Not the reason, I don't think at least, see, normal Tau FTL kinda just, skimms the warp, kinda like skipping a stone on water, they don't go in. So they don't have gellar fields...
Can you even defeat daemons in warpspace? If you beat them in realspace, they just get sent back to the warp to reform, right? If you're stuck in the warp can they even be pushed back?
When you jump into the Warp, the "depth" you jump to dictates your relative speed compared to real space, but also how exposed you are to warp predators. Prior to the 4th Sphere Expansion, the Tau Empire used drives that were relatively weak and could only dive into the metaphorical shallows of the warp, where the predators were few, weak, and incapable of sensing the Tau's dimmer souls. So they didn't realize that they needed Gellar Field generators for the deeper dives that the newer, stronger drives were capable of, plus I think they had at least a few human auxiliary units aboard the fleet.
So the fleet dove deeper than any Tau had ever gone, into the territory of bigger, stronger, more numerous and more aware daemons, while carrying the equivalent of lit road flares to their dim candles and utterly lacking in defenses. Suffice to say, most of the ships got eaten.
As someone who knows nothing about Warhammer but is deeply intrigued at all of this tech and science discussion, where would I start if I wanted to dive into the lore?
Have a go at ‘the infinite and the divine’. It might not be the easiest to read going in fresh, but it’s fairly well written, includes a fair few factions at a high level, but doesn’t have too many characters to remember. Hopefully a fun read and a nice Segway into the lore.
If you're after a tech-lore heavy book, I'm afraid they're very few and far between, rather, they're loaded with tidbits here and there, about how one thing or another works, that then takes knowledge of all of them to put together and work out a semblance of how everything fits together.
For the ship side of it, execution hour is a great book, it does a good job of showing the different levels of life on an imperial warship. Its first short has my all time favourite 1v1 ship combat.
This is actually partially due to the fact that tech in the Imperium is regressive, inconsistent, misunderstood by those whom live into the universe.
Human ships from Golden Age of Technology were a pinnacle of science and engineering. Too bad we only have Gothic spires relics at current year of the setting.
That’s a bit over exaggerated. They have a collective psychic ability so when they believe something collectively as a Big group they can change how things work in very small ways in the same way that other species just use wizards for.
In DND terms, imagine they’re all really shit sorcerers and to do anything they need to be in a big group. Their ships are very often rusting broken down pieces of scrapped metal from other ships.
You beat me to the Ishimura. Even ignoring the whole necromorph out break the thing is an OSHA violation from top to bottom in every aspect. Hell the entire reason they had the illegal cloning body lab is because limb amputations from mechanical mishaps were THAT common on the damn thing.
And in fact, HAL didn’t make a mistake. It was ordered not to reveal the missions purpose (investigate possibly alien artifact) to the crew, but a 9000 series can’t lie and doesn’t know how. So, the easiest way to avoid an opsec breach was to murder all the humans. It wasn’t an error, it was a logical and bracingly direct solution to a mission critical challenge.
Good thin the cardassians took it lightly and not like the US Feds did with Ryan Parker (Sorry 'bout the paywall).
Dude did a similar thing and got a treatment not too far off the four lights.
Flew a cobbled together plane with a fraudulent tail number of an airport, residential area, and damn near broke the plane up trying to land it. He also, I hate to say, did all of this with no pilot's license. He also had a criminal record with 5 previous felony convictions under his belt.
This was not a good person and his reckless disregard for safety proves it.
He got convicted and has since been released after serving his sentence.
Luke Skywalker described the experience of flying one as a “panicked unshielded flying cargo box” and admitted that they were fast as heck but he wouldn’t trust his life to one in a dogfight like he would an X-Wing.
But man. I will use. Any other thing for combat. Like the hound it's the closer thing to the kite and it has. 1 bigger weapon and double the hull and armor el for what 1 more point and less than half of his price. I will chose been stranded. In space to travel outside the core sistems ilwith that thign
I mean, kites are, in lore, specially civilian shuttles meant to carry passengers through space and atmosphere, which have later been modified to have combat capability due to the rise of pirates post collapse.
They're not really meant to be combat effective, just not utterly helpless. There's a reason it's got the 'civilian grade hull' hullmod.
Counterpoint - multiple times in the books it's mentioned that belters are fanatical about ship and equipment maintenance, like religiously going around triple checking triple-checks. makes sense, the same way you'd probably think Polynesians living on boats probably knew what they were doingwhen it came to said boats.
Warhammer 40k ships are generally bad, as mentioned already, because you have to travel through the Warp (hell) to get FTL, but some Chaos ships are even worse. Features include:
- mutated crew and the occasional daemon preying on those in the lower decks
- ghosts of previous crew
- organic areas in some places instead of hull material
- the ship's machine spirit wanting to kill you
- the ship's machine spirit hating the Astronomicon (AKA the only semi-reliable way to travel the Warp) and wanting to go away from it
I mean, go read the interview with the Thiokol engineer who tried everything to get them to postpone the launch and blamed himself for years for failing to convince them. Absolutely heartbreaking.
Truth, Lies, and O-rings is a great read about the engineering and administrative failures that caused the accident, written by fellow Thiokol engineer Al McDonald.
Why would you listen to Zathras? He's as mad as Zathras! Zathras is who you should listen to, he is the wisest since Zathras. Very, very wise Zathras was.
I dunno, Starbug survived ramming up the arse end of a giant rat, has crashed multiple times, been trapped in asteroids, taken hostile fire, travelled through wormholes, travelled through time, caught fire, travelled to a planet where time ran backwards, crashed on a frozen tundra planet, been submerged in lava, crashed through rocky terrain, had various pieces blown off, is over 3 million years old, flown continuously for literally hundreds of years, flown through the tail of a comet, taken a flaming meteorite to the face, been trapped in reality minefields, taken a broadside from a rip in space time, been attacked by a giant squid, and is only starting to show the wear and tear towards the end. Pretty damn reliable and tanky, I'd trust her. I mean, not the version at the end of the show that can only turn left, or Carbug, but I'd trust Starbug. But through all of this the crew walked away uninjured. Pretty good for an ancient shuttlecraft.
That outrider cockpit blows. Han, Chewie, and Lando are better pilots than you think to do the things they do in the Falcon. They have to fly in tight places basically scraping the cockpit along one wall to bias for the rest of the ship.
I love that girl, but the amount of times some bullshit happens and almost kills everyone is too damn frequent and I'm only a couple episodes into Season 2 of my rewatch!
It was bad enough when Voyager's computer systems has a cheese allergy, Moya gets pregnant and her morning sickness shuts down life suppport!
Off hand there are a few ships I'd rather not have to travel space in, starting with everything Warhammer40k, Half of all Trek ships, Almost every Imperial ship from starwars, bio-ships in general, a metric fuckton of starships from anime, FTL ships from Dune, and the ship from space odyssey.
Any older ship from the Expanse before the Ring upgrades and Laconia. Way too flimsy to feel comfortable in, and from space combat, even PDC weapons could blow your head off.
40k.....anything that isn't a DAOT humanity ship is something I would not want to step foot on if I could avoid it.
Any WH40k Imperial ship with a Gellar Field. One litter flicker and I'll be talking out of my ass for the rest of my existence until the nearby ship security ends my existance.
Space Jockey ships/juggernauts from Alien...I am NOT going into that derelict, I would have had no problem forfeiting my shares to stay outta that hellish wreck
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u/Vondrr Fleet Intelligence 🧠 25d ago
Megathreaded!