I haven't been on the forums for a while. Has anyone brought up the notion so far of FFG coming out with an RPG about the Imperial Navy? I think it would be a perfect bridge between Rogue Trader and Only War. (We also might get the fliers associated with the Guard, since some retard at GW decided that such things were Navy only...as if that bunch would give a rat's patoot about anything having to do with planetary warfare. Sort of like how the USAF treats the idea of actual ground support, which is the whole reason for air superiority in the first place .)

Actually the division of the guard and navy is a big deal in the fluff and not some somebody at GW being a prat.

The division of navy and armed ground forces came about during the time of rebuilding after the heresy when the council of Terra wanted to stop any single commander from ever having the power to threaten the Imperium as Horus had ever again.

They did this by dividing the space marine legions into bite-sized chunks and the forming the Imperial Guard and Navy out of the sprawling expeditionary forces.

The idea was that no one naval captain, guard general or marine commander would have the capablity to strike effectively against the might of the Imperium alone.

Except any and all aircraft are under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Navy, which is kind of dumb considering they have nothing else to do with ground warfare, and aircraft generally used for transport, ground attack, or air superiority. I mean, while we do have an Air Force, the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard all have planes too.

Absolutely. Think of it from the standpoint of the navy, whose bailiwick is space...you know, as in big? Really big? (Kudos to Adams.) Imagine that you not only have to operate the fleet, which is a task far surpassing monumental, but also ground support aircraft - planetary craft. What a logistical nightmare; spacecraft and aircraft are so dissimilar that their engineering is entirely different. Which means the logistics of supplying those craft is entirely different. Why the frak would the Navy even agree to that! What a pain!

And then you come to the roles of each force. The air force exists entirely to support the ground force, handling transport, recon, air superiority, and ground attack. The Navy exists to control space. Aircraft have all sorts of trouble operating in space - their drives don't have to fuel reserves and thrust to operate for long without an atmosphere and gravity well (for aerodynamics and gravitics), while true spacecraft risk damage from the undispersed heat of their own plasma drives! (The energetic plasma expands rapidly in vacuum, at near relativistic speeds. In atmosphere, the plasma is constrained by pressure in a 'bubble.' The result is a constant low-yield plasma explosion at the ship's tailpipe, which cannot be good. This is why interface craft - lighters and so on - are expensive, since they have to handle space and the soup.)

Finally, imagine joining the Navy and being told you're being shunted off to support the groundpounders as an air jockey. Goodbye, career path.

I maintain that whatever prat at GW came up with this malarkey was an ignorant idiot.

Yep, to reach the Imperial Army heyday, you have to be a Rogue Trader. Then, if you want, you can have a cruiser, sprouting guns of death, and be allowed to carry troops, be they House Guard, mercs, or even a regiment of Imperial Guard you "bought." Might even make a deal with some Space Marines, and have a few of them, and the drop pods to deploy them. You can bring their tanks, their gear, and what have you, possibly even Navy Valkyries, or your own transport craft, and be a little Warmaster, if you want to. Since the Imperium has had so many little Warmasters come biting, thinking most of Horus and Vandire (his feat is almost as impressive, since he did it AFTER the Army became Guard and Navy, IMO), it has been in their best interest to make everyone interdependent. Even if a whole regiment of Guard go rogue, without the Navy to ferry them around, they are useless, save Chaos or the Tau stepping up, and giving transport. Meanwhile, the Space Marines need both to survive, or their surprise attack will lead to an unsurprising end via attrition, without IG to slug it out, and IN to have brought them.

Personally, minus the whole absence of Valks in the OW books (I, at least, go in expecting something like IG Codex, and to not have the airborne transports, because the Navy is separate, and not what your players will be playing, irritates me), I appreciate the military divisions. My only fail is when I'm trying to decide if ______ force can be included, and that blank is USUALLY Adepta Soroitas, but they aren't usually very important. I still think it would be cool to include a force of them in the background of an OW game, to either help or be helped by the players, and their regiment; IG are very good at either wrecking stuff, and clearing a path for superior specialists, or for holding off massive forces, and making delays possible to benefit said superior specialists, and the AS are a bit more prevalent, and less cheese, than Astartes, but that's just me. It doesn't seem it would be too hard to make them playable, or certainly as an NPC set piece, but no game in the future in sight, so no worries.

More than just the Valkyries, I fear. What about speeders? The IG had them (I still have two lead speeders myself - armed with multilaser and heavy plasma gun, egad!). And what about air transport? And aerial support? The Thunderbolt fighter and the Marauder bomber are NOT space craft, nor are they capable of performing the tasks needed for space fighter/bomber combat (space fighters are bigger than Marauder bombers! And space bombers - or, as I should say, attack craft - are the size of Gallofry medium freighters from Star Wars!! Check out Battlefleet Koronos. ). Leaving out the Guard's attached aircraft is a criminal piece of negligence, and making them Navy was a criminal piece of idiocy on the part of the prats at GW.

I think it was mainly a blunder by somebody who doesn't understand how divisions of military powers work. Logically, the flyer people would operate all the flyer things, and the ground people would do the ground things. But that's not ever how it works, and it seems this small, inconsequential blunder has been repeated for quite some time, leading to a not so inconsequential error in how the military of the Imperium operates.

In CURRENT canon, as I understand it, if it is not land-based, it is the Navy's materiel. Thus, Thunderbolts and Marauaders are NOT Imperial Guard, but Imperial Navy, to be used by one through the other, at the discretion of both. As for Speeders, I've been playing and reading 40k fluff since 2002, and while that might not be a long time compared to some (3rd edition, I think was then), I don't remember IG ever in my time having speeders. Speeders belong to Space Marines, along with real tanks that also have carry cap. I know that, eons ago, Imperial Guard could field Land Raiders, but they've always been solo Space Marines (and Chaos offshoots) for me, unless my Inquisitor pulled his shenanigans, and came out in one.

Again, that's just me, one guy's recollection over time I've paid attention. I rarely read the novels, and some codices are not my thing, but as I get it, ground things are Guard, and air things are Navy, even if they never go into space, where one often thinks of that navy having sway. The ground needs air support, and the air needs ground defenses, so the two have to work in tandem, and the orders get followed, hopefully rather than perverted by one man's ambition or corruption. If the Ruinous Powers can't corrupt the general AND the admiral, their corrupted force might come up weak, and get aced.

I believe cpteveros has the gist of the problem, that some prat at GW made a really ignorant, retarded boo-boo some time ago, and now it affects the RPGs, because the FFG fellows have been pretty good at staying canon (much better at it than GW, as a matter of fact...). And no amount of attempting to rationalize it with 'Chaos this, Chaos that' will change that central boo-boo.

Since FFG is so good at trying to stay canon (and I hope I'm not the only person who loves their swipe at 'canon' in the background sections of Black Crusade ), that's why I was wondering if they'd put out another game based on the Navy. It would be, as I said, sort of a cross between Only War and Rogue Trader . And it would be pretty good, I think.

FFG occasionally sneaks a fluff change past the GW approval system- I think the most glaring example is making the Deathwatch not the 'chamber militant' of the Ordo Xenos anymore in the DW game. I dare say that allowing the Imperial Guard to control their own **** transport flyers would be a tweak to fluff worth fighting for.

Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Yes, wouldn't that be nice!

Please stop using the word "retarded" not only is it not appropriate to the context (the decsion clearly was not unusually limited in it`s growth or development as it became a guiding precept of two decades of fluff) but it is an offensive term and is not needed. You are either misusing an outmoded medical term or using offensive language contary to this forums ToU, either way continued use will be reported.

No matter what your feeling on flyers it all boils down to a simple truth.

The ground pounders aren`t trusted with any flyer worth a ****, the flyboys aren`t trusted with any soldier worth a ****. This is the way of the Imperium.

That said stats would be nice. Even if it just so we know how many autocannon hits the extraction flyer can take before everybody dies in a supersonic fireball.

Fine, I shall not use the term 'retarded,' either to refer to prats at GW or different but similar prats who use linguistic political correctness to strike back when it becomes clear that no-one agrees with them...

Back to the original subject matter. I'll refine the question: Should FFG give us an Only War supplement containing the fliers used nearly exclusively by the Imperial Guard and similar ground forces, said fliers used for reasons which shouldn't have to be explained here since the assumption is that any Only War GW should know enough about post-WW I warfare to realize the value of air support on his/her own, or would it be preferable for FFG to make an entirely new game about the Imperial Navy? My own choice is both, but, then, I'm greedy.

Just so that it's clear: I did not only like Askil's post for telling you off about 'retarded', as much as I agree with him on that, I also agree on his explanation fluff-wise.

I think it's a great piece of fluff, in fact: The IoM, completely intentionally, decided to splits its forces in a stupid way, limiting their effectiveness and costing them millions of soldiers because they are JUST. THAT. PARANOID. And it is, on balance, a good decision for them!
To me, that's a large part of how the IoM works: They may be catholic space nazis, but they are right in doing it!

But yeah, OW really needs stats for at least a Valkyrie.

I do remember laughing when I got the OW corebook, and I saw the Elysians. I rather like their fluff, and I said, hey, if they do this right, that means that these guys should be drop infantry", and sure enough, they are. Then I chortled, thinking "we'll finally get that Valkyrie write-up I sort of wanted in RT books, among other places", and it's like they heard my laugh, grimaced, and said "NO!!!" Not sure how Elysian regiments are dropped in, to use their grav-chutes, without the Valkyrie carrying them, but...and while I am firmly on the "the Imperium split their military because their leaders have been dicks before" side of things, and know that the Valks are Navy assets they use for the Guard, it seems weird, then, to have a dedicated IG regiment who isn't a Navy group, but who depends on them so much. Who it belongs to aside, I do think they really just should've given the stat block, to quit people, and to help them, and maybe it could have a little rule discussing the Navy, but let's be honest, OW is a game about nobodies. No offense to anyone playing it, but your character sort of supposed to, at least at first, just another disposable infantryman, or whatever your regiment does, and whether they get access to a Valkyrie, a Chimera, or whatever will be decided by higher-ups, who are NPC's. Whomever the Valk belongs to, the players will either be told they have access to it, or they don't; they will never really be "asking" for one, themselves.

Personally, I don't really want a Navy book spin-off of OW; I'd rather play RT, or have RT 2.0 using OW's ruleset, right up until it negates 10 books I spent hard money on, and then I'll swear (also my biggest problem with DH2; I own 9 books of DH ) Still, if it did get made, I'd probably take a look at it.

Yeah, give me a stat block with a note saying "you can't ever requisition this permanently" and ideally " but here's how you can maybe get one to give you a lift / air support" and I'd be perfectly happy!
It's just, the valk is so integral to drop troops, and appears in several adventures and is generally so important... I feel it needs stats. And generalized rules for flyers, so that the Hydra can get some targets.

I don't think this needs a dedicated Navy book, although more info on liaising with the navy and space-based warfare etc would interest me from an OW perspective. *shrug* As long as the Valk is in a book finally, I'll be glad.

Maybe an Imperia Aeronautica book is in order, as I could see that making a little bit better sense. As an expansion to OW (though it deals with Navy as opposed to Guard) it is the realm of ground/planetary warfare and would give an excellent excuse to not only have Valkyrie stats, but the stats for other flyers as well. I for one would love to play as the crew of a bomber or a fighter squadron, providing support against Dark Eldar raiders and marauding Orks. It would be a very similar theme to normal OW, just in the air instead of a tank or chimera.

Yes, exactly!