What If: Inqusition goes too far

[Aldramelech]

Now I admit I'm not as well read as many in the realms of 40k, but what Ive read so far (All the Ultra books, Dawn of war series etc.) leads me to believe that the Space Marines by and Large do not take orders from Inquisitors, regard them as a minor irritation and couldn't care less what they think.

In fact in one of the Blood Ravens books Capt. Gabrial Angelos flat out tells one he does not have the authority to issue orders to him.

[Just_Me]

It is certainly true that chapter have been wiped out by the Inquisition before, but in each case it was for something more serious that just refusing to polish an Inquisitor’s shoes when asked. Generally it involved either really radical warlordism or the corruption of their gene-seed and/or refusal to submit to the routine inspection of same.

When they have to act the Inquisition is perfectly capable of extinguishing an Astartes chapter with: a) aid from another chapter (thus the independence of the chapters is in itself a safeguard). b) their own Inquisitorial Stormtrooper forces. c) the Adepta Sororitas (which I think we all agreed in that other thread are one of the few military forces that can truly take on marines on relatively even footing, even it still nowhere near “equal”).

[Nabterayl]

regard them as a minor irritation and couldn't care less what they think.

I think this is what makes this hypothetical hard for me to analyze. It's hard for me to imagine the Inquisition "pushing" the space marines as a whole too far. What could they do that the marines would even care about? Even subjecting a chapter's recruiting world to Exterminatus wouldn't get the marines as a whole riled up, I don't think. Virus-bomb Fenris and Logan Grimnar's going to have it in for you, but I can't see why the Imperial Fists would care. And even then it's not like Grimnar would have it in for the entire Inquisition. More likely the individual that ordered the Exterminatus, or perhaps his Conclave.

[Nabterayl]

When they have to act the Inquisition is perfectly capable of extinguishing an Astartes chapter with: a) aid from another chapter (thus the independence of the chapters is in itself a safeguard). b) their own Inquisitorial Stormtrooper forces. c) the Adepta Sororitas (which I think we all agreed in that other thread are one of the few military forces that can truly take on marines on relatively even footing, even it still nowhere near “equal”).

Agreed about a) and c). b) I'm not so sure about. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't bet on an Astartes chapter if it was facing, say, an Imperial Guard army. I wouldn't even necessarily bet on an Astartes chapter if it was facing just a sufficient number of Inquisitorial storm troopers. But I doubt many inquisitors - if any - have enough storm troopers in their house troops to get the job done.

[Aenir]

like i said, it would be a rather think stretch, hence the what if...


But I think what im trying to ask now, could the Sisters + Inquisitorial Stormtroopers hold up to the weight of a combined assault of multiple marine chapters?

One chapter sure... but you (as an example) would have the DA, plus all their successors, or the Ultramarines and all of THEIR successors etc.

[Nabterayl]

I think the question is how many sisters, and how many storm troopers? Two sisters and ten million storm troopers? Yeah, I think a force like that could stand up to several marine chapters, you know? =P

I think this is one of those situations where you need to take it scenario by scenario. For instance:

1. Marines attacking a Sororitas fortress (or anybody's fortress) - will go fine, if the marines control the orbits, which means punching out any local system defense forces or Imperial Navy detachments and taking out the surface-to-orbit defenses. Without their strike cruisers and battle barges, space marines have no heavy artillery. Taking out a real fortress without artillery is a hell of a job even for the best infantry in the Imperium. As long as there isn't a powerful local Navy detachment, several chapters' fleet assets should be able to achieve decisive space superiority. Taking out surface-to-orbit defenses is a marine specialty, so unless the fortress has its own integral defense lasers/STO missile batteries, this scenario probably goes to the marines, by virtue of the fact that they can bombard the fortress from orbit with impunity (and space marine ships, while not designed for ship-to-ship combat, are designed for planetary bombardments).
2. Marines attacking a Sororitas/storm trooper force in a pitched battle - this is trickier. This situation is kind of akin to several SEAL teams engaging the U.S. Marines in a pitched battle. SEAL operators are very dangerous men, but you'd still be asking them to do something they aren't really equipped or organized to do, and if you told a couple SEAL teams, "Tell me how you'd take out this Marine battalion" the last answer they'd give you was, "Well, we'll engage them in a pitched battle and defeat them by virtue of our superior training."
   
   Marines aren't SEALs, but like SEALs, and unlike Sororitas, pitched battle is not what they do. So this one comes down to numbers, I think. Several marine chapters is a lot of marines - more marines than you'll necessarily find Sororitas in one place. My personal rule of thumb is that if the marines get to fight the way they want to, ten marines are worth approximately forty Sororitas, although I've completely made up that ratio out of thin air. If the Sororitas and storm troopers can bring the marines to battle not on the marines' terms (which will be very difficult, as the marines have a decisive mobility advantage in the form of their Thunderhawks), I would not be at all surprised if 4,000 Sororitas can defeat 3,000 marines.
3. Marines attacking a Sororitas/storm trooper force through a series of commando raids - this is what marines do, and they're better equipped for it than anybody in the Imperium. Find a vulnerable target, hit it via Thunderhawk, drop pod, and teleporter before it can be reinforced, and then run away via Thunderhawk. Rinse and repeat. If they can continue to fight this way, I imagine a couple marine chapters could take on many times their number of Sororitas and storm troopers. Victory for the Sororitas and storm troopers in this scenario would depend upon finding a way to stop the raids. Holing up in a fortress is one way to do this. A more aggressive way would be to use the storm troopers' own attached Valkyries to counter-raid the marines. The difficulty there is that the marines can and will retreat to space to prevent this. What the Sororitas and storm troopers would really need in this situation is serious anti-air assets, probably in the form of Guard or PDF Hydras, SAM batteries, or ground-based Navy fighter squadrons. Knock out the Thunderhawks and the ability of a marine chapter to fight the way it wants to is seriously reduced, which would increase the ability of the Sororitas and storm troopers to bring the marines to pitched battle.

That's how I'd analyze that hypothetical, anyway.

EDIT: I focus mostly on the Sororitas precisely because they are the troops that are trained and equipped for conventional engagements. Storm troopers, like marines, are fundamentally special forces operators. The trouble is that they don't have their own spacecraft, which means that most of the time there would be nothing for the storm troopers to raid, since most of the time the space marines are going to withdraw to their strike cruisers and battle barges. Thus, the storm troopers will be largely forced to fight as airborne infantry, a mission which in any but the direst circumstances is a gross waste, and likely to result in high casualties for the storm troopers.

EDIT 2: In the pitched battle scenario, I'm making some assumptions about Sororitas armor, particularly that Exorcists are a normal part of their motor pools. That is, admittedly, a big if. We know that the Prioris pattern is very rare, with some vehicles dating back to the Age of Apostasy when the design was first produced. It's less clear to me how rare the Sanctorum pattern is. Certainly the Sanctorum pattern doesn't look particularly old, which leads me to believe that it might be more common.

[Just_Me]

like i said, it would be a rather think stretch, hence the what if...


But I think what im trying to ask now, could the Sisters + Inquisitorial Stormtroopers hold up to the weight of a combined assault of multiple marine chapters?

One chapter sure... but you (as an example) would have the DA, plus all their successors, or the Ultramarines and all of THEIR successors etc.

I think what we are having trouble with is two things.

First this isn’t even really a “stretch,” the hypothetical you are proposing is so far-fetched with so many variables and unlikely circumstances having to coincide for anything like what you are describing to happen that it is very hard to consider it at all. It’s like asking who would win in a cage fight between the Emperor and a giant radioactive crab in a wetsuit, one gets so hung up on the absurdity of the situation that it’s hard to make rational comparisons.

The second is the vagueness of the conditions you have outlined, how many Stormtroopers are we talking about? How many marines? Do you literally mean a whole chapter in its entirety (unlikely, marines virtually never fight this way)? Is the Inquisition force involved defending a fortress, or are they all just fighting on a continent wide Imperial parking lot? The variables and vagaries of terrain and conditions make any battle hard to predict, a single soldier with a sniper rifle could hold up and entire division if he were defending a mountain pass. And all of that is just very basic ground level tactical stuff, not even considering things like air-support, let alone strategic and logistical questions. This unpredictability is why we even play wargames, otherwise a 40k game would go like this; “oh you brought marines? Well I brought Witch Hunters, and everyone knows that marines would beat Witch Hunters, so you win, good game!”

[Nabterayl]

like i said, it would be a rather think stretch, hence the what if...


But I think what im trying to ask now, could the Sisters + Inquisitorial Stormtroopers hold up to the weight of a combined assault of multiple marine chapters?

One chapter sure... but you (as an example) would have the DA, plus all their successors, or the Ultramarines and all of THEIR successors etc.

It just occurred to me that you might be trying to get an idea of the balance of military power between the Inquisition and the Astartes. That's an easier question to answer, though the short answer is, "We don't know." Long answer:

There are more Ordos within the Inquisition than the Ordo Hereticus, Ordo Xenos, and Ordo Malleus. The lesser Ordos are still part of the Inquisition, but they don't have (as far as we know) Chambers Militant. So those Ordos have far, far less inherent military power than even a single space marine chapter. Of course, any inquisitor even in one of the lesser Ordos could in theory impress the entire Imperial Guard.

We don't know how many inquisitorial storm troopers there are in the entire Inquisition, within any given Ordo, or even in the service of any given inquisitor. Fluff-wise, it's doubtful that anybody knows the precise number at any given time. Real-world wise, this seems like one of those things GW is never going to tell us. Certainly they never have told us. So this number gets to remain a big unknown. It is complicated by the fact that, fluff-wise, inquisitors sometimes permanently induct Guard units into their household troops. Detachment D-99, formerly D Company of the 99th Elysian Drop Troop regiments, is one known example of this. These are not storm troopers, but they are permanent Inquisitorial troops outside of the Chambers Militant.

The amount of information we have about the Chambers Militant varies. About the Deathwatch we know almost nothing, except that they're a seemingly permanent space marine chapter whose membership is not permanent (just like military formations today - the regiment stays the same, even though its members come and go). Is it a codex chapter? If not, how big is it? Does it include armor? We just don't know. The actual capabilities of the Deathwatch are a big black hole in our knowledge.

The Grey Knights we know something more about. Our best information puts their numbers at about three thousand marines. The Daemonhunters codex implies that the Grey Knights are effectively part of the Ordo Malleus. We don't know much about their organization, but they seem to be more efficiently organized than most marines, in that they don't appear to have this silly quasi-British battle company/reserve company distinction. The Grey Knights are also, of course, powerful psykers, and seem to have somewhat more Land Raiders per 1,000 marines than normal. Against this we may balance the fact that Grey Knight storm bolters are strictly side arms (each clip has only 20 rounds); unlike on the tabletop, Grey Knights are definitely intended and equipped primarily to fight hand to hand. All in all it's probably fair to say that the Grey Knights are worth four to six normal space marine chapters in terms of overall combat power.

The Adepta Sororitas we know less about than the Grey Knights, in some ways. We have a [url=http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/showthread.php?t=2907]pretty good idea[/url] of their combat power per sister, what their mission is, what they'd be good at and what they wouldn't. We know that, although their Orders Militant are the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Hereticus, the Sororitas are not formally part of the Ordo Hereticus (formally, they're part of the Ecclesiarchy). Instead, at the Convocation of Nephilim, the Sororitas agreed to fight for the Ordo Hereticus when called. Unfortunately, we don't know how many sisters there are in the Orders Militant, which is the real question. We know that preceptories are formations of 1,000 sisters apiece, but we don't know how many preceptories are in an Order, or even what the ballpark range is. We don't even know how big the various Orders Militant Majoris are, or how much of the pie they make up compared to the Orders Militant Minoris. Thus, it is impossible to estimate how much combat power they represent collectively. It's not even possible to estimate, say, whether the Order of the Sacred Rose could take on the Dark Angels in a one-on-one.

When it comes to the Chambers Militant, there's another variable that further muddies the soup. Each of the Chambers Militant are primarily loyal to the Emperor - the Grey Knights and the Deathwatch because they are space marines, and the Sororitas because that's how they roll. Thus, depending on the reason for a marine attack against any of their respective Ordos, there's no guarantee that the Chambers Militant would fight at all - or that they wouldn't fight on the marines' side.

Is any of this getting at the question you're really trying to ask?

[Just_Me]

Also, in general we have been discussing the Inquisition here as if it were a single unified organization when this is emphatically not the case. Each Inquisitor is essentially a power in and of his/herself. Some have permanent household contingents that are small armies, others only have a handful of loyal retainers. Some prefer to operate primarily or entirely behind the scenes and may rarely if ever persecute a military action (Ravenor and Eisenhorn for example), others are quite willing and capable of taking overt and direct military action (Cortez and Rex come to mind). Each and every one of them is a potential wild card, you don’t become an Inquisitor at all by being anything less than exceptional, and some of the most potent psykers in the Imperium (with abilities that can turn the tides of entire battles) are Inquisitors (Ravenor and Rex once again are good examples), and even the meanest of non-psyker Inquisitors will be capable of astonishing feats of skill and determination.

Thus the Inquisition is incredibly hard to quantify. Supposing one was to consider the unified military capability directly under the control of the Inquisition as a whole in purely quantifiable terms (e.g. how many men under arms, how many tanks, relative quality of war material, etc.) then I am fairly sure that the Inquisition would come up woefully short of the all of the true dedicated military arms of the Imperium. But on the other hand this comparison would be meaningless as the Inquisition would induct forces from other Imperial organizations as needed, and the force-multiplying effects of each Inquisitor would be completely incalculable.

[Aenir]

yeah, that hits it a bit more clearly, I am sorry for the vague post

So what im getting from this however, is that Since all these fighters are loyal to emp. first, not the inquisition

So in the thing mentioned earlier (All inquisitors asend to daemonhood) other than their own troops would they have anything to pull from?


To the other posters:

How about a planetary invasion

IE a traditional (@ least on TT campaign), start with Planet Strike, run a couple of missions, then finish it off with an apoc)

how would that equate into the background?