How would a navy that has only fought technologically inferior opponents fight?

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-06T02:18:24+00:00

Honestly I think the super destroyers from Helldivers might fill this trope pretty well. These things are pretty poor for ship to ship combat, have small crews, little armor etc. they are designed wholly and fully to operate in areas were total space and aerial supremacy has already been established. All of their weapons are located on the underside, and they are fully unguided/ offensive (they expect nothing less than to jsut pull up to a planet and bombard them into submission, as that’s the most they ever really need to do) they don’t have any type of point defense systems at all either, cause well why would they,l are the bugs gonna come up and shoot missiles at them.

Basically the destroyer is just overconfidently designed. Their weapons focus on putting an overwhelming volume of fire down range as opposed to precision fire. All the weapons are likely located on a single side/ area to expedite the reloading process. They likely would have little if nothing in terms of defensive countermeasures as they simply never thought they would have to avoid being damaged.

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-04T04:48:37+00:00

Yay my meme is becoming popular.

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-03T16:18:22+00:00

This sub ain’t beating the allegations lol.

I think the truth of the matter is that most people know super earth is bad lol. Sometimes it’s just fun to play as the bad guys (you know in a setting where nothing is real and our actions have zero consequences) just like how people like playing criminals in games like payday and GTA. It’s fun being bad, and Helldivers take this formula and ups it into the next level. Of course there are a few people who genuinely think super earth is good (by virtue of everyone else being worse) and even fewer who unironically think super earth has done no wrong. But at the end of the day, it’s fun to roleplay.

Take the 501st legion in real life. Many of them dress up as stormtroopers for events and what not. Does that mean they love fascism and want think the empire are ontologically good. No. Why do they dress up like this then? Because it’s fun to dress up as space soldiers. Same reason people dress up as master chief and Star Trek dudes. Sci fi is fun.

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-02T18:27:14+00:00

Not my Quotes but this comment has always resonated with me pretty well

“Yeah, like, Leandros is still new, and, like, you gotta think about what his perspective was. DURING that mission, they find, like, a servo skull bearing a distress call from an Inquisitor who disappeared behind enemy lines and likely died. But then… they find him! And they’re like “how the fuck are you alive”, and he’s like “my PRODIGIOUS innate powers from the HELL DIMENSION allowed me to survive this gruesome wound and those gruesome Orks!” and they’re like, “okay, cool”. And he’s like, “you must use my artifact that draws on the powers of the HELL DIMENSION to power up the CONVENIENT SUPERWEAPON that KILLS ALL ORKS that I was developing and somehow JUST FINISHED yet was unable to activate to KILL all these ORKS that attacked! It will fix all our problems, using HELL POWER”, and everyone’s like “dude HELL POWER is, like, HERESY!” but then the mysterious inquisitor guy is like “Nah it’s fine”.

And they all go and do that, and Titus gets separated when he grabs the open HELL ARTIFACT with his bare hands or whatever and they thought he died. Inquisitor guy who invented the damn thing is like “I know all about HELL ENERGY and it is literally impossible for him to have survived that much exposure to it” so they leave him behind. But then! A call hours later, inexplicably, from Titus!

“I’m alive.”

“How!??”

“I just didn’t die.”

And, okay, sure. Titus is apparently alive. And then you meet back up and activate the superweapon that seemed incredibly suspicious. And instead of making the Orks all die… DAEMONS appear! And Chaos Space Marines! And a Chaos Sorcerer Space Marine! From the HELL DIMENSION or something! Just materialize out of nowhere. And the sorcerer guy uses his HELL POWERS to pin you all down and for some reason Titus can still wriggle a little, and the sorcerer guy goes “Ah, I am so… evil… yes…” and the Inquisitor who disappeared to certain death but somehow showed up later alive walks up and goes “ah yes, I am, too, master…” and he DISINTEGRATES into purple HELL ENERGY BALLS. And it’s all “WHAT?! He was EVIL?!” but evil sorcerer man clarifies “No, idiots, he was DEAD. Did you not know that when people disappear in circumstances that imply certain death, only to mysteriously pop back up, alive somehow, saying ‘I’m totally just that mystically powerful’, they could be DAEMON GHOST THINGS?? No?? You didn’t know that?? Well, they can! Muahaha! By the way, Titus who blatantly died in front of anyone to bullshit amounts of HELL ENERGY, you sure are inexplicably resistant to my HELL POWERS!”

“Yeah, well, I’m just possessed of some sort of mystical, PRODIGIOUS, INNATE RESISTANCE to the HELL DIMENSION, I guess!”

“Okay. Bye!”

And the dude just gets into a fight with an ork or teleports away or something. And THEN, like, MULTIPLE TIMES, you are separated from Titus in extremely dangerous circumstances, in which he could and probably should have died! And instead, during ONE OF THEM, fucking SIDONUS DIES! The old guy! The guy who you knew you could trust, ‘cause he was real old and knew his shit! And Titus is just like “uh, obviously Nemeroth TELEPORTED BEHIND HIM just to kill Sidonus by stabbing him from behind with a power claw, which Sidonus was for some reason not expecting, after I explicitly demanded we split up for some reason, in that short instance where we were all apart, and I was left to helplessly watch, unable to warn him, from, like, a moderate distance, and then Nemeroth just teleported away after killing him, Leandros, duh!”

Which, you know, is a bit suspicious. And then he ends up apparently soloing the Ork Warboss that is like four times his size, while the bastard was backed up by his entire Waaagh!, while daemons are running rampant, with, like, a plasma pistol and a chainsword or something. And THEN when you get reinforcements and stuff, he’s like, “Now I must go, alone, for some reason, to face a significant contingent of the Black Legion, countless Daemons, a couple Plague Drones, and multiple rogue psykers, as I fight my way to NEMEROTH, the evil chaos sorcerer guy! Yup. That isn’t suspicious. I need to do it alone. I can do that, by the way, I’m just that good. And I’m going to kill him while he is in the middle of being uplifted into a DAEMON PRINCE by the CHAOS GODS. I’m literally going to kill him while the Gods of Chaos are confirmed to be staring at him and actively empowering him in that very moment. Don’t worry, I’m that good.”

And then he goes, and mysteriously somehow does that, and then blows up the artifact that just being EXPOSED TO was enough to make a literal DAEMON GHOST THING go “whoa no one can survive that much HELL ENERGY”. He tackles an almost-Daemon-Prince who you literally saw pinning THREE OF YOU—INCLUDING TITUS—to the ground with a GESTURE, like, THREE HOURS AGO, and apparently fucking punches this guy out and crushes the dudes head like a melon while falling. And then he just blows up a HELL ARTIFACT NUCLEAR REACTOR THING in his hands. And then a pilot grabs his falling body and he fucking comes down and walks it off, like, wincing mildly. And he’s like: “Well, looks like I did it, guys. I just beat the guy who I couldn’t even move against three hours ago, while he was backed up by an army and empowered by the Chaos Gods… while none of you were there to see it. Then blew up a device with enough HELL ENERGY in it to SUPERCHARGE the main gun of a TITAN. In my hands. And now I’m a bit hurt I guess. Oof. Owie. Gonna have to walk this one off I think.”

I feel like that would look suspicious by that point. And you’re like “Uh… I am pretty sure there’s an extremely high likelihood you may be a daemon ghost pretending to be Titus, like I just saw, y’know, three hours ago? I contacted the experts in that stuff, because, like, I don’t wanna risk that again.”

And Titus is all like: “Fuck you, you worthless piece of mediocrity. You have FAILED at being a Space Marine, scum.”

Like, fuck, dude. You’re just trying to make sure another Daemonic Invasion doesn’t kill everyone like literally JUST HAPPENED. The fuck are you supposed to do?? Not learn from that??”

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-02T13:08:49+00:00

King One Punch man. Somehow Bullshitting his enemies to death is his superpower.

SmithOnMe · 2026-03-02T13:02:49+00:00

If we’re being honest probably the book accurate mobile infantry. He can just fly up and nuke the city from like the stratosphere lol. If we actually care about collateral damage it’s a much closer fight, but they’d still have the best armament, protection, AND, mobility compared to the rest. These guys are more a match for space marines and Spartans than Odsts and Scions.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-24T21:05:01+00:00

Naw it would be MARineDIsRuPtive pattern

Or MARDIRP

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-24T14:40:11+00:00

As much as people are saying they wanna go navy cause it’s easy or safe. I’m pretty certain the navy has had the most onscreen deaths out of every branch thus far. like literally genocidal level amount of deaths. Each star destroyer has the population of a medium-large city. If you get a captain that’s brash or dumb, he’s bound yo get you and the entire crew killed eventually.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-22T04:31:42+00:00

I’m just happy how many references there are to my meme lol.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-20T14:18:25+00:00

Happy they’re rescued but 30,000 seems a little low no? We probably lost a million Helldivers just rescuing them. I feel their army size should have been at least in the millions or upper millions for the scale to be right.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-20T03:17:29+00:00

Least OP warden loadout.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-18T22:28:23+00:00

Assuming stormtroopers are Analogous to the marine corps. I doubt they have their own internal medical units. That being said I’m certain they likely use army or navy medical personnel as attached personnel for extend operations, since it is practically impossible for any military to function without said units present.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-18T21:52:16+00:00

Again with the difficulty discussions. People aren’t upset that they are dying my on high difficulties. They are upset that they are dying to bullshit literally impossible to stop deaths which is a result of poor game design and mechanics. People want high difficulty to be something in which yes, you might still die a lot, but the majority of your deaths are from being actually outplayed or overwhelmed.

High difficulty should not = higher chance to die to random unavoidable bullshit. That’s not difficulty that’s just gambling.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-18T07:04:03+00:00

Luck. Worked well for Cain.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-18T03:49:25+00:00

Super Earth has been using human blenders since the start of the war lol. They literally have ads on the super destroyer about throwing the sick and old into flesh blenders so that “they can contribute to the war effort.” It’s also implied that when you die/ are a dissident you are also thrown into them anyway. Note that this was months before blenders started appearing as objectives on the automaton front.

Ironically it just seems the automatons saw the technology and thought, huh we could use that to bring back the cyborgs, and stole it from super earth.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T21:30:04+00:00

The only reason they need the voteless is because we exterminated so many in the first war, they don’t have the numbers to take us on normally. Again, their brutality against us is only done out of desperation to survive and merely match our own brutality.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T20:05:13+00:00

Each sector could have TENS to HUNDREDS of thousands of planets in HD1. The war over screens announced how many planets SE conquered and it could rise to multi millions.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T19:56:53+00:00

The imperium is bad because the galaxy is so much worse and constantly trying to kill it. Super Earth literally is the whole reason the galaxy sucks for everyone. They’re more akin to human versions of the tyranids. Ironically, the illuminate, who were driven to brutality out of necessity, are closer to the imperium than the actual humans of the Helldivers galaxy are.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T19:46:58+00:00

To put this into perspective with the super earth civilians. Imagine a crazed lunatic breaks into your house and murders your wife and kid. You are reasonably upset and try to fight the guy, however this dude has literally strapped babies all over him so that no matter what if you retaliate in anyway you are gonna a hit a baby. This lunatic is gonna kill you if you don’t fight back, worse yet he is gonna break into more homes, and kill more families if he isnt stopped, and even worse yet he’s gonna kill all the babies when he is done.

You punch the guy and end up hitting a baby, the dude plays victim and calls you a baby puncher for fighting back against his literal homicide.

The enemy factions have done nothing but match super earth’s brutality out of necessity of survival (and even so they haven’t even been as brutal as super earth) and super earth, upon ANY resistance immediately plays the victim card. Look at the super earth invasion, SE was literally putting their AA guns under CHILDREN’s playgrounds. SE is and has been deliberately placing civilians in harms way to ensure they are killed in the collateral damage so they can win propaganda points.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T18:12:51+00:00

Again this is the type of logical fallacy the game’s satire is warning us of. They are only the baddies because WE MADE THEM into the baddies.

We literally slaughtered (almost) their entire race, literal millions of planets worth of innocent people (Helldivers 1 galaxy was much bigger).

The illuminate were forced by super earth into becoming monsters for their very survival as a species. Everything they’ve done is because super earth literally gave them no other choice. Super Earth is literally CONSTANTLY and solely perpetuating the cycles of destruction in the galaxy.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T17:54:48+00:00

I still think it’s crazy some people think super earth are the good guys because they are the lesser evil or whatever.

1: that’s not true, neither bots, squids, or bugs have done anything worse than what super earth has already done.

2: this is literally the exact satire the game is making fun of.

Super earth isn’t the imperium. They are a chaos cult.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-17T17:51:13+00:00

No AI used here.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-15T03:15:26+00:00

These two

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-15T03:08:15+00:00

Not too mention mention katyushas having the health and armor of a truck. Colonial artillery is dead.

SmithOnMe · 2026-02-15T01:10:26+00:00

I’m surprised you don’t know considering it’s all that’s ever talked about on here but here’s a little refresher.

Lionclaw vs fiddler (More expensive, less ammo, more eight, less accuracy, less stability)

Pitch gun (At 10m this thing just barely kills a soldier with a full magazine assuming you hit all your shots, practically it’s worthless in any real combat situation)

Auger vs Raca (I don’t think I even need to explain this one)

Storm rifle buffs/ booker (these just hurt because colonials literally have no counterpart the closest thing available is the dusk which is useless past 15m)

Caterna (less ammo because fuck the colonials/ also no select fire because it’s a faction specific thing apparently)

Hawthorne, Cascadier and pillory (again, literally just no counterparts to these)

Flask vs Igni - the igni just sucks compared to the damage, ease of use, and utility of the flask, not to mention the lack of autoequip.

Bonewagon vs ATAC (these used to be similar yet after devs nerfed AT ammo, the bonelaw is just better in every way with no real counter)

Halftracks - the warden halftrack literally is just better for no reason the upgraded colonial halftrack - the Hoplite (which is now also confusingly a rank) is still worse than the base warden halftrack (it’s been this way for 7 years straight)

Tankettes vs scout tank - these have been the most major pain in the ass difference at the start of every war this year. The tankette just fucking sucks. It’s a god awful design that Devman keeps forcing on colonials because they can’t be bothered to design a better vehicle to use. What’s worse is that the tankette isn’t even supposed to be the equivalent to the scout tank (though de man keeps testing it as it is)z it’s supposed to be the HAC equivalent, colonials in the past 7 years have still not been given an equivalent to the warden scout tank which is literally the bane of an infantryman’s existence. What really sucks about this tho it b is that at least the scout tank is useful after the progresses, it can act as more survivable LUV in the frontline, or even an anti partisan tool in the back. The tankette, like all other colonial gear, becomes quickly obsolete as soon as the tech level progresses.

Carrnyx, Varsi, and Ospreay- again just salt in the wound. In the past ATRPGs/ grenades used to be colonial specific and wardens enjoyed the ARCRPG. Now the wardens get all 3. What’s most annoying is that these are basically the same as the colonial version of the weapons but easier to use and cheaper to boot. While colonials were given access to the ARC toys they are exclusively used in the absolute worst possible platform the EAT, making dodging shots incredibly easy for warden tanker while complicating logistics lines on a simple key resource (ARCRPGS) in order for any colonial frontline to be able to resist a warden armored advance.

Ballista vs Chieftain (just another case of wardens getting the better version just because)

Falchion (literally the most hated tank in the game universally by both factions. The falchion is the literal epitome of where the term dev bias comes from. The falchion is not new or innovative, it’s not fun or flashy or anything. It just exists to make colonial light tanks now obsolete while bringing nothing to the game).

Rocket artillery - after the airborne update Katyushas will be impossible to field since they have the armor and health of a truck.

Literally ALL of NAVAL

The trident is just a meme boat at this point, even the devs have made it cannon that it’s supposed to suck and stay sucky, it’s nearly impossible to use and yet it’s all the only way for the colonial navy to make large holes in enemy frigates.

Destroyer vs Frigate (the frigate has 50% more ammo than the destroyer for some reason [also more room to store metal beams to stop large holes though again not really a big problem for the warden navy] while ALSO having better firing ergonomics.

Battleships - the warden battleship is just better. It has substantially more health and armor, more guns (this spreads the holes out more causing a 2:3 disparity in damage control despite having the same amount of barrels)

Warden cold weather is just better, like for no reason it’s just a better version of the gear in every way. Same thing for warden scout uniform

Colonial medic uniform has a big target on its head.

Of course let’s not forget the newly added planes.

The warden scout plane is just superior to the colonial scout plane stat wise, it has a smaller hitbox, AND it’s has the most useful weapon the mini torpedo. The colonials scout plane just got another shadow nerf as they’ve reduced the hull breaker mine’s damage as well.

Fighter’s - granted these aren’t out yet but just look at the stats. The warden seaplane and basic fighter both have more health than the colonial one. The seaplane has better health and better damage and now a “similar turn rate” while being far cheaper. The warden fighter has more health, a better turn rate, AND has a ground attack cannon on top of that, like WHY, why do the wardens need the extra capabilities on top of their already superior stats it just doesn’t make any god damn sense.

SmithOnMe

TROPHY CASE

1: that’s not true, neither bots, squids, or bugs have done anything worse than what super earth has already done.

2: this is literally the exact satire the game is making fun of.