Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-4851119-20160428173549

To all those mentioning Mass Effect as even remotely relevant, allow me to do a thing.

Codex quote on Reaper weaponry: The main gun on a Reaper capital ship dwarfs that of the Alliance's Everest-class dreadnoughts. No dreadnought has yet survived a direct hit from the weapon. Estimates put its destructive power anywhere from 132 to 454 kilotons of TNT. Even if the target is hardened, as in the case of a surface-based missile silo, the gun can instead bury the target beneath molten metal. One of if not the most powerful space combat weapons in ME tops out at the hundreds of kilotons per shot.

Compare to the following:

They knew so little of the reality of things, however. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel’s most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster’s flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet’s crust cracked, the continents sliced open. -Nemesis

Azkaellon felt a chill run through him. The hammer of the Emperor’s will was a powerful force, and in the wars of the Great Crusade it had often been regrettably necessary to punish whole worlds with ruthless intent. The Guard Commander had seen cities wiped off the map in the blink of an eye, vaporised by lance cannons and macronuclear bombs; continents seared by laser barrages; skies scorched. And while the power to kill a world? to truly, utterly destroy it? had always rested within the reach of the Legiones Astartes, it was not an order that Azkaellon had ever witnessed in execution. ‘All shipmasters report guns at ready.’ DuCade read back the status in a dead voice, as if she was unwilling to believe what would come next.

...

The void surrounding the planet Holst flashed crimson as energies were liberated and directed, as a surge of weapons of mass destruction hurtled from launch tubes and bore down upon the turbulent world. Energy pulses struck first, moving at the speed of light and boiling away the vapours shrouding the sky, punching into the nitrogen ice surface. Rocky under-strata that had been sealed beneath permafrost for millions of years were burned clean and exposed. '''The torpedo barrage came seconds after, great fusion-powered rockets tipped with lethal warheads. Each had the power to lay waste to a continent''', but in this instance they were combined with force enough to spear the molten heart of a world. Whatever unreal influence had spread its cancerous instrumentality through Holst-Prime Hive spilled into the matter of the planet itself. -Fear to Tread "A mighty Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser with powerful reactors and heavy armour in sloping facets of adamantine and ceramite scores of metres thick, the vessel carried a weight of armament and ordnance that could reduce a continent to ruins with a single salvo." Have some firepower which is vague due to the language used but which implies gigaton-range firepower,. Millions of kilotons.

Now, let me do another related thing.

Codex quote on ME space combat: Ship mobility dominates space combat; the primary objective is to align the mass accelerator along the bow with the opposing vessel's broadside. Battles typically play out as artillery duels fought at ranges measured in thousands of kilometers, though assault through defended mass relays often occur at "knife fight" ranges as close as a few dozen kilometers. Another quote from the section on combat tactics: The largest-ranged combat occurs between dreadnoughts, whose projectiles have the highest velocity but are the least maneuverable. The shortest-range combat is between frigates, which have the slowest projectile velocities and highest maneuverability. Opposing dreadnoughts open with main gun artillery duel at EXTREME ranges of tens of thousands of kilometers. Capitalization on "extreme" not mine.

Compare to the following:

“The onrushing daemon ships wore the fusillade. '''Their shields wobbled like wet glass as they soaked up the punishment. They were half a million kilometres out''', closing at a sharp angle to the system plane, as if they intended to perform a slashing strike down and across the Imperial gunline.” -Salvation's Reach half a light-second

And another thing.

A dreadnought's power lies in the length of its main gun. Dreadnoughts range from 800 meters to one kilometer long, with main guns of commensurate length. An 800-meter mass-accelerator is capable of accelerating one 20 kg slug to a velocity of 4025 km/s (1.3% of light speed) every two seconds. Each slug has the kinetic energy of 38 kilotons of TNT, enough to destroy the infrastructure of a mid-sized city and kill half a million people. This is the speed of a projectile fired from one of ME's larger warships.

Compare to:

“For the second time in less than an hour, space tore open. The reality fissure leapt and crackled like a luminous cephalopod, lashing tendrils of warp energy into real space that twisted out, fizzled and faded. Non-baryonic light flared brilliantly through the tear, backlighting the arriving ships. Monumental silhouettes, they were shot forward into real space. Four ships, one of them very large. And they were moving. Point seven five light at least, cutting straight towards Herodor. They did not slow down. They were moving at cruise speed. Attack Speed.” -One of the Gaunt's Ghosts stories (not sure which, quote came from an omnibus “Several light minutes inside the orbit of Eri, the Phalanx exploded from a warp gate with violent concussion, sending sheets of exotic lightning radiating out and away into the void. Delicate sensory devices dotting the surface of the tenth planet registered the new arrival and immediately communicated reports to relay stations on Pluto and Uranus, where in turn they would be sent onward by astropath to Terra and her dominions. The return of the Imperial Fists to humanity's cradle was long overdue. By rights there should have been celebrations and great ceremony on many of the outer colonies of the solar system to mark it. Instead, the Phalanx came in with speed and ruthless purpose, not in a stately cruise around the solar systems outlying worlds.

The mammoth craft did not fly the pennants and banners associated with the triumphant arrival of a heroic vessel. Instead, the colour on her masts and the laser lamps about the Phalanx's circumference were lit for urgency. Patrol ships made way, no captain daring to challenge the Master of the Imperial Fists for his haste. Drives flaring like captured stars, the fortress-vessel passed in through the ragged edge of the Oort Cloud at three-quarters the speed of light, down into the place of the ecliptic, crossing the orbit of Neptune in a flicker of dazzling radiation.”

-Flight of the Eisenstein Close-range lascannons on the hull of the drive module blew apart the paper-thin sheath of metals hiding the aft section of the ship, and the Ultio's drive section blasted free of the station wreck in a pulse of detonation. Fusion motors unleashed the tiny suns at their cores and pushed the craft away, climbing the acceleration curve in a glitter of void shields and displaced energy. In moments, the vessel was rising to one-quarter lightspeed.” -Nemesis Behold the speed of 40K ships. Not the shots they fire to hit each other, the ships themselves.

And before any ME fanboy/fangirl thinks of using Virmire nuke calcs to produce FTL multi-teraton mass accelerators, I'll point out that this requires incredibly dodgy scaling based on taking blatant outliers that are contradicted by the setting's internal logic and coherence as well as pretty much all other information we have about ME space combat. If you proceed to use this dishonest tactic anyway it will only provoke me to do the same for 40K.