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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

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Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
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Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
There are a lot of things I have to say regarding the setup of the Space Marines, though I don't have a problem with them crewing their frontline armor like the Rhino with marines. Here are some likely very divisive opinions in no particular order.

The way I see it, the Space Marines should be built to thematically contrast the Imperial Guard doctrinally, operationally and organization wise. If the Guard is largely World War 1 to late Cold War, the Space Marines would be equivalent to the modern brigade. A slimmer and more strategically mobile formation whose deployments are task assembled from its building blocks.

Changes to emphasize this would include expending the chapters to a brigade sized organization of 3 to 6 thousand, with an expanded table of organization including expanding the ten companies to battalions (the company exist as battalion building blocks), platoons, Fire teams and platoon to battalion sergeants and executive officers. (All things referenced in the previous paragraph would be the Codex Astartes prescription. Terms and details differ chapter to chapter.)

Also they need more substantial artillery. Replace the puny launcher on the Whirlwind with a M270 style one with equivalent capabilities. Furthermore equivalents to 203 and 155mm artillery firing guided rounds and a mortar carrier Rhino variant would contrast the Guards saturation fire by shooting for precision. The guard fires warehouses worth of munitions for hours and days before advancing, the Marines need only their loaded stocks, and the enemy get no time before the advance hits.

Also, the Predator turret is to small, give it to the Razorback to play into it being an Infantry Fighting Vehicle while the Predator gets a bigger turret. To contrast Guard Armour, I think the addition of a hard-kill active protection system, like the trophy with lasers, would inform the capability gulf between both forces.

For one specific chapter, I think the White Scars and it's successors need wheeled variants of the Predator, Rhino and Razorback. Tracked vehicles can certainly go fast depending on design, but it simply does not impart the image rapid maneuver that the White Scars are all about. I would also make the chapter visually stand out in an eye catching way, and there is precedent for distinct vehicles such as a bunch of Raven Wing related aircraft and speeders the Dark Angels got. I can't say for sure what I would base the chassis on, perhaps the Boxer?

This has been Shypersons 40k hot takes. I am here all weekend.
 
Relying on orbital bombardment is only going to work if you have total orbital control. Which is a problem because planets are kinda big. It doesn't work out so well if there's a fleet camping over the planetary horizon or on a moon waiting to launch raids whenever your ships try to get into an orbital bombardment position.

And land has the advantage that where without that absolute orbital advantage it can be incredibly difficult to root the enemy out of a position. In space all it takes is one wrong shot followed by a series of disasters for the orbital artillery to be neutralized.
 
I mean if all else fails the Imperium will just melt the planet into inhospitability or drop a virus bomb. Even if all possible landing or planetside campaigns fail, they can simply just cleanse and move on. Like this whole fork of discussion is unnecessary.
 
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The biggest problem with the book Titanicus other than the fact that it needed an editor to cut out several of the D and E plots was that one of the major arcs was about re-establishing orbital to ground control... and then they did almost nothing with it. Should have ended with the Imperial Navy going "we have sensor readings on a whole bunch of enemy Titans... aaaaaaaand they're gone, extra grog rations to the loaders tonight."
 
For reference, the International Space Station circles the globe every 90 minutes.

There are probably interesting considerations in terms of being in higher orbit (more reaction time to people firing stuff up at you, more delta-V required, although it's not a massive difference honestly) and having more loiter time all the way up to geosynchronous orbit, versus being lower down and able to more easily sweep the whole of a planet's surface in a short period of time. Anti-orbital weapons might also make you want to avoid orbital trajectories that they can sight until you're able to blow them up, which adds an interesting tactical dynamic.

And yes of course, if there's a fleet or other defences protecting the planet, presumably ideally you want to deal with that first. Unless this is more of a daring raid or tactical gambit kind of scenario, which is likely to be a "high variance play" as they say.

But a fleet defending orbit is way more than most Imperial worlds have in Warhammer 40K apart from likehighly strategically important worlds. At least going by Battlefleet Gothic, where the average Imperial sector fleet stated to be between 50-75 ships total (of which only a quarter or so are capital ships) defending a roughly similar number of worlds. There are additional defences some planets will have, and stuff like non-warp capable planetary defence monitors, but if the defending world has its own fleet stationed in-system all the time then it's probably a Forge World or somewhere like Cadia or Macragge.

To put that fifty to seventy five vessels figure in context, in Battlefleet Gothic: Armada a Space Marine Chapter fleet is stated to have something like half a dozen to a dozen capital ships (trending to the lower end) with something like two to three three times that in escorts. Most of their capital ships are strike cruisers which are smaller than their imperial counterparts, whilst Battle Barges are very tough customers, but most chapters have at most two, and they're quite specialised for planetary assaults. That gives us a ballpark of twenty four to thirty six ships, let's say. That's a half the size of a sector fleet, which an Astartes chapter can concentrate far more easily. That's nuts!

An average Guard deployment is probably lucky if it will have more than a single escort vessel babysitting their transports, unless it's a very major deployment of force by the Imperium. Now even transport vessels mount some defensive weaponry which is still the equivalent of a small nuclear arsenal, but would you trust a transport ship to not blow up the 17th Mordian Guards when they were meant to be targetting an Ork Speed Freaks column? Even the Imperial Navy seem to have enough "friendly fire" incidents with the Guard that they generally leave fire support to strike craft once troops are on the surface, unless the target is very far away from Imperial forces.

Space Marines by contrast seem to arrive with an incredible luxury of orbital support, and it's emphasised how precise SM orbital fires are versus the Navy - if nothing else, they get more practice at working in close concert with ground forces. So this is why I think if we're thinking about how a Space Marine chapter is possibly supposed to work, "special forces guys who seize key objectives you can't blow up with a bombardment cannon" is not a bad interpretation, without drastically changing the lore.

It does all of the things that giving them more artillery would do (so long as you retain orbital control), without having to have Space Marines manning a Basilisk, which is not a good use of a Space Marine.

Mutton said:
The biggest problem with the book Titanicus other than the fact that it needed an editor to cut out several of the D and E plots was that one of the major arcs was about re-establishing orbital to ground control... and then they did almost nothing with it. Should have ended with the Imperial Navy going "we have sensor readings on a whole bunch of enemy Titans... aaaaaaaand they're gone, extra grog rations to the loaders tonight."
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That bit rustled my jimmies so much when I read the book lmao

Like, the Imperial presence on the world -at least the bit which had not already been taken by the traitor titan legion - seems to be focussed around a large mega-city, which also had all the valuable infrastructure. The traitor titan legions were still relatively far from the city, so even if you missed by a couple hundred klicks, you're not likely to accidentally blow up the one factory which makes boot polish for Commissars for the whole sector, or whatever.

You'd imagine the captain of a Sword class frigate would be at risk of severe neural hypotension because of so much blood going to their throbbing excitement at getting the chance to bag multiple Titans.

Otherwise it's a good book, Abnett is one of the only Black Library authors and make the Imperium feel like an actual human society which is incredibly fucked-up but not like, an absurd pastiche. He just tends to have his own distinct ideas on how the setting works, like Forge Worlds having a regular Imperial planetary governor, but honestly I'd take that over the total dearth of any kind of societal context you see in most other BL books.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Also the continental US is a really big place, to the point that it's arguably geographically impossible to invade. A lot of the issues that impact on a sea invasion also to some degree impact on a force deployed from orbit, and in some respects are even worse because unless you bring millions of dudes and enough supplies to keep them armed and fed for however long it takes to pacify the country then your logistics tail is lightyears long.
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Surely you've got to grant the premise that WH40k imperial armies are capable of performing expeditionary warfare on a planetary scale?

Because if not, their entire setting goes to bits long before they inexplicably invade 21st century Earth.
 
But the IoM explicitly textually does bring billions of dudes to take your base.
 
Aineko said:
Surely you've got to grant the premise that WH40k imperial armies are capable of performing expeditionary warfare on a planetary scale?

Because if not, their entire setting goes to bits long before they inexplicably invade 21st century Earth.
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Well fundamentally that's sort of the rub, because there's multiple readings of the source materials, all of which are ultimately equally valid. In many depictions, absolutely WH40K armies are bad at performing expeditionary warfare on a planetary scale. In a smaller number of other depictions they're implied not to be, and some are unclear or arguable. There's simply no consistency, and it's a setting written by people who on the whole are not even armchair military experts.

If you want to interpret Warhammer 40,000 as the Imperium and friends just fundamentally being very bad at war, there is definitely ample evidence to support this reading. If you want, you can find a lot of stuff which seems incompetent to a degree where even the Iraqi army would look like gods next to the best formations of the Imperial Guard. Equally, if you want to say, "this is a civilisation which has been fighting wars for almost as long as human history since the invention of agriculture, and where martial exploits are the single most important achievement for their elite class, their way of fighting war should at least make sense within their social context", then there's sources you can emphasise and readings you can take which do that. Personally I find this fun because it makes the Imperium feel more real and idiosyncratic and fucked up, a sort of mirror to the darkest times in our own history, but... it's not more valid because of that.

To be clear, I think even in a fairly generous view of the Imperium, it would be hard to argue without really squinting at the texts that the average Imperial Guard deployment is much better at war than, as an incredibly rough comparison, Russian forces in Ukraine today. Huge fuckups at the outset of campaigns due to a lack of clear orders and poor planning, different service branches at loggerheads, unsupported infantry assaults in conditions reminiscent of the Western Front, an air force which struggles to do more than basic CAS and gravity bombing... but somewhat ameliorated by a massive advantage in supporting fires which are used as the solution to most problems, and an ability to replace losses. There are probably specific regiments or campaigns which rise somewhat above that standard, and ones that fall far below. Many PDF forces have combat showings which do seem very reminiscent of the Iraqi army circa '91.

But ultimately it's what reading you want to take out of this massively internally contradictory and sprawling set of source materials. No one actually cares about how operationally incompetent 40K armies are, outside of discussions online like this, and it's clearly not a priority for GW because why would they care? Their demographic is a million miles away from people who play Command: Modern Operations for fun, or even relatively soft wargames.
 
Skippy said:
Well fundamentally that's sort of the rub, because there's multiple readings of the source materials, all of which are ultimately equally valid.

If you want to interpret Warhammer 40,000 as the Imperium and friends just fundamentally being very bad at war, there is definitely ample evidence to support this reading. If you want, you can find a lot of stuff which seems incompetent to a degree where even the Iraqi army would look like gods next to the best formations of the Imperial Guard. Equally, if you want to say, "this is a civilisation which has been fighting wars for almost as long as human history since the invention of agriculture, and where martial exploits are the single most important achievement for their elite class, their way of fighting war should at least make sense within their social context", then there's sources you can emphasise and readings you can take which do that. Personally I find this fun because it makes the Imperium feel more real and idiosyncratic and fucked up, a sort of mirror to the darkest times in our own history, but... it's not more valid because of that.

To be clear, I think even in a fairly generous view of the Imperium, it would be hard to argue without really squinting at the texts that the average Imperial Guard deployment is much better at war than, as an incredibly rough comparison, Russian forces in Ukraine today. Huge fuckups at the outset of campaigns due to unclear orders and poor planning, massive infantry assaults for limited strategic gain, an air force which struggles to do more than basic CAS and gravity bombing... but somewhat ameliorated by a massive advantage in supporting fires which are used as the solution to most problems, and an ability to replace losses. There are probably specific regiments or campaigns with rise somewhat above that standard, and ones that fall far below, like many PDF forces whose combat showings do seem very reminiscent of the Iraqi army circa '91.

But ultimately it's what reading you want to take out of this massively internally contradictory and sprawling set of source materials. No one actually cares about how operationally incompetent 40K armies are, outside of discussions online like this, and it's clearly not a priority for GW because why would they care? Their demographic is a million miles away from people who play Command: Modern Operations for fun, or even relatively soft wargames.
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I don't see how any of this is a reply to my post, though?

I'm on the 'they're all very inept at war' side, have been for pages now. But I'm also on the 'that doesn't mean that they can't do the essential things that canonically they constantly do' side, and I posted about a specific point of that where it was suggested the scale of the continental US made it logistically impossible to invade.
 
Aineko said:
I don't see how any of this is a reply to my post, though?

I'm on the 'they're all very inept at war' side, have been for pages now. But I'm also on the 'that doesn't mean that they can't do the essential things that canonically they constantly do' side, and I posted about a specific point of that where it was suggested the scale of the continental US made it logistically impossible to invade.
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Fair enough, I was taking your post more as a jumping off point, perhaps should have made that clearer.

To be clear I would broadly be inclined to agree with you personally, so I'm not really going to argue with you? Al I would say is that if you want to find sources indicating that the Guard struggle to logistically support an advance of even a couple hundred miles from their FOB, because the writer is mangling half-remembered school facts about the First World War, those depictions certainly exist. Does this really make sense in terms of the assumed capabilities of the Imperium, or other sources which directly contradict it? Not really, but welcome to Warhammer 40,000.

In relation to Ford's point, I think he was talking more specifically about the fact that even if you can set up an orbital bridgehead anywhere, conventional logistical realities still apply once you're moving past your FOB. Which is absolutely true, and I think even in a scenario where you're taking a fairly generous view of the Imperial Guard, there still have to be real limits based proportional to the availability of spacelift to how far they can actually push significant numbers of troops from a drop site, without seizing local infrastructure or supplies which makes it easier.

Space Marines don't have these issues because a Space Marine deployment is literally a hundred guys, and a strike cruiser has enough Thunderhawks to move a company and all its gear in a single drop. Also if a Space Marine company needs more than the ammunition they brought with them on a single insertion, it's probably quite an atypical situation. But in any case, the actual numbers required are so low that it's a much more tractable problem than trying to supply 100,000 guys. That's one silver lining of how ludicrously tiny SM Chapters are.
 
Mutton said:
The biggest problem with the book Titanicus other than the fact that it needed an editor to cut out several of the D and E plots was that one of the major arcs was about re-establishing orbital to ground control... and then they did almost nothing with it. Should have ended with the Imperial Navy going "we have sensor readings on a whole bunch of enemy Titans... aaaaaaaand they're gone, extra grog rations to the loaders tonight."
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God thinking about the ending to Titanicus makes me want to gnaw on human bones.

The main character in our ensemble cast has an arc that builds to a climax of him holding his princeps hostage at shotgun-point

...and then nothing. We never see them again. They don't even get a name-drop. Their titan is mentioned as taking part in the final battle so there must have been some resolution, but fuck us if we get to know what it was! Did he blow the guy away? Did they reconcile? Was there any fallout? Our dude was under a suspended sentence for killing that guy at the beginning, is he out from under that now or did the princeps sign his death warrant as revenge? Fuck off book's over.

Titanicus has the worst Abnett Rush Ending in his entire oeuvre. Like in regards to your post it's very clear that there was supposed to be some kind of orbital bombardment of the second chaos legion to even the odds, and then it just doesn't fucking happen because - I presume - Abnett was up against his deadline and book needs to end now. We don't get a resolution to the old badass princeps who's slowly going senile, either, was this his last action like he was fearing? Cause he was getting pretty bad at the end there. Fuck we don't even get to know if the diplomat lady and the pdf guy get to go on that dinner date they talked about.

The entire Samstag plot could have been cut out with zero loss to the overall narrative; it eats up like twenty to thirty pages of the overall book and the closest it comes to interacting with anything else is that her unit saves a princeps who's not important and she meets the skitarii guy.

Fuck, the Eisenhorn trilogy and Legion had abrupt endings but at least they had endings. Titanicus just fucking stops and says "oops we blew the budget for the final battle, uh, all the bad guys got shot k bye."
 
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The Samstag plot was one I personally really liked because it was a great view of warfare from the view of the little guys, putting a human face on the masses of conscripts being called up when a planet gets invaded. But yeah I think the novel needed a bit more focus, either less plotlines or more effort to tie them cohesively together.

And yeah the ending is hilariously abrupt. Like even by Abnett standards, it's like a group project where you spend too long getting the introduction and middle bits of your Powerpoint looking pretty, then realise you have fifteen minutes left and need to rush together the conclusion before you're due to present it.
 
I think that the most ironic thing about the Space Marines being basically the face of the W40k setting is that they are also about the least impactful part of the setting.

You can remove them from the setting entirely and basically nothing would change. I'd argue that they're about equivalent to the Tau in how much effect they overall have in the setting.
 
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My hot take on 40k Space Marines is that they are fine, actually, if presented as a high-speed low-drag operator bunch.

The actual problem is the size of the table that's played on, and the need to buy Forgeworld to get the full effect.

On a regular table, largely reduce to footslogging, they're a surprisingly weak army. On an Apocalypse-scale table, almost entirely mechanized or air-mobile, they are much more competitive than most armies but probably equal or even slightly inferior to mechanized Guard and Tau. On the scale of a game in somebody's back yard, with Thunderhawks and Drop Pods screaming in from orbit, they are terrifyingly mobile in a way most armies simply can't be, the sole exceptions being airmobile Guard lists like Elysians or Harakonis. At that size and backed by the absurd firepower of Thunderhawks and the occasional orbital bombardment, fighting Space Marines is like fighting angry ghosts. By the time you've gotten in position to fight them, there's nothing there.
 
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Skippy said:
Fair enough, I was taking your post more as a jumping off point, perhaps should have made that clearer.

To be clear I would broadly be inclined to agree with you personally, so I'm not really going to argue with you? Al I would say is that if you want to find sources indicating that the Guard struggle to logistically support an advance of even a couple hundred miles from their FOB, because the writer is mangling half-remembered school facts about the First World War, those depictions certainly exist. Does this really make sense in terms of the assumed capabilities of the Imperium, or other sources which directly contradict it? Not really, but welcome to Warhammer 40,000.

In relation to Ford's point, I think he was talking more specifically about the fact that even if you can set up an orbital bridgehead anywhere, conventional logistical realities still apply once you're moving past your FOB. Which is absolutely true, and I think even in a scenario where you're taking a fairly generous view of the Imperial Guard, there still have to be real limits based proportional to the availability of spacelift to how far they can actually push significant numbers of troops from a drop site, without seizing local infrastructure or supplies which makes it easier.

Space Marines don't have these issues because a Space Marine deployment is literally a hundred guys, and a strike cruiser has enough Thunderhawks to move a company and all its gear in a single drop. Also if a Space Marine company needs more than the ammunition they brought with them on a single insertion, it's probably quite an atypical situation. But in any case, the actual numbers required are so low that it's a much more tractable problem than trying to supply 100,000 guys. That's one silver lining of how ludicrously tiny SM Chapters are.
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FWIW I tend to think that IG logistics are organizationally inept enough to generate significant operational friction even standing still (the whole 'supplying arctic uniforms to equatorial jungle' meme), but voluminous enough that they can support the massive-scale operations they're supposed to when they're successfully directed. I'm not going to stand on finer points of that as canon, but I do think you've got to allow that they have ways of running operations over, again, entire planetary areas?

(One important fact about Imperial logistics is that while they certainly do make use of local production they also lean heavily on forge-worlds which are typically light-years away from the operations their materiel is used in.)
 
Cally's plot was fine but it should have actually tied in to the main plot; an on the ground viewpoint was great and I loved the descriptions of running from the shockroachs.. Her husband's was crap and should have been cut, it added nothing other than a bummer stinger.

I think the Princeps and guy's plot was kind of resolved with the implied "oh everyone learned it was a trick, possibly by the enemy, also they're there so you can bond over some VIOLENCE" but given their maniples had just barely made it through the first wave, dealing with the second wave should have been at most "we're going to paint some targeting lasers for the orbital bombardment or bait them into flat ground" instead of somehow shittershattering them in head to head offpage.
 
Aineko said:
Surely you've got to grant the premise that WH40k imperial armies are capable of performing expeditionary warfare on a planetary scale?

Because if not, their entire setting goes to bits long before they inexplicably invade 21st century Earth.
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I wasn't speaking specifically about the Imperium, though with regards to the Imperium specifically they absolutely do not typically bounce units from space to ground and back to space again gaining the kind of strategic mobility advantage that Tyran is talking about. Not even the Space Marines are typically depicted like this and they are, literally, space marines and have Thunderhawks in their org chart. Deployment via drop pod is fast but one way and everything you drop then needs to be picked up, including those drop pods, and vehicles which need specialised variants, etc

Astrid Fornhoff said:
But the IoM explicitly textually does bring billions of dudes to take your base.
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Only the largest crusades consist of billions of dudes and they are typically spread across a huge front. And not every crusade, which is the largest type of Imperial deployment, is on that scale. The forces put together to launch the Damocles Gulf Crusade was like 20 regiments of guard and a few companies of Space Marines. That's in the same ballpark as the initial phase of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
 
So this leads to what is perhaps an unpopular opinion. While a dynamic entry from orbit is of course an impressive tactic there is a technology that far surpasses any spaceborne attacker: the humble train.
 
Ultrakill is genuinely the greatest single-player FPS game experience ever made.
 
Alert: Take this to Vs. or Warfare
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    • take this to vs. or warfare
    I think at the point where we're discussing miltech capabilities and orbital mechanics and specific invasion scenarios, the topic has moved well past 'Unpopular opinions on fiction'.

    It's an interesting topic -- but it's one that's much better suited to a Vs. or Warfare thread. Time to take it there.
     
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