever been successful have been either converts to the Greater Good who could count on Tau support, Chaos rebellions who could summon support from the warp, or Genestealer Cults that only rise up when they expect a Tyranid hive fleet to show up soon (although you could argue just how "successful" a Genestealer rebellion really is even when they win.) One thing the video didn't mention is that the autarchs had additional reason to expect little to no reprisal from the Imperium because they timed their rebellion to occur at the same time the Imperium was tied up with several other crises.
I have to say, I enjoy your style of reaction content. Far too many reaction channels simply absorb the information and give a few words at the end. You seem to prefer to add real-world context to the lore as it's presented, which I do appreciate.
Furthermore, Arch lore videos in particular have a nostalgic quality for me, as I've watched pretty much every one of them as they came out. They're cozy.
21.12
The problem with that. Isn't just a matter of communication but also travel. Warp travel can take weeks to months over very short distances, and that's assuming you have ships and troops ready to deploy right now.
Not to mention that even communication isn't your only issue but so it bureaucracy. It would probably take years for the imperiums local (realitivly) goverment to even realize what's going on.
In any case. By which point the rebels would almost certainly be dead or dying.
To answer your question: Auspex is like radar.
I would say it is sensors in general. (Including Radar of course)
Can't wait for the next one
after the age of strife taking out all interstellar travel
trying to make your planet as self sufficient as possible made a lot more sense
while it is impossible to fully feed a hive world from locally grown produce, it is still smart to try and most hive planets do try with things like efficient recycling
from corpses to waste fed algae farms and just about any other thing that can be sqeezed for resources
trade routes arnt stable since they go trough the warp
From the wiki "In 433.M40, the end came for Krieg in the form of the High Autocrat of Krieg's largest hive, the Chairman of the Council of Autocrats and the de facto Planetary Governor, (a man so hated that his name has been purged from all Imperial records by an Edict of Obliteration) who declared planetary-wide martial law and that Krieg was now independent of the Imperium of Man. "
Auspex is a catch all term in 40k for sensor equipment. Usually a combination suite of optical and radar in varying wavelengths.
Ahh Watching an Arch video, that is great he is one of the best Warhammer UA-camrs on the platform.
I think coups tend to be very successful at first because they have surprise and can pick the time and place where they kick off. Tactical and strategic surprise combined is quite an advantage. Assuming that the plot isn't discovered before they are ready, that is.
the thing about the massed assaults was that as soon as you went outside the radiation would kill you
not instantly, but fast enough that returning home was useless
everyone who fought was dead from the start, even if they never got shot at
so if your men are lost anyway, better to make the loss worth it and make sure you claimed something usable in the assault
now if he was smarter you could probably come up with something like using small groups of infiltrators to strike at vulnerable areas and take out things like air filtration being even more reliable with your men being already dead so being able to add suicide terrorist to their arsenal, but those arnt the kind of tactics the imperium teaches to the pdf regularly
"4 hours..and the stop watch is running"..Kreig Sergeant.
"Why Sergeant ??"
"After that, we're dead from Radiation.."
Mentality of the Kreig.
to be fair. one other example of what you mention with outside help is a little known stellar power in 40K called the severan dominate. their leader, a former warhero and rogue trader i believe, had essentially become governor of a rather wide area. like. a subsector basically. but obviously he gets a few power hungry ideas. the thing is he didn't turn to chaos. no. he asked the dark eldar for help. in exchange for helping the severan dominate he would help them locate worlds, xenos or human, imperial or otherwise, to raid. aside from that he also had the benefit of being one of the most industrialised sub-sectors in a sector in the ass-end of the imperium. combine that with how difficult warp travel and communication is (something the council on Krieg had banked on too) and that the imperium can sometimes take a generation to deal with a rebellion and it becomes easy to see why they thought they could succeed. espesically if they had near 100 percent control of the planet and the orbital defenses and thus likely also the planetary defense fleet. they didn't have to win. they just had to make it too much of a nuisance to retake Krieg but too difficult to drop a cyclonic torpedo on the planet. and they almost succeeded if not for the. you know. mass nuclear holocaust.
If i'm not mistaken, the main reason Krieg could have gotten away with the rebellion was because their orbital defenses (setup to stop invading forces in their tracks) were strong enough to actually pose a major obstacle to Imperium forces trying to retake the planet (as in, if what I found wasn't exaggerating, their orbital defenses were enough to stop entire fleets, not even counting their own possible fleet or ground defenses)
Edit: the part about the landing zone only works once they breach into the atmosphere, the orbital defenses were fully in control of the rebellion and were designed to cover the entire planet
nice, an arch lore video lets go! xD
Watched this video on a whim, ended up watching the whole thing, subbed, rubbed, sat in a tub. learned a lot, and that mug is dope.
Dying in mass assaults probably had more to do with cultural reasons, plus some practical ones. Skirmishing as an idea was viable: underground. Tunnel fighting tended to operate on skirmishing because skirmishes assume long deployments. A basic attack has a limited period of operation. Scouts were almost certainly used on the surface but were probably dead men walking. Anyone doing that sort of thing on foot on in a light vehicle would need to be in very advanced gear. Much better candidates would be augmented humans or some kind of drone. I think this kind of warfare assumes some kind of imperfect information because getting accurate details would be pretty difficult.
When soldiers would go on the offensive, they would probably have gone over their time limit too. Which means they only had a slow death from radiation related illness to look forward to. Imagine you're a mother on Krieg and the next assault leads to tens of thousands of terminal soldiers coming back and dying slowly. It's almost better for them to go out and die, even in large numbers, and gain some kind of ground, rather than come back and then be a constant demoralizing force for everyone else.
In that sense it's almost ritualistic. The tunnel fighting and dangerous scouting would be the bread and butter of actual combat with real tactics. But the major operations would in a sense be ritualized. We're taking back a secessionist base or we're capturing this town or we're going to seize an important radiation resistant bunker complex on the way to the next hive we have to seize. In an ideal world you would use proper tactics, with scouting, feints, maneuver, etc. But when your time is so limited on the surface, having a period of training and preparation followed by a big offensive is almost better for a war fighting population.
Yes, they could have dug in and expended minimum numbers of casualties, but they were also in a losing fight. The secessionists still had the numbers advantage. Plus, it was almost certainly a point of pride to retake the rest of the planet and a long term goal keeping the population from going insane. Yes, maneuver and tactics were important, but when the operational time was so small, tactics gives way to the greater picture. The seizing of food production facilities and suitable places to expand your population, the seizing of arms, ammunition and defensible positions and the moral victories that inspire the greater war story, those I think are more important than the lives themselves. You can have the equivalent of Earth fighting seasons, with spring and summer especially as the main fighting seasons and other times of the year focused on food production, population growth, etc. In that way you can have a big offensive with a certain number of your troops, win or lose and then hunker down again while the population recovers and the next units salvage the equipment of the destroyed or damaged units. In this case the big tactical decision isn't how to fight, it's where to fight. Figuring out the correct and most useful areas to capture or hold would be way more important of a decision than the individual maneuvers, which would involve lots of tunneling to support the ground offensive and some limited scouting and maybe even a few sneaky tricks, rather than grand battles of maneuver.
Figuring out the resource and morale value of various objectives and the impact on your population would probably be the single biggest decision for the military commanders. Because at the end of the day, they were in this for the long haul.
Btw. There was a much of private combat ships in orbit so frop ng troops even getting close was kinda difficult
i just suddenly got recommended you and im glad
It's happening! I've been waiting for this Video since you started the Siege of Vraks Series. This going to be good
Two things I reacted to.
1 the orbital defence silos would stop any lesser help the imperium tried to send, and they were not neceserily knockd out during the nuking of the planet.
2 the math for sending huge numbers of people should go like this;
A - send 500 to take a position, they have to retreat and then die from the hazardus wasteland or the radiation. Now the position might be reinforced and you might not posess the manpower to take it at all, and might loose thousands in this little skirmish.
B - send 2000 to take a position, they likely take it by the enemy drowning in your mens blood. You have lost 4x as many men but hold the position.
Bonus points for choosing the best lore video available
Thr thing is after the heresy they were essentially lost on maps because of where it was and how bad things were beyond imperial space at the time but they could have repelled and possibly gotten away with it for a few decades...
39:59 No. Warfare was NEVER ritualized in any place on earth. The medieval europeans (of which we have the most data on) didn't run at low level of casualties to preserve their numbers, or any other SANE reason, but because war was fought face to face and they just ran from the screaming men killing their mates. Simple Instincts that were sometimes overridden and made legends, but most times were kept and relied upon.
Also in any historical battle if a force is retreating, they suffered horrifying casualties. Tactical retreat wasn't really feasible when your main armament is an iron tipped stick and you just couldn't engage your enemies WHILST fleeing. It was either or, so generals either left sacrificial units to hold the enemy whilst they withdraw with the main force(didn't work most times), or just scattered enough so the enemy can't run all of them down, either organized or disorganized.
Whilst the napoleonic era did see military change, it was because the new type of weaponry, the mass conscript armies, and the fact that generals actually did a god damn school for their positions (or sometimes at least), and military knowledge CONGREGATED, instead of being kept on via tradition. Medieval commanders were just as willing to do high risk maneuvers as napoleonic ones, blatant example would be the famous charge of the french cavalry in any battle basically, and the risk of such actions can be seen from the results of those charges being quite 50/50, sometimes resulting in catastrophies such as in the battle of agincourt.
The only ritualization of conflict would occur in-house, such as with the knightly tournaments that went from melee to bashing fancy statues off heavily armored bloke's head, or the dueling tradition which went from blatant assault to folks occasionally fighting naked to first blood. People NEVER (or at least not enough times to be the norm) did such things when the security of their community was on the line. There was just not enough trust between the belligerents to faciliate such behaviour.
Auspex is what they call their Radar/Scanner/IFF etc, equipment.
Today I learned that Autarch was not just some made up space word.
I swear I learn more from your reacts than the lore vids half the time.
It’s a word that’s showed up in games for a good while now, at least _Killzone_ has had it since the PS2 days
I think the point is if you are exposing them to lethal doses of radiation by fighting on the surface you gotta go all in and get something out of it. Its like the sunken cost fallacy which is typically a fallacy but sometimes its the right course of action if more is needed to complete the task.
The Auspex scanners are the WH 40 000 version of the more advanced radars and thermoscan systems we have nowadays... Some auspex scan devices are able to even spot warp entities or similar stuff.
I think the point about surface battles on Kreig is basically that any soldiers committed to them were guaranteed to die from radiation poisoning so regardless of if the battle was won or lost the men where not coming back as such you had absolutely better win somthing or not bother at all.
then why continue the war on the surface?
It’s worth noting that up until very recently technology and industry in the Imperium has been in steep regression. While generic equipment like lasguns, carapace armor, and the less valuable tanks and artillery pieces can be produced in obscene quantity, more complex energy weapons, heavy and super heavy vehicles, shields, etc will always be slowly suffering from attrition. Human beings however are in insanely numerous supply, hive cities contain what we would consider an entire planet’s population and worlds like Krieg play host to several up to tens of these megalopoli.
For your average Krieg commander if you had to choose between losing ten thousand infantrymen in a massed charge or losing like, a single baneblade or some other heavy tank, you’d expend the men because your reserves are probably in the tens of millions of men, but your heavy tanks and Titans may be literally irreplaceable, or at least so costly to refurbish that major damage will take them out of play for weeks or months.
Let's remember the "Tsar bomb" detonated in 1961. It was designed with a yield of above 100 Mt but during the test the final stage of the bomb was omitted to reduce radioactive fallout. The bomb still reached at yield of around 50 Mt. The bomb was detonated at a height of 4km above ground and the fireball reached a diamter of 8km but it didn't touch ground because the shockwave of the detonation bounced back of the ground and pushed off the fireball. The shockwave from the blast traveled three times around the entire globe (although the third time took some rather sensitive equipment to notice). The flare of the blast could be seen from 1.000 km away, the mushroom cloud reached a height of 67km which means it punched straight through the ozone layer which is only at around 25km height. A village located 55km from the blast zone was completly destroyed and in another village located 780km from the explosion the shockwave still shattered glass. The ionization of the atmosphere caused interference in all radio communication within a 400km radius. And finally, the explosion caused a seismic shockwave in the earths crust that circled the globe three times.
And that's just a bomb we can build right now. Just think about how unimaginably destructive dark age of technology nuclear devices would be.
To note Auspex is the 40k equivalent to Radar/GPS/motion trackers. It’s a cover all word.
A lot of Imperial Guard Vehicles have them and even troops will be assigned them to help detect enemies while on patrol or in battle - tho rarer for standard infantry to get one tho they have been made down in size (think like the ones you see the colonial marines use in Aliens but different appearance)
Fuck yeah death korps glad you finally watched this one can’t wait for part 2