The TYRANIDS 1st Contact was A BLOODBATH!- Combat Veteran Reacts
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- Опубліковано 23 сер 2024
- First contact between the Imperium and the Tyranid Hive Fleet was a wild ride. Ultimately stopped by the Astra Militarum and the UltraMarines, the Tyranid Hive Fleet seemed like an unstoppable threat. One thing is for sure, it changed the Warhammer 40,000 (40k) universe forever.
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![АЛАУДИНОВ у Скабеевой: эти их ВСУ нас НЕ ДОГОНЯТ 😁 [Пародия]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/an0anqU4WGQ/mqdefault.jpg)
One thing to note about their biomass conversion is that the Tyranids are living beings, not machines, so they constantly need to fuel themselves during their space travel as well. Imagine the amount of fuel needed to feed thousands of space whales kilometers long during the long journey through space where they may not encounter another food source for years or decades.
So they don't just suck up a garden world worth of resources and use 100% of it to make new troops, as they will need it for the future. In fact, they recycle existing combat troops by absorbing them back as resources after a war because keeping a standing army is a waste of resources. They do have a number of forces stored in their ships, but that's about it. So before an engagament they must birth new soldiers in preparation of the fight.
Thus theoretically speaking, if you can catch their fleet off guard or hit them back fast enough before they have time to entrench themselves on a world, you can drive them back before the Tyranids build up a critical mass to crush you.
Yup. Looks like he starts to figure this out at 29:48 while talking about logistics. The logistics analogy works really well here.
To add to your point, just like you need to deliver those MREs to the frontline, and you can't just fill every truck with ammo and let your troops starve, a tyranid hive fleet cannot just use all their biomass for troops and expect to survive. They not only need to gain more biomass than they use during an invasion, they also need to have enough of a biomass reserve to actually get to the next planet for a refill. The math of biomass spent vs biomass obtained is the key to understanding tyranids.
A hivemind will attempt to use the absolute bare minimum numbers of troops possible to win in order to conserve as much biomass as possible. If they miscalculate, things can go very wrong for that hive fleet.
Pretty sure that's how the Scythes of the Emperor managed to beat them and survive, if only just.
That problem is why I call BS on the idea that they have the galaxy surrounded. The logistics of intergalactic travel make it impossible to sustain the numbers many speculate are out there, at least on predation alone.
@@fluffly3606 it is possible they arrived in the galaxy with limited resources with just enough to take a planet don’t forget they already devoured several worlds before being discovered
@@fluffly3606 improbable, but not impossible. durring long intergalactic travel, living beings even here on earth can put them self into a deep sleep, or a sort of paralyzed state, where they waste almost no resources, and perhaps just a few ships are awake enough to stay on course and keep the rest on course.
The problem with Tyranids being convergent evolution is that multiple fleets share their new beiotechnologies. When hive-fleet Kraken consumed half of Eldar craftworld and engineered Zonathropes out of Eladar DNA, suddenly EVERY other hive-fleet, even scattered remains of Behemoth, started spawning zoanthropes.
About the Imperium not being able to just make hive-fleet swallowing bombs, the type of warpdrive capable of allowing such a rift into the warp to be created is more or less irreplaceable due to a general technological regression the Imperium has faced since 30k. In short that ship is irreplaceable with the tech the Imperium still retains which is why it was such a big sacrifice.
Also it may be important to note that it’s later revealed that the overload didn’t swallow up the whole fleet. It shattered them into splinter fleets that can and to some extent have recovered from this assault. I’d say that makes it a bigger net loss for the imperium honestly.
@@TheGreatBlueBlob or imagine this, just take a ship, stock it with nuclear warheads, and drive em to your nearest friendly neighborhood fleet. Then sit back, crack open a cold one and watch the fire works.
@@HungPham-qq6me that trick would only work a few times before the nids wise up
@@inquisitorthomasdefinitely536
What can they do? Ignore the ship hammering down on them? you can quite literally fit the ship with a skeleton crew and a complement of servitors, it can even be a single scout vessel among a scouting party.
Hell, just split our forces up, setting up a few kamikaze scout parties that had some degree of firepower, and just strike the fleet at different angles with the main splinter directly engaging the bulk-head of the enemy. if they focus on the splinter scouts and surround them, boom.
if they focus on the main fleet, boom.
if they do neither and retreat all the while attempting to harass imperial forces, the imperium had superiority. remember, nids are crap at void warfare, and the imperium is very much well rounded. so if they chose that it would be the biggest mistake.
remember, they burned fuel to get here, precious energy that could be devoted else where. furthermore, they suffered casualties without gaining anything in return. this would make it even harder the next time they would try anything.
and thirdly, it would make them extremely susceptible to counter attacks while retreating. they could be tracked and ambushed by scouting parties loaded with said weapons, they could be intercepted and take heavy casualty, they could even be wiped out.
@@HungPham-qq6me fitting a enough ships with nukes powerful enough to do anything at all would take a real dam long time and said nukes that are big enough are more or less irreplaceable plus the ships would still have to contend with the shadow in the warp disruption effect on space travel and Communications so tracking splinter fleets is a lot harder than you might think also a decent ship size let’s a say cruise takes a fair few years to make and is not something that can be simply kamikazed regularly the imperium simply dose not have the time to build ships that there just going to throw away if it is just stripped to the bone it still needs a warp drive , a gella field and a navigator all three of which are difficult to make
18:15 "Maybe they ran out of ammo."
The Tyranids swarm in the billions if not trillions, that is most definitely going to happen.
That is why bayonet drills are still important because everyone but the Tau and the Eldar are probably going to outnumber you on that Battlefield
The tyrannids themselves hadn’t met the imperium yet, but they’d had genestealer cults thousands of years prior in the imperium, the imperium just didn’t realize that they were connected.
I don't know what you are on about, unless you trying to cause an argument, I've collected tyranids since 2nd edition, tyranids have been in contact with the imperium since just before the horus heresy
@@skotbean5690 weird, because official lore is that they first noticed the Milky Way galaxy due to the Pharos Beacon lighting during the Horus heresy. You’re remembering incorrectly might wanna refresh :)
@@skotbean5690 also the first contact, the video that you’re literally commenting on, occurs in M41, eleven thousand years after what you’re saying lol. I mean cmon there’s a google fast answer popup for this for the emperors sake lol
The important part about how humans are able to stand against hive fleets is that they have to regrow their armies every time they invade a planet, so rather than being immediately faced with billions of advanced life forms the defenders fight off the waves as they develop.
chitin is a fibrous substance consisting of polysaccharides, which is the major constituent in the exoskeleton of arthropods and the cell walls of fungi.
See action, get rotated. Is generally how it goes. Most planets aren't importantly enough to be permanently defended by Imp Gaurd though. Most just have pdf.
Just having PDFs sounds pretty horrifying. Personal Document Format is a pretty trash document format.
@@barbariandude Hey! It does the job properly, and it's easy to make! X)
Yeah, problem is, that is not enough to ward off most baddies in 40k.
And yes, I am including the Inquisition here. XD
One of the reasons the frontier worlds like tyran prime have Guard forces is they don't have a civilian population, hence no PDF. The pdf is formed of the "native" troops of a world, while the guard is theoretically the cream of the crop (whether that is spec ops level soldier, the slickest gangster, the best woodsman, or the trash swept up in the press gangs depends on the world) generally sent offworld for decades or centuries at a time, only maintaining a semblance of strength by the virtue of taking less casualties then they can replace from home, recruitment on worlds they take or defend, or survivors of other regiments. Both the Valhallan 597th regiment (the former 296th and 301st regiments) from the Ciaphas Cain novels, and the Tanith First and Only from the Gaunts Ghosts novels, give a good look into how guardsmen formations fight to maintain their numbers and/or unit formations over the course of the campaigns they fight in.
all planets have a PDF, some have equipment equal to the IG, others have decent equipment and others have poor equipment.
Tearing open warp rifts are just asking to give chaos beachheads into the material realm
The Imperium had a specialized tactic against the tyrannids.
They defend a in best case scenario mildly populated world to force the tyrannids to send as many forces as they can.
Once that is done they gradually retreat from the planet and wait until the tyrannids to get to prepare for the feeding phase.
Where they then exterminatus the planet which leaves the nids on a biomatter net loss.
This inturn forces the nids to cannibalize themselves which leaves then more vulnerable against naval counter assaults
The problem with this is that they don't have infinite worlds to blow up.
Ah, yes. The favourite strategy of the imperium. If in doubt *EXTERMINATUS* .
@@sirkana There are around 100 billion planets in the milky way, assuming we'd want at least 1 billion to exist at all, that's technically 99 billion times we can blow worlds up XD.
As Isaac Arthur says, you dont get to the top of Dawrin's 4 billion year corpse pile by being nice.
Imperial Battleships are practically unreplaceable. While smaller ships would probably get destroyed far too easily to get close enough to affect the enemy fleet.
Also Macragge isn't just defended by Astartes. But also normal human Ultramar Auxiliary regiments.
Imperium has a weapon able to create warp rifts. It's called vortex torpedo and its effect is similar to a warp-drive explosion. But this stuff is rare and hard to manufacture, thus not employed very often.
I would highly recommend the Commisar Ciaphis Cain books to figuring out how the guard works, as he’s connected to the lowly front line soldier all the way to the Lord General of a Segmentum.
Started it a few weeks back, im utterly hooked now... my favourite series is between that one and the bequin one
@@inquisitorsneed2 just remember, you can find their audio versions right here on UA-cam
@@goliath1179 ahhhhhhh :s I already got them all, crap hahaha
@@inquisitorsneed2 return them if you can, boycott GW
@@goliath1179 audible takes all the profits, plus I really couldn't care less about the whole Warhammer plus stuff, it was always gonna happen unfortunately now that gw are looking to get into TV and film
Like that note of consuming an entire planet but not being able to produce much less sustain a force because of it.
But the Tyranids at this point have been theorised to have consumed galaxies before coming to the Milky Way, and all the Imperium's faced at this point is the scouting force/vanguard. Resources are no longer a concern.
Granted if Games Workshop EVER USED the Tyranids at this point, they're just a giant loophole now with how inactive they've been.
Paul complaining about GW's grip on numbers:
Congratulations, you are now no longer a noobie at WH40K. Yes, GW can't do numbers.
Are you continuing the Rogal Dorn series (by Baldrmort) soon? Also, yes, 1000 spacemarines is a retardedly small number of spacemarines. Now you know why we all think Gulliman was retarded when breaking the legions. Fuck, just give them a 100.000 hard limit. Sp,e ñegions reported losses of "hundreds of thousands" of marines and yet were still in fighting shape during the great crusade, so 100.000 was, back then, not even that many.
Well you know, there actually was the problem of the legion being too big and owning too much power, but still, you could easily have a 10k space marine chapter and still doing well, now I get that a SM still a SM, but the number are actually ridiculous. Just to be clear, at their pick the Ultramarines had over 250k sm in their legion, that would have meant over 250 successors chapter but we know just about a dozen of them.
The problem of the chapters its not the number of astartes but the numbers of chapters they are not enoguh of chapters and cant coordinate well
@@santymartin7383 well yes and no, is the general lack of sm and organization of the Astartes, now I really hope that Guilliman whit the coming of the Primaris will adjust the Book to fit a modern day imperium, but for now we can only wait and see
@@absolutelyloyalspacemarine1684 he is making changes,he creat a shit ton more of chapters
I would take it more seriously if GW also emphasized that the chapters have a complimentary fighting force(not under IG command) so it doesn't look like it's just squads of super soldiers.
I do understand that the Chapters are suppose to be stupidly inefficient as in the time of the Codex, humanity had become the galactic hegemon again, whose only danger now came from within and thus the Space marines needed to be crippled as a strategic force.
As others have mentioned Guilliman is apparently going to reorganize the way Chapters are organized as humanities situation has not necessarily developed to its advantage.
Also making a warp bomb is gambling on trading out tyrannids for daemons lol
To answer the question at 27:50, they were introduced in 1987, in 1st Edition of Warhammer 40,000.
While Starcraft 1 was released 1998, in case you thought they copied them from the Zerg.
Im quite late to the party but: Starcraft was in very early development a WH40k game, but Game Workshop didnt go with blizzard in the end. So main Starcraft races are basically Imperium, Tyranids, Eldar with different skins. Technically SC ripped off Game Workshop (this one time we can't say its GW)
Tyranids are my favourite xenos faction I think. The only true aliens.
They are better than alien xenoa
the xenos that we dont get to see on the table top are better IMO like the rak'gol, Hrud, Umbra and slaugth
Your remarks about the Imperiums capacity to make tyranid fleet swallowing black hole bombs reminded me of everyone's reaction to Star wars Episode 8's scene. Where one ship managed to warp into a planet killing fleet with such force that the shrapnel from the destroyed ships managed to effectively neutralize the rest of the fleet.
People then realized that this tactic could of been repeated so many times throughout star wars by disadvantaged factions but they for some reason have refused to make use of it.
It’s slightly more justified in this case (only a bit) as the imperium actually does not understand how most of the technology it uses functions. STC’s are kinda mystery boxes that make advanced tech but do not show how it is actually made. Still kinda stupid but, yeah know what GW is like.
@@georgesparling7179 and you dont know if of the black hole give brith of to a c'tan,weirder things happend before
George is right, especiale the Emperor class cruiser is not something that the current imperium can create, but smaller vessels would be possible. Just less effective
As my favorite UA-cam space nerd Isaac Arthur says, 'There's no such thing as an unarmed spaceship'. Any engine and power source capable of moving a ship at appreciable speeds is phenomenally powerful, and something the size of a Volkswagen moving at a small fraction of lightspeed hits with the force of dozens of nukes. Millions of asteroids with simple engines and a running start could waste any defended planet with way less loss than a battle fleet.
But that wouldn't be GrimDark Cool, would it.
Kamikaze Attacks don't win wars, Ten. The Rebellion didn't use the Holdo Maneuver against the Empire because it would've cost them men and ships that they couldn't replace. The Empire didn't use it because it's easier to replace a million men than to replace an entire armada. The Separatists didn't use it because the Battle Droids are expensive.
So to clarify, most of the Hive Fleet's biomass is invested in their ships, which are comparable in size to the the Imperium's vessels, which are usually several kilometers or more. This makes sense because the Hive Fleet's survival is dependent on the survival of the ships themselves, as they store the biomass and condensed resources that are used to produce the various Tyranid bio-forms. Even so, that's still thousands of combat-capable ships in orbit and millions or even billions of Tyranids swarming down onto the planet over the course of days, if not weeks.
As for logistics, Tyranids are more than capable of living off the land, feeding on any living organisms they come across, as well as the corpses of their enemies and of their own dead, and as each Tyranid is essentially a living weapon crafted with almost mechanical precision, their biology is almost certainly extremely efficient, and a Tyranid will keep fighting without rest, food or water, until its body essentially just gives out; the Hive Mind doesn't care about losses because the corpses of fallen Tyranids can simply be reclaimed along with everything else on the planet. The biggest logistical problem the Hive Fleets face is transportation, as virtually all of their units must be ferried down to the surface in biological drop pods from the ships in orbit, and it is only in the later stages that any kind of planetside production is even considered; it's actually noted that some Hive Fleets have begun establishing their own garden worlds in the wake of their advance, creating colonies that can presumably be used to generate more biomass to further the Tyranid war effort. This is, however, a new development in the lore, so the details are uncertain.
Oh god-emperor they are learning about farming
Exterminatus now!!!
arch made a video on tyranid tactics in it he said a land war against them is not there to be won, it is there to buy time for the navy to do its thing
Unless you're the towel where the Army is the only thing that they actually capable of taking on the tyranids
@@kingjonstarkgeryan8573 no one can beat the towel
@combat veteran reacts
The ship sacrificed (dominus astra)
Had a warp core, somthing that takes decades to build per unit.
And skeleton crews are dangerous becaus of the warp.
The imperium fully crews its ships, so they are not lost to boarding actions or daemonic incursions while in ftl.
As for the costs, tech has been in decline for ten thousand years, so ships like the dominus astra are irreplaceable since they require manpower of at least 100 thousand to to operate at minimum and tech takes generations to impiment and for construction itself.
These are no hundreds of meters ships, these are are multi km in scale. So a lose of such a ship iin other terms and universes would be considered unacceptable.
But of course this is the fanatical imperium.
Blizzard's original intention in the early 90's was to do Warhammer based games (both Fantasy and 40K), but they didn't come to an agreement with GW
Tyranids: *have a [collective] intelligence capable of figuring biological extragalactic space travel*
Also Tyranids: *Don’t understand sustainability or agriculture*
Why farm when hunt?
Stripping a planet's entire biomass, atmosphere, oceans, and part of the crust is a far more efficient use of resources than trying to sustain a planet. All plant matter is formed from a finite amount of biomass, simply recycled over and over again in soil and given energy by the sun. Why wait for a plant to grow when you could instead just absorb all the nutrients that plant would ever use in its existence in one go?
maybe they are running away from something or it's simply faster and easier to hunt the biomass
Tyranids were featured in the original Rogue Trader rulebook and an army list was produced towards the end of the first edition. This had far fewer different units than are available now of course. There was also a dedicated marine vs tyranid game called Advanced Space Crusade that covered a boarding action on a hive ship. There have been mentions in lore that the amount of material being gathered by the Tyranids cannot be accounted for in their hive fleets, which leaves the question of where the rest is being sent.
Shout-out to The All Guardsmen Party who had to capture a live Tyranid with the assistance of the Emperor's Scythes chapter of space marines. Also highly recommend reading the AGP stories, great stuff.
12:00 fireships were a thing for quite a while.
I suppose the battle you are referencing would be the Spanish Armada, as the English use of fireships in that battle is one of the most famous uses of the fireship.
And yes, their main function was in having the enemy break formation, rather than ramming and setting into fire.
Thought fireships were mostly quite large ships actually, not small ones.
For the small ship used as vanguard to attack larger ships point you made the Torpedoboat and the Missileboat are probably better examples.
Imperial Ships can outrange bioships by hundreds of thousands of kilometers and their weapons can destroy them rather quickly
It’s just that there’s So many of them
Rumors say the Tyranids encountered thus far are only scout fleets.
I think that this story is told brilliantly here by Luetin.
His version of the imperiums first encounter with the Tyranids is definitely one of my favorite 40k lore videos period.
I'm an army vet myself and so I really enjoyed the occasional pauses to talk tactical strategies and history.
I'm very glad to have discovered your channel brother.
Cheers. 🍻
I like how in the beginning you were describing how all life could go extinct.
Because the twist isn't that planet is devoid of life, but rather that there is no signs of any organic materials at all. A corpse can do that much at least.
The amount of tech-heresy spoken in this video is astounding - Automated Ships gifted with potential Abominable Intelligence, building suicide - ships you try explaining their purpose to the machine spirit. I see a Servitor in your future.
Ah this is going to be good!
Oldest documented use of fire ships would be the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 CE
Watched the movie for that and loved it. Was wondering if you know where I can stream/download/buy it because I haven't seen it in ages. That's if you've seen the movie.
Tyranids were one of the first enemies in the 40k universe. They were present in the Space Crusade board game :)
Perhaps the most important thing luetin didn't mention was that the Tyranids seem to have the galaxy completely surrounded. Two of the three major hive fleet invasions entered the galaxy from the east, but leviathan, the most recent and largest, came directly up from below the galactic plane then broke into numerous splinter fleets.
The last time I watched this video of Luten's I hadn't finished reading all the Caiaphas Cain novels. I didn't realize that the Imperial Guard regiment that had encounter the dormant Hive ship on the ice world was The #597th Valhallan.
Maybe watch LT09's STC video to understand why they don't do that
Should look into Arch's videos on the creatures, he goes in depth on a lot of what they are an why they do it. However do note his presentation is far different from luetins. He's fond of presenting things in a wide variety of humors but I think he still does a well enough job explaining things. Need to understand how tyranids themselves operate to understand why they fight the way they do. Just trying to use a bio weapon would be the death of you an everyone around you. The hiveminds hunger is so strong just trying to wield an test a severed bio weapon will see your mind consumed and the weapon turned on allies.
One thing that often gets over looked is that the Tyranids take more than biomass. They take oceans and atmospheres, and before Kryptman's tactics, even digested off huge sections of planetary crust. They even congregate around stars before moving on, implying all sorts of harvesting.
They're not specifically after biomass, that's just the easy bits to work with. They're after matter.
Combine that with the gravity manipulation powers used in how they travel space, and the ability to tap the Warp for a nigh-infinite power supply, and you start running into some really crazy potential end game scenarios with no-singularity black hole fleets, but that's probably too much even for 40k.
But that also highlights how GW has kinda fucked up with Tyranids. They have the warp to tap for power, even if they do it super inefficient by just boiling water to spin bio-turbines. Feeding their armies and ships should be trivial. Space marines of Macrage are literally a rounding error,not just outnumbered. The Tyranids could have melted the planet crust to lava with impacts alone from their previous feasts, and the guns of the defenders would have just sped up the process.
I love my bugs dearly, but GW either doesn't understand what they wrote, or the bugs have deliberately been nerfed to fight with maximum stupid for a force their size, or their goals have nothing to do with what we have so far been told
Correction this is the second Tyranid contact. The first one involved Zoats and that first fleet went so badly for the Tyranids that the Imperium thought that they were created by the Zoats.
Shout out to the coffee! The hero behind the curtains.
1000 Marines isn't much for a military force, but it's a lot for models.
23:00 well, you should consider that most of the biomass is used to sustain the fleet itself and not so much for creating new tyranids, everything the tyranids use is organic, to the smallest troops to the largest of the ships. You should watch a tyranid bioship like an ark where the "veteran tyranids" sleep until the next battle whit just some sentinels still awake in case of attack, so to keep all these xenos alive you need a very large quantity of biomass eaten before the nap, and a lot of biomass to maintain the ship itself when traveling in space. And finally if you consider the sheer number of tyranids expended in order not only to take over the planet but to eat it as well the hive fleet has yes some profit, but not enough to be expended in order to duplicate/triplicate the size of the fleet.
Just to say chitin is the biggest component of insects exoskeleton, and by extention, of the tyranids
Chitin is the biopolymer of which insect carapaces are made. Same for crabs and lobsters
27:55 Tyranids as a playable, full faction were introduced in 1993. At least according to an account on Wikipedia.
I am Lyon El Johnsonn of this comment section. Glory to the first!!
You need to look in to the devastation of Baal. The Blood Angels vs tyranids, If I remember correctly, there were around 70 Blool angels successor chapters present.
Chitin is the material that makes up a bugs exoskeleton.
If the tyranids were a product of convergent evolution, wouldn't they all be crabs?
Even with almost the entirety of the Ultramarines and their successor chapters, the only thing I can think of to even begin to tip the scales in the battle of Macrage, is that there were Billions upon billions of guardsmen who aren't acknowledged because of Space Marine pride
When the time comes checkout🔥 The War for Badab🔥
I hope not🤨
I think it's to long of a series. I want that also,but i'll be fine with war for armaghedon.
For Warhammer numbers to make sense just add around 3 zeros behind every number or maybe more. When i read i always do it this way and all makes more sense :)
Imperial Guard are usually doing offensive campaigns, or they are garrisoning planets short-term. PDF are the guys doing long-term garrison. There are exceptions, like fortress worlds / conflict zones (eg: Cadia being the obvious example) where Guard may be garrisoned long-term.
If you want tyranids, you could play Dawn of war 2. I believe you would enjoy the tactical aspects of this game.
Its not 1k ultramarines. Its 1k ultramarines plus successor support, plus the guard, pdf, mechanicus, and navy of ultramar
13:10 Luetin did say that there had been reports of previously vibrant lush worlds becoming dead husks prior to this. it's the Imperium's first RECORDED encounter with what they will call Tyranids, may not be the Tyranids first encounter with Imperial armed forces they probably didn't live long enough to tell anyone especially since the Tyranid hive mind casts a shadow in the warp that blocks all the Psychers from accessing the warp on the planet being invaded. We don't know how humanities initial engagements with the Tyranids went maybe they did well to start with in spite of lacking astropath communication for reinforcements but got ground down through attrition and the Tyranids got more efficient at fighting humans planet by planet until the first recorded encounter on Tyran primus.
The opening to Luetin's Chaos video is pretty friggin' epic too, moreso in my opinion.
Really good points on tyranid fighting strategies, you should apply for an inquisitorial post. :)
Great work!
“Your sacrifice will be remembered” followed by “Next!” And “Your sacrifice will be remembered “
The Tyranids are the ultimate superorganism. There are a huge number of them but, in a very real sense, there is really only really one. The Tyranid act as a single, huge organism with a single, massive mind that links them all together. The Tyranids revert to instinct when they are cut off from this single mind. That's why the synapse creatures are so crucial. They link the lesser Tyranids to the hive mind. The Tyranid don't evolve in any normal sense. They don't change gradually in response to environmental conditions. New types are made with newly acquired DNA and then purpose-built across the various hive fleets for their roles. The Tyranid hive-mind is intelligent and adapts to new threats by changing tactics and making new types as needed. It's more bespoke bio-engineering than evolution. The Tyranids left normal evolution behind millions, possibly billions, of years ago.
Tyranids actually were seen before this but no one knew what they were. Genestealers arrived before the main hive fleets as infiltrators and intelligence gatherers. One genestealer could corrupt an entire planetary population if left unchecked. They would form hybrids with humans that became increasingly difficult to tell from normal humans. Once the 4th generation was born, they were impossible to tell from normal humans. At that point, the world was considered a complete loss and exterminatus was the only solution to keep the corruption from spreading to other worlds.
Most of the Tyranids *are* support creatures. The ones in the army list are the ones that get deployed to the battlefield. The support ones stay back on the ships or are deployed after resistance is crushed to convert the world. Many of the types are bio-engineered to perform specific support functions within the Tyranids. Much of the ammunition they use are actually creatures bio-engineered for that purpose.
The Tyranids should be essentially unstoppable from how they are described in the fluff. They should just roll over everything in their path through sheer weight of numbers. The Tyranid hive fleet in total covers an entire spiral arm of the galaxy. They have consumed entire other galaxies before arriving in the 40k galaxies. Yes, multiple entire galaxies. That doesn't really work for a wargame though so they don't. Bio-engineered plagues would be more efficient but, again, that doesn't work very for a tabletop wargame.
Detonating a warp drive is a dicey proposition. It creates a hole into the warp. Such breaches can quickly get out of hand and swallow whole regions of space. swarms of demons and other unpleasantness come out of them. It can become a significant existential threat in its own right.
Fun fact. This is not the first time Imperials fought nids. They had been dealing with Genestealers for a while at this point, but it wasn't until they saw them in the nid armies they realized it wasn't its own species
Also the kraken of fenrus are tyranids
Yeah, that's the one thing that actually dose kinda irk me about Space Marines. The number of Marines in the chapters seems ridiculously too small. But, that number could be doubled depending on how many chapters are actually on the field together.
The problem with wiping Imperium with biological weapons is that imperial planets are very isolated ans warp-travel between planets takes long enough time for people on the ship to notice plague.
It wasn't JUST the Ultramarines who was in the battle of Macrag. You also had millions of guardsmen, leagons of Titans and entire house holds of Knights also in the battle, and STILL the Imperium lost.
A note on your mentioning of the Starcraft sounds, Starcraft was originally supposed to be a 40k game but either GW or Blizzard balked early in development. Terrans were designed to be Space Marines, Zerg were Nids and Protoss being the crying space elves.
Ive seen a few answers already but as far as I know, once the Tyranids are done with consuming a world, everything gets fed to the hive ships. Not even the stronger synapse creatures are spared as Zoanthropes, bio-titans and even the odd Hive Tyrant are biomass to be recycled. Commanders like the hive tyrants may live on in spirit within the mind but presumably because giving them a body that will exist to wander in a bio-ship costs resources, these commander strategies and memories might live by drifting within the Tyranid intellect.
Although the Hive Mind will usually just flood the battlefield in numbers and treat lower tier bioforms as completely expendable (engorged ripper bioforms simply throw themselves into digestion pools), it still calculates whether it can come out of an invasion with enough biomass to make the whole trip worth it. Commanders tend to be ‘born’ with all the skills and memories they need to do their job, so the idea of the Hive Mind storing its favoured generals in limbo between planets doesn’t seem too far fetched.
The only synapse creature so far that the Hive Mind is really protective about for reasons other than their death breaking the synapse link is any Norn Queen. Not only are these the most powerful synapse creatures the hive fleets have deployed, they posses a genetic makeup that can be reverse-engineered into a kind of anti-tyranid venom that is lethal to any other member of the strain regardless of future mutations.
Also for biomass conversion, instead of a planet with tones of extra stuff in it, lets use the moon as a rough guess for biomass.
moon weight = 7.3477×1022 kilograms.
Let's say an average combat tyranid weighs five humans = 800 pounds
800 pounds to kilograms = 362.874
7.3477×1022 kilograms divided by 362.874 is = 2.02486262 × 10(20th power)
So yeah unless the imperium is actively recruiting say double earths current population every week in soldiers and not training them, it still probably wouldn't be enough if the tyranids get even one small moon sized planet. We are fooked.
You mentioned the use of fireships during the age of sails.
The series Hornblower have a very good episode with such a scen.
The battle you refer to was the English Navy under Drake used this agenst the Spanish fleet when it was harbored in Holland he knew that the fleet would out match his on as it stood but under the cover of night he used rowing boats and small craft pilled and loaded with oil to drift into the harbor alight and crash and cripple the Spanish fleet.
I think the chaos gods would love the idea of warp holes. Smells like heresy...
The victory at Macragge did destroy Behemoth's cohesion and obliterated the bulk of the Hive Fleet, but the small remnants of it that survived the counterattack by the (already battered and mangled) Imperial fleet scattered to the stars, either joining other fleets they passed or going dormant to preserve resources until the opportunity to feed again landed on them. As others have mentioned, blowing up a Warp Drive to wipe out a Hive Fleet is an expensive tactic that isn't something the Imperium can just throw out without consequence, not anymore.
It's telling that the second major Hive Fleet, Kraken, adjusted to this defeat overtly: instead of arriving as a massive fist of bioships, Kraken spread itself over many light years as a series of "tendrils." Killing one tendril of Kraken meant little to the whole Hive Fleet. Only by luring the bulk of the tendrils (as well as the other races beating back other tendrils all across the galaxy) to a relatively small area could a meaningful victory be achieved, but like with Behemoth, the remnants of Kraken formed tiny splinter fleets (like a dozen ships or so each) that could function as a raiding and harassment force behind enemy lines. They pick off isolated or poorly defended worlds quietly to build their strength until a larger Hive Fleet shows up and absorbs them.
The third Hive Fleet, Leviathan, apparently figured out that none of the races were about the warp bomb them like they did Behemoth, so it opted for only two massive tendrils. and switched from attacking from the Eastern Fringe to underneath the galactic plane, leaving the veterans of the previous wars watching the Eastern Fringe completely in the wrong spot to defend the galaxy. And the Hive Mind might still not be putting in serious effort yet.
Its important to note that imperial gaurdsmen are generally drawn from the top 5% of the planetary PDF. This is because of the importance placed on the quality of the raised troops which may place the governor's head on the chopping block if the troops were not of sufficient quality. Its the guardsmen that goes off world, the rest are known as PDF, Planetary Defense Forces, if this answers your question on planetary garrisons.
Really makes you think.
It is much much more likely to have a regiment assigned to a war zone then garrisoned on a world. Remember, Tryanids may have just been found but other enemies like Ork, Chaos, Eldar, Tau, etc. are still out there causing problems for the Imperium. Regiments are constantly being pulled from one warfront to the other, their times of rest usually being in the interim of going through the warp from one war to the other. If a regiment of Guardsman is assigned to garrison duty, it is likely to oversee the reconstruction and or the being the cleanup crew for when PDF isn’t enough and or have gone traitor.
I disagree. More worlds in the Imperium are at peace rather than at war. Now sure, some of these worlds can probably do without Guard garrison but I would say guardsman in active combat zones would not be higher than half of the entire Imperial Guard.
I think if they use warp weapons too much that might let chaos come through.
Scale context: multiply all 40k figures by 100-10000 and they make a lot more sense.
In Horus Rising (Horus Heresy, Book 1) a detachment of the Luna Wolves Legion arrives to support the Imperial Army, which had been at an impasse for months, unable to advance due to heavy artillery defending that section of the world. The Luna Wolves (in early power armor, before terminator armor was readily available, and several generations earlier than what is warn in the 41st millennium) were able to simply “tank” that same heavy artillery, allowing it to detonate on their armor and ignoring it. In a single day that small detachment broke the stalemate the Imperial Army had been unable to break.
In Hellsreach (novel, but if you haven’t seen the dramatization on UA-cam, watch it) 900 Black Templar arrive and are exclaimed as a force far more than sufficient to conquer entire star systems.
While all right thinking people know that the Luna Wolves were the best Legion (if we ignore what happened to them later….), against todays military the only weapons we have that would be viable are our nuclear arsenal, for scale.
The battle you speak of the is loss of the Spanish Armada and Drake's use of fireships.
Chitan is a soft shell like the armor plating on an ant or wasp. Carapace refers to the hardened shell on a beetle.
there were way more than 1000 ultramarines were there, im pretty sure all their successor chapters also came to help, making them almost at legion strength again
Early 90’s was the introduction in the advanced space crusade board game. They then retconned gene stealers into being from tyranids. Advanced space crusade had you playing as space marine scouts exploring a tyranid hive ship. They only had 2 options for the tyranid models, close combat or ranged...people enjoyed the concept and they started building up lore and model versions to bring them in as an army to play in full 40k
35:14 Chitin is what the exoskeleton of arthropods is made of.
Skeleton ship with servitor crew, I'm hearing some tech heresy now.
As a reminder the consumption of food to create energy is restrained by physics limitations, autotroph‘s (plants) get about 1% of the suns energy, herbivores take about 10% of the plants energy and then predators eating the herbivores also take 10% off of that energy. Ie. 10 pounds of grass makes 1 pound of cow 10 pounds of cow Makes 1 pound of lion, and if we assume trynids and have to work under the same physics limitations. Even if trynids hyper efficient digestive systems they’re likely only getting 10% or less of a planets total biomass when converted back into pure nutrients
The problem with detonating a warp drive is the very real chance of creating a permanent gateway to the warp (literal gateway to hell) and nothing says victory like a fresh path for chaos fleets and daemons (and daemon ships, yes there are daemon ships) to bypass imperial defenses and get the express lane to imperial worlds. Vortex weapons are essentially what you described and they have a distinct tendency to not close right away (it gets scarier when you realized that they have grenade versions of this, cue the davy crockett nuke...)(in the tabletop version of the game, I have watched the hole my grenade ripped into the warp happily careen about the battlefield eating every friend or foe in its path...)
@Combat Veteran Reacts
There are 2 main reasons why they do not use such "sucking warp bombs":
1. it requres battleship sized warpcores and those are very hard to produce, said that building one Battleship of the Imperator class takes a century of the whole production of an entire worlds economy. So even just building a skeleton of a battleship without weapons, accommodations and what not, would still take years.
2. is the high risk. everything is sucked into the Warp. which is litteral hell. they got lucky that it happened as a surprise for the deamons as well or else a deamonlord could try to be there on the warp side and stabilize this breach and use it as an entryway into the matterium. Imagine sucking up the Tyranids to just be replaced by an chaos invasion fleet.
When planets go dark on a regular basis it’s the just the norm
Badab war or isstvan campaigns would make for great videos!
No one: Tyran (tie-ran)
Brits: 'tirin'
According to arch imperial ship abilities is never the same. like how you have 2 imperial star fortress monistaries one horribly mauled with barely any functional weapons and in half an hour it destroys a fully intact Imperial star Monistary fully crewed armed and everything when normally these ships should take days to weeks pounding each other before any real damage is visible.
Yeah when it comes to books it gets weird like that ...
@28min11sec tyranids were first described in "Warhammer 40,000rogue trader" in 1987
Chitin is what insect exoskeletons are made of
In most 40k battles the guard are the main force that deals with the entirety of a conflict. Space marines or other super advanced units only come in if it gets really out of hand and the guard cant deal with it. Like if a legion of traitor marines shows up or an entire tyranid hive is coming. But if its just a typical orc invasion or some chaos cultists or whatever, the guard will deal with it on their own.
To kinda make an excuse to why they don’t weaponize Warp Drives Is because if I remember right, in the novel Flight of the Eisenstein, the crew is forced to abandon and detonate their Warp Drive to mask their escape and disrupt the traitors following them. And although it succeeded, the ship was left unable to move in space, Real or Warp space, and the resulting warp explosion, created a ripple in the warp, creating deadly warp storms within the area, and drawing Daemons to them and their area in Space. So while technically it could work to stop the Tyranids and nearly every other Xeno Race, the resulting Warp Storms would not only fuck up all travel throughout the area for who knows how long, but also would summon a crap load of daemons to the area where they could further fuck shit up.
The Tyranids pop up 1989 Genestealer Space Hulk and Tyranid warriors appeared in Advanced Space Crusade in 1990.
You can watch BEHEMOTH 1-3 by Eliphas ( this is a Parody).
Fidus Kryptman did come up with a plan to deal with the Tyranids Scorched earth. By Exterminatus planets on the Tyranids route and also he used the Genestealer to call the hive mind to a world with orkz on it. Late on Kryptman was exiled from the Inquisition for being too cruel.
I know this is old and you may of moved on, but what I kind of found in the books and video games is that the imperium leaves an imperial guard regiment as a garrison on newly colonized or recently conquered world until there is no more local threats and then either they ship off or the officers of the regiment becomes the ruling class. Which I think Tyran was a mechanicus research Planet. Imperial Guard seem to garrison mechanicus areas in non mechanicus worlds, at least the perimeter in some places. Example: Dawn of War 2 which had an actual imperial guard infantry regiment guarding a mechanicus forge on a hive world that was not under the mechanicus.
The 1000 Ultramarines at the Battle of Macragge is analogous to there only being 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. We here about the a famous subset of the forces and talk as if they were the whole force.
Just before the arrival of Hive Fleet Behemoth was the Damocles Gulf Crusade. This was intended to be a crusade of annihilation against the recently encountered Tau Empire. By luck, The Tau Empire is extremely close to the Ultramarine's realm of Ultramar. Decades had been spent collecting forces: gaurd armies, Astartes Chapters, Titan Legions, etc for the Damocles Gulf Crusade. The crusade was called off and redirected to the defense of Ultramar.
There is also the reason why most impossible odds situations are survived in fiction: plot armor.
Chitine is the material that composes insects exoskeleton.
And human hair, finger and footnails.
In the fluff entire star systems could be conquered by hundreds of space marines. A thousand would be devastating. That's what the authors of Games Workshop have said and written. Although the space marines are pretty hard.
Guard regiments arent assigned to garrison planets I'm pretty sure. That would be the job of the local Planetary Defense Force (PDF).
PDFs arent as well trained or as well armed, but exist to hold off the invaders from a well fortified position until some other force, usually an imperial guard force, can arrive to help.
Guard regiments are raised and sent off just for campaigns.
the shells of prawns chitin "Khi tin"
they lost tech to make bomb big as a tyrannids fleet, but some remain ship from dark age can suicide to make the same effect