On 1/23/2015 at 9:19 PM, Traejun said:

An easy wrap up, or perhaps re-boot, would be to actually kill the Emperor. Let the psychic death rattle kill billions

Also, since he holds the Gates of Terra, the planet would be extremely screwed even without "psychic death rattle".

On 1/23/2015 at 9:19 PM, Traejun said:

Welcome to Warhammer 50K, *******... buy our new models.

When the story picks back up, GW could literally write a new universe.

Heh.

On 1/23/2015 at 10:39 PM, javcs said:

Can't kill off interstellar travel or communications for a while. Tyranids would have nothing to stop them from eating the Ultrasmurfs. And we know how much GW (and the writers) loves them some Ultrasmurfs.

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A breakup scenario works slightly better, imo, if some of the Missing Primarchs get found/rediscovered/come back. They would not approve of the Imperium as it stands. That causes internal divisions between those who hold to the status quo, and those who embrace the new direction of the Primarch(s).

We have a winner!

I still think the Tales of the Emperasque solved it much better than GW did, however.

Great thread now what is not much mentioned so far but for me the most important factor is scale of Imperial Guard operations.

WW2 was the largest military operation in human history at its peak with a bit about over 10 million troops (both sides together and including noncombat troops) involved at one moment and along 3000km (1900 miles) front. Now from all I read the important conflicts in 40k are even larger.

If you have 2 Operation Barbarossa, 3 D-Days, 5 Vietnams and 12 Stalingrads all going on at the same time all over a giant planet where do you really shoot at with your Navy Ships?

It will probably be houndreds of thousands of square kilometers you have to shell, none of the enemy is concentrated but everything is spread out.

And your intelligence, surveillance plus precision are so bad you never know where exactly which troops are and what you hit.

Better use your navy ships to protect the troop transports getting more reinforcements. And for the enemy side the same better use ships to threaten troop transport ships the guardsmen are much more vulnerable inside ships than on the surface of a planet. If you have smaller invasions that aren't on a scale as described above the troops can even spread out better and you probably also have less naval assets.

Then you can't shoot forever. When you fire for days and weeks, ballistic macrobatteries need ammo, energy macrobatteries can overload and have issues needing replacement parts and such. And even plasma engines need fuel which is normally not an issue but what about if you 24/7 Sunsear a planet for extended periods of time? As said the naval assets might be better used in other ways especially getting more troops onto the planet.