Added a couple entries to the "Great Quotes from the Wrong Joes" threadmark. XD
Unsurprisingly, there's some folks following the ongoing 30k interlude on Fiction.Live who are butthurt over the Great Crusade-era Space Marines
not being all auto-win and immediately able to see through the Joes' mind games.
Question will you post the 30k what if on sufficient velocity?
Yes.
He'll probably do it when it's actually complete.
Though, speaking of said what if,
@sun tzu how will you handle that small number of alien species that actually DOES hit that combination of "powerful enough to pose a threat to humanity as a whole, galaxy-wide" and "unavoidably, inherently hostile to humanity" that the Imperium propagandizes most aliens to be, like the Ullanor Orks and Slaught/Rangdan?
I ran into arguments that ridiculed the idea that the Great Crusade wasn't neccessary on the basis of them existing and the Imperium being "needed" to counter them, you see; and I'd like some kind of refutation of that.
Let's consider the math, shall we?
Say the Great Crusade starts out with a military strength of GC. Obviously, this number is massively abstracting a whole lot of things, but WH40K lore wasn't written by folks who juggle Excel sheets for fun.
Now, let us consider a minor human nation that stands in the path of the Great Crusade. Say that the Great Crusade chooses to conquer this nation. This will not happen bloodlessly; losses will occur on both sides, so after this is done, the Great Crusade's military power will become GC - L, for some given value of L. But then, forces will be recruited from this nation, and the Great Crusade's military power becomes GC - L + R.
If GC - L + R is
greater than GC, that implies that the military power this conquered nation can contribute
after the Imperium mopped the floor with it is greater than the losses the Imperium suffered while fighting it. I'm sure you see the problem here. If the nation was so weak that the Imperium took minuscule losses conquering it, it likely won't be able to contribute much military strength once it's conquered; if it has enough military strength to contribute a lot (even
after deducing all the losses it suffered fighting the invasion), then the Imperium will have suffered significant casualties conquering it.
This doesn't mean that L
has to be greater than R. For starters, the Great Crusade has the superb spec ops forces that are the Astartes, and if you have them start the conflict by taking military and political leaders hostage, it's
possible you can get recalcitrant worlds to surrender to you with minimal fighting and losses. But of the million(s?) of worlds conquered by the Great Crusade, how many actually saw a Space Marine?
The other argument in favor of R being greater than L is that, once you've conquered a planet, it'll keep providing troops for decades and centuries, so it has the time to recover from the conquest so R grows,
and there's time for the L to be recouped... but that in itself assumes your strategy allows you the leisure of time. If you're in a
hurry to, say, stave off a snowballing Ork empire, that's a
stupid approach.
And then, you have to factor in two more complications:
The first is that once you've conquered a world by force, you need to
keep it under your heel. Which means leaving a garrison as an occupying force. So you don't even get GC - L + R, you get GC - L + R - G, where G is the garrison and needs to be particularly large if the world it's occupying is particularly strong (meaning, the bigger the R, the bigger the G).
The second is that once the Great Crusade has conquered a world, its technology now falls under the purview of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Are you going to tell Mars
not to purge all the non-AdMech technicians, scientists and engineers? Because if this purge happens, R is going to be severely reduced for decades to come.
And do note that this is all under the assumption that we're talking about a
human world. If the Great Crusade is forcibly vassalizing a minor xeno world, the calculus can get even harsher - unless they're recruiting xeno auxiliaries for the crusade, they're ending with R much closer to zero, since the vassal they shed blood to conquer is limited to strictly material contributions to the war effort, not actual troops (and since you're not taking away their troops, you need an even stronger occupation garrison!).
So, to make a long story short ("Too late!", called the cast of
Clue), conquering worlds by force leaves the Great Crusade militarily weaker for at least a few decades. If your goal is to amass power, then that's fine. But if your goal is to protect the galaxy from the Orks, Rangdan, Slaught, and so on... then the smart thing to do is to rely on diplomacy to bring in what worlds you can, restrict military conquest to a tiny minority of worlds (those you
positively need for war logistics, those where the local authorities are so hated you'll
actually be welcome as liberators, and low-hanging fruits where local factors make conquest easy despite significant future returns), and thus keep the GC as high as possible so you can
concentrate your military power on the enemies that are impossible to negotiate with.
