Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27642965-20160211003725/@comment-4851119-20160921172942

ReDquinox wrote: "Mark VI Mars Pattern Macrocannon - The most common macrobattery, these Macrocannons are reliable, hard-hitting weapons that fire  kilotonne-grade ordnance, mounted along an Imperial warship's dorsal ridge or in a broadside." - literally on the wiki page. Ah, exploiting 40K inconsistency to lowball despite the fact that it goes against the thematics of the setting. A classic tactic, but ultimately flawed since you misinterpreted the source.

Rather than a wiki page, let's have a look at the actual canon source for that. Mars Pattern Macrocannon Broadside

The most common macrobattery, these are reliable, hard-hitting weapons firing kilo-tonne ordinance, mounted along the vessel's dorsal ridge or in broadside. -Rogue Trader Core Rulebook Not "kiloton", which would be a measurement of firepower, but "kilotonne", a measurement of weight. I'll quote Guderian2nd's excellent calc from Spacebattles.com on the matter, because I'm tired out from school and don't want to spend my 18th Birthday calculating relativistic kinetic energy.

*A kilo-tonne is 1000 tonnes of mass, which translates into a million kilograms.
 * Since macrocannons are Direct fire weapons, they have to be at least as fast as the torpedoes, and in order for them to NOT be considered ordnance weapons and 'hit almost instantly', we can safely presume they are several orders of magnitudes faster than torpedoes, perhaps even a significant fraction of the Speed of light(!).
 * All that taken into account, let's assume the shells are 100 times faster than 40k torpedoes. A 40k torpedo goes 10 Void Units(One VU being around 10,000 kms) every strategic turn, and if you read the Starship section of the rulebook carefully you can see it is clearly stated a turn equals around 30 minutes IC.
 * A little bit of calc-ing yourself and you will discover torpedoes travel 56km/s.

Calcs:

So, since a torpedo travels around 56km/s, our macro cannon shell will travel 5600km/s, or to be exact, 5,600,000m/s.

A million kilograms traveling at 5,600,000m/s, using the infamous ½mv^2, has around 1.568e+19 Joules of energy.

That, in the TNT equivalent scale, is 3.7 gigatons of energy, an averaged, slightly conservative figure. Over three gigatons per shell.

But that's not necessarily relevant; since you're using the wanktastic teraton turbolasers for Star Wars I see nothing wrong with using the wanktastic planet-splitting macrocannons for 40K.

Nice how you let out the part where it said that it was directed at Horus' heart. No one said the blast went any further past that, so that's just speculation. I'll repeat myself: since you're using Teratons for Star Wars I see nothing wrong with using the supernova ship durability for 40K. I'd do exactly the same for Mass Effect fanboys trying to use Virmire nuke scaling or Halo fanboys trying to use teraton MACs.

That's called plot armour - they are actually far more accurate than they are portrayed in the films. "Plot armour" or "plot-induced stupidity" isn't an argument. If you want to claim Stormtroopers are capable of better marksmanship then show me some visuals or quotes from canon* sources to back this up.


 * Either Legends or Disney canon, I personally am not bothered, though given your preference for wanktastic turbolaser calcs I should probably expect the former.

As said by Ben Kenobi in in A New Hope: "And these blast points, too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise." That doesn't tell us anything except in relative terms. It could easily mean that Stormtroopers despite their crappy accuracy are still better than Sand People, which is in line with the fact that Stormtroopers consistently display comically bad marksmanship.

The standard-issue E-11 is also more effective than a Lasgun: a Lasgun shot, while capable of snapping your bones and potentially rupturing organs, can hardly penetrate armour, while the E-11 has shown to be able to blast chunks of metal to bits. A lasgun power cell can be recharged from damn-near any source of energy, including sunlight, or in a pinch throwing it on a campfire. What's the logistical footprint of an E-11?

The lasgun fires a proper laser beam which travels at the speed of light, whereas the E-11's bolts can be tracked by the naked eye.

There's more to the efficacy of a weapon than just the number of joules it puts out. Jedi and Sith aren't "random Force user mooks", they're highly trained and disciplined warriors. Not helping your case. Also, I don't see a Space Marine being able to resist having its insides crushed by the Force. And I don't see how the Jedi, who don't always succeed at deflecting Blaster bolts slower than bullets, will be able to react to the much faster Space Marines. True, there's that incident of Obi-Wan blocking bullets with a lightsaber but that's very much an outlier from what I've seen. Cool, but the Death Star actually completely destroys the planet, whereas Cyclonic Torpedoes just ignite the atmosphere and crack the planet's crust. Needless to say, the former is more powerful. Cyclonic torpedoes can be launched from any Imperial warship.

Well there you go, you've given me even more points. The Eclipse-class, as well as the Sovereign-class. How many of each of these were built?

It also takes a lot more than a single fighter-sized torpedo to blow up the Death Star. It took the Force to actually make the shot land, and on top of that, the tractor beams had been disabled. If they hadn't been, the fighters would've just been yanked into the Death Star's surface. Good thing 40K strikecraft are much faster than SW strikecraft and can just blast away huge portions of the Death Star's surface with their vastly superior firepower. That is is anyone actually opts for a fighter assault instead of just shelling it with capital ships from a few AU away.

Vader doesn't need to see his targets - he simply needs to be aware of their presence and location. Citation needed. When he killed Ozzel he had indirect line of sight on him via the viewscreen. Every other source I've seen has displayed him only using the Force in direct line of sight. If you have a citation that he can project the Force beyond his direct or indirect visual range I'd like to see it.

That's thirteen Executors, and then fleets upon fleets of Imperial-I and II Star Destroyers, Interdictors, Vindicators, Acclamators, Victory-I and IIs, Venators, Precursators, Enforcers, several Eclipses and Sovereigns, etc etc... Citation on exact numbers?

A trillion times is not even a hyperbole. Make the calculation. 50 Teratons is 1.000.000.000.000 (= 1 trillion) times more powerful than 50 (a fair average) Kilotons. Citation on the fifty teratons you keep bandying about?