WH40K - 40K misc numbers... (SDN)

[Mith]

What's amusing is now that the quote is 'bad', people seem to eager to claim that physics doesn't work properly so that's not a fair source.

Even though they would have knowingly kept using it if no one had called them on it...

[Mr. Oragahn]

• TITAN STUFF II

For starters, be sure to visit at least once this link. It contains a lot of pictures of the WH40K miniatures, notably Epic material.

Now, let's get into that new chapter of Titan related observations, commentaries and wild calcs.

A couple months ago, I dipped my fingers into an unexceptionally small versus thread at SBC, titled Imperator War Titan vs. Battletech.
Rather unsurprisingly, the thread started with the usual opening volleys about Titans' megatons of firepower, and it pretty much didn't change from there.
Captain Orsai provided several quotations (1, 2). Of course, him like some others, didn't bother pointing out why the quote spam supported their position, alternating between libel and burden shifting as smoke screens. Still, you always learn new stuff about WH40K. After all, the amount of published material is properly staggering.
Note of interest, Inquisitor Ryan was much more willing to debate properly than he did in the "Ori vs Imperium" thread. I guess debate only goes well when the victory of the all mighty Imperium is something certain.

Anyway, I decided to pick the quotes, save them here and treat them as a whole, because they are relevant to a Titan Imperator's abilities, both offensive and defensive. Notice that although the SBC topic involves one of the mightest Titans, what I'm going to post below deals with other models as well, notably Warlords.

So let's start with this particular post from the thread.

Yet they can be damaged by ground weapons... it takes a lot of them but they're not as godly as some fans might like to fwap, I mean think.

True. Titans have also been somewhat toned down from a lot of the old fluff, where they were quite literally able to simply walk through divisions of tanks without slowing down, and duel with smaller capital ships in orbit.

From there, I'll post the content of Captain Orsai's post in orange.

And amusingly, as you'll see, even the high end firepower levels which supposedly threaten small capital ships (which are around 1 km long already) would be sitting in the megaton range.

And as for Imperators, anything less than another Imperator or scores of Warlords trying to kill one in direct combat is wasting its time. Or committing suicide, it depends on how much attention the Imperator's paying to them. In Dark Apostle there's the assessment of the combined heavy weapons firepower of every heavy weapon some ~3,000 Word Bearers and attendant vehicles, dreadnoughts, etc. vs. an Imperator, that "there was just not enough firepower to take down the Imperator's shields, let alone damage the Titan" (pg. 205).

The book speaks of a combined firepower from all available units. The Word Bearers are a legion of Chaos Space Marines. Giving each of them an average firepower of 50 MW, you'd only get a total of 150 GW. Assuming they'd fire for ten minutes non stop -- a rather generous claim considering that a Titan would obliterate them all within the first minutes -- that's 600 seconds, you'd get a total of 90 TJ. Ten times less if you think 50 MW per Word Bearer is too high.
Now would they carry enough power cells and ammunition for this?

They had other vehicles and dreadnoughts. Although the armoured tanks could have a firepower in the couple gigajoules, they would not be firing a shell per second. For reference, a main battle tank like the Leclerc fires 12 rounds per minute. Most of all, they would not carry 600 rounds. A M1A5 Abram main battle tank carries 32 rounds for the main gun. Although we're speaking of Chaos vehicles, the example of the Leman Russ is interesting. Imperial Armour Vol I: IG&IN, gives the standard variants 40 rounds for the main gun. The Demolisher gets 25 rounds. The rarer Vanquisher, of the Stygies VII pattern, relies on 28 rounds. There's an interesting cutaway of the LRV on p.40, which may allow to gauge the amount of explosives carried in those shells.
Globally, if we ran with firepower figures from 5 GJ to 10 GJ (I think they are lower than that), you'd get 400 GJ of firepower per tank for each entire stock of shells. Similar figures should be assumed for Chaos tanks.
Super heavies would enable greater total firepower (more firepower per main gun, plus more ammo), but super heavies are less prevalent.
So focusing on the more mundane tanks, what matters is the quantity of such units. To obtain 400 TJ, you'd need at least a thousand of such tanks.
When there's just three thousand SMs around, that's 1 tank for 3 SMs. Which is rather ridiculous, and that's working from a figure that allows each tank to fire all of those shells with generous firepower figures.

I say one tank for every 30 SMs is damned generous. So still going with 10 GJ per shell, with 100 tanks, we get 40 TJ. All shells expanded.

Then the Dreadnoughts. Giving each of those unit an averaged firepower of 500 MW, over 600 seconds you get a total of 300 GJ each. These things are just as few as tanks. But let's say there's 1 Dreadnought for 10 SMs. That's a total of a hundred of them then. Which results in a total of 30 TJ from their combined arms, at the end of the whole bombardment.

All in all, you have 160 TJ (38.24 kilotons) from generous premises, including the crucial factor that all these forces could fire for ten minutes at the same spot on the Titan's void shields, instead of being progressively destroyed.

You may also appreciate the following details:

The entire line from the book is not just "there was just not enough firepower to take down the Imperator's shields, let alone damage the Titan", but "There was just not
enough firepower to take down the Imperator's shields, let alone damage the Titan, not while they were already engaged with the Guard and Skitarii forces."

Basically, they couldn't damage the Titan with whatever they could use to engage the machine because they already were fighting against two other enemy groups at the same time.
Which becomes interesting since the text strongly implies that if all these Chaos forces could concentrate their firepower on the Titan and only the Titan, then they'd stand more than a chance of taking it down. it is amusing how the meaning has been completely butchered by the removal of a critical portion of the line, which I'm sure wasn't missed by the person who forwarded the partial quote. What we had here was complete dishonesty. Period.
Moving on.

This passage is preceded by the presentation of the Titan, and a description of the destruction it brings to the battlefield:

Advancing through the press of soldiers and tanks, it dwarfed everything in its path. A multi-towered bastion the size of a walled stronghold sat atop its massive, armoured carapace shell. Siege ordnance and battle cannons, of such size that a small tank could drive through the barrels, were housed within this massive structure, ... The air around the giant war machine shimmered with the power of its void shields. The siege cannons upon the hulking shoulders of the Imperator thumped as they launched their first salvo, and the air was filled with screaming shells that erupted amongst the Word Bearers. Warrior-brothers were thrown through the air and tanks smashed asunder beneath the barrage, but that was as nothing compared to the awesome destruction that was to come.
Super-heated plasma fed into the annihilator cannon on the beast's right arm, filling the air with potent hissing that hurt the unprotected ears of the Guardsmen, and the massive barrels of the deadly hellstorm cannon began to rotate, the wind beating fiercely as it picked up speed. The hellstorm cannon let loose with a torrent of fire from the spinning barrels that tore along the line of Word Bearers, cutting from one side of the valley to the other, ripping through warriors and vehicles alike. The plasma annihilator cannon flared with the power of a contained sun and a
gout of white-hot energy roared from its barrel, engulfing a handful of tanks that were instantly returned to their molten base elements. The destruction that the Imperator wrought was awe inspiring, and a roar rose from the ranks of Imperial Guardsmen as their god-machine unleashed the power of its weapon systems upon the hated foe.

The most impressive thing being the capacity, here, to melt a handful of tanks. Not that much. Considering that it's contained plasma, there would be a limited blast, helping the plasma to be more efficient in delivering heat to the targets. All in all, a few thousand gigajoules would be a high end. That's not counting the tanks' own ammo blowing up, adding more energy, and logically sending gouts of molten metal across all four corners.

Stabbing beams of energy flashed from the mountainside as the lascannons of the havoc squads positioned there targeted the Imperator. The powerful blasts looked like little more than pin-pricks of light as they strobed towards the Titan. Scores of predator tanks, Land Raiders, Dreadnoughts and daemon engines added their fire to that of the havoc squads as they directed their heavy weapons fire towards the towering behemoth. Missiles, lascannon beams, heavy ordnance shells and streaming plasma speared towards the Titan. Its void shields flashed as they absorbed the incoming firepower, leaving the deadly machine unscathed, and it returned fire with dozens of battle cannons situated in the leg bastions.

Roughly between 40 and 80 of each of the four types of vehicles fired at the Titan, which absorbed that volley of accumulated fire, and returned fire. It's unclear how long it lasted, but no indication is made that it took more than a few minutes.
You get between 160 and 320 vehicles firing at the Titan, some of them only being Dreadnoughts. You'd get a total of several hundreds of gigajoules, by using the figures obtained earlier on.
Eventually, after several volleys, you'd get low thousands of gigajoules fired at the Titan, tops.

Once again, considering the power of such a Titan, there's no reason the enemy would be left with more than a few minutes of its life to throw stuff at the mighty machine before being pulverized, as you'll be able to verify below...

The ranks of the Imperial Guard renewed their attack, bolstered by the arrival of the Titan that unleashed the power of its plasma Annihilator once more, firing up into the darkness and blasting away a ridge top, causing salt rock, debris and daemon engines to crash down the sheer cliff in a mass avalanche. Its hellstorm cannons smoked as they spun, tearing along the ridge. Rain turned to steam as it lashed against the super-heated barrels of the mega-weapon. Barrages of ordnance continued to pound at the void shields atop the carapace of the Titan, and they flashed with a myriad of colours as they deflected the incoming fire.

Probably the most noticeable act is the firing of the annihilator cannon, destroying a ridge top. The magnitude is clearly well above conventional fire, but there's simply no possible way to translate this into some firm figure. That and the excessively hyperbolic terminologies, when mere rocket launchers "annihilate" walkers, where ridge tops "erupt" following bombing runs, another Chaos vehicle "obliterated in a screaming inferno" and so on.


And the useful notes on Imperators from Titanicus;
- There's essentially fuck-all lesser Titans can do against one. After scanning the Augmenautus Rex's shields, Princeps Kung (Sicarian Faero) assesses the following;

Augmenautus Rex was wrapped in voids of such power and cohesive performance, they could withstand anything Faero and any of the other engines fired at it. The only way to break them was sustained, erosive fire. If they all hit the same shield section hard enough, for long enough, they might force a rupture. The necessary coordinated bombardment would take minutes to arrange and accomplish.

The moment they commenced such a bombardment, however, Augmenautus Rex would turn on them, and they wouldn't have anything like minutes left of their lives.
pg. 336

At this point, there are several dozen Tempestus and Invicta Warlords active and in position to open up on the Augmenautus Rex.

Of course all comes down to how much firepower the Warlords have, and how concentrated and long the bombardment is. Considering the author doesn't hesitate to use proper quantification for the number of machines and weapons, using the term dozens abundantly, it is expected that if minutes meant ten or more, then he would have used such terms.
Based on former calculations* (the projectile's diameter was based on the bore of a rather tall Gargant), we can see that the entirety of a Warlord's shields can be saturated by the fraction of the energy released by a ball stuffed with explosives, if the explosion is internal, and that even before the explosion has time to really damage the Titan itself. This represents a fraction of hundreds of gigajoules to very low kilotons. Which, in return, would dictate the sustained firepower of Warlords.

From the provided references, we know that dozens of Titans are involved. So you have between 24 to 96 Warlords. Considering what it takes to bring down their shields, you would have to take the higher end of the spectrum to rattle the hundred terajoule range, after a sustained constant firing over 9 minutes.

Among those minutes are those needed to prepare and coordinate the attack.
Also, what were the sizes of the Titans? This matters a lot, in terms of power core size.

* Notice that the Titan sizes I used for these calculations (much earlier in this thread) are somehow inferior to some high ends available in other sources. Nevertheless, the adjusted values according to the correction on sizes wouldn't change the firepower figures much. Doubling the size of a Titan wouldn't even double the figures.

Rather interesting, from this blog, the author gives his own opinion of the novel "Titanicus", and provides the following extract:

The Engine they had seen light up with gunfire had vanished from view.
"What are enemy numbers like?" Etta asked.
"Princeps Kung is currently tagging forty-eight sources of ordnance or heavy weapons fire."
"Forty-Eight?" asked Etta. "He's taking fire from forty-eight sources?"
"His shields are holding, mamzel. He is eliminating them at an admirable rate."
"He is?" she echoed.
"Of course," said Crusius, "He is Sicarian Faero."

Sicarian Faero was the Warlord-class Titan controlled by Kung. 48 different targets, firing ordnance or heavy weapons. A heavy weapon can typically be the main gun of a Predator tank. There's no certainty that all shots land on the Titan either.
He's dispatching the targets with contemptuous ease apparently, which would decimate enemy fire quickly. In this case the impression I'm getting is that the Titan may have taken a high end total between many hundreds of gigajoules to some terajoules perhaps, all spread through time and counting shield recharge.


- An Imperator's weapons loadout is fully capable of scoring catastrophic kills on fully shielded Warlords, as the Augmenautus Rex does to Orestes Magnificat (destroying it before Magnificat's crew were even aware it was there (pg. 322)) and Tempus Ionicus (described as "perishing in a ball of light hotter than a sun" (pg. 336), indicating a reactor detonation); neither Warlord had, so far as is indicated in the text, taken hits that would compromise their shields. It's also mentioned as "levelling city blocks and hive stacks" to get at the Imperial engines (pg. 335).


Titans are powered by fission cores. Hotter than a sun is an exaggeration since it's a temperature that is simply impossible to achieve with such nuclear power production method, unless you are somehow limiting the comparison to the temperature of the surface of a star, which is lower than in other parts of the star.
As for leveling city blocks, you don't need more than hundreds of gigajoules to cause massive damage. Here is an example chemical blast of 2.3 kilotons which leveled nearly 1000 buildings. 1000 buildings, that's huge and would easily count for several city blocks in many modern cities.
The reference about leveling the hive stacks could be misleading. One could wonder how it is possible to level entire stacks at a given level without pulling the whole hive down. The most obvious way to solve this issue is to understand that the stacks were groups of structures on the edge of hives which were brought down, without pulling the whole hive down. Then, again, this doesn't require megatons of energy per shot at all, and moderate kiloton shots would be more than enough to get the job done.
From the citations, we don't know how long it took for the Titan to achieve this degree of destruction either, so you could cut this over several shots and seconds.


- The method Kung resorts to for killing the beast is, well, take a look;

<Listen to me, all of you,> Kung canted. <This isn't up for debate, and there's no time for discussion. Link your MIUs directly to my engine. Slave to me your auspex and fire control systems. Grant me authority over your Titans.>

<Manifold linkage of MIUs is forbidden!> Theron of Stridex canted.

<If we open our impulses to the Manifold, we risk scrapcode invasion and corruption!> declared Philostartus of Atrox Terribilus.

<I said this wasn't a discussion,> Kung replied. <Do it now.>
[...]
<Ready all weapons,> he exloaded.

Dozens of engine minds answered him obediently. Dozens of autoloaders clattered, dozens of missile pods opened their receivers to chamber munitions, dozens of massive main-limb and carapace energy weapons came up to charge, guzzling power from their accumulators. Dozens of crosshairs and target reticules overlaid and pinpointed the same small section of the Imperator's void structure, the third lower left anterior lumbar. The overlaid targetters formed a hard, glowing mass on the Manifold view, like an incandescent remnant of cobweb.

<Fire!> canted Vancent Kung.

In a perfect action of simultaneous discharge, the merged engines opened fire. From their scattered positions in and around the Symphony, the engines of Invicta and Tempestus lit off in absolute coordination. Stark beams of energy lashed out through the fire and the rain, missiles spat out into the dark, broadsides boomed; enough combined fire to bring down a city.
You can bring down a city with several tenths of low kilotons of energy, especially when you're doing so by spreading the firepower over many weapons, as it is done here since several weapons fire in unison, and striking the target at different points, which is far more efficient than a single detonation from a single weapon of the same yield. Obviously, time and damage spread would reduce yield per cannon.
All of it struck the same ten metre square section of void shield at the same instant.
They hit a square that's ten meters wide. It's not 10 m², cause it would be written "square meters" then. It's rather interesting, since it means that you can saturate one square meter of a void shield with a hundredth of the firepower. A very interesting figure, surely.
The third lower left anterior lumbar distorted like blown, wet glass and popped. A nanosecond later, Augmenautus Rex experienced a system-wide, cascade shield failure as the generators blew out, attempting to compensate and underlap the remaining voids.

On the Manifold, the shield halo surrounding the monster vanished like the flame of an extinguished candle.

<Kill it,> snarled Kung.

The massed engines opened fire again.
[..]
Augmenautus Rex took ten whole minutes to die.
pgs 337-338

This last part was rather curious. I'm sure some Hammies would rush at this piece of text to claim that since the bare hull of the Imperator-class Titan can take the massed firepower of dozens of Warlords for ten minutes, there is somehow evidence to cope with megatons of firepower. But let's point a thing or two here.
First, was the Titan left to die there for ten minutes, or were they firing at it for ten minutes? Thus far, the text only allows us to understand two salvoes were fired, the first blowing the voids out.
Secondly, if the Titans kept firing at the Imperator for ten minutes (while the shields factually went down with one salvo), we would have to believe that the shields could only provide a fraction of the protection of the armour. Even if you think Kung's engines achieved one salvo per minute, that's already a ratio of 10 for "hull strength / shield strength". With a salvo every ten seconds, you'd obtain a ratio of 300, which just strikes me as terribly silly, and highly unlikely.
Starships, which are better equipped, don't seem to count on armour that much more than shields to cope with enemy attacks they could not intercept by other means. In general, it actually seems to be shields which allow much more protection than armour. Not to say that it would certainly not take more than hundreds of gigajoules, perhaps a few thousands tops, to pierce the armour of such a Titan in several crucial points, if you had to melt considerable amounts of thick armour.
Any exposed part wouldn't even require that much firepower, and it's rather specious to claim that the other war machines couldn't get a clear aim at a wounded Titan which couldn't move nor retaliate, and instead wasted their time firing at the armour.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Continued...

Now let's deal with Orsai's second post, which unsurprisingly, hinged around a nice ad hominem.

I read it. Don't take it personally, but until BL publishes an official fiction that pits a Bolo against an Imperator, this observation remains your opinion, and solely that. For one, nothing of what Captain Orsai posted makes me believe that even a spam of kiloton warheads would be required, and I think a low megaton nuke would be overkill. My 2c.

Prove it.

And, for the non-idiot population, the kind of thing Titan-grade weapons do; from Fulgrim;

Miniature suns exploded in the desert as the Titan's plasma weaponry blasted craters hundreds of metres in diameter, obliterating hundreds of Astartes at a stroke and turning the sand to shimmering dark glass.
- pg. 462

At this point, I was asked to provide evidence for my claim. Shifting the burden of proof, Orsai never bothered showing how he managed to derive his precious megatons from the quotes he provided, and anyone criticizing his opinion or the opinion of same-minded people, or merely disagreeing with them, proved to be enough to be called an idiot who would have to defend his idiotic claims, obviously.

Never mind. Although it doesn't work that way, we can try to get some idea of the firepower involved in those events.
One odd fact here is that if this were the result of firepower in the megaton range, despite "thousands of Astartes engaged in a furious firefight", only hundreds died, while tens of thousands of marines were fighting there.
This is the first problem, already. As you'll see below, we even know that the plasma weapon can be fired in successive pulses.
Multi-KT pulses fired over a wider arc would have killed far, far more troops. Although this could sound like an argument against a bad tactical decision, the point remains that a single explosion in the megaton range only killed hundreds of people, and that doesn't make much sense.

The Dies Irae's plasma weapon seems different from the one described in "Dark Apostle", since this one makes large craters, while the other would melt a hnadful tanks. It's not just a question of energy, but a question of behaviour. "Dark Apostle" clearly evokes something akin to a giant plasma torch, while "Fulgrim" really points to a high power pulses capable of generating blasts:

Firing lines of Land Raiders formed and collimated lines of ruby laser fire stabbed towards the fortress and the leviathan-like form of the Dies Irae.
Void shields flickered and, realising the danger, the monstrous Titan switched its fire from the infantry to the armour. Rippling blasts of plasma energy sawed along the line of tanks, and a dozen exploded as the white heat of fire torched their energy magazines.

In this case the ammo of some of the tanks caused them to explode.
Huh, the weapon has been dialed down? Why that? The titan would use megatons against infantry, but switch down to something like low kiloton or sub-kiloton against armoured vehicles?
Here's your second problem, because that's absurd.

Now, high energy super concentrated plasma pulses aimed at the ground would still heat it up with enough energy to make a nice luminous fireball, but it's not guaranteed to make blasts as powerful as those of thermonuclear nukes. Actually, there is no reason to think so. Which means that to obtain a blast that leaves craters with diameters as wide as hundreds of meters, the weapon would indeed need to be worth megatons, after comparing its effects to those of the Castle Bravo nuke, a 10.7 tons device with a light aluminium casing which left a 2 km wide crater into the unique ground of the Bikini Attol (it's more prone to make large craters, contrary to the dry and compact sand of your desert).

So, in the end, of course, you can focus on the size of the craters if you're looking for a big number, but if you're objective and look at the rest of the data, you realize that it doesn't fit at all.

In a setting where megatons of firepower would have ended the battle very quickly, a way to rationalize the craters' dimensions is to consider that the weapon somehow exploded at a sufficient depth. Only then it becomes possible to make large craters with lower yield explosions, as with the Lochnogar mine explosion, 24 tons of chemicals blowing up and leaving a 100 wide crater.

For that, the plasma weapon would need to fire a focused beam, which for all intents and purposes, it seems to do. It would need, anyway, to be more shaped than truly omnidirectional, at first.
So we could consider that it's some form of rapid-fire pulsed weapon that does look like a beam to the naked eye.

Then, the focused energy weapon delivers its energy straight into the ground, chiefly through heat. We'll assume that although the beams are related to plasma, there's very little leaking energy, so much that the IG troopers located around the Titan aren't squashed like ants by the over pressure, or blown away, which would be effects caused by the air suddenly expanding all around the beam's forward axis.
Read: it's very well bottled.

As it is a focused weapon, it won't waste as much energy as a nuke does. A chain of plasma pulses will be fired within a few seconds at the same spot into the ground.

As the pulses hit the ground, the matter is heated up and expands. The ground fractures, soil is lifted up, and whatever matter that is caught in the beam but can't escape fast enough is melted and largely vaporized. As the primary volume of matter is expanding, part dust and part vapour, the series of pulses continues to pour energy into the remaining matter located further down the beam's path, the expanding and vaporized matter barely putting up any resistance against the plasma pulses (they're bottled, and thus more effective at penetrating thick gaseous fluids than lasers for example).
The deeper the garland of pulses goes, the greater the coupling becomes (transfer of energy to the ground). There, you can expect that the matters heated up by the plasma weapon will expand at the speed of a powerful chemical reaction, at least.

The point I'm getting at is that the crater will be several hundred meters long and won't be circular, but actually ellipsoidal or pear shaped.
And before anyone would argue that it's pulling hairs in order to lower the yield of the weapon, since a crater is, by default, circular, consider this:

• 

As you can see, the area hit by the weapon will be much wider than the cross section circular area of the beam. Above all, it will be elongated, as the impacted surface area will stretch forward, from the Titan's position.
So your crater is fated not to be circular, and this effect only gets greater the further away the beam lands.
Besides, I used a height of 140 meters. Any shorter height would force the beam to hit the land at an even more open angle, just worsening the case.

So is a firepower in the petajoules even required? No, because the series of pulses is hitting the ground at an angle and digging down, and it would be wrong to treat the impact as if the projectile or beam (or else) had delivered all its energy within a small area.

This, in the end, reduces the firepower that's necessary to make a large crater since the affected area, even before the blast occurs, is already several dozen meters wide.

All in all, it's always important to point out that the unleashing of such firepower wasn't exactly regular, otherwise there would have been little left of the Loyalist forces over the Urgall Depression.

I wouldn't be surprised that the Dies Irae (an Imperator Titan) had one of those bores which are so large that a tank could be fitted in.

But in order to understand the outstanding nature of the megaton claim, we need to read more from the book:

THE DELAYS ENFORCED upon Ferras Manus had not been wasted by the Warmaster's forces. Since their arrival at Isstvan V, eight days ago, the warriors of the World Eaters, Death Guard, Sons of Horus and Emperor's Children had deployed throughout the defences constructed along the ridge of the Urgall Depression, making ready for the howling storm of battle that was soon to descend upon them. Behind them, long range, support squads manned the walls of the fortress, and Army artillery pieces waited to shower any attacker with high explosive death.
The Dies Irae stood before the wall, its colossal guns primed and ready to visit destruction on the enemies of the Warmaster, Princeps Turnet personally swearing to atone for the treachery that had engulfed his command during the Battle of Isstvan III.
Nearly thirty thousand Astartes hunkered down on the northern edge of the Urgall, their guns ready and their hearts steeled to the necessity of what must be done.
The skies remained an unbroken canopy of slate grey clouds, and the only sound to break the ghostly howl of the wind was the scrape of metal on metal. A sense of historic solemnity hung over the black desert, as though all gathered knew that these were the last moments of quiet in what was soon to be a bloody battlefield.
The first warning came when a dull, red orange glow built behind the clouds, bathing the Urgall in a fiery light. Then came the sound: a low roar that built from a deep, thrumming bass to a shrieking whine.
Alarms sounded and the clouds split apart as individual streaks of light burned through and fell in a cascading torrent of fire. Thunderous explosions ripped along the edge of the Urgall, and the entire length of the Warmaster's forces was engulfed in a searing, roaring bombardment.
For long minutes, the forces of the Emperor pounded the Urgall from orbit, a firestorm of unimaginable ferocity hammering the surface of Isstvan V with the power of the world's end. Eventually, the horrific bombardment ceased and the drifting echoes of its power faded, along with the acrid smoke of explosions, but the Emperor's Children had performed perfectly in creating a network of defences from which to face their former brothers, and the forces of the Warmaster had been well protected.
From his vantage point in the alien keep, the Warmaster smiled, and he watched the sky darken once again as thousands upon thousands of drop-pods streaked through the atmosphere towards the planet's surface.
He turned to the bellicose, armoured figure of Angron and the gloriously presented Fulgrim and said, 'Mark this day well, my friends. The Emperor's loyalists are heading to their doom!'

They weren't exactly hiding deep either, and there was no mention of shields flaring up during the initial bombardment.
I mean, even if they had deployed theater shields along the ridge, megatons of firepower fired all around the Chaos forces' positions would have destroyed the ground, and even if the shields were also working underground, there's nothing they could do to prevent the surrounding rock from being removed by weapons, and thus destroying all of them via indirect fire.

And yet, somehow, there's a Titan down there that supposedly fires megatons of firepower, when the world-ending, unimaginable and spectacular display of firepower can't even blast the whole region?
It doesn't add up barely begins to describe the magnitude of the contradiction here, if we were to believe that such super nuclear level firepower rained over the battlefield.

Behind the tremendous thunder strike of the assault, the heavy landers of the loyalist fleets braved the storm of anti-aircraft fire ripping upwards from inside the ancient fortress. Burning craft spiralled to the ground, ripped apart in streams of tracer fire, or blown apart by mass-reactive torpedoes. Hundreds of aircraft jostled for position as they descended to the dropsite, bringing heavy equipment, artillery, tanks and war machines to the surface of Isstvan V.
Billowing clouds of granular dust obscured much of the landing zones as cavernous holds disgorged scores of Land Raiders and Predator battle tanks. Entire companies of armoured vehicles roared onto the surface of the planet, churning the sand beneath their tracks as they raced to join the battle on the ridge.
Whirlwinds and Army artillery units deployed on the desert flats, spreading out and zeroing in on enemy emplacements, added their own thunder to the constant crack and rumble of battle. Even heavier craft descended on burning columns of fire, and the super heavy tanks of the Army rambled out, the barrels of their massive guns hurling huge shells against the glassy walls of the fortress.
What had begun as a massed strike against the traitors' position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. All told, over sixty thousand Astartes warriors clashed on the dusky plains of Isstvan V, and for all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

...

Blood ran in rivers down the slopes of the Urgall Depression, carving thick, sticky runnels in the dark sand. Such destruction had never yet been concentrated in such a horrifically confined space, enough martial power to conquer an entire planetary system having been unleashed in a line less than twenty kilometres wide.
Entire squadrons of armoured vehicles fought to reach the front lines, but the press of armoured bodies was so thick that their commanders were frustrated in their desire to crush the traitors beneath their armoured bulk. Firing lines of Land Raiders formed and collimated lines of ruby laser fire stabbed towards the fortress and the leviathan-like form of the Dies Irae.
Void shields flickered and, realising the danger, the monstrous Titan switched its fire from the infantry to the armour. Rippling blasts of plasma energy sawed along the line of tanks, and a dozen exploded as the white heat of fire torched their energy magazines.

Hundreds of heavy landers disgorged everything they carried, from artillery pieces to soldiers, Land Raiders, Predators and heavy machines hosing the fortress with shells.
Several Landers were shot down. So just how many Land Raiders were there?

It is rather silly to expect petajoules on such a battlefield to barely be worth a notification, really. Yet we're supposed to agree that a book that treats, with a passing interest, the unleashing of petajoules of firepower that leaves wide craters, would not largely focus on the Titan despite how overkill it would be, and largely make the rest of present forces totally irrelevant? Because that's exactly what goes on, the Titan is but a fraction of the whole battle. One could say almost negligible, in light of the few references to its actions during the battle.
How absurd can this be?
Remember that the deployment was preceded by an orbital bombardment which destroyed many structures, redoubts and else, but globally the Chaos forces were not affected much, with fortifications and trenches surviving the onslaught. There are times I really have trouble understanding the fuss about those bombardments, nor what logic drives armies which seem to enjoy hacking and slashing between two exchanges of bullets and lasers just for the sake of it, but not employing anything close to a nuke in order to terminate, as swiftly as possible, a target such as the traitors, Horus' servants.

Besides, did you see this: "Blood ran in rivers down the slopes of the Urgall Depression, carving thick, sticky runnels in the dark sand. Such destruction had never yet been concentrated in such a horrifically confined space, enough martial power to conquer an entire planetary system having been unleashed in a line less than twenty kilometres wide."

Apparently back then, it didn't take much firepower to conquer an entire planetary system.

Once again, with context, it is quite impressive how the understanding of a few lines extracted from their ensemble changes so considerably.

Note: According to Lexicanum, there's at least four sources which relate the fates of this titan, so there's probably a specific case to make out of so much information.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Continuing with his second post...

And from Gunheads;

The ork wall was easily a hundred metres high.
[...]
It was plated with great metal slabs of armour
[...]
There were vast iron gates, as tall as the wall itself, spaced at intervals all along its length, but none were open. They looked very heavy, very solid.
- pg. 238

- The wall described

Then, suddenly, the whole bulk of the Shadowsword shook as if it had been kicked by a giant. Blazing white light burst from her cannon, lancing straight across the battlefield, striking the massive ork gate dead centre.

The air shook with a massive thunderous crack. The iron gate glowed blindingly bright for an instant, and then seemed to vanish completely just as if it had never been there at all. The armoured wall around it glowed white, then yellow, then orange and red. Gobs of molten metal began to rain down on the ground.
- pg. 254

- and the Angel of Apocalypse blows a hole big enough for an army to get through in the said wall. :)

The gate is around a hundred meters high. Nothing is said about its width. Could be anything between 50 meters and 100 meters. Thickness isn't indicated either.

The fact that only the gate was vaporized, while the metal of the wall it was in contact with only melted at best, is odd. The blast would spread in a radial fashion from the point of impact.
In order to vaporize the whole gate, you need a certain excess of energy at the point of impact to be sure enough heat travels to the most distant lower and upper edges of the gate.
However, with so much energy, why is that so nothing about the wall is said to be vaporized, and only the gate?

Could it be that although it looked solid, it wasn't that sturdy? The spread of energy all over the gate is almost magical. Especially since the walls were covered with slabs of iron, and it's about the strongest material the Orks had to use.
So how the hell did that blast manage to vaporize an entire gate, yet barely threaten the wall?

Okay, let's go for a quick calc here.

Say it's a 100 m wide and 2 m high iron cylinder:

1.5708 e4 m^3 x 7870 kg = 123,621,960 kg.
Being utterly lazy, I go with 7.85 MJ needed to vaporize one kilogram of iron based on the number found here. Hell, this is based on an ambient temperature of 150 K.

There you get 970,432,386 MJ, or 970 TJ (232 kilotons).

Even if you multiplied this by 4 for whatever reason like inverse square law or something relative to shock pressure, you would still not be in the megaton range.

So, did we ever see any evidence that such a vast amount of firepower was absolutely necessary to destroy a Titan?
Have we seen a Titan only fall to amounts of energy vast enough to vaporize such an amount of iron?

The Shadowsword's beam vapes a quantity of metal in one strike that's well beyond the firepower that's been seen to be enough to take down a Titan. We precisely have examples above, and no indication of near-megaton firepower being poured into the unshielded entrails of a war machine is observed. I wouldn't even say we got evidence of low to mid kiloton. Titan-killing shots don't vaporize the entire mass of the beast when they destroy them. They pierce a given section of the mechanical beast and hit something sensitive underneath. Sometimes they hit a vital part, sometimes the machine only loses a limb.

Besides, this Shadowsword, the Angel of the Apocalypse, was one of a kind.

To some extent, Vinnemann's tank, Angel of the Apocalypse, was a victim of her own superb design. She was a Shadowsword super-heavy tank, ancient and deadly, but her Volcano cannon, with its nine-metre barrel, had originally been designed for felling traitor Titans and the like. She was far too specialised to warrant being fielded in most conventional battles, including this one.
Today, though, she would get to show what she could do.

This is a Shadowsword of the old and rare kind, the real ones, left overs from a bygone age. All the models which are still built to "this day" are sub-par replicas in comparison, less powerful.

So no sign of megaton firepower here, sorry, and that's without counting the rather specious way the gate is actually made to disappear.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Also, I'll post two more links to SDN threads which are spectacularly tame, clearly preceding Connor & Co's onslaught of inflated numbers. For their rarity, they're little gems on their own merits.
First, there is this thread, from which I'll pick the following quotations:

Titans are among the most powerful land vehicles in 40K, capable of levelling cities in short order with their main weapons.

There are three commonly observed classes, Warhound, Reaver, and Warlord. Imperators are less common.

Warhounds stand around 20 meters tall, with two main weapon mounts, typically a Vulcan megabolter and some form of energy weapon. They're vulnerable to attack from tanks and such, but can also play footie with them (as Defensor Fidei does in Storm of Iron).

Reavers are about 30-35 meters tall, with three main weapons - most often observed is a Titan-grade close combat weapon and two long range ones.

Warlords come in three sizes, light, medium and heavy. Light Warlords are 40 meters high, Medium ones are fifty meters high, and Heavy ones are sixty. They have four primary weapons, two shoulder mounted and two forearm mounted, normally a mix of energy and solid weapons. They can also mount single shot Vortex/Barrage/Warp missile launchers and Titan CCWs.

Imperators are well over seventy meters tall, armed with a defence laser, plasma annihilator, Hellstorm Cannon and an unspecified dorsal armament. They're also phenomonally agile for something that big, as seen when the Dies Irae takes on CCW-armed Warlords and Reaver (and wins, I might add).

Frankly, the sizes as presented above make much more sense than the minish walkers detailed in the PDF datasheet available at GW, in the Apocalypse section. If only for the fact that there's no way to squeeze people into a 40 meters tall Imperator.

I'll quote myself, from the SBC thread:

Actually, Imperators are a bit under three times that height (~140m), assuming we're not using Graham McNeill's ridiculous chibi-Titan figures.

Most interestingly, as a frame of reference, it would put the Imperator as tall as the Eiffel Tower when it was a bit less than half built in 1878.

So we're done on sizes. Now, a quote from "Eisenhorn" that's most interesting. At this point, it had been already twice, within something like three weeks, that I've asked guys in two different Titan-related threads if they knew where to get the quote that talked about Titans leveling cities. You know, the kind of stuff inflationists generally rely on to argue for high kilotons of firepower at the very least for the medium size Titans, and which allows them purchase to continue further and argue even megaton-level weapôns for Imperators, which is generally accompagnated by claims that said cities are hives.
It starts with the following exchange on page 2:

Given the way that 40K makes built up areas (especially on places like Armegeddon) this is like saying that hitting Norad with an Airstrike and not killing it means the airstrike is weak.
Titans smallest Titan-Grade weaponry is still described as making light buildings vaporize in under a second. This is just an oversized machine gun, plasma blastguns and others are so ridiculously overpowered that Titans are not concidered a normal usage weapon.
Descriptions say that titans can level cities in short order, to level a 40k city requires the firepower Imperial Ovelord states.

1. Show me quotes/extracts/official artwork where you get mult-km Fireballs from said 'low-megaton' firepower. You simply cannot have such staggering firepower without them. Or the after affects for that matter; the first Megaton scale nuclear test (Ivy Mike) completely levelled the island leaving a 2 crater in its place...

2. You are falling into the same trap as many who throw around multi-megaton (which requires multiple-km diameter fireballs that you could in no-way miss in a battle...) figures like snowballs. Do you have any idea of how impressive (and utterly un-miss it would be in a battle), the explosion from 100 tonnes of TNT is?
I refer you to the 'calibration' test for Trinity (shown on the documentary 'Trinity and beyond').

Have you also any idea of the devastation incurred when hundreds of tonnes of TNT and other explosives are detonated? I refer you to the real example of the Halifax explosion of 1917 and the effect of 200 tonnes of TNT, 2300 tons of picric acid, going up in one go had on the city http://www.halifaxexplosion.org/dayof.shtml

In that example 2.5 square km was levelled in the explosion. You don't need a multi-megaton blasts to level a city. Just one of those (halifax explosion) going off per minute would cause horrendous damage in the space of an hour. Clearly there is massive ordinance used in 40K land Battles, artillery pieces that far exceed the calibre of anything used today (large areas of the city in ‘necropolis’ where flattened in short order by massive artillery bombardments), but nothing to suggest dozens of square Km disappearing in a single fireball is the ‘norm’.

3. Show me where it states all 40K buildings are capable of with-standing sub-megaton hits. I refer you to the Hive Spire in the 'necropolis' book in Gaunts Ghost's which was repeatedly penetrated by conventional heavy gun/rocket artillery (And in an aside, the 'tainted Hive' in that book was finally levelled from orbit by a fleet of thousands of warships, not a single 'uber' titan weapon)

I'd point out that Dark Hellion's "light buildings" vaporized "in under a second" can just mean leveled that fast.


And then perhaps the quote everybody has vague memories of:

When he looks into Cruor Vult's memory banks in Hereticus, Eisenhorn describes seeing "legions of the Imperial Guard incinerated, cities die in flames," presumably from Cruor Vult's own weapons, given that not much later he sees its' memories of engaging and destroying Imperium Titans. (exact quotes can be provided if needed)

And on the subject of Titan weapons against cities:

[Fayde Thuring] could hold cities to ransom, here on Durer or elsewhere. He could raze population centres, kill millions, particularly once the turbines of Cruor Vult were operating at full power.

Eisenhorn is referring to Cruor Vult's energy weapons here, since it was only just powered up and didn't have enough juice to fuel its plasma cannon+ turbo laser batteries.

Cruor Vult was a Warlord-class Chaos Titan.

Then there you have a typical argumentation in favour of megaton firepower, and yet the arguments used here, with minutiae, work very well for kiloton firepower:

Actually PhysBod, you are falling into the trap that most Trekkies fall into when debating about how SW has Gigaton range weaponry. You are assuming that the damage absorbtion capabilities of a normal town are the same as a hive city composed of thousands of 10+km tall buildings. In a built up enough area of a hive city, a jet crashing into a building is only noticable for the few floors it hits.
Megatons is high end, and only the largest classes of Titans carry that size of weaponry, but to say that kilotons is high end is absurd, as we know they can destroy exceptionally large cities in very short time periods (not known exact period, but short enough that it is difficult for PDF forces to respond to) and that a single Titan is threatening enough to hold a planet hostage. Given the general range of ground weapons seen in 40k (lascannons can cut straight through fortified structures, autocannons all but vaporize houses in seconds, bolters are semi-auto RPGs, etc.) we know they field at least Kt yields and most likely have more.

We actually know that a Warlord with high gigajoule explosive ordnance could level copious areas of a city in very little time, especially with a missile spam or a sweeping beam that would level some buildings and let fires run over several city blocks.
See the effect of a Gargant's rolling ball stuffed with HE explosives on a fine Warlord-class Titan here. Go for the volumetric firepower estimation, at the bottom of the post.

A 140 meters tall Imperator-class Titan would only be 3.5 times bigger than a 40 meters tall Warlord, and therefore there are obvious limits to how powerful an Imperator's fission core can be.

Note: I'll probably have to update the bit about the Warlord, considering I worked from a 30 meters tall one, when apparently the smallest model is 40 meters tall, then 50 m and finally 60 m for the mightest Warlord-class Titan.

Here's Darth PhysBod's response to Dark Hellion's post:

Don't even go down that route....
Titan Battles don't just happen in 'uber' hive cities, they happen on open plains, jungle, everywhere. Yet I for one have never seen any artwork, read any offical descriptions that would support kiloton-megaton weapons as the 'norm'
Secondly we know directly from 'Necropolis' that conventional heavy artillery will flatten the ordinary hab's/buildings in a Hive city in short order and will even penetrate the 'uber' spire.

If you have direct evidence of Kiloton to megaton range weaponry then please show it. No-one has yet posted, and given I've played 40K for 13 years I highly doubt such evidence exists, until then all you have is pure speculation, you are assuming kiloton to megaton ground weaponry is the norm because??...

Your example of a Titan destroying a city:

1/ Post the evidence to back up your argument So far you have been unable/unwilling to.
2/ From what you have said you have neither: area 'destroyed', qualified what 'destroyed' is in this case, time-frame or number of weapons involved.

You bring up penetrative power las-cannons (a red-herring anyway), but need I remind you that the most advanced armoured vehicle in the Imperium has the equivalent of 365mm of conventional steel armour protection (and that value has appeared the 'chapter approved' yearly annual two years in a row, and is now set in stone in Imperial armour alongside values for the rest of the Imperiums fighting vehicles)

I've already posted an example of the real effects of a munitions ship exploding in a city harbour. Titan weaponry of that magnitude would be utterly devastating and flatten a city in short order given the number of weapons and rate of fire. Even firing only one shot per 10 seconds would result in complete levelling of up to 15 square km a minute (An area roughly the size of Greater london in under two hours)

Finally, you cannot have that magnitude (megaton yield) of energy in a small volume (the area of the beam on a target) without generating a multiple Km fireball.

More quotes from Black Admiral:

Okay, examples from the Titan graphic novels.

First off, in the second book, Tyranid bio-titans (unknown number, but at most I think about 3-4) burned 20,000 square miles of jungle (with trees taller than Battle Titans), including three million-plus Imperial Guardsmen and their equipment, in a short enough timeframe that before Imperius Dictatio confirmed it, no-one had any idea what had happened.

Second, in Titan III: Cold Steel a Chaos Warlord is caught in the fireball from a nuclear explosion (actually a Warp rift, but its effects were identical to a nuke).

Now, assuming that the fireball was level with Imperious Dictatio (it wasn't, actually about 750 meters away, but I'm not sure how to account for perspective), and given that Dictatio is most likely one of the "Heavy" 60-meter tall Warlords (height on the page is about 3cm, so a rough scale of 1cm:20 meters), the fireball is at its widest visible point (one side extends off the page) 13.5cm across, which translates to 270m diameter, and according to the main site's nuclear weapons effects calculator ~300 kilotons.

1.a. It all depends how many Bio-Titans there were, and what zones they fired at, or if they even used a type of weapon that is relevant in Titan battles. For one, it's not because a submarine carries a set of nuclear warheads that its hull can withstand kiloton level torpedoes. In other words, were these weapons even conventional for Bio-Titans?
It should perhaps be easy to confirm by looking at the damage they'd cause later in the books.

1.b. What would the Titan's confirmation prove? If only the Titan managed to get a reading of what caused the damage, why should we think that a force that lost some million men in a extremely large forest would get a clue about stroke them at all?

2. Fission fuel is not like fusion fuel. It can actually explode with very little efforts. A similar event occured in some book, when a Rok saw its stock of fission fuel ignite after being shot at by some Imperial craft.

Oh, and as another note, from Necropolis, some of the craters from Zoican shellfire were "five hundred meters across." (pg. 217, second edition)

Shells carry much more momentum than light weight nuclear warheads detonated right on top of any ground. Momentum is an essential part in gouging matter out and is far more efficient at cratering. You could easily have ballistic impacts with shells loaded with terajoule-level fission material.
Besides, it is inconclusive until we know how it was used, and what got hit precisely, what the casualties were. Sounds like the Zoican were pretty desperate though.





The second Titan thread is here, and is ripe with low yield observations.

Also, there's more information and (biased) observations found in the Epic thread at SDN.

[sonofccn]

Hey, hope you don't mind me poking my head in. First off I want to say I've enjoyed these threads of yours and if nothing else you have provided a much needed illumination and "dialoge" on 40k firepower. I mean that regardless if the "uber firepower" remains or if lower yields usurp thier place the fact that one must actually dredge up the mountain of material and support/prove one's assumption is a valid accomplishment.

I also wanted to shoot my mouth off a bit regarding this:

And then perhaps the quote everybody has vague memories of

Now I speak from a vastly more limited experiance than one such as yourself but in my few excursions into 40 versusdom it strikes me that the bulk of the debaters who'd run into a thread shouting the IOM stomps your faction, 70-80% as it appears to me, don't own the books, don't appear to have actually read the books, nor actually play the tabletop game. I understand that 40k isn't "mainstream" to the extent say Star Wars or Trek or Doctor Who is but it get's my heckles up when an obnoxious poster claims your faction is boned and backs it up with vauge generalities/summaries of some event.

Eh sorry about the quasi-rant. Just speaking my mind. In any event keep up the good work.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Hey, hope you don't mind me poking my head in.

Hey, no pb! :)

First off I want to say I've enjoyed these threads of yours and if nothing else you have provided a much needed illumination and "dialoge" on 40k firepower. I mean that regardless if the "uber firepower" remains or if lower yields usurp thier place the fact that one must actually dredge up the mountain of material and support/prove one's assumption is a valid accomplishment.

Thanks.
There's so much more to look at. But at least some of the most recurring claims have been given a counter weight that was much needed, I believe.

I also wanted to shoot my mouth off a bit regarding this:

And then perhaps the quote everybody has vague memories of

Now I speak from a vastly more limited experiance than one such as yourself but in my few excursions into 40 versusdom it strikes me that the bulk of the debaters who'd run into a thread shouting the IOM stomps your faction, 70-80% as it appears to me, don't own the books, don't appear to have actually read the books, nor actually play the tabletop game. I understand that 40k isn't "mainstream" to the extent say Star Wars or Trek or Doctor Who is but it get's my heckles up when an obnoxious poster claims your faction is boned and backs it up with vague generalities/summaries of some event.

Eh sorry about the quasi-rant. Just speaking my mind. In any event keep up the good work.

I'm not much different from these people, aside from the claims I make which tend to be diametrically opposed to theirs. But what happens with WH40K is exactly what happened with Star Wars. You have one group, for which most of its plebe doesn't try to read quotes properly. And there are those who want to read something. There are the few who drive the whole group, either because they have access to the books and provide some quotations, sometimes with cherry picking (as I've shown above), or because they then provide their own theories or all encompassing views.
Just like for SW. It comes to a point when they actually read sources looking to make them fit with their own core codex. It's really the feeling I got when reading Connor's comments. For example, for starships' power production, he really started with one major interpretation of a given event which seemed to define all, and then ran from this and shaped all interpretation to fit with this seed. What you get in the end is a rotten tree and fruits of nonsense.

It is also interesting to take a look at Warhammer 40000, for the reason that if, as SDN's people say, the debate is dead when it comes to STvSW, WH40K always has been a big player, and even more because of the figures brewed at SDN mainly, and there may other universes which can be pitted against the old ones, or against WH40K. It's actually clear that nothing is dead, but when you're being intellectually lazy, you have pretty much admitted, without knowing it, that you didn't care about the debates anymore.
New main SF universes as they go these days are Halo, Mass Effect, Stargate and nBSG. With Star Wars which actually keeps expanding, like the Alien and Predator series as well. Hell, with ME and nBSG alone, there's no reason not to see Babylon 5 return.
Plus you have plenty of more products, animes, comics and books.
For one, I really wish I'd have time to take a look at the Hyperion and Ilium series.

...

[Mr. Oragahn]

Another quote from Orsai, here.

Imperator weaponry, or descriptions thereof, are relatively sparse, but there's a few. FOr instance;

Miniature suns exploded in the desert as the Titan's plasma weaponry blasted craters hundreds of metres in diameter, obliterating hundreds of Astartes at a stroke and turning the sand to shimmering dark glass.
- Fulgrim, pg. 462

A few pages later the Dies Irae opens up on loyalist Land Raiders, taking out a full squadron thereof in one Plas. Annihilator salvo. Other possibly helpful descriptions refer to Titan weapons vs. tanks as "returned them to their molten base elements" (Dark Apostle, pg. 204)/"blasting tanks to atoms" (Storm of Iron, pg. 111).

Not much to work with, though, in absolute terms (vice relative ones).

Storms of Iron has other instances of stuff "blown to atoms". One involves a Leman Russ Demolisher getting severely damaged, with a shell stuck in the main cannon menacing to explode and pulverize Honshu as the tank kept rolling forward aimlessly through flames and rubble, before finally being destroyed by an internal detonation. Obviously not to be taken literally.
The other is even more interesting.

[Honsu] shivered as he saw the stubby, multiple barrels of the rear-mounted assault cannon and took a deep breath.
[...]
[Hawke] grabbed the handle of the rear cannon and yanked the trigger hard. He swung the gun from side to side, not aiming, just shooting. The roar of the cannon was deafening, the rattling of spent shells ringing from the grey walls. The supersonic shells blew up a storm, churning the mud and earth outside to atoms as thousands of rounds turned the area before him into a death-trap, shredding anything within its arc of fire.

Supersonic bullets couldn't technically turn matter to atoms, no matter how liberal you want to be in the interpretation of this.
But surely this wouldn't be complete with, well, the whole context of the quote Orsai used. Notice the slight difference between what you're led to think, and what really goes on.

The gunners of the Iron Warriors picked off tanks with ease and huge explosions blossomed along the Imperial lines as lascannon shots and missiles found their targets. The screaming of soldiers was audible even over the continuous thump of explosions and the hiss of flashing lasers. Then the heavier blasts of enemy Titan weapons joined the fray, blasting tanks to atoms with the unimaginable power of their weapons.

So it turns out that it's the effect of the multiple weapons of several Titans, not just one big blast. We'll not resist to the suggestion that those weapons could also be heavier meltas.

Storm of Iron also is the book in which Honsu's melts the front of a bunker. The multi-melta he uses clearly has the ability to make stuff undergo fusion, yet with near zero blast effect despite the very quick delivery of energy. It is, in other words, some magic super hot goo gun.
That's the same system which blasted a wall of ice in Caves of Ice, "vaporizing" matter without any blast effect at all which would have surely pulled down the entire tunnel. It's not very far from Trek's "let's vaporize a boulder" firing mode, with the difference that it does leave the matter to flow like wax of expand as gas, but completely cheats a crucial and basic part of thermodynamics.




Finally, here's one last quote of interest.

THE TITAN LEGIONS

Mars endured long centuries of isolation while anarchy tore at the ancient world of Earth. When the Emperor drew Mars back into the fold of the united Imperium, it had long since become a society very different to that of Earth's. One of the most important and enduring differences was the development of the huge fighting machines known as Titans. These vast constructions were unlike anything ever seen on Earth, massive humanoid-shaped weapons of destruction powered by fission reactors and bristling with mighty cannons. On a world as barren as Mars the Titans could stride effortlessly over the hostile landscape where mere troopers would be engulfed in the poisonous wastes and choking dust of the Martian deserts.

A Titan is a gargantuan land-battleship powered by advanced technology. Its armoured carapace is capable of withstanding heavy damage, whilst its armaments can level whole cities. The Titans are one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of the Imperium. Within each Titan a crew of dozens, or even hundreds, of individuals scurry about their tasks, propelling, refueling and maintaining the giant machine, manning its mighty weapons and guiding it over the battlefield.

When the Emperor led mankind on the Great Crusade the Titan Legions of the Adeptus Mechanicus marched alongside the Space Marines. As the Imperium expanded the Adeptus Mechanicus took many worlds for themselves, planets which they settled and turned into the Mechanicus Forge Worlds. These became the bases for the Titan Legions thoughout the galaxy, so that today the Titan Legions are spread across the Imperium, where they defend the scattered Forge Worlds of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

[Kahless]

Wow, what an amazing write up! You should totally post this on SB and shut some people there up!

[Mr. Oragahn]

Wow, what an amazing write up! You should totally post this on SB and shut some people there up!

I'm not seeking to shut anyone up, but to have them reconsider some long hold positions. It's good for debates' health. I've recently been permabanned and I'm still trying to sort this out.
No matter what, those pages still serve a purpose as to open some eyes on the possibility that Warhammer 40000 is not the über teraton universe as depicted by some people.

[Kahless]

I've recently been permabanned and I'm still trying to sort this out.

What?!!! Why?!! That sucks man :(

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

I've recently been permabanned and I'm still trying to sort this out.

OMG SB is just a disgrace....a debate forum that bans you for debating.

You gotta learn to stop being so good at this stuff buddy.

[User1390]

http://forums.spacebattles.com/showthre ... ost4911220

i had a look on sb and found the thread tempers semed to have got hot in this thread

[Mr. Oragahn]

Stuff happens anyway.
My ban is not the topic of this thread, let's keep it on tracks, thanks. ;)
If you want to talk about it, we got a section for that stuff.

[Mith]

Actually there was a recent thread involving 40k Titans and the Big O. Again, you had people masturbating to their megatons...but then oddly enough one debator came in and pointed out that the idea was absolutely absurd (shocking...isn' it?) and that the warship that the titans were hitting that apparently caused so much megatons was an old rusted junk bucket of a ship.

Other indications of firepower showed nothing more than simple mech capabilities, such as leveling blocks from battles, or some such. Some people tried to tie in 'enough firepower to destroy a city' to 'hive city', but I was able to smack it down. I also pointed out that destroy is actually a fairly vague term and wouldn't require even kilotons. A well placed volley from a half dozen or so Titans, spread out well enough, would certainly blast apart most small cities.