Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Movement is very important for traders and commerce in general.
-
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The Long Night Part One: Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) Complete Sequel Up
- Thread starter Durin
- Start date
- Location
- Australia
It's important for a whole crapload of people and things. It's too general. I'd recommend looking at Handrich's divine spells in Tome of Salvation to get some ideas for trade god blessings.
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Pretty sure we will need to upgrade them with our tech in mind, but I also get the feeling that will be a Vanaheim action (they're the experts).
Why do we want to buy the alloy? It's kinda for Astartes.
Battlebarges are made for planetary assaults. Avernus main speciality is planetary assaults.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
Well they're made to get astartes onto a planet.
That they're good at planetary assault is more of a pleasant coincidence.
In general I think we're not the best people to have them, but I'm not really coherent enough to argue the point.
Battle barges rely on boarding parties. Avernus has the best mass produced soldiers and we also can use the bombardment cannons to even greater effect in planetary bombardment.
- Location
- madison
I think the vangrin guard should certainly get first dibs on the super dens alloy, but we may look into getting some ourselves since we do kind of fulfill a similar role as the vangrin guard.
sabreFather
Dr Pepper is the flavour that I savour
- Location
- Land of Bears and Loggers AKA Oregon
Would definitely want to see if we could incorporate the Super Dense Emperor Alloy to our Transatmospheric space craft. Landers and the Descent especially. Very good benefits if we can, as it increases their survival and utility so much. Ah shit, and also for our FLYING FORTRESSES which we have not actually made. And I just realized, I don't think we mentioned those for close to half a year...
avatar11792
Et Sic Incipit
- Location
- Planet Earth, North America
...I wonder if the Space Marines would be interested in us making our own version of a Battlebarge? I mean, we have the DAOT tech to make it, and they could supply us with the necessary schematics for a starting point. I mean, DAOT tech-enhanced Battlebarges, they'd probably love them. Right?
We could make two variants, one specifically designed for optimal use by SPACE MARINES!, and the other by Avernites/technically normal humans (no matter how tweaked and badass we get). This way the Trust could also possibly purchase some if they prove useful enough.
We could make two variants, one specifically designed for optimal use by SPACE MARINES!, and the other by Avernites/technically normal humans (no matter how tweaked and badass we get). This way the Trust could also possibly purchase some if they prove useful enough.
Doomed Wombat
Let's go Darling!
- Location
- Dancing on wires!
We know it needs to be upgraded, but I'm pretty sure it'll be Vanaheim's job to do. They're meant to be the experts after all.
RogueInquisitor
Unexpected!
The only difference between the two would likely be that the Space Marine version would include Drop Pods. Otherwise, they both need to carry and deploy large numbers of power-armored elite troops into contested areas, so the designs should be pretty similar.
Yeah but Vanaheim upgrading something... yeah I do not see that happening. The conservatives have not been too progressive with updating new designs. Other wise the backlog of ship designs we have would have at least gone down by now.
You have a point, but don't forget that Vanaheim will be making the Battle Barges for the Adeptus Astartes. It would be spectacularly damaging to the Conservatives if Chapter Master Julies has to ask them to explain why his ships are objectively inferior to what the Progressives could make him.
Xenos species- Seiche
- Location
- Toronto, Ontario(occasionally)
@Durin more Xenos appear. Mostly because I think fighting them would be easier on us than fighting Chaos, so I'll keep creating species that have a fighting chance out here.
To the thread, I'm working on three(ish) Omakes, one that involves a certain amount of physics research and fills out exactly how certain pieces of tech function, one that I am remaking that involves a lot of writing and an attempt to tranpose the classic Hero's journey into a deep cavern expedition and backstory, and one about another Xenos species that is kind of invasion of the body snatchers(Yeerks copied from Animorphs). Do you have any preferences?
Edit:advice on editing this is welcome.
Before anyone calls me on making them too powerful, A. They need to be powerful to survive out here, B. Here's the list of tech they have that the Imperium didn't, or at least didn't deploy widely enough to really be considered a part of their tech base: fairly bullshit magnetic technology, a small number of electroweak force reactors for super weapons/dreadnoughts/etc, better automation and distributed computing(techheresy), better servitors(actually their cybernetics are worse, but they don't obsess over using people for the biological parts and as such can gene engineer the biological bits), a couple of things that are easier to make with better magnetic tech, and a number of advantages in psykery(biological, mental, and cultural quirks), to make up for these advantages they had some areas where they lag behind in tech, but have probably caught up to the Imperial standard after the fall of the empire.
Xenos species- Seiche,
report last updated late M44, original source Rogue Trader Carlious Titus Saturn,*
The imperial sectors are, as often as not separated by vast gulfs of space, uninhabited by anything but Orks, strange and unique Xenos, and untold horrors. With the proportion of non-Imperial planets to Imperial ones favoring non-imperial by several thousand to one** that is a lot of horrors. It is the job of Rogue Traders to go out into these unknown reaches, explore, and exploit the heck out of them. With the Emperor's guidance our travel speed is so far superior that we are able to outcompete the shipping efforts of many xenos without using more than a fraction of their number of ships.
I am writing to elucidate my opinions on some of these things I have found in my travels inbetween recognizable patches of civilisation.
The Seiche are as unusual to human sensibilities as any other type of Xenos, but as my job frequently requires developing at least some understanding of the bizarre creatures I can only be thankful that they are more comprehensible than some.
They take the form of large squid-like amphibious creatures, possessed of an endoskeleton, omnivorous diet, trilateral symmetry, and the means to move about on land by both slithering and dragging themselves forward.
The Seiche are thought to have developed on a heavy world with formidable natural threats, and as such possess some similarities to Ogryns in their impressive senses and strength, and the size than facilitates it, and their somewhat primal and instinctive reaction to threats, alongside natural weapons suited to such an environment such as the three 'claws' tipping their three primary tentacles that they can use to strike at, and draw in, any threat.
Their technological expertise appears to be focused on electromagnetism, they appear to have discovered some way to actually store a standing electromagnetic field in empty space, then become excessively fascinated with ll possible applications of the electromagnetic branch of physics.
Notably their combatants use several varieties of electromagnetic accelerator, from armour piercing projectile launchers, to variable width and geometry flechette sprays.
These Xenos are also known to use haywire weaponry, particle beam weaponry, lightning arc weaponry not entirely dissimilar to the Adeptus Mechanicus counterpart, fusion weapons comparable in effect to our own plasma guns, and exotic types of grenade, including EMP, area Lightning, and magnetically propelled flechette or fragmentation outputs.
A notable area denial weapon in their infantry arsenal are submunitions that can adjust their position relative to one another and relative to their 'field launcher spikes' driven into the ground and used as both off-munition cogitator processing and push plates for the terrifying little flying blade swarms, these are often deployed in a similar role as, and in addition to minefields and razor wire.
I have been able to find evidence of more advanced submunitions swarm variants known as 'buzzers', that are mobile under their own power, more damaging, apparently unlimited by any easily struck control network needed to support their operation, and legendary for their ability to find the seams and weaknesses in armour, before tearing into them with the force of a chain sword and rushing in the gap to get at the weaker fleshy bits inside.
It is known that the Seiche occasionally deploy elite troops equipped to a far higher standard than their normal forces. This is believed to be for societal and logistical reasons that will be discussed later, this section is devoted to their armament. They appear to attempt to utilize some variant of armoured infantry mobility and combat platform, but at their size it is honestly more akin fighting sentinels mounted on a cluster of tentacle legs than like fighting power armoured foes, and as such they are easily targeted with anti-vehicle weapons, these forces are deployed with significantly superior weapons and accompanied by superior ships when compared to what their equivalent to PDF or sector forces have at their disposal, and are essentially the only portions of their forces deployed with their psykers. Of note is that unlike elite human forces such as the Space Marines, Myrmidons and Skitarii, who focus on enhancing their soldiers to produce better fighters I have only observed the elite forces of the Seiche to use implants in response to injuries. They focus on altering the environment that combat will take place in over the troops that will be undertaking combat.
Between my own observations and that of others who have been in contact with them these forces can be surmised to be deploying squads of expendable mechanical and biomechanical servant constructs for every pair of soldiers, constructed from local resources as often as not, and to have been responsible for some of the more impressive feats of military engineering seen from these Xenos.
Alongside more conventional efforts in fortification, transportation, siege, and supply line disruption they have been seen to undertake exotic efforts, like filling a battlefield with specialized smokes and particulates to greatly degrade the effectiveness of Las weapons, setting even more ambitious smoke clouds to prevent orbital or fortification based Macrocannon bombardment from being able to target them, deploying immobile void shields or quickly constructed fortifications to cover their positions on the defence, setting up field generators to disrupt and cause greatly increased failure of plasma weapons, or other generators visually indistinct but functionally divergent using carefully targeted induced heat inside of our magazines or shells to cook off artillery rounds in mid flight, and ammunition in depots before use.
While the Enemy's weapons are respectable their protective gear is less so, nothing their troops wear is better than Carapace armour, and thus it loses out against the powered armour worn by the holy Adeptus Astartes and Sisters of Battle pound for pound, generally being out matched by them despite the number of pounds their bulky forms can lug around, though there are unsubstantiated rumours of elite forces possessing the ability to turn invisible, a feature that could have been traded or copied from the Tau and their stealth suit 'disruption' stealth technology.
Navaly, this produces interesting combat conditions, where these Xenos's vessels seem to lack the proper armouring that makes Imperial, or even Orkish, vessels so durable, on account of their apparent inability to manufacture anything quite matching Adamantium.
Yet, they are possessed of extremely effective shields and point defences, in the case of shields being better able to deflect an indirect hit than any Imperial counterpart, and able to cover their vessels in numerous overlapping shielding arrays, both allowing them more depth of shielding than most Imperial vessels with comparable size and power draw, and also allowing them to prevent localized overwhelming of their shielding from bringing down their defences across their ship.
I would personally suggest extremely skilled gunnery crews, ship component positionings designed to minimize time between bringing their shields down and carving into their ships, and possibly just buying comparable defensive systems from the forge worlds that supply Astartes battle barges if you can scrounge up the money and contacts to manage it.
In terms of point defenses they favour particle beams and small missiles over their rather anemic Las technology. Of particular threat is the poorly understood way that their vessels turret rating can vary over the course of a fight, from unimpressive to effectively impenetrable, starting out higher as all of their weapons enter the fight charged, then, it is suspected, varying as they change the amount of energy they can devote to point defense, then occasionally jumping drastically upwards as they start firing wide spread particle beams and having the particles focus inward on their targets on their own, as if they were being drawn towards their intended targets. It is unknown at this time what mechanism they use to accomplish this.
As a counter I suggest firing cheap duds during the initial moments of the engagement, then switching over to more expensive weapons to be fired as the enemy is hard pressed and forced to keep their energy going to their shields and weapons batteries, but not waiting too long, as it is not yet understood what conditions allow them to 'mark' our missiles and torpedoes or affect the amount of time it takes them to do so.
For anti ship work they possess weapons that fill equivalent roles to both the Tau Railgun and Imperial macro cannon, with the distinguishing feature that both are given propulsion by their stored electromagnetic fields, in the form of cartridges switched in and out of their weapons while in battle and charged between battles.
Rather than the more conventional Tau solution of powering them with a reactor feed, or self evidently superior Imperial solution of using stored chemical energy to induce a shockwave, that is then reflected back on itself to cause a single point of the now exploded propulsive to go into a high energy reaction, akin to fusion or a truncated plasma reaction, followed by transferring the energy of the shockwave, rather than of the the expanding gas that is a byproduct of this process, into the projectile, that I am assured Imperial Macrocannons all use variations off of.***
I am of the personal opinion that the Imperial version of the macrocannon is both spiritually and practically superior, as it avoids requiring complex understanding of field mechanics, and can in fact be performed without involving any moving parts beyond the ammunition.
The Seiche have also been known to employ positron beam and grav weapons aboard their more advanced ships, both of which can be devastating once their enemies shields come down, and to employ exotic torpedo types, including haywire, lightning, relativistic mag-frag, molecular disruption piercers, grav bomb, and antimatter, alongside more conventional fusion-derivative bombs. Though their fleets do not specialize in torpedo use, and often some(molecular disruption piercer, grav, and antimatter) of these weapons will only be available to their most advanced and expensive ships. You might occasionally see some of these exotic payloads used in their ammunition for their macrocannons or rail guns.
For battling these xenos in the void I would suggest concentrating fire on individual vessels as much as practical, their generally high quality shielding, combined with their much inferior armour and hull integrity means that once fire sufficient to break their energy defences can be brought to bear their ships tend to crumple quickly.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve a numerical advantage against these xenos, they travel in large groups, and have enough shipbuilding industry to sustain significant losses, as such it is recommended that efforts be undertaken to draw out conflict, both allowing for more ships to arrive, and allowing more time between engaging the leading and trailing edges of the enemy fleet.
One effective stratagem is leveraging the emperor gifted superior warp speed that all human vessels are provided by their navigators and the astronomicon, these Xenos are adverse to allowing the judging eyes of humanity to fall upon their own systems, and have been known to fall back from raids to aid in concealing the position of their centres of disgusting habitation.
Additionally many of their attacks are either performed out of a profit motive or performed out of a desire to conceal the position of their population centres, either by destroying Imperial colonization efforts heading in their direction, by eliminating colonies or survey efforts that accidentally land on their worlds, by actively warring against those seeking to destroy their worlds, or by striking against those worlds most likely to support expanding colonisation efforts in their area. Once a local commander achieves understanding of what has motivated the particular xenos force that they face, it becomes possible to oppose their goals by destroying whatever they seek, or otherwise rendering their goal unachievable even in the event of their military victory.
These factors contribute to this species reputation as wide ranging pirates, but the Seiche are also surprisingly prolifigate traders, if ones that the Imperium does not interact with directly all that much for their prior negative experiences with us that our failings have allowed them to persist past and learn from those experiences.
This species of Xenos doesn't allow other species to trade on their worlds, but does propose trade deals by sending out vox messages in the systems of potential trading partners, and then proceeds to either undertake trade from ships visiting those systems, or from trading stations they occasionally drop off in regions they expect to become economically invested in. They have stopped attempting to employ these trade tactics in Imperial systems, except in rare cases which it is believed are accidental or subject to fluke motivation and instead trade with the Imperium through the Intermediary of interacting with Rogue Traders in non-Imperial systems.
They possess significant raw and refined resources, and a number of curios and artworks to be traded legitimately, and subversively tempting pieces of technology for the black marketeers to develop a less legitimate trade in.
The Seiche do appear to desire and either trade for or capture Imperial weapons and technology, but do not appear to make use of it beyond low level individuals immediately employing captured Imperial weapons against their original owners, it is unknown why this is the case, and suspected that they may make an exception for plasma reactors aboard their ships. It is impossible to be certain given their heavy internal security and tendency to explode right as you are about to compromise the bridge or enginarium.
Though their other power systems are supposedly more comprehensible, much of their energy is provided by fusion plants, sophisticated fusion, but for all that both systems extract electrical flow directly from charged plasma, still inferior to the more exotic fusion based particle reactions of an Imperial plasma reactor.
Their other systems run the gamut from the comprehensible to the exotic, from fission fragment reactors for small long-mission systems, to stored electromagnetic fields for any system that will be deployed with a supply line that allows it to be serviced and supplied with replacement batteries or ammunition, while some of their largest and rarest systems, both ground and spaceborne, are thought to be powered by some manner of what my tech priest informs me is an electroweak force altering reactor. This too would be unknown, given their propensity for self-destruction of critical systems, were it not for the hopefully expensive and casualty prone efforts of some Hereteks in mid M43, after which the Seiche seem to have briefly assumed that the secret was out, and that there was no point in blowing these facilities to smithereens. It is unknown at this time precisely how these reactors work or, according to my techpriest, why gradients of this arcane force are not used to create arbitrarily large current flow, he suspects a point of decreasing returns is reached at some point in the engineering of the reactor, and also that the creation of such reactors is dependent on some limited factor.
Another concerning 'super technology' of this species in found in their shipyard construction, and is responsible for the way they are not only failing to go extinct, but are actually rising in prominence despite the increasingly disrupted and deadly state of the galaxy. The Seiche put a great priority on capturing young star systems, they then outfit massive stations or asteroids to trawl through the sections of protoplanetary dust containing elements useful to them, gathering and shaping these elements with magnetic projections, then rapidly forging them however they want. This process allows them to create great numbers of hulls at an incomparably rapid speed, then between other factories in system gathering materials the same way, and imported parts from other systems they can rapidly outfit these hulls with components and send them on their ways, often carrying out preshaped segments of plating for planetary or orbital construction elsewhere.
The Seiche society is organized along unintuitive(see Xenos) lines, influenced heavily by their biology. They developed complex language before developing conscious thought and the ability to regulate instinctive muscle impulses, much less sapience or tool use, as such many species of their biosphere distribute complex thought processes among several individuals. In the Seiche this manifests in an extremely strong tendency to pair-bond from a young age, and in a language that is completely impossible to translate into spoken Gothic, and extremely difficult to translate into written Gothic, as it is customary for each member of the pair to speak simultaneously, with an additional layer of meaning arising from the interactions of the words and frequencies used by each to speak that is representative of intent of the group-mind formed by the two individuals. If you do not understand the third set of words arising from the interactions between the two simultaneous sentences then you are missing an important part of the meaning in the conversation as well as the communication of the most intelligent of the minds involved in the whole affair.
This is leaving aside the great difficulty in figuring out what to not bother translating, as it is maintenance and idle thought to the group mind the two are forming, and not directed at whoever they are speaking to.
Unlike in humans this pair bonding is non-romantic, instead when a pair decides that they have reached a point in their life where it is possible to reproduce, they seek out two other pairs and engage in a process that they are unwilling to discuss or demonstrate with humans, and produce a considerable number of eggs. In conditions where population must be limited they tend to put the resultant offspring through harsh tests and kill the ones that do not pass, they do not develop affection for their youth until they reach an age sufficient to be adopted into a clan. At which point they become part of an organization that is one part familial, one part educational, and one part occupational, generally matching up with their clan occupation, nearly comparable to how some human worlds make occupations familial in order to simplify administration. Except for the cases where they do not match up with their clan occupation, an event that I am told is relatively common, and makes perfect sense to the Xenos when it occurs, even if it appears random to a human observer.
Their governance is conducted through the gathering together of large groups of their people, for the purpose of forming even larger group minds. Effectively the entire gathering is part rational debate, part group dominance display, part religious ritual, and part gathering pairs to form components of specific hive-minds. All of these 'debates' eventually come to a consensus, as the addition of more support to one side allows it some factor that improves its chances of gaining additional support, both from unaligned pairs and from pairs currently aligned with another group mind. In cases where more total pairs than one group mind can unify are involved in a decision making process they will tend to form multiple 'debates' that will then each reach consensus, each consensus will then send a representative pair to carry their views to another 'debate' and so on and so forth.
On the strategic level this means that every consensus must pass through their equivalent of astropaths, no doubt inspired by our own and innately inferior imitations for attempting to profiteer off of the Emperor's work, in order to truly achieve acceptance throughout the entirety of whichever strategic division is making the choice in question. This forces the Xenos to maintain an unseemly integration of witches into their societies and political systems, increasing their influence vastly at higher levels.
What practical application this information has to people who aren't trying to get them to take a deal is that they are very difficult to divide against themselves, that outside of the battlefield they are even more susceptible to groupthink and going with the first solution that seems viable than humans are, that they will tend to have one of these group minds in command of their military forces somewhere behind their lines existing as a priority target both for the disruption to their chain of command, and for how much more effort it apparently is for them to train such a large group for synchronized military command, that their command turnaround time will be greater the larger a population of the creatures that will be affected by a decision, and that they tend to live in extremely numerous smaller communities rather than large hives like humans do.
The Seiche tend to either live on single worlds, relying on concealment to avoid destruction, or in clusters of systems around their protoplanetary disk skimming ship factories that can be as large as a sector. While their home world is, or perhaps was, somewhere in segmentum Tempestus, pockets of them have been found throughout Segmentums Pacifica and Ultima.
As an R selected species they would not be expected to employ psykers, normally such species either fall to corruption and psykic disaster, or become extreme and murderous in their vigilance against the horrors of the warp and those members of their society that can serve as a gateway to them.
After all, effective training of Psykers requires educational intervention starting shortly after the development of their powers and the investment of significant resources into their raising.
However in this case the barrier was made easier to overcome by a quirk of biology, the group mind the Seiche are capable of sharing has a similar effect to the Tyranid hive mind, in that it is possible for its members to shelter under the combined willpower of the group, and thus be harder to possess or corrupt. As these Xenos will at least pair bond from a young age this allowed them some defence from the horrors of the warp while trying to develop a more measured societal response to the appearance of psykers and acquire the technique and institutional knowledge to minimize the dangers involved with such fell powers.
Eventually they overcame their instincts that told them putting so much effort into promoting the development of the uselessly young was counterproductive in order to allow for 'psyker' clans to see to development and training, much like how K selected species like humans overcome their instincts to support organizations separating them from their children and placing them in an environment where they will be killed if they do not meet certain standards. A fear and hatred of Chaos makes for excellent motivation.
The specific organization of their psyker regulating system is one part familial, organized along the lines of their clans as a superclan, and one part religious, as the group appears to be heavily focused on ancestor worship. Though their emphasis on familial bonds by adoption means that most of those 'ancestors' are actually more like the deceased preceding psykers in their xenos variant of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
The Inquisitors I have spoken to on the subject believe that their psyker organization grew out of psyker hunting orders that employed psykers, and now effectively rule over the nonpsykic portions of their population, a bitter irony I am sure.
It is believed that most of their understanding of warpcraft was actually acquired from other species, as there have been a number of incidents in the Imperium's early years in which they have reached out to or captured human psykers and attempted to extract knowledge or instruction, and it is believed based on the reports of those psykers that have made their way back into the bosom of the Imperium that they have reached out to the decrepit and essentially irrelevant Slann in their isolated systems above the galactic plane for further instruction.
Nonetheless, they put their own spin on their powers, their focus on ancestor worship has caused them to include communing with the spirits of their dead as a portion of most of their abilities, with the wailing of their spirits fouling the divination of their enemies, and the projection of burning ghostly forms of their dead as a routine portion of pyromancy, to give a couple of observed examples.
Their deployment alongside their elite forces induces them to take on a similar mindset towards altering the environment of combat to their advantage, driving many of physical specializations to focus on the control needed to enhance or alter widespread natural or technologically induced conditions, and many of nonphysical specializations to develop the power needed to at least slightly affect a vast number of combatants or impressive area of combat all at once.
This race is a particular frustration because of their psykic equivalents to our own astropaths and navigators. A pair bonded set of telepathic Seiche are able to pass messages to any distance, so long as they remain constantly in contact with each other, as they are on some level the same entity.
Worse, the Xenos are somehow able to use their intensely strange Choir rituals to approximate the enhancing effect that navigators can have on human warp travel. This appears to involve at least a pair of fleets leapfrogging last each other, with one fleet and attached psykers outside of the warp at all times serving as a navigational waypoint for the psychic choirs within the warp.
While slower than travel guided by the Emperor's light, this may actually be noticeably faster than what the mutant navigators can manage on their own, based off of incidents when a warp storm was blocking line of sight to the astronomicon, but were not close enough to disrupt the Xenos' mental links, and off of incidents in the outlying stars at the edge of the galaxy.
This is a significant strategic threat to the Imperium, much of our advantage over the Xenos species of the galaxy is based off of our superior logistical and communications systems. We can pass intelligence from one end of the galaxy to another far more easily than any of our enemies, and can generally rely on being able to shift forces faster, concentrating to overwhelm our foes without leaving other areas unaccountably open. Unfortunately this advantage is reversed in the Halo stars, where it is believed most of the centres of power of these Xenos are located. This game attempt at approaching strategic movement parity would make them one of the greatest threats to the Imperium, if they actually prioritized attacking us, to date their attacks have either been pirate raids or highly destructive attempts to prevent us from making moves towards their worlds in time for them to evacuate and relocate. They do not seem to try to take and hold human territory, with some exceptions, and luckily seem to lack the numbers near most human sectors to support a comparable naval force.
Moreover they lack the number of psykers needed to provide navigation for all of their ships, leading to a disparity in quality between the teeming fleets that remain close to their domains and the wider ranging elite forces that pursue colonisation and commit war on a strategic scale across the breadth of the galaxy.
Luckily their method of transit is also a significant weakness, it can be countered by seeking out the location of the division of their fleet that must remain in realspace to serve as a navigational waypoint and assaulting them with the intention of dividing to defeat the enemy forces in detail. It can also be disrupted by any psykery able to interrupt the mind link between the 'navigators' and the navigation reference on separate fleets, allowing forces with few ships to launch effective delaying attacks, forcing the Xenos to reform and reorganize their navigation after every disruption.
Nontheless it is a major priority that they not be allowed to ally with the Tau.
*whose head techpriest was later barred from any forge world across three sectors for an unseemly fascination with the underlying logic of both Imperial and xenos mechanisms and willingness to expose the secrets of the cult of the machine to outsiders, that was believed to be a possible indication of heretekal leanings, despite his high political patronage and the lack of sufficient evidence to convict him of heresy found once the review tribunal was called.
** OOC for a sec, the real Milky way is estimated to contain 40 billion habitable worlds, the Imperium contains one million(ish). This means that either they misplaced a couple zeros(possible), they suffer from delusions of grandeur when talking about the Imperium's galactic importance(definitely), or most of those worlds are already dead by 40k, it's probably the last one.
***this is broadly accurate but most patterns will do this in combination with various enhancements and tweaks to ensure better performance
To the thread, I'm working on three(ish) Omakes, one that involves a certain amount of physics research and fills out exactly how certain pieces of tech function, one that I am remaking that involves a lot of writing and an attempt to tranpose the classic Hero's journey into a deep cavern expedition and backstory, and one about another Xenos species that is kind of invasion of the body snatchers(Yeerks copied from Animorphs). Do you have any preferences?
Edit:advice on editing this is welcome.
Before anyone calls me on making them too powerful, A. They need to be powerful to survive out here, B. Here's the list of tech they have that the Imperium didn't, or at least didn't deploy widely enough to really be considered a part of their tech base: fairly bullshit magnetic technology, a small number of electroweak force reactors for super weapons/dreadnoughts/etc, better automation and distributed computing(techheresy), better servitors(actually their cybernetics are worse, but they don't obsess over using people for the biological parts and as such can gene engineer the biological bits), a couple of things that are easier to make with better magnetic tech, and a number of advantages in psykery(biological, mental, and cultural quirks), to make up for these advantages they had some areas where they lag behind in tech, but have probably caught up to the Imperial standard after the fall of the empire.
Xenos species- Seiche,
report last updated late M44, original source Rogue Trader Carlious Titus Saturn,*
The imperial sectors are, as often as not separated by vast gulfs of space, uninhabited by anything but Orks, strange and unique Xenos, and untold horrors. With the proportion of non-Imperial planets to Imperial ones favoring non-imperial by several thousand to one** that is a lot of horrors. It is the job of Rogue Traders to go out into these unknown reaches, explore, and exploit the heck out of them. With the Emperor's guidance our travel speed is so far superior that we are able to outcompete the shipping efforts of many xenos without using more than a fraction of their number of ships.
I am writing to elucidate my opinions on some of these things I have found in my travels inbetween recognizable patches of civilisation.
The Seiche are as unusual to human sensibilities as any other type of Xenos, but as my job frequently requires developing at least some understanding of the bizarre creatures I can only be thankful that they are more comprehensible than some.
They take the form of large squid-like amphibious creatures, possessed of an endoskeleton, omnivorous diet, trilateral symmetry, and the means to move about on land by both slithering and dragging themselves forward.
The Seiche are thought to have developed on a heavy world with formidable natural threats, and as such possess some similarities to Ogryns in their impressive senses and strength, and the size than facilitates it, and their somewhat primal and instinctive reaction to threats, alongside natural weapons suited to such an environment such as the three 'claws' tipping their three primary tentacles that they can use to strike at, and draw in, any threat.
Their technological expertise appears to be focused on electromagnetism, they appear to have discovered some way to actually store a standing electromagnetic field in empty space, then become excessively fascinated with ll possible applications of the electromagnetic branch of physics.
Notably their combatants use several varieties of electromagnetic accelerator, from armour piercing projectile launchers, to variable width and geometry flechette sprays.
These Xenos are also known to use haywire weaponry, particle beam weaponry, lightning arc weaponry not entirely dissimilar to the Adeptus Mechanicus counterpart, fusion weapons comparable in effect to our own plasma guns, and exotic types of grenade, including EMP, area Lightning, and magnetically propelled flechette or fragmentation outputs.
A notable area denial weapon in their infantry arsenal are submunitions that can adjust their position relative to one another and relative to their 'field launcher spikes' driven into the ground and used as both off-munition cogitator processing and push plates for the terrifying little flying blade swarms, these are often deployed in a similar role as, and in addition to minefields and razor wire.
I have been able to find evidence of more advanced submunitions swarm variants known as 'buzzers', that are mobile under their own power, more damaging, apparently unlimited by any easily struck control network needed to support their operation, and legendary for their ability to find the seams and weaknesses in armour, before tearing into them with the force of a chain sword and rushing in the gap to get at the weaker fleshy bits inside.
It is known that the Seiche occasionally deploy elite troops equipped to a far higher standard than their normal forces. This is believed to be for societal and logistical reasons that will be discussed later, this section is devoted to their armament. They appear to attempt to utilize some variant of armoured infantry mobility and combat platform, but at their size it is honestly more akin fighting sentinels mounted on a cluster of tentacle legs than like fighting power armoured foes, and as such they are easily targeted with anti-vehicle weapons, these forces are deployed with significantly superior weapons and accompanied by superior ships when compared to what their equivalent to PDF or sector forces have at their disposal, and are essentially the only portions of their forces deployed with their psykers. Of note is that unlike elite human forces such as the Space Marines, Myrmidons and Skitarii, who focus on enhancing their soldiers to produce better fighters I have only observed the elite forces of the Seiche to use implants in response to injuries. They focus on altering the environment that combat will take place in over the troops that will be undertaking combat.
Between my own observations and that of others who have been in contact with them these forces can be surmised to be deploying squads of expendable mechanical and biomechanical servant constructs for every pair of soldiers, constructed from local resources as often as not, and to have been responsible for some of the more impressive feats of military engineering seen from these Xenos.
Alongside more conventional efforts in fortification, transportation, siege, and supply line disruption they have been seen to undertake exotic efforts, like filling a battlefield with specialized smokes and particulates to greatly degrade the effectiveness of Las weapons, setting even more ambitious smoke clouds to prevent orbital or fortification based Macrocannon bombardment from being able to target them, deploying immobile void shields or quickly constructed fortifications to cover their positions on the defence, setting up field generators to disrupt and cause greatly increased failure of plasma weapons, or other generators visually indistinct but functionally divergent using carefully targeted induced heat inside of our magazines or shells to cook off artillery rounds in mid flight, and ammunition in depots before use.
While the Enemy's weapons are respectable their protective gear is less so, nothing their troops wear is better than Carapace armour, and thus it loses out against the powered armour worn by the holy Adeptus Astartes and Sisters of Battle pound for pound, generally being out matched by them despite the number of pounds their bulky forms can lug around, though there are unsubstantiated rumours of elite forces possessing the ability to turn invisible, a feature that could have been traded or copied from the Tau and their stealth suit 'disruption' stealth technology.
Navaly, this produces interesting combat conditions, where these Xenos's vessels seem to lack the proper armouring that makes Imperial, or even Orkish, vessels so durable, on account of their apparent inability to manufacture anything quite matching Adamantium.
Yet, they are possessed of extremely effective shields and point defences, in the case of shields being better able to deflect an indirect hit than any Imperial counterpart, and able to cover their vessels in numerous overlapping shielding arrays, both allowing them more depth of shielding than most Imperial vessels with comparable size and power draw, and also allowing them to prevent localized overwhelming of their shielding from bringing down their defences across their ship.
I would personally suggest extremely skilled gunnery crews, ship component positionings designed to minimize time between bringing their shields down and carving into their ships, and possibly just buying comparable defensive systems from the forge worlds that supply Astartes battle barges if you can scrounge up the money and contacts to manage it.
In terms of point defenses they favour particle beams and small missiles over their rather anemic Las technology. Of particular threat is the poorly understood way that their vessels turret rating can vary over the course of a fight, from unimpressive to effectively impenetrable, starting out higher as all of their weapons enter the fight charged, then, it is suspected, varying as they change the amount of energy they can devote to point defense, then occasionally jumping drastically upwards as they start firing wide spread particle beams and having the particles focus inward on their targets on their own, as if they were being drawn towards their intended targets. It is unknown at this time what mechanism they use to accomplish this.
As a counter I suggest firing cheap duds during the initial moments of the engagement, then switching over to more expensive weapons to be fired as the enemy is hard pressed and forced to keep their energy going to their shields and weapons batteries, but not waiting too long, as it is not yet understood what conditions allow them to 'mark' our missiles and torpedoes or affect the amount of time it takes them to do so.
For anti ship work they possess weapons that fill equivalent roles to both the Tau Railgun and Imperial macro cannon, with the distinguishing feature that both are given propulsion by their stored electromagnetic fields, in the form of cartridges switched in and out of their weapons while in battle and charged between battles.
Rather than the more conventional Tau solution of powering them with a reactor feed, or self evidently superior Imperial solution of using stored chemical energy to induce a shockwave, that is then reflected back on itself to cause a single point of the now exploded propulsive to go into a high energy reaction, akin to fusion or a truncated plasma reaction, followed by transferring the energy of the shockwave, rather than of the the expanding gas that is a byproduct of this process, into the projectile, that I am assured Imperial Macrocannons all use variations off of.***
I am of the personal opinion that the Imperial version of the macrocannon is both spiritually and practically superior, as it avoids requiring complex understanding of field mechanics, and can in fact be performed without involving any moving parts beyond the ammunition.
The Seiche have also been known to employ positron beam and grav weapons aboard their more advanced ships, both of which can be devastating once their enemies shields come down, and to employ exotic torpedo types, including haywire, lightning, relativistic mag-frag, molecular disruption piercers, grav bomb, and antimatter, alongside more conventional fusion-derivative bombs. Though their fleets do not specialize in torpedo use, and often some(molecular disruption piercer, grav, and antimatter) of these weapons will only be available to their most advanced and expensive ships. You might occasionally see some of these exotic payloads used in their ammunition for their macrocannons or rail guns.
For battling these xenos in the void I would suggest concentrating fire on individual vessels as much as practical, their generally high quality shielding, combined with their much inferior armour and hull integrity means that once fire sufficient to break their energy defences can be brought to bear their ships tend to crumple quickly.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve a numerical advantage against these xenos, they travel in large groups, and have enough shipbuilding industry to sustain significant losses, as such it is recommended that efforts be undertaken to draw out conflict, both allowing for more ships to arrive, and allowing more time between engaging the leading and trailing edges of the enemy fleet.
One effective stratagem is leveraging the emperor gifted superior warp speed that all human vessels are provided by their navigators and the astronomicon, these Xenos are adverse to allowing the judging eyes of humanity to fall upon their own systems, and have been known to fall back from raids to aid in concealing the position of their centres of disgusting habitation.
Additionally many of their attacks are either performed out of a profit motive or performed out of a desire to conceal the position of their population centres, either by destroying Imperial colonization efforts heading in their direction, by eliminating colonies or survey efforts that accidentally land on their worlds, by actively warring against those seeking to destroy their worlds, or by striking against those worlds most likely to support expanding colonisation efforts in their area. Once a local commander achieves understanding of what has motivated the particular xenos force that they face, it becomes possible to oppose their goals by destroying whatever they seek, or otherwise rendering their goal unachievable even in the event of their military victory.
These factors contribute to this species reputation as wide ranging pirates, but the Seiche are also surprisingly prolifigate traders, if ones that the Imperium does not interact with directly all that much for their prior negative experiences with us that our failings have allowed them to persist past and learn from those experiences.
This species of Xenos doesn't allow other species to trade on their worlds, but does propose trade deals by sending out vox messages in the systems of potential trading partners, and then proceeds to either undertake trade from ships visiting those systems, or from trading stations they occasionally drop off in regions they expect to become economically invested in. They have stopped attempting to employ these trade tactics in Imperial systems, except in rare cases which it is believed are accidental or subject to fluke motivation and instead trade with the Imperium through the Intermediary of interacting with Rogue Traders in non-Imperial systems.
They possess significant raw and refined resources, and a number of curios and artworks to be traded legitimately, and subversively tempting pieces of technology for the black marketeers to develop a less legitimate trade in.
The Seiche do appear to desire and either trade for or capture Imperial weapons and technology, but do not appear to make use of it beyond low level individuals immediately employing captured Imperial weapons against their original owners, it is unknown why this is the case, and suspected that they may make an exception for plasma reactors aboard their ships. It is impossible to be certain given their heavy internal security and tendency to explode right as you are about to compromise the bridge or enginarium.
Though their other power systems are supposedly more comprehensible, much of their energy is provided by fusion plants, sophisticated fusion, but for all that both systems extract electrical flow directly from charged plasma, still inferior to the more exotic fusion based particle reactions of an Imperial plasma reactor.
Their other systems run the gamut from the comprehensible to the exotic, from fission fragment reactors for small long-mission systems, to stored electromagnetic fields for any system that will be deployed with a supply line that allows it to be serviced and supplied with replacement batteries or ammunition, while some of their largest and rarest systems, both ground and spaceborne, are thought to be powered by some manner of what my tech priest informs me is an electroweak force altering reactor. This too would be unknown, given their propensity for self-destruction of critical systems, were it not for the hopefully expensive and casualty prone efforts of some Hereteks in mid M43, after which the Seiche seem to have briefly assumed that the secret was out, and that there was no point in blowing these facilities to smithereens. It is unknown at this time precisely how these reactors work or, according to my techpriest, why gradients of this arcane force are not used to create arbitrarily large current flow, he suspects a point of decreasing returns is reached at some point in the engineering of the reactor, and also that the creation of such reactors is dependent on some limited factor.
Another concerning 'super technology' of this species in found in their shipyard construction, and is responsible for the way they are not only failing to go extinct, but are actually rising in prominence despite the increasingly disrupted and deadly state of the galaxy. The Seiche put a great priority on capturing young star systems, they then outfit massive stations or asteroids to trawl through the sections of protoplanetary dust containing elements useful to them, gathering and shaping these elements with magnetic projections, then rapidly forging them however they want. This process allows them to create great numbers of hulls at an incomparably rapid speed, then between other factories in system gathering materials the same way, and imported parts from other systems they can rapidly outfit these hulls with components and send them on their ways, often carrying out preshaped segments of plating for planetary or orbital construction elsewhere.
The Seiche society is organized along unintuitive(see Xenos) lines, influenced heavily by their biology. They developed complex language before developing conscious thought and the ability to regulate instinctive muscle impulses, much less sapience or tool use, as such many species of their biosphere distribute complex thought processes among several individuals. In the Seiche this manifests in an extremely strong tendency to pair-bond from a young age, and in a language that is completely impossible to translate into spoken Gothic, and extremely difficult to translate into written Gothic, as it is customary for each member of the pair to speak simultaneously, with an additional layer of meaning arising from the interactions of the words and frequencies used by each to speak that is representative of intent of the group-mind formed by the two individuals. If you do not understand the third set of words arising from the interactions between the two simultaneous sentences then you are missing an important part of the meaning in the conversation as well as the communication of the most intelligent of the minds involved in the whole affair.
This is leaving aside the great difficulty in figuring out what to not bother translating, as it is maintenance and idle thought to the group mind the two are forming, and not directed at whoever they are speaking to.
Unlike in humans this pair bonding is non-romantic, instead when a pair decides that they have reached a point in their life where it is possible to reproduce, they seek out two other pairs and engage in a process that they are unwilling to discuss or demonstrate with humans, and produce a considerable number of eggs. In conditions where population must be limited they tend to put the resultant offspring through harsh tests and kill the ones that do not pass, they do not develop affection for their youth until they reach an age sufficient to be adopted into a clan. At which point they become part of an organization that is one part familial, one part educational, and one part occupational, generally matching up with their clan occupation, nearly comparable to how some human worlds make occupations familial in order to simplify administration. Except for the cases where they do not match up with their clan occupation, an event that I am told is relatively common, and makes perfect sense to the Xenos when it occurs, even if it appears random to a human observer.
Their governance is conducted through the gathering together of large groups of their people, for the purpose of forming even larger group minds. Effectively the entire gathering is part rational debate, part group dominance display, part religious ritual, and part gathering pairs to form components of specific hive-minds. All of these 'debates' eventually come to a consensus, as the addition of more support to one side allows it some factor that improves its chances of gaining additional support, both from unaligned pairs and from pairs currently aligned with another group mind. In cases where more total pairs than one group mind can unify are involved in a decision making process they will tend to form multiple 'debates' that will then each reach consensus, each consensus will then send a representative pair to carry their views to another 'debate' and so on and so forth.
On the strategic level this means that every consensus must pass through their equivalent of astropaths, no doubt inspired by our own and innately inferior imitations for attempting to profiteer off of the Emperor's work, in order to truly achieve acceptance throughout the entirety of whichever strategic division is making the choice in question. This forces the Xenos to maintain an unseemly integration of witches into their societies and political systems, increasing their influence vastly at higher levels.
What practical application this information has to people who aren't trying to get them to take a deal is that they are very difficult to divide against themselves, that outside of the battlefield they are even more susceptible to groupthink and going with the first solution that seems viable than humans are, that they will tend to have one of these group minds in command of their military forces somewhere behind their lines existing as a priority target both for the disruption to their chain of command, and for how much more effort it apparently is for them to train such a large group for synchronized military command, that their command turnaround time will be greater the larger a population of the creatures that will be affected by a decision, and that they tend to live in extremely numerous smaller communities rather than large hives like humans do.
The Seiche tend to either live on single worlds, relying on concealment to avoid destruction, or in clusters of systems around their protoplanetary disk skimming ship factories that can be as large as a sector. While their home world is, or perhaps was, somewhere in segmentum Tempestus, pockets of them have been found throughout Segmentums Pacifica and Ultima.
As an R selected species they would not be expected to employ psykers, normally such species either fall to corruption and psykic disaster, or become extreme and murderous in their vigilance against the horrors of the warp and those members of their society that can serve as a gateway to them.
After all, effective training of Psykers requires educational intervention starting shortly after the development of their powers and the investment of significant resources into their raising.
However in this case the barrier was made easier to overcome by a quirk of biology, the group mind the Seiche are capable of sharing has a similar effect to the Tyranid hive mind, in that it is possible for its members to shelter under the combined willpower of the group, and thus be harder to possess or corrupt. As these Xenos will at least pair bond from a young age this allowed them some defence from the horrors of the warp while trying to develop a more measured societal response to the appearance of psykers and acquire the technique and institutional knowledge to minimize the dangers involved with such fell powers.
Eventually they overcame their instincts that told them putting so much effort into promoting the development of the uselessly young was counterproductive in order to allow for 'psyker' clans to see to development and training, much like how K selected species like humans overcome their instincts to support organizations separating them from their children and placing them in an environment where they will be killed if they do not meet certain standards. A fear and hatred of Chaos makes for excellent motivation.
The specific organization of their psyker regulating system is one part familial, organized along the lines of their clans as a superclan, and one part religious, as the group appears to be heavily focused on ancestor worship. Though their emphasis on familial bonds by adoption means that most of those 'ancestors' are actually more like the deceased preceding psykers in their xenos variant of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.
The Inquisitors I have spoken to on the subject believe that their psyker organization grew out of psyker hunting orders that employed psykers, and now effectively rule over the nonpsykic portions of their population, a bitter irony I am sure.
It is believed that most of their understanding of warpcraft was actually acquired from other species, as there have been a number of incidents in the Imperium's early years in which they have reached out to or captured human psykers and attempted to extract knowledge or instruction, and it is believed based on the reports of those psykers that have made their way back into the bosom of the Imperium that they have reached out to the decrepit and essentially irrelevant Slann in their isolated systems above the galactic plane for further instruction.
Nonetheless, they put their own spin on their powers, their focus on ancestor worship has caused them to include communing with the spirits of their dead as a portion of most of their abilities, with the wailing of their spirits fouling the divination of their enemies, and the projection of burning ghostly forms of their dead as a routine portion of pyromancy, to give a couple of observed examples.
Their deployment alongside their elite forces induces them to take on a similar mindset towards altering the environment of combat to their advantage, driving many of physical specializations to focus on the control needed to enhance or alter widespread natural or technologically induced conditions, and many of nonphysical specializations to develop the power needed to at least slightly affect a vast number of combatants or impressive area of combat all at once.
This race is a particular frustration because of their psykic equivalents to our own astropaths and navigators. A pair bonded set of telepathic Seiche are able to pass messages to any distance, so long as they remain constantly in contact with each other, as they are on some level the same entity.
Worse, the Xenos are somehow able to use their intensely strange Choir rituals to approximate the enhancing effect that navigators can have on human warp travel. This appears to involve at least a pair of fleets leapfrogging last each other, with one fleet and attached psykers outside of the warp at all times serving as a navigational waypoint for the psychic choirs within the warp.
While slower than travel guided by the Emperor's light, this may actually be noticeably faster than what the mutant navigators can manage on their own, based off of incidents when a warp storm was blocking line of sight to the astronomicon, but were not close enough to disrupt the Xenos' mental links, and off of incidents in the outlying stars at the edge of the galaxy.
This is a significant strategic threat to the Imperium, much of our advantage over the Xenos species of the galaxy is based off of our superior logistical and communications systems. We can pass intelligence from one end of the galaxy to another far more easily than any of our enemies, and can generally rely on being able to shift forces faster, concentrating to overwhelm our foes without leaving other areas unaccountably open. Unfortunately this advantage is reversed in the Halo stars, where it is believed most of the centres of power of these Xenos are located. This game attempt at approaching strategic movement parity would make them one of the greatest threats to the Imperium, if they actually prioritized attacking us, to date their attacks have either been pirate raids or highly destructive attempts to prevent us from making moves towards their worlds in time for them to evacuate and relocate. They do not seem to try to take and hold human territory, with some exceptions, and luckily seem to lack the numbers near most human sectors to support a comparable naval force.
Moreover they lack the number of psykers needed to provide navigation for all of their ships, leading to a disparity in quality between the teeming fleets that remain close to their domains and the wider ranging elite forces that pursue colonisation and commit war on a strategic scale across the breadth of the galaxy.
Luckily their method of transit is also a significant weakness, it can be countered by seeking out the location of the division of their fleet that must remain in realspace to serve as a navigational waypoint and assaulting them with the intention of dividing to defeat the enemy forces in detail. It can also be disrupted by any psykery able to interrupt the mind link between the 'navigators' and the navigation reference on separate fleets, allowing forces with few ships to launch effective delaying attacks, forcing the Xenos to reform and reorganize their navigation after every disruption.
Nontheless it is a major priority that they not be allowed to ally with the Tau.
*whose head techpriest was later barred from any forge world across three sectors for an unseemly fascination with the underlying logic of both Imperial and xenos mechanisms and willingness to expose the secrets of the cult of the machine to outsiders, that was believed to be a possible indication of heretekal leanings, despite his high political patronage and the lack of sufficient evidence to convict him of heresy found once the review tribunal was called.
** OOC for a sec, the real Milky way is estimated to contain 40 billion habitable worlds, the Imperium contains one million(ish). This means that either they misplaced a couple zeros(possible), they suffer from delusions of grandeur when talking about the Imperium's galactic importance(definitely), or most of those worlds are already dead by 40k, it's probably the last one.
***this is broadly accurate but most patterns will do this in combination with various enhancements and tweaks to ensure better performance
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The Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the High Council Part Seven: Matters of Defence
- Location
- Alice Springs, Australia
The Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the High Council Part Seven: Matters of Defence
With a combination of well worded arguments and a few favors you were able to get the most extreme of the three new tax proposals. You were also able to convince the High Council to have the Imperial Trust help fund the increase of defences to match the new standards by covering a tenth of the cost and to provide a long term rebate of ten percent of all costs spent on Forges. The first of your suggestions will reduce the impact that having to upgrade to a higher level of defences will have on Midgard and Vanaheim, especially Vanaheim, while the second should encourage more investment in Advanced and Exotic material production across the Trust as a whole, which are the main bottlenecks on your economy. In fact the rebates and subsidies that you proposed were enough to convince Chapter Master Julius to change his vote, making it pass with a vote of eight for and five against.
The next focus of the High Council meeting is how to deal with the planned attacks from Turoq in the coming decades. The Princedom of Turoq is a Chaos Domain of the Changer of Ways that's nearest world is over a hundred Light-years from the Imperial Trust, around two months travel by your fastest ships and close to a weeks travel by their ships. According to High Grandmaster Ridcully their attack plans are based around using dealing with deamons and spies to locate the Imperial Fleets and then launching medium strength on vulnerable worlds, both within the Imperial Trust and within Dragon's Nest. These attacks will be supported by a massive number of Psykers and will focus on damaging as much as possible, stealing technology and setting up sleeper agents and will retreat before any dangerous reinforcements arrive. As this is going one the forces of Turoq will continue to reinforce the defences of their core worlds and make pacts and deals to acquire allies for the final battle with the Imperial Trust. They will also be able to field far more Psykers then they once could, as the forces of the Changer of Ways now have a method to create clones of Psykers that can be linked to a Psyker to greatly magnify his power. In total up to eight clones can be linked to each Psyker, boosting his power ninefold and allowing him to act in multiple places.
After a lot of debate on the matter it is decided that taking the offensive will be rather challenging, and that any attacks will have to wait until all worlds reach the new defence requirements and for the colonies to further strengthen themselves. As such the debate focuses on how to best minimize the damage that you suffer from these raids. There are several suggestions on this, of which Chapter mater Julius' is the most well though out. He suggests deploying an elite force including at least a Flank of the Imperial Trust Navy, one Astartes Company, a Household of Knight-Titans, a Helguard Brigade, a Division of other power armoured forces and a contingent of Battle Psykers to each world of the Imperial Trust. While this would spread the Varangian Guard out over the entire Trust along with half the Imperial Trust Navy and many of the Imperial Trust Guard's best units it would prepare each world of the Imperial Trust against assault from a wide variety of forces, without totally removing your ability to concentrate your forces.
Your voice is highly respected in matters of war, and now is the time to put forward your suggestions on how to deal with the threat of Turoq
With a combination of well worded arguments and a few favors you were able to get the most extreme of the three new tax proposals. You were also able to convince the High Council to have the Imperial Trust help fund the increase of defences to match the new standards by covering a tenth of the cost and to provide a long term rebate of ten percent of all costs spent on Forges. The first of your suggestions will reduce the impact that having to upgrade to a higher level of defences will have on Midgard and Vanaheim, especially Vanaheim, while the second should encourage more investment in Advanced and Exotic material production across the Trust as a whole, which are the main bottlenecks on your economy. In fact the rebates and subsidies that you proposed were enough to convince Chapter Master Julius to change his vote, making it pass with a vote of eight for and five against.
- increase the tithe to 25%
- increase the trade level from to 10%
- increase the valuable resource tax to 10%
Provide a subsidiary of 10 percent to help with the new standard of defenses till the new standard is reached
Provide rebate of 10 percent for all building of forges
The next focus of the High Council meeting is how to deal with the planned attacks from Turoq in the coming decades. The Princedom of Turoq is a Chaos Domain of the Changer of Ways that's nearest world is over a hundred Light-years from the Imperial Trust, around two months travel by your fastest ships and close to a weeks travel by their ships. According to High Grandmaster Ridcully their attack plans are based around using dealing with deamons and spies to locate the Imperial Fleets and then launching medium strength on vulnerable worlds, both within the Imperial Trust and within Dragon's Nest. These attacks will be supported by a massive number of Psykers and will focus on damaging as much as possible, stealing technology and setting up sleeper agents and will retreat before any dangerous reinforcements arrive. As this is going one the forces of Turoq will continue to reinforce the defences of their core worlds and make pacts and deals to acquire allies for the final battle with the Imperial Trust. They will also be able to field far more Psykers then they once could, as the forces of the Changer of Ways now have a method to create clones of Psykers that can be linked to a Psyker to greatly magnify his power. In total up to eight clones can be linked to each Psyker, boosting his power ninefold and allowing him to act in multiple places.
After a lot of debate on the matter it is decided that taking the offensive will be rather challenging, and that any attacks will have to wait until all worlds reach the new defence requirements and for the colonies to further strengthen themselves. As such the debate focuses on how to best minimize the damage that you suffer from these raids. There are several suggestions on this, of which Chapter mater Julius' is the most well though out. He suggests deploying an elite force including at least a Flank of the Imperial Trust Navy, one Astartes Company, a Household of Knight-Titans, a Helguard Brigade, a Division of other power armoured forces and a contingent of Battle Psykers to each world of the Imperial Trust. While this would spread the Varangian Guard out over the entire Trust along with half the Imperial Trust Navy and many of the Imperial Trust Guard's best units it would prepare each world of the Imperial Trust against assault from a wide variety of forces, without totally removing your ability to concentrate your forces.
Your voice is highly respected in matters of war, and now is the time to put forward your suggestions on how to deal with the threat of Turoq
- Location
- Germany
@Durin
How fast could we gather our troops if they do make a more concentrated attack to wipe out some of these forces in detail?
- Location
- Leeds
Okay, here's my plan:
[ ] Hope Ridcully can outdivine the Turoq diviners.
[ ] Hope Ridcully can outdivine the Turoq diviners.
- Location
- madison
Won't work, they have essentially real time info on our fleet disposition.