Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-8881468-20150204091114/@comment-6078851-20150206181310

when i say about the whole of ork-dom united under an uber-massive, brutal, and let's not forget kunnin', warlord that was pure hypothetical. while ghazghkull has done more to unite orks than any other ork even he could never unite the entire race, and i seriously doubt there will ever be such an ork as orks are simply too inately violence-prone to be able to unite in such a manner, as well as the fact that if they were united then that's game over for everyone else :P

the tyranids wont continue on as they currently have though - the hive fleets of leviathan, behemoth, kraken etc, are (despite the colossity of the numbers involved) simply the hive-mind 'sizing-up' this galaxy's organic opposition. by and large this feeling-out process has been fairly successful so no drastic changes need be made, but remember that the hive-mind is "unfathomably intelligent" and if a sticky situation arises, like the entire imperium being massed against tyranids, it has the intellect and unimaginable resources to create alternate bio-forms to combat any situation. but it's not feasible if the imperium were to attempt to fortify the edge of the galaxy, there are too many worlds and they simply don't have the numbers to do so effectively. plus, while tyranids have effectively surrounded the milky way, they don't need to make planetfall to feed: they are more than capable of space-warfare and even when they do make planetfall they don't feed on-world - all organic matter is transported to the hive ships still in orbit. and though this is just conjecture on my part: i don't believe the imperium has enough munitions to fight the whole of the tyranid race - the imperium needs metals and oil-based plastics as the base ingredient for any munitions, which are in a finite supply, while tyranids only need organic matter for their munitions, which are a self-replenishing resource.

besides my idea of the entirety of tyranid numbers, which as i said is just conjecture, everything else here is based on the info from their codex, but that's from the last codex and i havn't yet read the new codex, so they may be slightly less of a threat now... or more :P  i'll be getting it soon though so i'll find out in not too long if they've been altered for the better or worse.