I do have a fluff question.

How does the Imperial Guard (Navy actually) land a descent amount of troops quickly. The Halo Barge can only carry 50, one would need hundreds.
The cover of the new Imperial guard Codex does show us a regimental size drop ship but there is very little fluff discussing it.

Answers?

Devourer Dropships and Tetrarch landers.

The former can carry a few companies, and the latter a regiment or more. Tetrarchs are the huge landers in the IG codex cover (probably).

I'm not actually sure how big devourers are, if their mothership (the cetecean) is comparable in size to the battle barge (which it is compared to) then each devourer should be bigger than the frigate and will likely be able to carry several tens of thousands of men. This is sort of unlikely as the devourer has only a few TL lascannons for armament.

These are for contested landings, once the guard has a beachhead large enough to make a hole in anti-starship weapons emplacements they can just land the landers and have the troops walk off.

Hope this helps.

The Cain novels often had the Guard requisition civilian freighters which of course had the same problem (you can't easily land a voidship). The landers used are capable of transporting a company.

I think they also mentioned, in one of the Rogue Trader suppliments, that some ships can emit a grav field of some kind. A tempermental piece of technology. The ship enters the atmosphere and the regiments jump. Sort of like giving everything a grav chute. You just hope that it doesn't flicker at the wrong time.

I see most planetary assaults starting with drop troopers, or regular infantry (temporarily equiped so), forming an initial beachhead so the Dropships could land. And then the transports would start landing.

If their is a defence laser you land out of range and then go get it.

Just my perception.

SomVone said:

Where did you get the information on these vessels? I've honestly never seen it never seen it!

BTW: @ Tygre: The Grav cone appears in both "Planetstrike" and "Warhammer 40k Epic" rules. You are correct in it's function.

In BFG: Standard transports and escorts were all capable of landing. I believe that during the attack on Istvan IV the World Eaters landed their transport directly on the battlefield! In the Videogame "Space Marine" starts with an Orcish Voidship operating in the lower atmosphere and destroying imperial transports as they attempt to land. I believe certain "true Voidships" could be designed to land and deliver heavy cargo (Similar in concept to the LST's (Landing Ship Tank) of WWII through the 80's. Before they could land though smaller transports would need to create "Beachheads" to allow their safe approach. (A Warp capble Voidship is not something you generally risk in a "Hot" landing zone.)

Tetarch imperiallanders appear in the Tacita Imperialis book, it even has a picture! I think the others come from an old Inferno series about the blood angels. Heavy Landers without much description appear in lots of sources and certainly give the impression that Imperial Landers are designed to be to big to stop, with lots of weapons and supported by orbital strikes around the landing zone. The size of dropships that even a civlian freighter would require to load and unload cargo mean that landing companies of men would be quite easy.

I remember that in one of the "Gaunt's Ghosts" series they dealt with a vehicle called the "Pegasus heavy lander" The description brought to mind something like a void (or at least orbit) capable C-130 or C-5. A craft of this size could easily deliver a company of infantry or maybe even a tank sguadron! I do remember that one relief flight from one of these was sufficient to resupply the Ghosts in combat. On the downside, The Pegasus had to have a Valkyrie escort since it was essentially unarmed.

There's been a bunch of discussion about the venerable Halo Barge on the RT forums. In fact, here's the thread I started: javascript:void(0);/*1334623873397*/

Larkin said:

Good point! I remember reading that one a while ago. It is worth reading for those not familiar with it.

This is an interesting question. As mentioned above, it’s been dealt with on the RT forums a few times, but it makes sense to cover it here properly, too.

Imperial Guard Landers in the 40k Canon

The first dropship/lander in the canon featured in Codex Titanicus, the supplement for Adeptus Titanicus. It came out in around 1990 or so. It was called the Thunderbolt Dropship. The same name was later used for the Imperial Navy fighter, so this suggests that the lander is probably difficult to resurrect in the modern canon. Here is a picture of it. I think it shares certain design cues with the Capitol Imperialis miniature of the same era. There was also a template for it, which I now can't find.... Here is an image which featured on Bob Naismith’s website some time ago which shows an attempt to make a model of one. The rules stated it could carry 8 stands of infantry. Armoured vehicles counted as two stands. In Epic scale that’s 40 men.

The second was a vehicle that I completely missed at the time: a limited edition dropship/lander miniature described as “Space Marine dropship.” Here is an image , and here is a picture from a citadel catalogue of the time . I’m including it here because it (in my view) seems to fit the Imperial Guard better than it does the Marines. The Astartes of course have since developed their own line of dropships/landers, and this doesn’t fit in with their “look.” I like its ramshackle, almost “Orky” appearance, and the ribbed structure seems to link to the Chaos fleets of Battlefleet Gothic. To me, this suggests a truly ancient, Crusade-era ship/design that has been used and re-patched for millennia. This “battered” image suits the Imperial Guard very well! (Even though it would probably actually be operated by the Navy.) I’ve never seen any rules for it, so it’s hard to tell how many men it could carry. At a guess, I’d say it may have been intended to carry the same numbers as the Thunderbolt Dropship, perhaps a little more – maybe at most a company of infantry.

Then we have the Devourer Class dropship, which featured in the Inferno comic in the mid ‘90s. An unusual design, it stacked into groups of nine aboard a transport and was then released from orbit. It’s a neat design, but I haven’t seen it feature again in the canon. The Devourer seems to be able to carry an entire company of armoured troops

We then have the Dan Abnett “Guncutter,” described as a large and heavily armed combat shuttle. These feature in the 40kRPG in “Into the Storm.” They are described in terms that suggest they are not used for the transportation of large numbers of troops: rather they are combat and transport vessels for the Imperial elite – Rogue Traders and Inquisitors. The combat capabilities of these vessels put them on a par with Thunderhawk Gunships, and indeed in the only “official” image of one from 40k, in Into the Storm, they closely resemble one. Personally, I really like the fan made images put together by CELS , a contributor to the Anargo Sector Project, who has drawn some genuinely excellent versions of these ships. One imagines that the Imperial Guard doesn’t see too many of these.

As has already been pointed out we then also have mention of the Pegasus Heavy Lander in Dan Abnett books. At the time, I read this as being a flyer, like the Valkyrie, not an orbital insertion craft, but the fact it’s called a “Lander” links it to the Aquila Lander, suggesting some sort of shuttlecraft. I’ve not seen any images of this, and don’t have any real idea of its capabilities. Perhaps Forge World will step in and cover this craft?

Speaking of Forge World, we then turn to their contributions to the canon. There are a couple of ships they’ve produced which have been used by the guard. The first is the Arvus Lighter , a tiny shuttlecraft that from the look of it would only have the transport capacity of a long wheelbase transit van. These have been used by the Guard in the most recent Gaunt’s Ghosts novel to attack an orbital station. These are probably not used for the insertion of large numbers of Guard troops to a planet’s surface though as they’re far too small.

Then we have the Aquila Lander , a smart shuttle for the transportation of VIPs. I seem to recall that in the Taros campaign a story was spread that a senior guard officer had been killed in an Aquila crash, suggesting that it’s used for the transportation of Imperial Guard high command on a regular basis.

Then we have the Tetrarch Heavy Lander , which features in Tactica Imperialis. This seems to resemble the Space Marine Lander, in that it is a heavily armed, turreted and presumably heavily armoured transport. Here’s a picture.

We also have the “Halo Barge” from Rogue Trader, a medium sized transport/shuttlecraft. These feature in “Into the Storm” as well. There are no images of them, but I have always pictured them as oversized Arvus Lighters, perhaps “stretched” quite a bit. These are described as unarmed an unarmoured transport vessels.

Finally, we have the vast, unnamed vessels shown on the cover of the latest Imperial Guard Codex . Whatever this is, it’s clearly huge. It would appear to be disgorging an entire regiment, which makes it larger than anything else mentioned so far. One can speculate that it is a warp-capable transport vessel that has landed on a planet’s surface, but I actually prefer the idea that it is a specialist ship used just for the purpose of landing entire regiments at a time!

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of it, but maybe someone else here will. If anyone has played Dawn of War games, for the PC, they show a method of getting tanks and structures in. Space Marines deploy their heavies with drop pods (Marines, Termies, and Dreadnoughts,while their actual tanks (Predators, Rhinos, and Land Raiders) are dropped off by a flyby Thunderhawk. For the Guard, they have a similar craft, though obviously a different one, that swoops in, and deposits your tanks, crated up, into your Machine Shop, where tech-Priests then unpack it, and send a Leman Russ, or even a Baneblade, on its way. As the Guard always gets described as being a slow, laborious deployment process, often mired down by miles of logistical difficulties and red tape, I could easily see them sometimes deploy their tanks one at a time, carried in slung under from the Cruiser by an atmospheric void craft, sheathed in a heat-resistant pressure case, which is discarded after landing, allowing the tank to do its stuff, while the casing is recovered by lower-ranked Tech-Priests, with their powerful servo-arms, and loader Sentinels. If they actually win the engagement, and their tanks actually leave the planet, again, the TPs could crate the tank back up, the lander could swoop in, hook up, and carry it back into orbit, and, once loaded on the Navy cruiser (since the Guard are forbidden from having real space craft), be warp-jumped back to the next war zone. I, for one, would possibly rather the slow deployment (the rest of the battle will take years; why should this be any faster?), rather than risk my big transport getting shot down, wrecking, and destroying 10 Leman Russ tanks, with their crews, and having to figure out what to do now.

For large groups of guys, yeah, any of the above ships should be able to ferry them down in okay numbers, to allow them to safe hold an area, likely after a preliminary orbital bombardment; the IG isn't known for subtle arrivals, anymore than for speedy ones. Then the landers could drop off several prefab structures, in much the same way as a tank would be dropped in, or the structure could be grav-chuted in, like in DoW, and the Guard could, relatively quickly, have a base of operations for their planetary missions.

Another craft I havn't seen mentioned is the "Shark" assault boat detailed in Battlefleet koronus. These craft hold some fifty troops and operate in squadrons of eight. This means that a squadron of these craft could deliver and entire company of infantry! These craft bring to mind the old "Mike boat" style landing craft of WWII. I think these would give the same "Saving private Ryan" type feel for when a IG unit first assaults a world! In the old "Dawn of war: winter assault" game the IG Shark assault boat could even deliver one or two light tanks (Chimera or Hellhound) to the field!

When it comes to 40k, it really is important not to think to deeply about logic and the fluff. You can tell that the writers, by and large, have zero Military experiance. These are the same people that will talk about a world being garrisoned by this or that Regiment. So, an entire planet being guarded by about...being generous, 3000 troops. The pure size and scale of a planetary invasion would be astronomical.

The thing about planatary assullt is you can land anywhere once you have suppressed the defenses so If I was invading this world my landins for the US would be Around the same area as Edmonton canada as there are bugger all defences there.

Having said that for planater invasion you need

1. Grav chute for taking the LZ. Interdicting enamy reinforcment lanes E.G Peguse Bridge
2. First wave assault landers Platoon 1 tank size
3. 2nd wave company/Tank platton Artillery sized
4. 3rd wave is the heavy landers entire regts start of the second line units

which Book have the Void Ship component Y'all talk about?

Cjalw1 said:

As earlier pointed out, I was wrong, the Gravity Cone is not in any Rogue Trader book. The Gravity Cone was mentioned in the 40K supplement Planet Strike, so there is currently no rules for it.

I think that when you read about a single IG Regiment garrisoning a planet, it is important to remember that it is in addition to the PDF regiments.

Baradiel said:

"Regiment" in the Imperial Guard context, has no fixed size or specific definition, and there are multiple contradictory sources on the matter to further complicate things. The 2nd Edition Imperial Guard codex, for example, defined a Regiment as being all the Guardsmen raised from a single world during a single muster... which, given that such musters basically took the top 10% of all fighting men (and anything else needed to make up any shortfall), means that by that definition a single Regiment could be composed of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Guardsmen.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Yeah, I realize that. That is just another reason I skim over those parts of the fluff. I have a feeling the real explaination is that one of the writers just threw the term out there, then someone pointed out that flaw, and they just rewrote the fluff to mean that.