the point of a planetary bombardment for most wouldn't be the extermination of all life on it..it could be but that would probably be rare.its a gross and careless expenditure on munitions. the point would be to destroy as much infrastructure as possible. to potentially bomb that back into the stone age. life would still be there. it would just be very difficult and radically changed. ur not going to waste munitions on habs and the sort...u lay waste manufactories that produce essential products, power generators, processing facilities, communication hubs

and everything that i have encountered in WH40K states that while Exterminatus is a viable option it is NOT common nor commonly known. it is a form of ultimate sanction when all else fails. the order can only be give by a Warmaster or an inquisitor. and even then thats dicey,,Inquisitor Kryptmann was declared Traitoris Extremis for his destruction of a number of worlds to stem the Tyranid advance.

to my knowledge there are 3 methods of performing Exterminatus 1.a viral barrage AKA the 'life-eater' in the HH novels,2.Cyclonic Barrage and 3. the atmospheric incinerator barrage

Exterminatus a common thing? Where are you getting that from? Only Inquisitors and some Space Marine Chapter Masters can order an Exterminatus (and maybe a Lord General/Admiral, depending on the writer at the time), and it's impressed on them how severe it is and why they should avoid it if possible. Sure, the rock of the planet is left (if you use something other than an atmospheric incenerator), but the point of Exterminatus is to destroy ALL life on the planet, including the flora that make atmospheric sustainment possible. Exterminatus is not something that's thrown around blithely, it's a planetary denial weapon: we can't use it, but it's far too dangerous to let you have it, too. It's used in exterme cases, like the planet is overrun by a Chaos cult or a Tyrranid invasion, and there's really no hope of ever taking it back.

Tyraxus said:

Very true. Exterminatus is not common at all. The need to invoke exterminatus on a world is proof that the Inquisition have failed miserably in their task at finding and purging the relevant threat on the world in question.

If we're talking scale here, then exterminatus is as common in WH40K as using nuclear weapons in the real world. It has so far only happened twice, and the reason for it was a last resort because the US knew that they could never force Japan to surrender by conventional warfare.

the liegekiller said:

The reason for that is because from an evolutionary standpoint mankind is doing exactly what it is supposed to do in order to survive. Your body and brain doesn't know that obesity and over-eating is bad. In fact the primitive "survival instincts" of your brain will constantly tell you that when you eat food (no matter which food it might be) you're doing the right thing. The problem is that our biological evolutions isn't exactly in synch with how our intellectual evolution has progressed. So while the medical science has found out that over-eating and lack of excercise is bad for you, your body and your brain has yet to reach the same concluscion.

Warfare is also perfectly legal and desireable through the primitive aspects of our evolution. Mankind arose in an age where resources were scarce and you'd have to compete with not only other species on the planet, but with your own species as well in order for the weaker individuals to die out and the stronger, more fitting individuals to survive. In fact we're currently suffering from a bit to much peace in the world today. We're already seeing the effects of over-population and it's going to get much worse if mankind doesnt "cull" itself through warfare soon.

About the enviroment id have to disagree with you. I've studied enviromental problems on an academic level and the fact is that most talk of enviromental threats (like Al Gore nagging about global warming and that the earth will be flooded by water from melting polar ice) is actually nothing more than bogus propaganda to further some usurpers political career. To win in politics you need to have a cause, and you need to convince other people that your cause is important (regardless of whether that actually being the case or just outright lies). Trust me on this one, mankinds influence over the global enviroment and climate is only of marginal proportions if you compare it to climate changes that the earth causes naturally. In fact it's a bit foolish that some people actually believe that exhaust fumes from cars could actually compete with the insane amounts of toxic fumes that normal volcanic activity release every year.

As anti-idealist it might be to say this: you realy shouldn't believe all you hear about the imminent threat to the global enviroment. Much of the concluscions reached are based on nothing more than pseudo-science and politically correct propaganda. Of course there are aspects that really should be improved but the doomsday scenarios that the enviroment nut's are trying to spread is a bit over-the-top and sometimes outright unrealistic.

To summarize: it is not survival that tell people to stop going to war and looking after the enviroment. It is idealism and compassion, both of which can be powerful and useful traits during some situations, but in other cases they can be more harmful than good. Of course, this applies to the survival instinct as well. Balance between the two and reason would be for the best.

@ Varnias Tybalt....u miss the point as to why i included the environment. whether it is true or not, is not relevant. what matters is how do ppl PERCIEVE a threat to their survival and how they respond to said threat. some will react vigorously, others will shrug and not see the big deal.

Govts respond in the same manner...what they PERCIEVE to be a threat. whether a threat is real or not is irrelevant.

and i will agree with ur summary to an extent. it is idealism and compassion and that kind of thing happens mostly in the western world. however, survival is a factor also. in the west we have developed an infrastructure, a way and standard of living that makes war a necessary evil...as long as its done on someone elses soil. the very weapons we can bring to bear in a modern conventional conflict make war a very very dicey porposition...and i'm not even talking WMD classification tools. we don't conduct ourselves the way we do to for the purpose of survival. in the west the other option is too terrible to bear. compassion is evident. idealism is evident . so is survival...as opposed to mutually assured destruction. in other parts of the world, where gov'ts are destabilised, poverty is more common, idealism culturally absent, compassion fleeting and real destructive weapons absent...they are rockin and rollin. they have nothing to lose.

at some point, the industrialized nations of the West will come to blows over dwindling resources. we're just not there as yet. and when the sabre rattling begins, u will hear much talk of necessity and survival.

the unification of mankind was coached under that banner. the 'compliance' of once independent worlds. the Imperium uses that self same language in modern 40K lore. the problem with the Imperium is that its so caught up in its own dogma..it no longer really understands what its survival is. even the Emperor for all his vaunted wisdom was blind to think humans can go on a war of extermination and genocide and win. the modern Imperium is even weaker but still maintains this stance. unfortuantely a stance which might well be all too true if it were to occur as such.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but are you saying the Great Crusade was the Emperour embarking on a war of genocide and extermination? If so, I have to beg to differ; the Crusade was about uniting humanity under a single banner (through diplomacy or force, it didn't matter which), not about killing everyone who disagreed. Sure, the Army and Space Marines killed any xenos they found with extreme prejudice, but that was more to provide those worlds to humanity than it was about extermination. If the Crusade was about genocide and extermination rather than conquest, why didn't the Expeditionary Forces just consist of small fleets dropping virus bombs on ever inhabited planet they came across?

Perhaps "common" was a poor choice of words on my part. I meant that it is a prevalent term in the WH40k universe. I bet every DH group or GM at one point has talked about or thought about (even if not seriously) Exterminatus. It is a term that is 'common' to WH40k (associated with the Inquisition), even if the act isn't.

Although, I don't believe it is as uncommon as suggested with the "only ever occured twice" comparison with nuclear weapons. The Empire is vast, and so are its enemies. True, Exterminatus is not done willy nilly, nor can it be ordered by just anyone. However, it has been done ... many ... times throughout the years, as enemies of the Empire corrupt various worlds too far to be redeemed. The Empire has many worlds, and is willing to get rid of one too far gone than to risk the corruption spreading. And this is with the 'stable' Empire.

The original discussion of destroying planets revolved around the Age of Strife when there was instability and war. My point of the post really was to respond that 'destroying' a planet does not necessarily mean turning it into dust or breaking it up, which is what that link discussed. Just scouring the entire surface of the planet is really enough to consider it "destroyed".

Tyraxus said:

yes, the Crusade was all about uniting humanity. but what happened to those that didn't bend its knee and bow its head? what happened to those human populations, i would surmise the same thing that has happened to all cultures that didn't submit to percieved tyranny. they were subjugated. the writers of the Horus Heresy novels paint a very rosey picture of alien bashing and killing. but between those lines in the unwritten histories, i'm sure, were a good number of worlds that wanted to remain independent. they didn't have that choice. it was snatched away from them and done through bloodshed.

in the HH writings, the only author to shed light on this was Dan Abnett, in the opening scenes of the Horus Heresy. there is a particularly pointed dialogue between Loken and an elderly man. the old man states quite simply. "you could have left us alone" he goes on to state "if our philosophies are so much at odds, you could have passed us by and left us to our lives, unviolated." one has to wonder...how many other human worlds felt the exact same way?

and them poor **** aliens. genocide and extermination. u asked the question why didn't they just drop virus bombs on every planet they came across? u answered ur own question in the line above...they needed the worlds to inhabit. and i disagree..the Emperor was a xenophobe..there was no quarter, no parley...just bolter shell and blade for them.

dvang said:

I disagree. Even the fluff doesn't actually give us all that many cases of Exterminatus to draw upon, despite the fact that they constantly carp on about the threat of it. Of the million worlds of the Imperium, surprisingly few have gone "too far to be redeemed". Even worlds that have fallen to the forces of chaos are rarely cleansed - instead the possibility of reconquering the world seems preferable. The Sabbat Crusades, for example, were not a war of genocide, but on conquest, the chaos-held worlds recaptured by humanity. This may be partially a result of resources and opportunity, of course - the weaponry required for exterminatus probably isn't loaded upon every ship, ready for use, and even if you have the resources handy you may not be able to deploy them (planet defended by an enemy fleet or planetary defences).

dvang said:

It was a scale comparison. In the real world there is only one planet, in WH40K there are several thousands. Our civilisation has only existed for roughly a few hundred years, the Imperium of man has existed for several thousand years. Hence why exterminatus is about as common as using nuclear weapons is today. It's a matter of scale quite simply...

yes, the Crusade was all about uniting humanity. but what happened to those that didn't bend its knee and bow its head? what happened to those human populations, i would surmise the same thing that has happened to all cultures that didn't submit to percieved tyranny. they were subjugated. the writers of the Horus Heresy novels paint a very rosey picture of alien bashing and killing. but between those lines in the unwritten histories, i'm sure, were a good number of worlds that wanted to remain independent. they didn't have that choice. it was snatched away from them and done through bloodshed.

Yes, and my point is that a war of subjugation is vastly different from a war of extermination. To use a this-world example, the Nazi taking France was a war of subjugation, while the Nazis' "final solution" was a war of extermination. The Crusade wasn't a war of extermination and genocide any more than World War I or the Napoleonic Wars. It was, as I said, the uniting of humanity under the Emperour's banner. It's not like the Crusade killed everyone and then transplanted new colonists from Terra onto every **** planet they came across.

It's interesting you mention Galaxy in Flames... that's the only Heresy book I've had the chance to really read (our local bookstores didn't have False Gods in stock until about two weeks ago, they botched my order, and I refused to read them out of sequence). I was looking forward to reading the rest, but if they're not as good then I may pass.

@Tyraxus

to those that have seen their families and loved ones extinguished and their culture torn down. life very changed as how they know it, their belief systems cast down. i don't think wordy semantics will make much difference to them.

i don't think those brutalized by the Nazi's, Napoleons armies, and the Germans and the Turks would be quite so cavalier. i don't think the Iraqis are quite so cavalier. and i don't think any peoples under such use of force throughout history have decided to play with the letter of the wording.

i would suggest ppl talk to any ppl that have lived under such assaults and ask them whether or not..the pat and clean definitions matter.

Does this truly matter what other peoples interpretations of being wasted are? they are they and we are we, we are allowed our own opinions right or wrong it all depends on our past experiences.

as for the Crusades they were in 40k what they were for us a termination of differeing beliefs, and in 40k xenos to but not all because even some xeno do trade with the empire and in Ciaphis Cain novels the tau even had a "peace" with the imperial peoples for a time.

as back to the original subject these things always change as i said opinions and therefore results change, a few people had an idea for a space setting and they made it if you dont like it make your own. im not trying to bash or rant anyone but opinions are just that...o p i n i o n s

I think this thread has hit TL;DNR status, but I'll post back to the original poster.

Your inconsistancies with the history of 40k and the present setting are spot on. The canon history could not have resulted in the current situation, as history is written.

There is one explanation to this, one that is inescapable, and yet so simply obvious that it is overlooked.

What we know as "canon" history, is not "factual" history within the setting. We're talking about 40,000 years of time passing. We can't even agree on what was happening beyond the macro events with the Greeks and Romans (who were fetishistic about record keeping to boot) from 2000 years ago. Even today, with the internet nearing 20 years old in the incarnation we know it, we see instances of bit-rot. Information still ages and passes out of the collective consiousness, and eventually is removed, without a trace thanks to the digital medium, and it's as if that knowledge never existed within a few short years. Multiply this effect by 10,000 and you'll start to get the scale of the fabrication that the Imperium is.

Make the truth whatever you want it to be. The Imperium is a slowly decaying organism, which has only continued this long because of lies, myths, and half-truths, all carefully constructed to generate a level of zeal and faith to keep things rolling. When you look at the big picture, it is patchwork, doesn't make sense, and often is contradictory. But how many people ever get to look at "the big picture" from inside the setting? A handful. Thousands maybe out of billions. The rest are subjected to a "noble lie", a lie necessary to continue the existence of the Imperium. And from their vantage point, the lie is enough to justify their existence, their toil, and their death.

You will never have a factual history of the Imperium that will make sense when you look at the present time. That is, literally, impossible, both by the sheer amount of text which has been written (a very, very common problem with established settings, as more is written into canon, the more contradictions you get. Star Wars is rife with these, Star Trek to a lesser degree), and by the very genre itself. This is a sci-fi recreation of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It's the start of our Dark Ages amongst the stars. The factual truth may remain out there, not as a coherent tapestry, but as a puzzle to be put back together, but it is not for this generation, or the next thousand generations of the Imperium to do. Eventually there will be a renaissance, and the reconstruction of history and knowledge will begin.

If humanity survives.

So I take the Horus Heresy books as being myth rather than historical. I take any canon splat story as being legend or hearsay. Anything that is not relevant in the here and now (or say the last 500 years of game history) I don't trust, I take with a grain of salt, even as I present it to my players as the gospel truth. As the GM of my 40k setting, even I can't comprehend the massive clockwork mechinism that is the Imperium, but at least I see the myriad of machinery. My players only see the clock face, and are sufficed to know that the time is kept.

@ TheFlatline

very eloquently said. the final good word is yours.

Graver said:

I thought to read that the warpstorms isolated Terra itself

llsoth said:

Not necessarily, it could be the need of population and ressources, raw material, manpower, place and time for learning.

The

agri world wouldn´t have automatically the technological base to build and maintain them, a few well supplied forge worlds could build Fleets in the thousands.

@Ilsoth

1st i don´t think only Worlds would fight against each other, second i don´t think a fleet would be enough to take out a well defended and fortified system.

OTOH you could force them to bow but how will you force them to follow your orders?

Much of the work done on specialized industry efficency does not take into account the extra transport layer of space travel.

The benefits of specialization are real. However they do not take into account planetary scale and the costs of a extra transport layer (space). They mostly deal on the factory or single supply/manufacturing chain level. The planetary scale adds in a LOT of infrastructure needs that are not accounted for and space travel adds in a whole new type of infrastructure needed.

As to making a planet do what you want after winning the space battle... the gun to your head would be a good motivator. There are many ways to get what you want.. everything from population replacement/govermantal control/to simply demanding tiths.

If you have a planet with formidable planetary defenses there are still plenty of ways to deal with them. Ground invasion is not really one of them. If they have enough firepower to wipe out your battle fleets (even after having to go through atmosphere and dealing with the gravity well) then they can past your troopships as well. Any planet that concerned with defense would be a nightmare to fight a ground battle against anyway. However what are they going to do when you do the whole footfall thing? Droping some really big rocks on them will take the starch right out of them. (as just one example of what you could do. The mobile battle fleet would have a huge advantage over the static ground emplacements.

Though as a side note there is something I have noticed in most sci-fi.

1. They have aero-space fighters that are at least marginally effective. (my personal beliefe is that if fighter/bomber craft are effective then you would not have huge massive ships of the line)

2. Planets do not field them in huge numbers.. Given point 1 a earth type planet shoufl field them by the 10s of thousands.

TheFlatline said:

Fetishistic about record keeping? Not bloody likely. Both the Greeks and the Romans had this nasty habit of embellishing exactly EVERYTHING they wrote down as being "historical", not only in the ways of facts and figures but even tossing in a few mythological beasts and gods as well to make the stories sound more fantastic (basically an ancient form of show-biz). Not even Herodotus (which by some western historians are considered to be the "father of all history") could keep his fantasies and need for emellishment out of his recounts, although he tried really hard to stick to the facts in contrast with his peers.

Sure, when it came to business and keeping check of how much more money traders and nobles were entitled too, then both Romans and Greeks were quite meticulous in record keeping. But when it came to "historical accounts" they evidently suffered as much from the tall tale-syndrome as pretty much everyone else did.

But then again, who can blame them? After all they lived in an age where people believed in minotaurs, trolls and goblins.

I don't know if anyone brought this up but from my understanding the rapid growth of pyskers was one of the leading causes in the age of strife. From the fluff it says that major bastions of humanity accepted the psykers. When the psykers started failing their perils of the warp rolls, **** hit the fan really fast. Now anyone whose played DH can attest to how strong an unbound daemonhost is, but how about a million of them? How do the authorities, nevermind the average citizen, respond to such a thing when they had no experience with it whatsoever? Add this to the fact that the Iron Men, humanities robot army, are rebelling and large warp storms are making reinforcements impossible, and you have a pretty nightmarish scenario. Also I read that the many alien empires humanity had crushed in its expansion or formed treaties with sensed weakness and choose to strike. Pretty sick huh? Its no wonder that only out of the way colonies survived, being isolated from the start they probably didn't have to worry about daemons and robots.

I read though most of the posts and liked the early discussions but if you really want an example of a "fall" from Tech advance "ness" to survive war ignorance try looking at our own "Dark Ages" From the Sacking of Rome to the rise of Charlemange even after him there is a bit of a back lash to the progress. The Goal is blessed ignorance for the majority of the population. A person is adaptable a small group (ie 4-8) can co-exist, get along and make progress. But a large group, no chance. Its like a Mob is only as smart as the dumbest person, Hence you have dictators and other Real World Monsters. Individuals tend not to be "evil" but large groups can have the ability to become evil. SO in the idea of self preservation keep em stupid its easier to control the populace and keep the majority safe from them selves and the various boogie men in the world.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Herodotus was really more of what would be called nowadays a travel journalist. Contemporary journalism is not much different. I used to be one; believe me, much "factual reporting" is actually fiction.