Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-4851119-20140719123726/@comment-6078851-20150610144554

as i understand the life eater virus i think it requires an atmosphere to be effective, so if it isn't used on a planet its effect will be massively reduced, for example: a warhead launched at a bioship would only kill a single ship, whereas if that warhead was launched at a planet it would kill everything on the world.

while i'm not overly knowledgable on the life eater virus i think it doesn't/shouldn't work in space, because if used in space then any virus left over from the attack would drift until reaching a world, and any world that fragments of the virus reached would then be killed. so i would imagine that as a basic safety precaution the life eater would be engineered to only work within atmosphere. also, isn't the life eater ancient, as in it can't be created any more and any life eater munitions are all they have? i could be wrong on both counts here though, so if anyone can please correct.

but say it does work in space just as well as within atmosphere, the terror of the tyranids stems from two facts: 1) their numbers - tyranids potentially have numbers greater than all the other races combined, so that's a lot of life eater that would be needed. and 2) the intellect of the hive mind - the life eater could possibly be used effectively a few times, but the hive mind would learn, quickly, and then create countermeasures.