The Covenant (Halo) vs The Grand Imperium of Man (Warhammer 40k)

[Soras Teva Gee]

You know I was just in the process of crunching those numbers myself? It seems to me that the only comparable weaponry the Covenant have to a standard Imperial Lance battery are the Energy Projectors aboard their Super Carriers. And as you pointed out, Void Shields are designed to prevent those same lances from reaching the soon to be gooey starship exterior hull plating.

But where are you getting these numbers from? What is the benchmark (ie the deed) that a Lance Battery has done.

My benchmark (like admittedly most for 40k) is the Cain books where Imperial Lance Strikes are used like tactical nukes with comparable scale. They could carry out say an Exterminatus order... exactly like the Covenant carries out glassing a planet. Unless the Covenant has special glassing only guns I'm not aware of I'm seeing parity there. And since they can take hits like that I'm seeing a reasonably even direct fight allowing the Covenant's higher deployed numbers and superior mobility to win in space.

Now the Imperium has better weapons out there like the Nova Cannon, which if what I've read is accurate is a big arsed railgun type weapon. The Super MACs on humanity's defense stations seem the analogue there, able to one shot covenant vessels. However much like being on a stable platform Nova Cannons are bow mounted and rare enough that countering them is a basic strategy, flank them with a few ships at once.

Pretty much. The only tactic that we could come up with was the Covenant using hit and run tactics and suicide ships to destroy worlds. And even that does nothing to prevent the Imperium from taking over Covenant worlds and defending against the suicide ships.

I brought it up in response to an elaborate undertaking by the Imperium to disable the Covenant's leadership, pointing out this is in fact easier in reverse.

I'm not talking about Colony Dropping their huge ships on Imperium worlds. but on Terra itself. The Imperium has a lynchpin in that the only way it can navigate as well as it can is because of the Astronomicon, located on Earth and which the Emperor is an integral piece of machinery within. If you ruin Holy Terra its not a just a socio-political problem, but an immediate engineering one across the entire Imperium. Suddenly you've turned the Imperium into the Tau, isolated sections of humanity will hold out but the galactic frays apart at a stroke.

Now I'm not even suggesting this as something that would happen, but as a story its far more reliable and simpler to accomplish then taking out the Covernant's leadership as a way to victory. I don't think either should be considered to happen, because they become stories not assessments of capability.

Speaking of the suicide ships I believe that the ground defenses would be enough to reduce them to slag so that the damage is minimized.

Conservation of Mass + Gravity = Planetary Devastation

There's almost nothing the Imperium can do because you need to prove Nu Gundam isn't just for show stop the mass from falling which could be done with enough range, but the Covenant FTL jumps disallow this method. Blowing it apart could help through dispersal, but for the size I'm not impressed. And the precision achieved suggests that a Covenant could jump in with literally seconds to a high speed impact so no mass is going anywhere.

Mind you for anything BUT Holy Terra and ONLY Holy Terra I'd call it a probable waste of resources. But this is another reason I describe the Imperium as a rotting corpse, its utter fail at technology opens it to this sort of devastation by needing a highly stupid system to operate. Simply intolerable for a major space empire.

Heck if I remember correctly the Golden Throne is known to be living on borrowed time and the Tech-priests can't fix it. The whole Imperium had best hope the Star-Child idea is true after all.

Soras your example is silly. The Space Marines would secure orbit first before deploying and could do so easily via boarding torpedoes and teleporters since the Covenant ships have to get well within the Battle Barge's range.

If they could secure orbit then they aren't operating alone because no single Battle Barge is going to do that. And then you could just lance the target without sending in the Marine to begin with. A different example of how strategically irrelevant they are.

Actually IIRC a Battle Barge implies a pretty heavy commitment from a Chapter to begin with. I understand the norm in-universe is detached squads of a handful of Marines, with even the army list as sort of a contrivance on the part of Games Workshop. Which by points suggests a much larger but far less individually potent force more like the Sisters of Battle then the Space Marines. Ironically I'd probably have higher regard for them that way. If the Marine ran less on nebulous qualities like undescribed heroism and more on being say 5% of Imperial forces (heck 1%) they could actually plausibly be protecting the Imperium as a mighty hammer to work with the IG mighty wall.