A full scale Tyranid hive fleet enters Galactic Empire space at the GE's height of power. Can the GE withstand and defend against a full scale Tyranid invasions? This occurs within tne period of Empire Stikes Back. Expanded Universe allowed.
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Tyranids aren't people, they're an alien race from another galaxy. They eat planets, use the mass of the planet to create moar tyranids, and repeat. They've stripped multiple galaxies already.
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This Leviathan?
The Tyranids suffer none of the logistic issues that can be cited as a problem for the Imperium of Man. They're essentially a single being so 'communication' is instant, they have true FTL travel, they don't need supplies, and there's no bureaucracy to deal with.
The flipside is it takes them a little less than two weeks to finish with a planet before moving on, so the advance of individual tendrils of a fleet is fairly slow. If the Empire has 1.6 million worlds, it'd take 22 million years total to devour each of them one at a time.
Unfortunately for the GE, Leviathan doesn't eat one at a time, and every planet devoured will swell Leviathan's numbers. There's not a lot of ways for the GE to score a lasting victory against Tyranids either. After a battle any Tyranid, dead or alive, is consumed anyway, and their fleets can match those of the Imperium, notably Behemoth was only stopped because an Emperor class battleship was exploded in some special plot relevant way and pulled a large portion of the main tendril into the warp.
On land it would be a complete slaughter, in space, it'd still probably be pretty bad. The suncrusher and deathstars and the like aren't all too useful here, either. Tyranid ships come in huge numbers, so destroying some individuals is just a waste of the GE's greatest firepower, and destroying planets and stars doesn't hinder the Tyranids much because they're a space faring race.
The most viable tactic the GE has is to destroy every planet the Tyranids land on, hurting themselves just as badly as the Tyranids, and even that means tangling with the Tyranid 'navy'.
So yeah.
__________________
The moon and stars aren't just shades of lead
But you wouldn't know as you rest your head.
Yeah, the Tyranids has the huge numerical advantage. But aren't they just as vulnerable to hit and run strikes by the much faster Imperial Navy? Also, rather than killing their own populations, can't the GE simply evac and raze the remaining biomass off the worlds before the Tyranid fleet can get to it! Also, droids would be a viable replacement to human soldiers and ships here. What happens when the empire switch back its factories to produce droid soldiers like the seperatists did in the prequels?
Wouldn't the Alliance and Empire be likely to join forces here when threatened by extinction via an outside threat?
No doubt they won't apply these strats early. Prolly lose dozens, if not hundreds of worlds to trial and error. But I can see these as workable tactics that the Tyranids would be hard pressed to counter, IMO. Tho, admittedly, I'm not really too sure about how effective it would be to reduce such staggering numbers.
Gender: Male Location: 1/9.7'rd Horseman of the Apocalypse
How are they vulnerable to this, exactly? The GE shows up, there's a fight, and the GE leaves. Any damaged or destroyed ships are consumed, the Tyranids lose nothing.
This again only hurts the GE, the populations aren't a big deal, it's the resources, which the Tyranids take. Raze the biomass? They'd need to destroy everything. The Tyranids consume the oceans, soil, atmosphere, minerals, fuels, anything useful. The life on the surface is just bonus, honestly.
Even if they totally destroy everything on a planet, the Tyranids just won't stop there, they'll go eat a different planet, having lost nothing.
This doesn't change much. The droids are, IIRC, less effective soldiery than their human counterparts, troopers and the like. This just pads out the numbers in surface battles which are where things are extrmely one sided. The GE wouldn't want to face the Tyranids in a ground battle, imho. The Tyranids drown the droids in gaunts and after the battle is over the droids are consumed just like any storm trooper would be. /shrug.
Well, I suppose. But that makes this thread "Tyranids v.s. the SW Galaxy" rather than v.s. just the GE.
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The moon and stars aren't just shades of lead
But you wouldn't know as you rest your head.
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Dec 12th, 2012 10:10 PM
