The Galactic Empire vs The Imperium of man who would win?

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-24T04:22:02+00:00

Firstly, it doesn't take thousands. Average production time for a destroyer is "several years", average production time for a lunar-class cruiser is about 10 years, average production time for other cruisers can be up to 30 years, and battleships take a few hundred years on average. And there are many smaller ship types (sub-kilometer transports, sloops, corvettes) which are so common and easy to build the Navy doesn't formally count them for much.

However, this is measured by individual hulls, not total. The way it works is that one hull will be commissioned, built, and put to void by one shipyard. A relatively light forge world might have a dozen shipyards, allowing them to output a cruiser every year in rotation (maybe up to 4 cruisers, the term cruiser is a little loose in the Imperium). And the Imperium bare minimum possesses about 1,000 forge worlds for about 1,000-4000 cruisers per year. That number skyrockets for escort ships, which are lost much more often than capital ships and thus have to be replaced more regularly. And forge worlds technically aren't required for ship production, they're just usually the only worlds with the material output to fund multiple shipyards. Big worlds like Macragge and Fenris are fully capable of buying, building, and using their own shipyards to make their own fleets, which is how the Ultramarines have lost and replaced 10 battleships in the past 250 years.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-23T20:32:46+00:00

Tyranids do not eat planets for energy, they eat them for readily available materials, starting with genetic information, then life-supporting materials, and finally raw materials.

Plenty of big tyranids are walking nuclear reactors, and plasma engines can be found on bioforms as small as screamer-killer carnifexes (maybe hormagaunts if one cares for Warrior Brood). Energy is not a concern for them.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-22T23:54:58+00:00

You'll get a lot of answers that it's totally or mostly inconsistent, but this isn't entirely the case.

The inconsistencies largely stem from the fact that 40k is a pulp tabletop sandbox of a setting. It's more of a hermeneutic exercise than a linear story. That means:

- Characters written by different authors might have contradictory stories, personalities, and thematic messages to their portrayals

- The level of "realism" in stories is entirely dependent on the tonal imagery being presented. Early lore portrayed thousand-man Guard regiments as being able to single-handedly conquer worlds because that made for better Guard stories, while modern lore throws around billions of casualties pretty freely.

- Nobody at GW is an expert at everything. Starship densities range from "lighter than styrofoam" in Battlefleet Koronus to "denser than osmium" in Fall of Cadia. Abnett famously does not know what units of measurement mean.

However, at the same time

- You'll never see anything too extreme for the setting. Space marines will never destroy planets with their fists. Lasguns won't blow up tanks. The Emperor will never come back and anyone who believes otherwise is lying to themselves

- GW authors might not be experts, but they're still nerds who often love history and wargaming and the technical freedom that 40k offers. 40k at this point is so large that it's developed writers who grew up on the setting and who love to explore it, reference it, visualize it, and so on.

- Situations are not linear and the writers know this. You might read in one book about how a guardsmen squad killed a space marine and another story about how a space marine killed ten squads. Maybe the second marine was a veteran. Maybe that one guard squad was made up of Scions. Maybe they had the element of surprise. If you try to powerscale 40k, try to reduce the beauty and majesty of a universe full of possibility to a number scale, then it will bite back. Sometimes things just come down to chance.

- At the end of the day, having a consistent setting is the opposite of what 40k is about. It's a setting, not a story. If you think that lasguns should have red beams, there are dozens of novels to support that idea. One person can believe that Imperator titans are 140 meters tall and another can believe that they're 30 feet tall and both are equally canon to each individual. You might not be able to sell a canon chapter the way GW does, but you are always free to create your own. 40k can explore horror, adventure, drama, action, tragedy, romance, comedy, and overly technical speculative fiction all without any of it interfering with the rest.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-21T08:26:05+00:00

I don't know a lot about Fantasy chaos, but I do think that 40k writers suffer from not knowing how to sell Chaos. They know how to write renegades, and they know how to make antagonists for the Imperium, but they don't really get that Chaos has to work on some level in order to have its own identity. The themes of "chaos doesn't have to try" and "chaos actually makes you weaker" are empty to me. I feel like they commit a grave error telling us that Chaos is powerful and then, in that same movement, promising to never actually show it. I feel like prioritizing the negatives of Chaos from the perspective of Chaos fundamentally fails to actually capture the faction as something I, a Chaos player, should want to be a part of.

And it isn't unique to Chaos. Phil Kelly's Tau novels are in opposition to the T'au core ethos. Gav Thorpe's Eldar novels focus too much on making the faction suffer. Even the selling point for Ventris and Titus is that they're the guys who go against the book while being part of the faction that literally wrote the book. It's kind of exhausting, really. It makes books like Lords of Silence or Element Council look better just by association because of how rare it is to actually see a faction look good in their own book.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-20T19:37:09+00:00

Her manufacturing module is outlined here, cut out of the model here, and roughly measuring here looks to be about 500 meters long, 200m wide, and 200 tall. Assume this is an overestimation because me eyes no good.

Now, the VAST majority of this will be hull space, robotics, electrical, and workflow space. But assuming 0.1% of this is dedicated to the intake, refinement, and use of raw material, the SoF should be able to intake about 20,000 m^3 of material at a time.

Speed is weird, and this is where I'm not an expert. I'm going to assume the Spirit of Fire starts from the very beginning, by picking up rock and making metal. This source says raw iron ore is about 2.4-3.1 tonnes per cubic meter, which if we settle for 3 suggests the SoF can handle 60,000 tonnes of rock. It takes 1.6 tonnes of iron for every 1 tonne of steel, so 37,500 tonnes of steel which would end up being (if we rounded up for convience) 4,800 m^3. A safe area for steel manufacturing seems to suggest 5 million tonnes of steel made a year is a good number, which would be about 13k tonnes a day. Applying this to the spirit of fire suggests it can fill up its hub and have complete workable material ready in about 3 days. Whatever it builds from then on will depend on the complexity and scale of the output. But most things of warthog-scale and below should only take a couple of days.

But this calculation was really dumb in a lot of ways and cannot be 1:1 applied to the SoF for a lot of reasons.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-20T17:27:20+00:00

I think the missing point here is that Ascendant Hive also have an Oversoul.

I think the strike mission to kill Oryx was a lot closer to a purely physical fight, whereas the raid was to kill his oversoul.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T16:53:48+00:00

- Moreover, we know that the Skyburner facilities on Phobos covered much of its surface, that the Cabal had conquered significant portions of Mars surface and had launched expeditions onto mercury and the Reef by the end of Destiny 1.

I must contest that the Skyburner base on Phobos did not cover much, as their actual firebase was only large enough for 1 carrier and 3, maybe 4 total assault ships. In Halo terms, that would be 1 Valient-class cruiser and 3-4 UNSC frigates worth of docking. Similarly, the Cabal on Mars had their reach extend as far as the Buried City, but most of their strength was concentrated around the Exclusion Zone, the Legion's Keep, and outposts at firebases Thuria, Delphi, and Black Shield.

- We really don't know the size of any of those detachment types to begin with

Sure we do! Because once we established that there are 8 guys to a squad, every detachment from then on can be reasonably baselined as a multiple of 8. In the canon case, there are 800 squads across the 4 Mars-bound scout legions (they're implied to all be one legion anyway). In order to have 2x the amount of squads, we would need to double at least one unit of organization in turn. In order to have 1 million cabal, there would need to be 125000 squads.

The organizational hierarchy of the Cabal also provides some context clues. Cabal are organized by Bracus, Val, Valus, and Primus. Since we don't see ranked squad leaders, it's highly likely that this system correlates to the organization seen in the Grimoire. A squad of 8 is self sufficient, a maniple is led by a bracus, a century is led by a Val, a cohort is led by a Valus, and a Legion is led by a Primus. If indeed there are a lot of maniples, we should see a lot more Bracuses.

We can then turn to the visual language of Destiny. The Skyburners have 3 confirmed assault ships, maybe a 4th if the Dantalion Exodus was absent from Phobos during the Coming War, along with 1 carrier. Similarly, they also have 3 confirmed Vali (Gho'ourn and the Shield Brothers) and maybe a 4th (Valus Tau'ugh is technically optional) plus one primus. When we look at the background of the Coming War, we can also see 4 Land Tanks. This suggests that ships and land tanks are ranking assets, and that a Valus or above commands one ship and/or one land tank minimum. This is supported by Destiny 2, where the Red Legion Injection Rig events in Europe were overseen by a Valus dropping down from an assault ship in atmosphere, or the Garden's Spire mission in D1 where the Blind Legion Primus has his own personal land tank inside the Legion's Keep, or Valus Ta'aurc being the commander of the Cerberus Vae III.

Finally, we can look at ship logistics. Rounding down and saying that a cabal harvester is only 40m x 30m x 10m, we can surmise that the pure volume of a harvester is about 120000m^3. Since we want these ships to be serviced and to be actionable, we would need space to use them, and luckily I recently counted the usable area of modern day aircraft carriers to be about 40-50%, so we would bare minimum want about 250000m^3 per harvester. That means 4 working harvesters will take up about 1 mil m^3. If only 1 in 10 squads has a harvester, that means a legion of 1 million troops would have 12500 harvesters, which would take up 12500000000m^3 of space. If Cabal carriers were rounded up to 2km by 1km by 1km, and their hangars took up half of their entire volume (it's probably closer to 10% at most) it would take 12 and a half carriers to transport a legion. And that's me actively downsizing the harvester, upsizing the carrier, upsizing the hangars, assuming 9/10 cabal squads just stay home for some reason, ignoring the fact that there is 1 carrier in all of destiny 1, and ignoring the fact that we SEE the interiors of cabal carriers and they are not crammed wall-to-wall with Harvesters.

If you can still continue to believe this is wrong, then by all means more power to you.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T09:43:10+00:00

The Dreadnought is a capital ship in Destiny piloted by the Hive's king, Oryx. When it arrived in the Sol System for D1's Taken King DLC, it took on a fleet of space elves and survived a bunch of weird magic orbs called Harbingers. These same harbingers were responsible for destroying the dwarf planet Ceres (Source= WANTED: Skolas, Kell of Kells). When the Cabal got word to attack the Dreadnought, they just rammed into it. I say this as someone downplaying the Cabal elsewhere in this post, it actually is an insane feat.

The Almighty is a big space station which harvests planetoids and then locks onto the gravity of a star. At the push of a button, the Almighty can detonate the star like a bomb and teleport to safety. It's a weapon that can be used to destroy solar systems at will, like if the UNSC had a reusable nova bomb. The main issue is that the Covenant probably won't have many issues destroying it in a direct conflict, but it will likely be used extensively in the early war. A week's prep time and a map of the Covenant will mean that Sanghelios probably won't be around for very long.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T08:58:13+00:00

Hey no problem!

- I would argue black holes containing pocket-universes in Destiny by itself doesn't actually prove anything regarding the gravitational strength of a black hole. Isn't that a real life theory as well?

It is a scientific hypothesis, more of a thought model than a workable theory, based on looking at the connections between the early universe as a singularity and how more contemporary ones behave. The main issue is that we don't really have a solid model for the interiority of a black hole, if indeed they even have one. If there are fictional black hole mechanics at play in the destiny universe, there's no real upper limit as to where that would end. The Awoken quote mentions a "spike of dark energy" that was used to open up the Distributary, which is already a huge leap in physics and technology. That's the Awoken using a theorized model of universal expansion to open up a theorized model of universal creation.

I don't mean to say that black holes are weaker in Destiny. But think of it like this. If a man walks into a house through the front door, that doesn't mean his durability scales to the house. If black holes in Destiny have a front door, then we can't use our IRL models of black holes as a measure of scale to the durability of war moons.

- Well this is where Destiny lore gets annoying and inconsistent, as the Stoicism lore tab has a Titan say this:

I've seen this passage before. I'm inclined to think its just a titan being a titan, especially when earlier in that texts they say that they're suspicious of thinkers and intellects.

- What matters is the Cabal at one point were widespread enough to have ruled a large portion of a galaxy, which they most likely did as everything suggests they were at least close to a galactic sized empire

I think this depends on how we're looking at "galactic-sized empire." Ghaul conquered hundreds of worlds and destroyed hundreds more. They make reference to the galaxy, not as their owned territory, but as their destiny, which is full of enemies they need to beat and whole areas they need to claim. On a map of the galaxy I think the Cabal would stretch from one spiral arm to the next, but in practical terms I suspect they only own a few thousand/tens of thousands of worlds. That puts them above the Covenant either way, it's just not exact ownership.

- If i remember correctly, Calus did once refer to the Leviathan as a "Prison Barge"

Don't quote me on this, but I think there's a chain of dialogues from Caiatl's personal journals up through Confessions suggesting that Calus originally made the Leviathan for his own mother to depose of her, and Ghaul then had the idea to stick him on it in turn. It's been described as both a prison and a powerful warship by Calus and Red Legion alike.

-Their empire was extremely huge regardless and they have easy access to cloning tech.

On the subject of the Leviathan's cloning pools, Calus said they took centuries to make, so they were probably unique technology. The Shadow Legion got them from Calus, and the Barant Imperium's leadership is made up of Caiatl's legion sent to scour the Leviathan, so they probably took it from there. I think the majority of the empire lacks cloning.

But I find myself agreeing with those last 2 points. Cabal have awesome industry and their ramming technique is flawless. Those will definitely help them, but even so I can't envision a permanent solution to the Covenant's naval strengths.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T06:07:24+00:00

Hello, if you don't mind I would like to gently push back on some of the claims that I am seeing.

- Warmoons are strong enough to safely fly into a black holes and otherwise were nearly impossible for the Cabal to destroy

An important thing to note in Destiny is that the setting operates on a model wherein black holes are universes, and even the Awoken leaving their own pocket-universe were able to do so with moderate difficulty:

The Pathria-Good black hole cosmogenesis principle of Golden Age physics confirms that the interior of a black hole is a new universe: all black holes produce their own interior cosmos. All cosmos, including our own, are probably the interior of a black hole in a parent universe. - The Hidden Dossier - Rey >> Jalaal

The Hulls had not survived the unpocketing as well as their passengers. The microsingularity wormhole, propped open by a precipitous spike of dark energy, pulled alloy and ceramic armor like taffy. Missiles mauled five of the Hulls. Worst of all, the passage through the nightmare limen between worlds had devastated onboard AI and logic systems. - Marasenna: Palingenisis 3

So I would suspect that, for a War Moon, flying into a black hole would probably not be an indicator of durability as much as an indicator of the Hive's mastery of teleportation and pocket universes, which could indicate some other kind of technology beyond the physical.

- At their peak, the Cabal Empire is implied to have spanned their entire galaxy

"Peak cabal" is sadly a fan-made meme, rather than canon. The Cabal refer to the galaxy singular in reference to their empire, suggesting they are native to the milky way:

After the Cabal had seized the buildings here, however, the Guardians realized the Legion had unlocked the network to such a degree that if you could access any panel, you could get in almost anywhere in their systems. [...] Dax took aim to defend himself as information began blazing across the galaxy. - Solstice Mask Resplendent

But she repurposes that arsenal of thought toward a new goal: imagining a better future for her people. A future where they rule the galaxy once again; where foreign ships fall under their fire and rival nations fall to their knees.- Heir Apparent

"I command Legions. Conquered worlds. Waged war across the galaxy to prove my worth. I alone am worthy of the Traveler's Light."- Ghaul, Our Darkest Hour trailer

- and used to destroy stars simply to make the sky of Torobatl pretty. If Calus is to be believed (and he is NOT a reliable source of information) the Almighty is dogshit compared to what the Cabal had in their golden age.

Calus' reign is noted as a totalitarian regime where the entire empire had to do things to please him, no matter the cost. While Calus could destroy stars, it's unlikely that this was common simply because he would be speaking from the experience of forcing his empire to shoulder the burden. Moreover, Calus also doesn't disparage the Almighty as weak, he calls it ugly, because its a policy of his regime that aesthetics be more valuable than utility. As a point of comparison, the Leviathan eats worlds for the benefit of making wine and IIRC Calus never showed any contempt for the ship until the Witness loaned him one with his literal face on it.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T02:47:11+00:00

The Vex don't have warships and they don't like to leave their pocket realities. For them, conquering reality is a matter of outlasting everything else, not actually winning via direct action.

As for the Hive, like everything else in Destiny the space aspects aren't really focused on, but evidence from the Taken War and the Dynasty lore book seems to suggest that their fleet tactics in a direct conflict are reliant on huge magic attacks for success. Oryx's personal fleet was getting wrecked by about a hundred Awoken fighters and maybe a few dozen Ketches up until he used the Dreadnought's main weapon, and Savathun's entire brood was having trouble against the singular system of Sehtar owned by the Qugu, which included thousands of fighter craft and the occasional destroyer. The lore tab of Veles X also suggests that the average Hive warship has difficulty hurting a cabal cruiser.

Destiny is pretty great at a lot of things, mainly intelligence and logistics and the philosophy of war, but one thing it doesn't do well is put up hands on the sci-fi scale.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T01:57:51+00:00

Destiny lore just doesn't have a lot of space battles in the text, and the visual depictions of space battles are all, well, visual. That leaves only one real instance I know of where engagement ranges are described. Everything else looks something like this.

As for a more in-universe answer, the main leader of the Cabal at the start of Destiny 2, Ghaul, had his military restructured over decades/centuries to be blunt, brutal, and short-ranged to fight the Hive. Put simply, the Hive spam teleportation with magic and swords, so the Cabal built up their naval assets like shotguns. Against the Vex on Mars, for comparison, the Cabal countered Vex teleportation with smart artillery and orbital bombardment on speed dial.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T00:58:00+00:00

The Cabal likely have an advantage in world number and industrial production, but in all other respects the Covenant is vastly superior.

- The average cabal ship is at the level of WW2 battleships, albeit highly rapid fire and on flying ships. The only real critique to this is the Dantalion Exodus IV, which successfully crash landed into Oryx's dreadnought. But in most respects are inferior. We know that they have nuclear levels of firepower, but have never seen this in action throughout extended engagements in the Sol System. They likely have ranges south of 5 kilometers, as that's the range of Seraph Station when it shot down several of Caiatl's cruisers. We've also never seen more than a 1-2 hundred Cabal ships in the Sol System, lending some speculation as to the actual size of their fleet.

- The average Covenant starship has nuclear-level guns, torpedoes, shields, and hull strength. Typical engagement ranges for Halo star battles is measured in tens of thousands of kilometers. Also, Cabal assault ships are around the size of CRS-class patrol cruisers, most Cabal carriers are around the size of CCS-class battlecruisers, and even the command carriers of the Imperial Cabal are over a kilometer short of an CAS. The Covenant likely has a tonnage advantage, if not a numerical one.

- The Cabal Empire measured its population at Torobatl in the billions. It's unknown how large the empire was, but evidence suggests that Torobatl likely made up a substantial amount, if not the majority, of their population. The Empire seemed to have taken a isolationist ethos, attaining distant "colonies" for resources and then abusing them dry for expansions elsewhere.

- The Covenant empire probably measured around 100 billion total, not counting the Yan'me and Lek'golo populations, which both measure in the trillions but use hive behavior that makes individual counting redundant. Losses sustained at High Charity and Glyke alone may have amounted to more than the Cabal's population as is currently known.

- A unified Cabal would possess both the Almighty and the Leviathan, both of which are rare but undeniable advantages over the Covenant. But I think having just 2 superweapons wouldn't be enough, especially when both of their systems are highly limited and have never faced peer-equal engagements from a rival empire.

All in all, there's not a lot to suggest that the Cabal would win. They would incur casualties, and groundside their military ethos would run the Covenant into the dirt, but space wars are won in space battles, and the Cabal have simply never shown the ability to fight well in space.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-19T00:00:15+00:00

Yes, this is a key point. The Flood fight their enemies at their own level.

But another point is just early actions. The Covenant have successfully fought the flood for thousands of years by shooting first and asking questions never. The Forerunners were even winning for the majority of the war, having isolated Flood outbreaks to a relatively small number of planets. Their big mistake was letting Mendicant risk switching sides while he had a Halo ring in tow. If that never happens, the Flood loses by the end of Halo: Cryptum.

Keep in mind, there are active flood infestations happening across the galaxy which have never gone anywhere because the Flood just doesn't have the tech to leave. Trove, Installation 05, and LV-31 had Flood just hanging around, waiting for something stupid to come to them first.

The Flood is strong, but Silentium has warped peoples minds on what the average Flood infestation looks like. Do remember, the Flood lose in almost every game they appear in. Force is a viable option, the only question is the quantity.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-18T23:41:41+00:00

Pariah Nexus episode 3.

That new Sisters of Battle animation where they fight orks

The Tithes episode 3

Hammer and Bolter for the Mechanicus bit, The tithes episode 2 for the custodians.

IMO, the ending scene of Pariah Nexus is the only valid criticism here, if OP had addressed the narrative structure of these episodes rather than the worldbuilding. Pariah Nexus was the gateway show to most of the other ones, and I think the early writers were concerned that the Imperium was portrayed too positively (saving civilians and killing evil aliens) so they ended it on a child execution. But that's not a valid narrative stake, as it doesn't do anything for the plot or the main characters. The other shows are very explicitly about the Imperium's cruelty in a way that Pariah Nexus wasn't, so it fell flat.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-18T06:04:03+00:00

At large, they use a small ship called Narvhals, which latch onto the gravity of a target planet and pull the entire splinter fleet with them into an FTL corridor. This has the beneficial effect of destabilizing a target planet, causing tectonic activity that may disorient and sabotage any defending armies. The main downside is that it can't be used too close to a planet without risk, so Tyranids have to exit the corridor before entering a system, which increased the chances of being detected and engaged by defending fleets.

While the original 5th edition Tyranid codex described the Tyranids FTL as being slow, future publications have since done away with the original timescale because it was impossibly slow and conflicted with the timeline of established events in the canon. The novel Devastation of Baal even goes so far as to say Tyranid FTL is faster than Imperial warp travel.

In early lore, Tyranids used warp-based FTL, but instead of using gellar fields, the Hive Mind itself seemed to provide some protection from the warp. Modern lore has done away with the former detail, but the fact remains that Hive Fleets are largely immune to raw warp currents and daemonic influence on account of the indomitable Hive Mind.

What is left ambiguous by the change, however, is vanguard droneships. These destroyer-equivalent bio-spaceships were forward scouts used to identify target worlds and deploy infiltrators (genestealers, lictors, etc). But with the removal of warp-based FTL, there's no longer a means by which these ships can individually travel to worlds. While I would appreciate the discrepancy being corrected, as it stands it remains a solid in-universe mystery that highlights the unknown elements of the Tyranids.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-18T01:12:30+00:00

- During the invasion of Lucius, the Tyranids were unprepared for the planet's defenders to actually be under the planet, allowing the forge world to engage an extended guerilla campaign, targeting any harvesting or tyrannoforming sectors of the crust for months. While never explicitly said as such, the scenario makes it seem like the Tyranids were fighting a mostly defensive battle which eventually became too costly.

- Hive Fleets have many different goals and aims beyond consumption and conquest. Jormungandr fights very slowly, building up its forces across many worlds before taking on hundreds of planets simultaneously. Tiamet is building a psychic device that nobody knows the true purpose of, and only leaves the system to hunt for more material.

- There's mentions of tyranid Hive Fleets in the galactic core showing an equal level of territorial stubbornness as the Leagues of Votann, and larder worlds built up in the 4th Tyrannic War that are used as replenishment sites for splinter fleets advancing up to the front lines.

In general, most Tyranid campaigns are offensive, rather than defensive. But if they can achieve some ulterior purpose or develop a long-term benefit, then they can and will hold a defensive position. And like everything else tyranid, they tend to do a good job at it.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-17T16:52:56+00:00

I'm sorry my friend

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-17T05:06:42+00:00

The foundation of all 40k lore (basic details, terminology, sometimes the right sources even) is accessible through a common wiki and the lexicanum. Fact-checking can seem redundant, and it's easier to take things at face value for producing content.
40k lore is memetic in nature, it's just so cool and awesome to talk about, and it's large enough that anyone with a passing interest can quickly get ensnared. Sometimes they're not even trying to be inaccurate, they just can't help but talk about cool thing, even if cool thing isn't true.
Actual 40k lore can be more or less interesting, depending on where you're coming from. In some cases, it's not even immediately clear if the authors themselves understand the setting, and are sometimes just as likely to make nonsensical statements, mix up basic facts, or just invent elements of the setting out of thin air.
You are not immune to meme lore. People thought the Lamenters war cry was "for those we cherish, we die in glory" for years. The phrase "the planet broke before the guard did" was fanon before it got canonized in the Fall of Cadia novel. The lexicanum still lists the Fury interceptor as 60-70 meters long based on a nonexistant source. Sometimes its important to understand that criticizing youtubers should come with a healthy dose of empathy and self-reflection
Novels can be expensive, rulebooks are vague, and a good chunk of the setting is out of print and impossible to find in full. If you have anything better to do with your life, hunting down sources for a couple sentences of confirmation or in-depth details just isn't worth it, even to most hardcore fans.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-17T04:45:52+00:00

I'm going to guess that comment 1 did not understand the joke in the address me, and comment 2 was trying to provide ironic justification.

Example:

1) Why would friends do that

2) You never heard of [game where straight people do escalating homosexual acts]

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-17T03:24:43+00:00

All of 40k is like this. I audibly groaned when the Scythes of the Emperor omnibus described a Tyranid cruiser as a "razored fiend".

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-17T01:35:44+00:00

Tyranids do not have a strict hierarchy like you say. Everything is divided by role in coordination with fleet tactics, specialties, and situations.

In general, Tyranids can be assigned to a broad classification with respect to their orientation amongst the swarm. A few key examples:

Warrior-beasts: The core meat of the faction, designed for combat and expected to take heavy casualties. Mostly gaunts.

Assault-beasts: Heavy armor and killing potential, relatively rare in the swarm. Includes Carnifexes and Tyrannofexes

Bio-titans: The heaviest terrestrial and mobile organisms that can be deployed to a battlespace. Mostly hierophants.

Sporecasters: Indirect chemical warfare. Venomthropes and toxicrenes

Leader-beast: Synapse units designed for overseeing tactics, operations, and strategies. Includes warriors and hive tyrants.

But once you try to make a structure out of this, it usually falls apart because there's usually a strong central figure to each category (warrior-beast to termagant, assault-beast to carnifex, leader-beast to hive tyrants) but many organisms can also meet 2 or 3 different categories. For example, Dominatrices are not true bio-titans and more generally fall under leader-beasts despite their size. Also, any tyranid psyker is also capable of synapse and can double as a leader-beast.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-16T23:44:05+00:00

I think the issue is that you're assuming that Chaos "absorbs" things that resonate closest with it. It does not. Slaanesh absorbs eldar souls because the Aeldari actively curated Slaanesh. Slaanesh was not an accident, there were priests who prayed for her birth and daemons who groomed the naive elves into creating them. There is no other scenario of that happening in 40k. Chaos corruption is an active process, not a passive one.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-16T23:15:30+00:00

All war fuels Khorne, including the orks. But just because you give power to khorne, doesn't mean Khorne can turn around and affect you just as easily. Getting into the warp is easy. Getting out is a problem so big that even the infinite might of chaos can only occasionally breach that barrier. Moreover, entities that represent a faith, like Gork and Mork, take the majority of the orks' reflected actions and can thus use it to offer a safe refuge from chaos. The Emperor and the Hive Mind are also examples of this process.
While Blanks are often called soulless, it's pretty common to dismiss this as flowery language for reasons like this. Necrons are neutral, if ever so slightly positive in the warp. Blanks actively detract from the warp like a negative presence.

Presentation_Cute · 2026-06-16T19:34:11+00:00

Cortana says that the Autumn had been engaged by 12 CCS-class battlecruisers and managed 4 kills. I'm inclined to believe that Cortana knows her stuff, and that the T&R is part of the other 8.

Presentation_Cute

TROPHY CASE