As noted here , the majority of the imperial forces doesn't know exactly where they're fighting. In addition, not even the higher-ups of the sectors that give their tithes to the war effort seem to know exactly where they're spent, instead thinking they're still funding the Margin Crusade.
Why is this a masterpiece of deception and outgame genius storywriting?
Why is this a load of crap and doomed to fail anyway?
Cifer said:
As noted here , the majority of the imperial forces doesn't know exactly where they're fighting. In addition, not even the higher-ups of the sectors that give their tithes to the war effort seem to know exactly where they're spent, instead thinking they're still funding the Margin Crusade.
Why is this a masterpiece of deception and outgame genius storywriting?
Why is this a load of crap and doomed to fail anyway?
How about this being neither? Something not all that interesting because the epic campaigns are not as interesting as the everyday work campaigns (yes, yes, with the deathwatch the epic is the everyday...
I just prefer it when it's all just a tiny bit more small scale, recovering artifacts, bodyguarding an inquisitor when he makes first contact with a race of xenos, etc.).
The pre-generated epic campaigns are less interesting to me, as I mentioned before.
Alex
Well... in all honesty it would fall apart, due to the tendency of the Administratum to use whaever ships are handy, including grabbing civilian haulers as auxillaria. All it takes is a ship or two having a junior officer on the bridge at the wrong moment and the jig is up for everyone on the ship as soon as the next watch comes on, and probably the entire port when they get back to Scintilla/Malf/Port Wander/Etc.
Rumor among void farers is, from what I read in the fluff, a bit harder to contain then rumor among the gropos.
Most imperial governors, nobles, and even Sector Governors aren't likely to know about the Jericho Reach at all, let along in general. Not to mention having more pressing concerns with their own affairs, like merchantile interests and actually governing their domains.
While the Inquisition and Commissriat will mercilessly kill anyone who can't keep quiet.
Plus, terms like "Jericho Reach" and "Achillus Crusade" could be OOC terms, while in character references to the locations could be entirely different.
Well... in all honesty it would fall apart, due to the tendency of the Administratum to use whaever ships are handy, including grabbing civilian haulers as auxillaria. All it takes is a ship or two having a junior officer on the bridge at the wrong moment and the jig is up for everyone on the ship as soon as the next watch comes on, and probably the entire port when they get back to Scintilla/Malf/Port Wander/Etc.
Not necessarily. After all, the only one who necessarily has to have an idea where they are would be the Navigator - who would in this case probably be generously supplied to the ship.
Alternatively, you could have the whole thing happen in stages, with one ship delivering the supplies to a place near the warpgate, another one making the delivery through it and a third actually travelling within the Reach. The first ship is the only one that comes back to Calixis et al. any time soon. The second ship would likely be in the know (well, their higher echelons) and based at a faciltiy near the gate which doesn't have too much contact with anything else while the third is irrelevant as it won't come back before the Crusade is done anyway.
Cifer said:
Not necessarily. After all, the only one who necessarily has to have an idea where they are would be the Navigator - who would in this case probably be generously supplied to the ship.
Alternatively, you could have the whole thing happen in stages, with one ship delivering the supplies to a place near the warpgate, another one making the delivery through it and a third actually travelling within the Reach. The first ship is the only one that comes back to Calixis et al. any time soon. The second ship would likely be in the know (well, their higher echelons) and based at a faciltiy near the gate which doesn't have too much contact with anything else while the third is irrelevant as it won't come back before the Crusade is done anyway.
Well, on the first, that's not actually, true. The Captain, the helmsman, and every astropath on board would also have to know, since astropathic communication would require correct 'routing' information, the captain would need to know his real destination in order to correctly navigate the solar system he's going to, as would the helmsmen.
The other problem is the Eye of Terror. Calixis boarders Scarus, which is a bastion agaisnt incursion from the Eye.
Therefor, anywhere in the sector, the Eye would be visible to the naked eye, even from the ground, considering it's size. All a void born would have to do is look out a veiwport to realize that something is up if the Eye is really, really small and in the wrong direction.
The multi-stage trick would work as long as no one ever comes back from the Crusade.
That is a more accurate representation of a real life military supply chain too.
It's not one truck (or in this case, ship) delivering them all the way from the manufacturing source all the way to the front lines. They take it to a primary supply centre, where another truck (ship) takes it to a depot closer to the field, where another after that takes it all the way to the front. With likely a lot more stops in between.
Sadly, people are assuming the Imperium is a whole lot stupider, and that everyone knows a whole lot more than they sensibly should.
Well, on the first, that's not actually, true. The Captain, the helmsman, and every astropath on board would also have to know, since astropathic communication would require correct 'routing' information, the captain would need to know his real destination in order to correctly navigate the solar system he's going to, as would the helmsmen.
I'll grant you the astropaths, though we don't quite know how their abilities work - considering they need relays for higher distances anyway, just telling them "The Halo Stars distort long range communications, just send everything to Astropath Totally-Not-A-Throne-Agent, his choir will forward the stuff" might work. The captain and the helmsman with their intra-system navigation, though? Well, they'll know they're not in Kansas anymore. Big deal, as they weren't expecting to be in Kansas anyway. They'll simply be given system maps by the Crusade forces with "System of McGuffin in the Jericho Reach" carefully crossed out and replaced with "System of McGuffin in the Halo Stars". Considering they will never need to navigate between two systems, it's pretty irrelevant where exactly a system is as long as the system internally behaves as the map says it should.
The other problem is the Eye of Terror. Calixis boarders Scarus, which is a bastion agaisnt incursion from the Eye.
Therefor, anywhere in the sector, the Eye would be visible to the naked eye, even from the ground, considering it's size. All a void born would have to do is look out a veiwport to realize that something is up if the Eye is really, really small and in the wrong direction.
Is it really known that the Eye of Terror is even visible from a Sector away? I don't have numbers here, but remember Douglas Adams "Space is pretty huge" explanation. To be visible from that far away, the Eye would have to be... well... large. Could anyone out there do the numbers on exactly how large it would have to be in order to be seen with the naked eye?
BaronIveagh said:
The other problem is the Eye of Terror. Calixis boarders Scarus, which is a bastion agaisnt incursion from the Eye.
Therefor, anywhere in the sector, the Eye would be visible to the naked eye, even from the ground, considering it's size. All a void born would have to do is look out a veiwport to realize that something is up if the Eye is really, really small and in the wrong direction.
The multi-stage trick would work as long as no one ever comes back from the Crusade.
Okay, I'm sorry to be rude here, but this is part of the problem. People making assumptions that are frankly quite stupid.
How visible do you think the Eye of Terror is? Sure it covers a whole galactic sector, there about, but that doesn't mean it's actually visible with the naked eye all the way out on the Eastern Fringe. I'd dare say it isn't even visible from the Calixis/Scarus/Ixaniad sectors. Consider how huge the Sun is relative to the moon, but the relatively small distances involved (on a galactic scale) make them both appear to be about the same size in our sky. If the Eye of Terror is visible at all, it likely looks like just a star.
Helmsmen don't involve themselves with warp navigation, that's all on the Navigators, who can probably be counted on to keep quiet. Astropaths are a bit more iffy, since they only need to direct their communications toward the next relay, and not the actual destination. Presumably there's a relay on the Segementum Obscurus side of the Warp Gate, which negates the need to inform all of the Astropaths. And we already covered how supply lines work in real life (and would probably be handled for the crusade), so not every tramp freighter captain needs to know the secret.
BaronIveagh said:
Well... in all honesty it would fall apart, due to the tendency of the Administratum to use whaever ships are handy, including grabbing civilian haulers as auxillaria. All it takes is a ship or two having a junior officer on the bridge at the wrong moment and the jig is up for everyone on the ship as soon as the next watch comes on, and probably the entire port when they get back to Scintilla/Malf/Port Wander/Etc.
Rumor among void farers is, from what I read in the fluff, a bit harder to contain then rumor among the gropos.
You assume those ships ever leave again.
Copying over my last post from the other thread:
Lightbringer said:
I don't doubt that they CAN keep this stuff secret...(for a while) from the various Planetary Governors and Subsector Governors. I don't agree that they'd find out almost immediately, Darknite. But I do think they'd have trouble keeping this stuff quiet from the Inquisition, who are primed to investigate big cover ups of this nature.
So I understand HOW they could do this cover up, but I don't understand WHY they feel they need to, and I don't think they could hide it for very long from the Inquisition.
Which suggests to me that the Inquisition are closely involved in the whole cover up...in fact even might be behind it. The only alternative to them being behind the whole thing is that it's a Segmentum-Level authorised cover up, as it appears to supersede the authority of 3 Lords Sector.
All this is very interesting, I like a nice big conspiracy! This was just the sort of high-level intrigue I was hoping for from a big Imperial Crusade!
Ooops, sorry, forgot to include the Inquisition in the groups of people who know all about it, and do actively try to keep those that are out of the know, out of the know
As for why the Sub-Sector/Sector bosses might argue if they knew the truth? Things were fine in the Crusade... until the Tyranids turned up and pretty much ate 1/3 of the Crusade force. The Orpheus Salient, the arm of the Crusade that ran into the Tyranids, was mostly wiped out, with General Curas, the leader of the Orpheus Salient forces, and his entire Senior Staff (basically the entire command of the Orpheus Salient) all missing, presumed dead.
As such, Orpheus is in disarray and has had huge losses, around 80%, and so the Crusade has had to be drafting over double the usual number of troops and materials given by the Ixanaid/Scarus/Calixis Sectors normally. If they knew that their industries and troops were being pushed to breaking point due to a Crusade happening on the opposite side of the galaxy, when the Sectors near the Jericho Reach are not being tithed harder (due to the lack of supply routes from those sectors to Jericho), you can imagine how pissed off those sectors would be.
Glad to have this out of the highly informative previous thread!
-
One thing that comes to mind is WHY?
Yeah, there's a warp gate. But that secret isn't going to last for long against any foe that would be capable of contesting its' control. They'll take prisoners, interrogate Navigators, 'track' ships' wakes through the Warp, etc. If this was meant to be a short-lived operation capable of establishing immediate strategic dominance then sure, good move. But it's a Crusade? Those things take decades or more to complete!
This means the WarMaster running the Crusade (or whoever he takes his lead from) wants to mislead a large segment of the Imperium who are actively backing it. On the face of it this seems absurd. Eventually the secret will get out and when that happens the reason for it's purpose had better be good. Remember, in a feudal society trust is paramount. The 'king' (High Lords of Terra) can't run everything, they depend on their vassals to act in their interest. The vassals in turn expect to not be boned by their leige. Civil wars start this way.
Another possibility is to mislead another actor (xenos, traitor, etc) that is watching events in the Calixis/Scarus/Koronus region. If there was reason to believe that there was such a force was a threat then there might be reason to create this fabrication. If you're a Chaos warlord who's looking to launch a Black Crusade across that sector of space, but notice that there's a massive Crusade underway nearby which could be quickly re-directed against you, then maybe you'd think twice. However if you knew that force was on the far side of the galaxy and all you needed to do was somehow disable a secret warp gate in the Maw, well that's another matter. Doesn't explain why you'd mislead the leadership of those sectors, however....
Who else might benefit from the 'secret'? How about power blocks in the Imperium that have an interest in the Jericho Reach region? They're getting someone else to reclaim the Sector at no cost to them. Bonus! When it's over they're there to reap the rewards.
Well, I'm looking forward to reading more on this when the book is released!
@MILLANDSON
Ouch... so much for my prior "It seems to be only a splinter fleet" theory for why they didn't abandon the other two arms of the Crusade in order to stomp on the 'nids.
@darknite
Yeah, there's a warp gate. But that secret isn't going to last for long against any foe that would be capable of contesting its' control. They'll take prisoners, interrogate Navigators, 'track' ships' wakes through the Warp, etc. If this was meant to be a short-lived operation capable of establishing immediate strategic dominance then sure, good move. But it's a Crusade? Those things take decades or more to complete!
Even with a Crusade, the longer you can keep the whole thing a secret the better. I daresay that while the whole thing is running, the system with that lonely warpgate is slowly made into a fortress intent on rivalling Cadia.
This means the WarMaster running the Crusade (or whoever he takes his lead from) wants to mislead a large segment of the Imperium who are actively backing it. On the face of it this seems absurd. Eventually the secret will get out and when that happens the reason for it's purpose had better be good. Remember, in a feudal society trust is paramount. The 'king' (High Lords of Terra) can't run everything, they depend on their vassals to act in their interest. The vassals in turn expect to not be boned by their leige. Civil wars start this way.
Hopefully, when that secret gets out the Crusade will already be near its end and able to continue with local ressources.
Cifer said:
Well, on the first, that's not actually, true. The Captain, the helmsman, and every astropath on board would also have to know, since astropathic communication would require correct 'routing' information, the captain would need to know his real destination in order to correctly navigate the solar system he's going to, as would the helmsmen.
I'll grant you the astropaths, though we don't quite know how their abilities work - considering they need relays for higher distances anyway, just telling them "The Halo Stars distort long range communications, just send everything to Astropath Totally-Not-A-Throne-Agent, his choir will forward the stuff" might work. The captain and the helmsman with their intra-system navigation, though? Well, they'll know they're not in Kansas anymore. Big deal, as they weren't expecting to be in Kansas anyway. They'll simply be given system maps by the Crusade forces with "System of McGuffin in the Jericho Reach" carefully crossed out and replaced with "System of McGuffin in the Halo Stars". Considering they will never need to navigate between two systems, it's pretty irrelevant where exactly a system is as long as the system internally behaves as the map says it should.
The other problem is the Eye of Terror. Calixis boarders Scarus, which is a bastion agaisnt incursion from the Eye.
Therefor, anywhere in the sector, the Eye would be visible to the naked eye, even from the ground, considering it's size. All a void born would have to do is look out a veiwport to realize that something is up if the Eye is really, really small and in the wrong direction.
Is it really known that the Eye of Terror is even visible from a Sector away? I don't have numbers here, but remember Douglas Adams "Space is pretty huge" explanation. To be visible from that far away, the Eye would have to be... well... large.
Well, if fluff is to be belived, it's visible to the naked eye across Segmentums Solar and Pacificus, so... yeah, a neighboring sector like Calixis has pretty good odds, considering that it's a glowing hole in reality that takes up something like a quarter to a third of the volume of segmentum obscurus, I would say it qualifies as 'large'.
That would be the point. It wouldn't be visible. I wonder if someone who's spent thier whole lives in space looking at the thing might notice it gone?
Secondly: If any of the IG books are to be belived, the chain of supply usually goes something like factory-starship-depot world - world war is taking place on - front line. However, this also seems to go out the window fairly often (Death or Glory, Caves of Ice, Duty Calls, 15 Hours, Most of the Siege of Vraks) depending on the situation.
Real life examples might be eastern Europe during WWII where occasionally the tanks were driven directly from the factory to the front. (Particularly if the front was down the street on the left.) The modern system that the US in particular uses only works because there's usually no real risk of the supply dumps being suddenly over-run by an enemy advance and it's possible to partially resupply by air. Loosing a supply column of trucks is bad. Loosing the dump they come from is a lot worse. It was one of the reasons that the US supply lines ran back to supply dumps in England for much of 1944.
Achem: the problem with 'silencing' the civilian ship captains and crews is that eventually you run out of civilian ship captains and crews. If no one that signs on with you ever comes back, word about that gets around pretty quick, too.
Well, if fluff is to be belived, it's visible to the naked eye across Segmentums Solar and Pacificus, so... yeah, a neighboring sector like Calixis has pretty good odds, considering that it's a glowing hole in reality that takes up something like a quarter to a third of the volume of segmentum obscurus, I would say it qualifies as 'large'.
That would be the point. It wouldn't be visible. I wonder if someone who's spent thier whole lives in space looking at the thing might notice it gone?
If it is indeed visible thusly (which I'm still not quite sure about - as we know, Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale ), yes, that would make a pretty huge dent in the deception.
Secondly: If any of the IG books are to be belived, the chain of supply usually goes something like factory-starship-depot world - world war is taking place on - front line. However, this also seems to go out the window fairly often (Death or Glory, Caves of Ice, Duty Calls, 15 Hours, Most of the Siege of Vraks) depending on the situation.
Real life examples might be eastern Europe during WWII where occasionally the tanks were driven directly from the factory to the front. (Particularly if the front was down the street on the left.) The modern system that the US in particular uses only works because there's usually no real risk of the supply dumps being suddenly over-run by an enemy advance and it's possible to partially resupply by air. Loosing a supply column of trucks is bad. Loosing the dump they come from is a lot worse. It was one of the reasons that the US supply lines ran back to supply dumps in England for much of 1944.
So in this case, it's quite believable that the Crusade forces would ensure their supply lines work in a way that doesn't reveal their little scheme?
Cifer said:
@MILLANDSON
Ouch... so much for my prior "It seems to be only a splinter fleet" theory for why they didn't abandon the other two arms of the Crusade in order to stomp on the 'nids.
Well, it is just a splinter fleet... just a fairly big one. They had no idea that Hive Fleet Dagon was there until over half of the Orpheus Salient had been cut off by the Shadow caused by the Hive Mind, and even then, due to the Shadow, no Astropathic messages were possible, so they didn't know what had caused communications to go down, or what was going on in general. It was only when the Deathwatch managed to slip a frigate into and back out of the affected area that word of the Tyranids reached the High Command.
The reason the Hive Fleet has caused so much damage is because of how totally unexpected it was. They basically caught the Imperium with a blitzkrieg.
Cifer said:
So in this case, it's quite believable that the Crusade forces would ensure their supply lines work in a way that doesn't reveal their little scheme?
Well... the problem is that it would work until it doesn't. If they discover a critical supply shortage of something, and rush a shipment through, the deception goes out the window because deception means nothing if you lose the war, because then your secret's out anyway.
The other problem is the volume of supplies and men we're talking about. Vast supplies require vast armies of clerks to maintain their flow. They require huge storage facilities. Ships require maintenance and supplies of their own. Troops have to be bivouced somewhere while they wait for embarkation. Remember that the hiveworld of Malfi was created simply to manage supplies for Angvin's crusade. And the more complicated you make it, the more difficult it is to keep it secret because, logically, a world like this would have to be located at every stop on the chain of supply.
This is not a secret that is likely to stay secret.
BaronIveagh said:
We have a winner! Between worlds to recolonise and 'administrative errors', hundreds of billions of Guardsmen can be conveniently put in places far from home, dead or alive.
The Administratum - who control the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy through the Departmento Munitorum - can lose planets by accident. It's not hard for them to deliberately misplace a crusade force if the situation calls for it, employing flamer-armed office of historical revision teams to clean up anything that doesn't gel with the approved version of events.
Beyond all that... it's a conspiracy. That doesn't mean it's fool-proof or unassailable, it just means that there are conspirators attempting to do something untoward. Whether it works or not is an entirely different matter...
N0-1_H3r3 said:
BaronIveagh said:
We have a winner! Between worlds to recolonise and 'administrative errors', hundreds of billions of Guardsmen can be conveniently put in places far from home, dead or alive.
The Administratum - who control the Imperial Guard and Imperial Navy through the Departmento Munitorum - can lose planets by accident. It's not hard for them to deliberately misplace a crusade force if the situation calls for it, employing flamer-armed office of historical revision teams to clean up anything that doesn't gel with the approved version of events.
Beyond all that... it's a conspiracy. That doesn't mean it's fool-proof or unassailable, it just means that there are conspirators attempting to do something untoward. Whether it works or not is an entirely different matter...
The problem with that is that too many people are involved that the administratum have no authority over. The Admech. The Space Marines. The Ecclesiarchy, The Inquisition. Rogue Traders.
Remember, folks, there are things that are too big for even the Inquisition to entirly hide. Particularly since the warp gate shows no signs of going away.
@Baron
Well... the problem is that it would work until it doesn't. If they discover a critical supply shortage of something, and rush a shipment through, the deception goes out the window because deception means nothing if you lose the war, because then your secret's out anyway.
If it's about one shipment, I don't think disappearing the specific ship in question would pose a problem. Other than that, supplies for a crusade are pretty long-term anyway - if you need something now that's available only on the other side of the Gate, you'll be waiting for a few months at least in the best case. "Rushing" something is a very relative term here.
The other problem is the volume of supplies and men we're talking about. Vast supplies require vast armies of clerks to maintain their flow. They require huge storage facilities. Ships require maintenance and supplies of their own. Troops have to be bivouced somewhere while they wait for embarkation. Remember that the hiveworld of Malfi was created simply to manage supplies for Angvin's crusade. And the more complicated you make it, the more difficult it is to keep it secret because, logically, a world like this would have to be located at every stop on the chain of supply.
I'd say the Bureaucracy is less of a problem than you think - at some point, everything turns into a number that is merely passed on. Let's just say that over here, a few years back a couple of guys in the military nearly succeeded in requisitioning a submarine. To a military base near the Alps.
Cifer said:
@MILLANDSON
Ouch... so much for my prior "It seems to be only a splinter fleet" theory for why they didn't abandon the other two arms of the Crusade in order to stomp on the 'nids.
@darknite
Yeah, there's a warp gate. But that secret isn't going to last for long against any foe that would be capable of contesting its' control. They'll take prisoners, interrogate Navigators, 'track' ships' wakes through the Warp, etc. If this was meant to be a short-lived operation capable of establishing immediate strategic dominance then sure, good move. But it's a Crusade? Those things take decades or more to complete!
Even with a Crusade, the longer you can keep the whole thing a secret the better. I daresay that while the whole thing is running, the system with that lonely warpgate is slowly made into a fortress intent on rivalling Cadia.
This means the WarMaster running the Crusade (or whoever he takes his lead from) wants to mislead a large segment of the Imperium who are actively backing it. On the face of it this seems absurd. Eventually the secret will get out and when that happens the reason for it's purpose had better be good. Remember, in a feudal society trust is paramount. The 'king' (High Lords of Terra) can't run everything, they depend on their vassals to act in their interest. The vassals in turn expect to not be boned by their leige. Civil wars start this way.
Hopefully, when that secret gets out the Crusade will already be near its end and able to continue with local ressources.
Cifer said:
Yeah, there's a warp gate. But that secret isn't going to last for long against any foe that would be capable of contesting its' control. They'll take prisoners, interrogate Navigators, 'track' ships' wakes through the Warp, etc. If this was meant to be a short-lived operation capable of establishing immediate strategic dominance then sure, good move. But it's a Crusade? Those things take decades or more to complete!
Even with a Crusade, the longer you can keep the whole thing a secret the better. I daresay that while the whole thing is running, the system with that lonely warpgate is slowly made into a fortress intent on rivalling Cadia.
Any enemy capable of interdicting the Warp Gate will likely be aware of the incursion of the Crusade shortly after it begins. They will quickly attempt to determine the avenues of Imperial encroachment and the lanes of logistical support. Even from just questioning prisoners they will very quickly come to a few conclusions...
Any opposing intelligence organization worth it's salt will figure out what's up very quickly. This doesn't even count methods of analyzing Imperial movement patterns, naval scouting and the like. We're talking days or weeks to get a basic understanding of what was going on - ie there's a Warp Gate.
The real secret won't be if there's a Warp Gate. It will be where is the Warp Gate. Establishing an easily-breakable cover story to confuse your enemies does nothing to safeguard that info. The vast majority of folks wouldn't have that information, anyway. So why even employ such a dull deception technique?
MILLANDSON said:
Cifer said:
@MILLANDSON
Ouch... so much for my prior "It seems to be only a splinter fleet" theory for why they didn't abandon the other two arms of the Crusade in order to stomp on the 'nids.
Well, it is just a splinter fleet... just a fairly big one. They had no idea that Hive Fleet Dagon was there until over half of the Orpheus Salient had been cut off by the Shadow caused by the Hive Mind, and even then, due to the Shadow, no Astropathic messages were possible, so they didn't know what had caused communications to go down, or what was going on in general. It was only when the Deathwatch managed to slip a frigate into and back out of the affected area that word of the Tyranids reached the High Command.
The reason the Hive Fleet has caused so much damage is because of how totally unexpected it was. They basically caught the Imperium with a blitzkrieg.
So what enemies was the Crusade originally fighting on that salient before the Hive Fleet bumrush caught them flatfooted?
Cifer said:
@Baron
Well... the problem is that it would work until it doesn't. If they discover a critical supply shortage of something, and rush a shipment through, the deception goes out the window because deception means nothing if you lose the war, because then your secret's out anyway.
If it's about one shipment, I don't think disappearing the specific ship in question would pose a problem. Other than that, supplies for a crusade are pretty long-term anyway - if you need something now that's available only on the other side of the Gate, you'll be waiting for a few months at least in the best case. "Rushing" something is a very relative term here.
The other problem is the volume of supplies and men we're talking about. Vast supplies require vast armies of clerks to maintain their flow. They require huge storage facilities. Ships require maintenance and supplies of their own. Troops have to be bivouced somewhere while they wait for embarkation. Remember that the hiveworld of Malfi was created simply to manage supplies for Angvin's crusade. And the more complicated you make it, the more difficult it is to keep it secret because, logically, a world like this would have to be located at every stop on the chain of supply.
I'd say the Bureaucracy is less of a problem than you think - at some point, everything turns into a number that is merely passed on. Let's just say that over here, a few years back a couple of guys in the military nearly succeeded in requisitioning a submarine. To a military base near the Alps.
Yes, but we're not changing all those masses of material to numbers and transmitting them through the warp to thier destination. There still has to be storage and maintenence and the people to move the supplies and a million other things that keep an army in the field. If you're feeding, clothing, and otherwise supplying 11 billion people, before you even get into support staff, you're looking at a supply dump of planetary proportions, or larger. And you're going to want those supplies to make as few stops as possible. Having seen the waste and supply shortfalls that can effect a 'mere' 50,000 men, the size of the problems with 11billion would be staggering.
The Infantryman's Uplifting primer has a cute thing about aquiring local supplies: The problem with this is that the planets they land on are unlikly to have the sort of vast stores of supplies that such a force would require. Food alone would be a nightmare. Never mind spare parts, fuel, and ammunition, which even 'small' armies burn through at a staggering pace.
GalagaGalaxian said:
So what enemies was the Crusade originally fighting on that salient before the Hive Fleet bumrush caught them flatfooted?
Your typical rebellious planets that had thrown the Imperial Creed and the thought of being part of the Imperium aside during the millenium of the Imperium not controlling the Jericho Reach, basically forcing planets into compliance. They did so well that Orpheus penetrated further into Jericho than any other Salient, to the point where they were having such an "easy" time of it that Crusade Command had started pulling forces away from Orpheus to reinforce the Acheros Salient that was having trouble against the Chaos held "Cellebos Warzone" because it was deemed that the Orpheus Salient "didn't need them".
Because of that, Orpheus didn't have the forces needed to even start to defend against the Tyranids, as they were spread too thin. Basically, the Tyranids caught them whilst they were complacent and with their trousers down, and promptly bent them over a table and did horrible Tyranid things to them, the likes of which you have only ever seen in X-Rated Japanese Anime.
@Baron: As for your problem with it, some of the first worlds for the Crusade to capture were the Forge Worlds, Agri-Worlds, etc, that would be required to keep the Crusade going. Not all of the supplies are coming through the Warp Gate. The majority of the "supplies" that are coming through the Warp Gate are the men to replace dead Guardsmen.
Also, you are assuming that the ships being used to ferry troops and supplies through the Warp Gate aren't Navy owned vessels, and don't let their crews off the ship whilst in Calixis/Scarus/Ixaniad, just to make sure that as few people who might know the truth are able to be in a position to tell anyone else as possible.
MILLANDSON said:
@Baron: As for your problem with it, some of the first worlds for the Crusade to capture were the Forge Worlds, Agri-Worlds, etc, that would be required to keep the Crusade going. Not all of the supplies are coming through the Warp Gate. The majority of the "supplies" that are coming through the Warp Gate are the men to replace dead Guardsmen.
Also, you are assuming that the ships being used to ferry troops and supplies through the Warp Gate aren't Navy owned vessels, and don't let their crews off the ship whilst in Calixis/Scarus/Ixaniad, just to make sure that as few people who might know the truth are able to be in a position to tell anyone else as possible.
Eh, the problem with that is time. It takes centuries (Phobos Wrought in Adamant, Caves of Ice) of time and hundereds of billions of thrones (Caves of Ice) to bring a large scale production facility, such as a forge world, up to an acceptable level of production (longer if it was in the hands of chaos due to the need to cleanse and rebuild extensively). Agriworlds are both better and worse. Better, in that production might take only a few years to get back to capacity, worse in that thier inferstructure would collapse much, much more rapidly, and much more completely and therefor be in a much grater state of disrepair.
This gets even worse trying to ship product off of them: stations and orbitals will have been heavilly damaged in the fighting, Dock facilities in particular might not recover for centuries (given the rate that 40k seems to build things like that).
Throw in that facilities would not have only suffered from neglect, but from battle damage, and there's no way that you're going to support a huge invasion on what meager production output you can muster from them.
As far as shipping it in by Navy... well, sure.. if you have thousands of ships to use, I suppose that works. But the problem is that if they only have the numbers that you claimed they do over in the RT forum when this issue was discussed before, they're going to be hiring every ship they can lay their hands on. Worse, you're going to have to send back damaged ships to the Calixis Sector to undergo repairs.