It would be very much in keeping with the average Rogue Trader's style to show up at some hunting club, tip a vase of ashes on the table and ask if anyone would like to inspect his kill of the continent of some Death World somewhere.

Not ashes from the continent. Ashes OF the Continent.

Honestly I think you'd probably get called out for how unsporting that is, kind of like on Buffy when some shlubby guy jumped the slayer with a shotgun and blew her away. The end result was not acclaim but rather rage and retribution from all the actual demons, vampires and badasses who were in the town to have their proper crack at her in a kung fu fight or kooky scheme.

That and death worlds have economic value, the Genetor branch of the Mechanicus likes them for research purposes, nobles and rich guys like them for adventurism and merchants and arena owners like them for gladiatorial games.

It's a big ocean, right? So you have lots of chances to try different solutions...

If at first you don't succeed, fire another Macrobattery salvo again.

**** guys it's not all about killing things, I mean yeah the actual enemies of the Imperium sure but why does the thought of destroying a random ocean just for the sake of destroying it thrill you so much? Then again I guess I've never really understood it the IT in this case being profitless acts of petty vandalism perpetrated vaguely against one's own habitat. Yet yes I know it's a major human pastime.

I think they should approach problem of dealing with whale turtles like you'd deal with any problem in Dwarf Fortress. If a dragon attacks you, trap it and use it as a smelter. If zombies attack you, trap tchem and use as a security mean against goblins.

I think you are missing the point Amazing Larry. The difference between orbital weapons or harpoons and lascannons is focus of the group. My group is heavy into empire building and advancement of Humanity. They wouldn't perform orbital bombardment unless they had written off the world for other reasons. They have blasted a continent clean because they found a daemongate formed from and ancient Webway gate. They have also used troops to clean Yu'vath constructs from an DAoT space station instead of just blasting it. It is about how your group sees profit and risk. The economic value of a Death World is tied highly variable. There may be valuable biological resources, but the presence of mineral wealth may exceed their value to the RT. It may not be sporting to wipe out half the ocean killing the dangerous creatures there, but if it allows them to harvest the huge mineral resources of the world without losing their mining operations every month it makes sense. Even using macrocannons to shock-kill some giant turtles isn't going to wreck the ecology of the planet. It may have some long term impact, but only if done repeatedly. If there isn't a large amount of land on the planet it is quite likely that its value to anyone is limited to minerals (hidden underwater, and therefore useless) and sport hunting.

Another point, this isn't 'one's own habitat'. This is a world where the ecology is actively trying to kill you. Some people get off on surviving that environment and hunting in a 'Gentelmanly Fashion'. Some just want to get the wealth and get out. There is allways another world out there... While that may be a 'major human pastime', you will note that it is how people treat their own enviornments that really matters. Would you try to preserve a Rak'Gol world ecology, even though it is a radioactive wasteland to us?

The Rogue Trader has a duty towards Humanity and his house. Wasting resources to try and preserve a Death World is not serviing either efficiently. It isn't like this is a Death World in the Imperium. You aren't going to get a lot of Nobles and Rich Guys taking years out of their lives to travel out to the Expanse just to hunt some giant turtles. Certainly not enough of them to justify the cost.

Wait how is it that shooting the oceans is going to drain them and expose the minerals? Even you boiled them off the water would just start raining down again as soon as the atmosphere cooled enough for the environment to be at all survivable.

Not to drain the oceans, to wipe out the dangerous life in the ocean. The Imperium has the technology to do underwater mining. The problem would come from the megafauna. Blasting the oceans like that should remove the major biological threats. Come back in a few years and verify it before you waste too much capitol starting mining operations. This would only be worth it for particularly valuable minerals, of course.

It'd be far simpler to stock up on neurotoxins from a Magos Biologis at an Ad-Mech outpost and then go dump them into this ocean planet's waters. That would require less effort and resources (Just because you don't pay to fire your guns and lances doesn't mean they are cheap actions!) and provide a more blanket solution to the megafauna-eating-my-mining-submarine issue.

Not to drain the oceans, to wipe out the dangerous life in the ocean.

If you don't want people to miss the point then ask the right questions to begin with, if you'd asked "can the ship's weapons be used to destroy all life in the planet's oceans to gain unharassed access to it's mineral resources?" I could have just said "probably" and saved alot of time but you made it sound like it was all about the whales themselves.

If you don't want wrong answers that "miss the point" then ask the right questions.

Not to drain the oceans, to wipe out the dangerous life in the ocean.

If you don't want people to miss the point then ask the right questions to begin with, if you'd asked "can the ship's weapons be used to destroy all life in the planet's oceans to gain unharassed access to it's mineral resources?" I could have just said "probably" and saved alot of time but you made it sound like it was all about the whales themselves.

If you don't want wrong answers that "miss the point" then ask the right questions.

Yeah I know. Asking an inaccurate question is like destroying a planet's ecosystem from orbit because you were annoyed with a species of whale or something.

Any single Imperial vessel, even a Transport, has the capability of destroying a planet's. Theoretically a Transport (or macrocannon Raider/Frigate) would probably run out of ammunition before completely being able to absolutely destroy the surface of a planet. I'd imagine oceans would be a bit trickier - macrocannon shells would break apart and the shock would kill everything on the surface, but deeper life forms would survive. Lances would probably do enough damage, but actually destroying the surface would just be a matter of time.

Exterminatus by macrobattery does not seem very efficient, rules-wise.

Macrobatteries deal damage in a 10 square kilometer radius. The total surface area of Earth (as an example of a habitable world), including oceans and ice caps, is around 510 000 000 sq km. A "strategic turn" in the ground combat rules (which is where the bombardment rules are) is 4 hours.

If there was no overlap, and the starship could fire non stop, it would take 510 000 000 / 10 (blast area) / 6 (volleys per day) / 365 (days per year) = around 23 000 years for a single ship to saturate a planet's surface using those rules.

And sure, there's more to it than that. The bombardment rules involve maneuvering to hit a fairly specific area - you could no doubt speed things up a lot if you just wanted to hit the planet ... somewhere. And the planet might become uninhabitable long before 23 000 years.

But still, planets are big .

If you want to level a city, that's all in a day's work. If you want to cleanse the surface of life, you better have a sector fleet and a lot of spare ammunition on hand. Or special weapons designed for Exterminatus.

(Of course, there's always the astreoid-option, time consuming as it may be.)

Um...I didn't ask a question. Not once. I answered questions about ways to utilize ships weapons to harvest megafauna, utilizing the concussive shock value to the macrocannons. While some of my answers may be a little tongue in cheek, they are valid for 40k. I suppose you latched onto the 'wipe out half the ocean' and thought it meant draining the oceans...which is a bit absurd, but has been done on worlds in 40. There are a number of worlds that once had oceans and water and are now deserts or forge worlds.

I also noted that different groups have different objectives. Not everyone has to have the same focus as you. Some players will be looking to kill off the fauna to harvest the minerals. Some just want to harvest the shells off giant turtles to make beach shelters. Some want to have grand stories to tell about personally hunting down a giant turtle with just their personal weapons. It is about the FOCUS of the group...as I said the first time. The point was that those sort of extreme ideas are actually part of the 40k universe already. Players can, and will, come up with seemingly ridiculous plans that may actually be not only possible...but just copies of things already done in the 40k universe. You should really leave your ecological views aside when discussing Rogue Traders (or any human in 40k). The humans in 40k regularly despoil major inhabited worlds just to push out a little more production. Many, if not most, of the organizations in 40k see worlds as just another expendable asset. There is no Greenpeace in 40k.

I wasn't 'asking the wrong questions'. I didn't ask any, you made assumptions about my statements. If you disagree with the possibility or an action, then please speak up. If you just don't like it...::shrug:: Then don't do it in your game.

******* drunk posts my bad

Oh toot off.

or

Oh Zion off.

or

Oh word off.

or

Oh love off.

I like this game. Substituting words is fun.

******* drunk posts my bad

Exterminatus by macrobattery does not seem very efficient, rules-wise.

Macrobatteries deal damage in a 10 square kilometer radius. The total surface area of Earth (as an example of a habitable world), including oceans and ice caps, is around 510 000 000 sq km. A "strategic turn" in the ground combat rules (which is where the bombardment rules are) is 4 hours.

I had actually missed the bit where ground combat rounds are four hours long, so that's good for my reference. I had clearly made too many assumptions in how long it would take to just saturate the planet in fire. Nonetheless it does seem like you could wreck a colony city pretty easily.

A smaller colony city is reasonably easy to burn down with Macrobatteries. Note that larger cities may have void shields, which reduces the effectiveness of your bombardment. Some may have defense emplacements that are a serious risk to your ship as well. Trying that tactic on Zaythe is likely to result in the loss of your ship, for instance.

Is it possible? Are there RAW that allow shooting surface objects from the orbit? They've got one macrobattery and one lance and the whale is coated in thick, very valuable shell that they want to sell, so they wouldn't like to damage it.

firing a lance into the water a ta distance might flashboil the animal and leave the shell?

Is it possible? Are there RAW that allow shooting surface objects from the orbit? They've got one macrobattery and one lance and the whale is coated in thick, very valuable shell that they want to sell, so they wouldn't like to damage it.

firing a lance into the water a ta distance might flashboil the animal and leave the shell?

I'd hope it was being fired from a distance, or else your ship would be within the planets atmosphere!

I spent a great deal of time today thinking about maybe writing a homebrew "Orbital Artillery" ship component. The idea being clusters of specialized not absurdly huge railguns mounted on a ship's keel that would be precise enough to provide support to ground units or level specific buildings/destroy specific vehicles without neccesarily wiping out half a continent. I did the math though and one interesting thing I noticed is that even at low orbit it would take about fifty seconds for the projectile to make it to the surface assuming it's traveling roughly 3.5 kilometers per second.

The idea I have for the projectiles themselves is that they don't actually contain any explosive material, rather they're just a solid fist sized piece of depleted uranium nested in many layers of heat ablative ceremite composites wrapped in a ferrous shell. They'd start out twice the size of a tank shell but by the time they reached dirt most of the material would have burned off. The damage profile for a direct hit would be something impossibly lethal even to a heavy tank, but even the splash damage would be something like 10+5d10 Pen 4 Explosive Blast 25m.

The way it would be not totally be all end all is that the operator's ability aboard the ship to really know what he was shooting at would be very low, his telescopes would be just barely good enough to mmake of that there are infantry at all and maaaybe tell a tank apart from a pickup truck. You would have to spot for the thing on the ground as a three full turn extended action and even then the shot doesn't hit for ten full turns afterwards assuming it was dead on anyway which it usually wouldn't be since someone on the ship would have to make a BS test every turn. That and it would require the ship to be in a low geo-stationary orbit and therefore kind of a sitting duck to anything nearby capable of hurting it.

The other thing you'd be able to do with the component is just pick a square kilometer area and suppress it, everyone in the area would have to roll vs suppression every combat turn or alternatively everything in the area would have to roll 1d10 once every strategic turn and on 6+ they would suffer the effects of an indirect hit from the thing.

That looks a lot like the classic Kinetic Kill weapon. Not sure why you'd bother with making the rod out of DU though.

The aestethics of 40k would probably be to just make it bigger, and that's probably work. While being cheaper.

That looks a lot like the classic Kinetic Kill weapon. Not sure why you'd bother with making the rod out of DU though.

The aestethics of 40k would probably be to just make it bigger, and that's probably work. While being cheaper.

Honestly yeah and the concept was getting overcomplicated anyway, probably best to just scale the entire concept back to a 1 space 1 power supplemental component that would let a character on the ground designate a target as a full action and have a big **** kentic death strike slam into the ground where they'd targeted it ten combat turns afterward unless it scatters because of a failed roll.

Maybe throw in an option where you could ignore the space requirement if you had a ship with a turret rating of more than one and you were willing to sacrifice one of your turret rating to have the orbital artillery instead.

This is why I am a giant fan of Bombardment cannons...they kill stuff SO DEAD!!!