40k Analysis: Ciaphas Cain -- For The Emperor

[General Donner]

Time for my first 40k novel analysis! I've provided some input and quotes before, but this is the first time I launch a detailed appraisal like this. My hopes are it'll be at least somewhat adequate. (Criticism is welcome, though preferably it should be constructive.)

So: I'll be having a look at the first book in the Caiaphas Cain series. These are a somewhat odd spin-off of mainline 40k, given they seem to go for humor more often than mindless grimdark. In some ways, it's sort of like self-parody at times; a lot of people appear to like it for that reason. As for me, the series isn't my favorite one, but I do think it's better than many others.

This particular installment concerns Imperial Guard, Tau and others, with focus heavily on the Guard (as protagonists and POV characters). Its overall scope is limited, restricted to one commissar and his regiment, but with some nods to the larger picture of Imperium/Tau relations. Narration is in the first person, in the form of notes for said commissar's autobiography. For analysis purposes, we'll be concerned primarily with infantry gear for the IoM and – to a lesser extent – the Tau, with some excursions into geopolitics and strategy.

The book, as literature, is decent if not great, which puts it in the upper quartile of 40k fiction. As noted, however, the style is rather off as compared to the 40k standard.

Well, that's that; now, down to business. Part 1 starts immediately below. All quotes are from the first Cain omnibus, which collects the first three Cain books.

To put it into some kind of perspective, a regiment consists of anything up to half a dozen companies - five in our case, most of which had four or five platoons. The exception was Third Company, which was our logistical support arm, and consisted mainly of transport vehicles, engineering units, and anything else we couldn't find a sensible place for on the SO&E. All told, that came to much the same thing in a headcount. Factor in five squads a platoon, at ten troopers each, plus a command element to keep them all in line, and you're looking at nearly a thousand people by the time you've added in the various specialists and the different layers of the overall command structure.

Ciaphas Cain, describing briefly the composition an Imperial Guard regiment. It'd appear we're looking at a battalion-strength formation. This might be at odds with some other 40k books, which often describe regiments numbering in the several thousands, or else just indicative of how standards aren't quite fixed. (The term "regiment" can refer to formations of quite varying sizes in real life, too.)

Just to add to the confusion, Kasteen had decided to split the squads into five-man fire-teams, anticipating that any open conflict was likely to take place in and around the urban areas. Beating off the tyranids on Corania had convinced her that smaller formations were easier to coordinate in a city fight than full-strength squads.[Note 1]


[Note 1] A widespread, though unofficial practice among units experienced in urban warfare. So much so that it's now become part of the standard operating procedure in many regiments, the ad hoc arrangement persisting to become a permanent feature of their organisation.

Division into fireteams is non-standard in the Imperial Guard (unlike such modern-day militaries as the present-day US Army or British Army), but a somewhat commonplace "informal" measure by individual regimental colonels with city-fighting experience.

We weren't the only regiment quartered there, I recall, as the Imperium had been fortifying against an expected incursion by the tau for some time, and I gathered that the Righteous Wrath's complement (three full regiments apart from our own) brought the total up to around thirty thousand all told. That should have been more than enough to keep a backwater planet, even spread out across the whole globe, but rumour had it we could expect still more reinforcement, which worried me more than I wanted to show. With that amount of build-up it seemed the aliens wanted this place quite badly, and we'd more than likely be expected to hold it the hard way.

Thirty thousand troops is considered more than enough to hold a contested border planet. This is probably indicative of the general level of defenses we can expect of most 40k planets. (Though hive worlds and similarly important planets will most likely be more heavily defended.)

'Same here,' I said. I turned my head, taking in the bustle surrounding us. 'This seems like an awful lot of firepower to put the frighteners on a bunch of stroppy provincials.'

'If the tau mobilise, we'll need every bit of it,' Divas said. 'Some of their wargear has to be seen to be believed. They've got these things like dreadnoughts, but they're fast, like Astartes infantry but twice the size, and their tanks make the eldar stuff look like they were built by orks.'

This is vague, but does appear to tell us the Tau battlesuits are in some way equivalent to the Dreadnoughts of the Space Marines. At least in speed, they are described as superior. Tau hovertanks are apparently also superior to those of the Eldar somehow.

No such luck, of course – the surrounding heretics drove in on us as a concerted wedge. I just managed to draw my laspistol and snap off a shot, taking out half the face of one of the group […].

Firepower of laspistol. I won't go into detail, but this isn't very much better than anything we can do with real-life pistols.

'Dreadnoughts,' Kasteen breathed. They were certainly large enough for that, but they moved with an easy grace far removed from the lumbering war machines I'd encountered before. Their lines were angular, topped off with headpieces which resembled the helmets of their line troopers, but the resemblance ended with their size, towering at least twice the height of an ordinary tau.

'Just battlesuits,' El'sorath said, with a faint trace of amusement. 'Nothing special.'

Kasteen and I glanced at one another. I couldn't make out much detail at this distance, but they were clearly heavily armed, and the idea of facing a foe that fielded such things as a matter of course wasn't exactly comforting.

Again, Tau battlesuits are faster, and/or more agile than Space Marine Dreadnoughts, their closest equivalent in the Imperium.

'Which is why we're so desperate to avoid a full-scale war over this miserable mudball,' Amberley said. 'Keeping it would tie up our naval assets from at least three sectors just to secure our supply lines, and we'd be funnelling Guard and Astartes units in from all over the Segmentum. Putting it bluntly, it's not worth the effort.'

To defend the planet Gravalax against a Tau attack would be a major undertaking the IoM bigwigs are "desperate" to avoid, and require troops from across the entire Segmentum. The space war campaign would require the deployment of three entire sector battlefleets at barest minimum. Going by the figures the Battlefleet Gothic rulebook gives for these, we would be looking at 150-225 warships for securing the supply lines, assuming the fleets are of typical size.

This would also imply that the Tau space military is quite more formidable per capita than that of the Imperium, since their entire territory is basically a single sector by IoM standards, and yet they can attack with sufficient forces to require a multi-sector mobilization response without endangering their other holdings.

I'd grabbed a set of the body armour, though, and wore it now, concealed beneath my uniform greatcoat. It felt a little heavy and uncomfortable, but a lot less so than taking a las-bolt to the chest.

Ciaphas Cain expects body armor light enough to be worn under his greatcoat to protect him against a lasgun bolt. This would seem to disagree with the commonly held (in some quarters) notion that these are megajoule-range weapons.

More to follow...

[Mr. Oragahn]

Good thing, that focus on the gears, formations, logistics and ground tech comparison. I rarely looked at those.

[General Donner]

Thank you.

Huh. I realized now, you have apparently done some work on this one already. Hope you don't see this as me trying to steal your thunder. Still, I think I'll finish it, if only because I found quite a bit of stuff that Connor didn't quote in his analysis, and hence didn't make it into your commentary on it either. And possibly, in some cases, our perspectives can complement each other.


Part the second and final, rather longer than the first because of more voluminous commentary. We now start getting a look at more weapons in action, Imperium and Tau alike.

Abruptly, unnervingly, the leading dreadnought (the same type El'sorath had called battlesuits) swung its head in our direction, and turned, a pair of long-barrelled weapons mounted on its shoulders coming to bear. We were still a long way away from being an easy target, but I've always been cautious, so I hailed our driver. […]

The driver's volley of profanity was drowned out by a sudden thunderclap of displaced air as something hit the front of an omnibus right where we'd been a moment before, reducing its entire nose to metallic confetti before raking the length of it, blowing a tangled mass of wreckage, blood and bone out of the back. […]

'What was that?' Amberley asked, her voice almost drowned out by the complaints of the troopers around her. I tried to explain the best I could, still shaken by the range and accuracy of the weapon deployed against us.

The battlesuits Cain observed earlier were Broadside suits, the kind that carry shoulder-mounted railguns. This is interesting because these are the least nimble and maneuverable kind of battlesuit the Tau employ.

The suit fires its railgun at Cain's APC, but misses and hits a bus instead. I'm unsure whether we can calculate any firepower from the description of the damage it causes. Cain considers the range it fired from extreme by IoM standards, but within easy visual range it shouldn't really be very much. (A single km would probably be stretching it.)

What looked like a maintenance hatch of some kind had been revealed, bent and twisted by the heat and the pounding it had received from the falling rubble. […]

'Right idea, though,' I added, seeing his crestfallen expression. 'Velade, Holenbi, front and centre. Five rounds rapid.' The twisted metal flashed into vapour under the combined power of the hellgun volley, and I clapped Jurgen on the back encouragingly. […]

I aimed my trusty pistol at it, but it was a pointless precaution, anyone waiting in ambush would have been vaporised along with the inspection panel, and anyone outside the hellguns' area of effect would have been shooting back by now.

A somewhat quantifiable lasgun (or, rather, hellgun) firepower example. The last paragraph and how the word "vaporized" is used there strongly implies that while we're indeed looking at literal vaporization for the hatch, it isn't necessarily complete and affecting its entire mass. Still, we see metal turned into vapor, perhaps as much as many kilograms of it, on the upper end. It's doubtful if we can get any precise figures from this, but I'd tentatively guesstimate a high-kilojoule to low-megajoule energy for the hellguns. (Assuming limited vaporization and more melting, and/or mechanical damage.) This isn't necessarily inconsistent with lower lasgun firepower elsewhere, as hellguns are known to be considerably more energetic.

On the upper end, assuming complete vaporization, we could possibly be looking at 10-20 MJ or even more for the total energy. (Taking the view that a human body below the hatch could also have been entirely and literally vaporized, as certain people have done in the past, we get into the hundreds of megajoules easily.) But then we would fast be running into the problem of collateral damage: Bare-faced troopers standing close by to the equivalent of multiple kilograms of TNT going off (nevermind tens or hundreds) is somewhat implausible, IMHO. This kind of ultra-high firepower would also conflict with another piece of quote further below in this story.

'They'll have to,' Amberley cut in. 'Whatever happens, the Guard must not get sucked into an open war with the tau.'

'Understood,' Kasteen said. It must have been galling for her, though, and the strain was clear in her voice. Being forced to stand by and do nothing while an imperial city burned, and xenos massacred the citizens with impunity was probably the hardest thing she ever had to do.

'Well, that's something,' Amberley said, as the vox link went dead. 'At least there's still hope.'

'Hope for who?' I asked, trying not to think of the civilians who, even as we stood here, were losing their homes and their lives. […]

'For half the segmentum,' Amberley replied, sounding suddenly weary, and for the first time, I had an inkling of the terrible weight of responsibility her calling imposed .

A larger war with the Tau will threaten half the entire Segmentum, according to an inquisitor. (Segmentum Ultima.) Again, even if we allow for hyperbole, this still shows that the Imperium takes the Tau very seriously. They're most assuredly not a minor irritant, as commonly assumed by some uncritical Imperium fans, but a dangerous enemy who can hit far above their own weight, at least as counted purely in the number of planets they inhabit.

'Bodies. Lots of them.' Well, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but there were at least half a dozen spread out across the large open space which the corridor had eventually led us into. […]

I spotlighted the nearest corpse with my luminator, a stocky fellow in work overalls with most of his chest missing.

Setting up for the next quote, below, which concerns small-arms firepower.

'I'm still trying to work out what killed the others,' I said. The wounds were too heavy for lasguns, even the hellguns we carried. […]

'It looks like plasma rounds to me,' Jurgen volunteered. The doubt in his voice told me how unlikely he thought it, though, plasma weapons were big, bulky, and unreliable, and took an age to recharge between shots. You'd have to be mad to arm an entire squad with them. Not to mention being rarer than an ork with a sense of humour. 'Plasma pistols, maybe?'

'Maybe,' I conceded. Those were even rarer, but suppose someone had found a whole cache of them from the fabled Dark Age of Technology? That would be worth going to almost any lengths to protect, wouldn't it?

Damage of exploding chests and up is here noted as incommensurate with lasgun and hellgun firepower. This would seem to put a cap on hellgun firepower in the sub-megajoules, or just possibly low megajoules, and the same, of course, goes for the standard lasguns, only more so. (Cain was talking about "bodies" rather than bits and pieces of bodies, so most should not be much more heavily damaged than whoever had much of his chest blown out.) We recall, now, the hatch-vaping incident earlier; there isn't necessarily a contradiction between them, but taken together, the two passages would seem to require that we interpret the former quite conservatively.

As for this one: The described magnitude of damage, we learn, is more typical of the rare and ultra-expensive plasma weapons. (Which are also notoriously unreliable and dangerous weapons prone to malfunction, as stated in numerous rulebooks and in 13th Legion.)

More enemy fire was pouring in on us by now, and to my horror, I realised that Jurgen was right. These were plasma weapons we were facing and even the heavy body armour we were wearing would be all but useless against it.

Unknown assailants are shooting at Cain and company with plasma weapons that cause grievous bodily harm in excess of what any hellgun can do. Guess who they turn out to be?

A bolt of incandescent energy burst against the metal piping close to my head, just missing my face with a spray of molten metal.

This would seem to put something of a cap on the plasma guns' firepower as well, given that Cain apparently suffers no ill effects otherwise. We must assume that the shot impacted some distance from Cain's face (although still "close" in relative terms) and at a lucky angle, so any molten metal or solid debris missed him. Still, it does also show that they can melt substantial amounts of metal – most likely 10+ grams, at least, for a somewhat significant spray – establishing a tentative lower limit on per-shot firepower in the double-digit kilojoules range.

At first, there were only the tau, their distinctive fatigues and hardshell body armour dulled with black and grey camouflage patterns ideally suited to blending into the shadows of this dusty labyrinth. Their faces were obscured by visored helmets – ocular lenses where the features should have been – which gave them a blank, robotic look.

Yes, these were Tau wielding the plasma guns. They also have full armor (as we know) and a sane camo pattern. (Which appears quite rare in 40k otherwise.)

[Note 1] Generally rendered into Gothic as ''pathfinders'', these are [Tau] reconnaissance specialists roughly equivalent to Imperial Guard storm-troopers or the forward observers normally attached to an artillery battery.

According to Inquisitor Amberley, the pathfinders (these are the troops they meet here) are the equivalent of stormtroopers or recon specialists in the Imperial Guard. This may be erroneous, as I don't believe the pathfinders are considered particularly "elite" in the Tau codices or elsewhere, like the stormtroopers are. They are light recon infantry, however.

'I'd rather have those plasma guns on our side than shooting at us.' Now I came to look at one close up they were surprisingly compact, no larger than a lasgun, but the amount of firepower they could put out wasn't to be sniffed at.

Pathfinder armament. This is a pulse carbine, according to the Tau Codex; the standard-issue pulse rifle most Tau soldiers use is larger and heavier. The weapon is the size of a lasgun but much more powerful, according to the lines above concerning weapons effects and plasma weapons.

We were making better time now, though, the tau appearing to have some way of seeing in the dark. They certainly had no visible luminators, so I assumed the lenses on the front of their helmets enabled them to see in some way I couldn't quite comprehend.

Cain is apparently unfamiliar with such things as IR goggles, let alone the principles they work on. He can conceive of the idea, however, which is unsurprising, as he has served in combat with Space Marines, and they certainly have access to nightvision equipment.

And, self-explanatory, the Pathfinders obviously have them.

Of the tau themselves we saw little sign, save, on occasion, a rounded tank hull hovering ominously at the end of a street, or a swiftly darting dreadnought keeping pace with us for a block or two. For the most part, however, they seemed content to watch us through the eyes of their aerial pictcasters, which floated like flying plates above the rooftops or flitted around our vehicles like flies around grox.

Widespread Tau use of expendable drones for tactical reconnaissance.

The tau took the lead again, which was fine by me, as whatever sensor gear they had inside those odd-shaped helmets of theirs seemed a good deal more reliable than Amberley's auspex.

This is high praise for Tau sensors, given that as an inquisitor, Amberley would have access to the very best gear the IoM has available.

We'd gone on for maybe another three kilometres when the shas'ui held up his curious malformed hand for silence. […]

'He says he's picking up life forms ahead, in large quantities,' Gorok said quietly, translating the flickering finger signs. The tau all had voxcasters and Emperor knew what else built into their helmets, but their kroot allies had no such aids to communication, and, I was beginning to suspect, would have spurned them if they'd been offered anyway. So they used this peculiar semaphore to pass orders and information silently, in much the same way that Guard units did when the troopers didn't have individual combeads, or the enemy was so close they might have overheard a verbal transmission.

Tau helmets have radio (which is what ”vox” generally means in 40k-to-English). Kroot don't, seemingly for cultural reasons.

A ragged volley of las-bolts and autogun fire thundered in reply, and one of the tau went down, his armour shredded by multiple impacts.

Heavy fire from lasguns and autoguns takes down an armored Pathfinder, explicitly penetrating his armor plate rather than hitting weak spots. Not sure how much this tells us, except that they aren't Space Marines who can laugh off any enemy fire with little concern. (Note that "autogun" in the IoM may refer to a wide range of weapons, from bolt-action rifles to assault rifles, AMR-grade heavy rifles or even machine guns, so it's not quite certain that we're looking at small arms fire, or of what kind if so.)

The firing continued, with las-bolts and bullets chewing up the masonry around us, and I felt a sudden blow against my chest. I glanced down, a las-bolt had impacted against the borrowed armour beneath my greatcoat, and I blessed the foresight that had impelled me to requisition it.

Cain's armor protects against lasgun. This has all the implications noted before.

I was there when the Reclaimers boarded the Spawn of Damnation, and saw the pure-strains which infested it tearing open their Terminator armour as though it were cardboard to get at the Astartes within.

Tyranid wank or weak Space Marines, depending on how you take it. Establishes Cain's background; he's seen exotic gear like Terminator armor in action, so we can probably count on him generally having a fair idea of what he's talking about. (At least when the IoM itself is concerned.)

Before I could cry a warning, Sorel punched a hole through her head with his usual unerring accuracy.

Sniper lasgun shot that doesn't explode a head, but only penetrates. As we know, long-las sniper rifles fire heavier bolts than is usual for lasguns.

The claws I'd seen tear open Terminator armour as though it were a crusty meat pie were already slicing at her cape when its head exploded, showering her with an unpleasant organic residue, and leaving the body to topple to the floor. I looked up at the gallery again and saw Sorel already seeking a fresh target for his long-las.

Sniper shot that does explode a head. Possibly a discrepancy? As well, a Genestealer head should be a tougher target than a more human one. Still, it's doubtful we're looking at megajoules, since the bone shrapnel of the head blowing up like a grenade should then probably do more than inconvenience Amberley if so. (She's wearing armor, but IIRC no helmet.)

Exploding heads is within the range of what modern-day sniper rifles can do, and these generally have muzzle energies in the single-digit kilojoules, or perhaps low double digits on the upper end for very heavy rifles. (Although their mechanism is of course somewhat different from that of a direct energy weapon.)

'I see.' She nodded, and pointed to the solid wooden door we'd reached at the top of the staircase. 'Jurgen, if you'd be so kind?'

'My pleasure, miss.' He grinned, like a schola student picked out to answer a question he knows the answer to, and vaporised it with a single blast from the melta, along with a generous section of wall.

For literal vaporization of a substantial mass of wood for a "solid" door, even if only partial, we're easily looking at tens of megajoules, and more likely hundreds for the total energy. Possibly even higher, depending on how much of the wall goes and how thick it is. Other meltagun incidents have also been calced in the high megajoules (or even gigajoules) range, I believe. Nevertheless, I find such high numbers problematic here, given the close proximity of the three unshielded people to the allegedly vaporizing door. One'd think they'd suffer some kind of damage from the heat and gases and/or shrapnel. So on the balance, I'd probably argue for hyperbole and in reality a much less quick and energetic destruction. Though I'm not entirely satisfied with such a solution, given how it requires us to go beyond the text. Thoughts?



With that, I conclude my look at the first Cain book. There are a number of other quotes involving weapons applied to Tyranids, but as those tend to be magic-wank critters whose tolerances are dictated even more by act of plot than those of the other factions, I've generally skipped those here. As well as some other sundry points.

In closing, we repeat the following main points:

Lasguns are decidedly sub-megajoule weapons, not that we needed more evidence for that.

Tau infantry has much superior equipment to the Imperial Guard, also something we knew before.

On the strategic scale, the Tau are much more of a power to be reckoned with than any SBer will generally admit. Which explains why the Imperium, in spite of their antagonism, will generally be wary of provoking them in the post-Damocles era. It surprised even me that they could supposedly threaten as large a portion of the Imperium as half of the entire Ultima Segmentum.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Thank you.

Huh. I realized now, you have apparently done some work on this one already. Hope you don't see this as me trying to steal your thunder.

Why? Absolutely not! I would be ashamed to ever react in such a way!
You must say what you think, make your own observations and provide personal comments. They're all the more valuable.

Still, I think I'll finish it, if only because I found quite a bit of stuff that Connor didn't quote in his analysis, and hence didn't make it into your commentary on it either. And possibly, in some cases, our perspectives can complement each other.

It's not surprising that he left some stuff out. I did that several times, especially for topics that mattered a lot to VS debates.
I'll take a look at the rest of your post later on.