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The Siege of Terra: Solar War


Izlude

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Oh me oh my
What glorious art... Maybe I'll try to get a copy in May, as well... :ohmy.:

After viewing them a couple of minutes, my favorites are Dorn / Perturabo, especially Dorns has so much to say, imho.

The Emperor's architect, if you want. The idealist, the soldier, the creator, THE Praetorian in all of his glory.

 

Somehow, he reminds me of someone in that pic but I can't grap it.

Oh my god I love the idea of illustrating select members of the dramatis personae with marble busts. That's brilliant. Same for the rest of the art, the paired colour portraits of Dorn and Perturabo in casual gear are exquisite, right down to the opposite gauntlets. Kinda regretting not going for the limited edition now.

 

Also it just sunk home that this is going to be French writing Ahriman again!

I would like for BL to describe the void battles more as they are in Battlestar Galactica and less as ships of the line. It is often described how some fleets sacrifice main battery and lances for more fighter and bomber hangars but the fighter and bombers are never given any major role. I would envisions the battles in such a way:

 

Nova Cannon and Lance "heavy" ships would be glass cannons that would fight at great distances but would sacrifice close range batteries and fighter protection for it. They would be mainly involved in the opening stages of the battle where they would either try to overwhelm the shields for the bombers/torpedoes or target the ships that already have their shields down.

 

Then come the torpedo "heavy" ships,  "carrier" ships and "close range battery" ships . They would act all in tandem, waves of fighters trying to clear the enemy fighters so to protect their waves of  bombers and torpedoes ,the bombers going for the enemy guns and smaller ships ( destroyers/frigates)  to disable as many as they can so more bombers and torpedoes can move in and the torpedoes ( both standard and boarding )  acting as the primary damage dealer.  The destroyers and frigates would all the while be dancing around the battlefield trying to protect the main ships from the bombers/torpedoes , targeting the enemy main ships with torpedoes and engaging the enemy destroyers/frigates.

 

But in the end because the superstructure of the biggest ships is so durable , the easiest way to deal with them is to get boarders to attack crucial systems so that is why with time when the massive ships are involved  the battles would end into a "close" range battery action.

 

This way it would be more of a massive choreographed dance instead of the go strong,get close,fire main battery/ torpedoes and go for boarding actions. Also it would give the writer a lot more options of describing the battles and outcomes instead of the simple "we fired all guns and the ship reactor blew up like a star "  or "our boarding troops managed to lower the shields /take over the bridge and it was done"

Ships in 30k/40k are too big for fighters to play a meaningful role. Their main purpose is to clear out boarding craft, intercept torpedoes, and clear away pdc's for boarding craft and torpedoes to hit their targets. Some ships in 30k/40k are bigger than sub-moons in our own real world solar system. The only thing that is threatening to them is high speed kinetic impacts, energy weapons, and boarders. Which is part of their design. 

  On 3/21/2019 at 2:41 AM, Roomsky said:

Besides the fact I don't know why Pert would have tubes coming out of his head outside of terminator armour, I really dig that pic. Power armour is fine, but the "big space marine" look for primarchs never really captured their grandeur for me. He looks like a true war leader and conqueror in that shot.

glad i’m not the only one who thought some of the primarchs depictions looked like aggressive teletubbies

  On 3/21/2019 at 12:09 PM, Marshal Rohr said:

Ships in 30k/40k are too big for fighters to play a meaningful role. Their main purpose is to clear out boarding craft, intercept torpedoes, and clear away pdc's for boarding craft and torpedoes to hit their targets. Some ships in 30k/40k are bigger than sub-moons in our own real world solar system. The only thing that is threatening to them is high speed kinetic impacts, energy weapons, and boarders. Which is part of their design. 

 

I think I wrote just that.

 

The Fighters would be fighting for superiority with the enemy fighters and intercepting the enemy bombers and torpedoes. 

The Bombers would be targeting capital ship turrets/battery so that more torpedoes/bombers could reach their targets and engaging targets of opportunity from the enemy screens ( destroyers ).

The torpedoes ( both standard and boarding) would be the main anti ship weapons but would depend on the fighters for protection and for the bombers to disable the turrets so they have a better chance to reach their target.

The Destroyers and Frigates would both screen the capital ships against the enemy bombers and torpedoes + launch their own torpedo volleys against the enemy capital ships.

 

I personally have never read a book where this kind of combat is described. Instead the authors either always jump into the boarding/macro cannon duel at close range or describe how a ship got destroyed by being targeted by everything. If they would describe the entire process I think the battles would become much more interesting. Instead of "named character" ordering his troops to the boarding craft to board the enemy vessel, where they race against time to reach the enemy ships most important locations. 

Here's a little on the opening 3 chapters of the Solar War, mostly elaborating on John's twitch interview. Spoilers, of course:

  Reveal hidden contents


I'm not going to keep updating as I read further, and I actually may not finish this for a while as I scramble to get things together for Adepticon. This is more of a teaser and a sign of John's writing priorities, if anyone had any doubt :laugh.:

and besides, it looks like more people are getting their LEs in so it won't take too long for reviews and summaries to start sprouting up

I messed up. I rapidly came down sick yesterday, so even though I already had the day off, I laid down in bed to recover and blew through the rest of The Solar War. I said I wouldn't do this, but I wrote up a plot summary anyway. I couldn't stop thinking about this book and this helped me to review it all again...

 

edit: I've decided to pull my summary down, though if anyone is incredibly desperate to know what happens in the book you can always send along a PM. It didn't feel right to spoil this one publicly. I think summarizing it failed to capture something essential.

It's fair to say I really enjoyed this book, though :sweat: 

letsyoudown, hope that wasn’t my reaction that inspired the edit

 

i’m still excited to read it, there were just a few bits i thought were a tad...done before. and honestly, i couldn’t remember who half the characters mentioned were

  On 3/23/2019 at 11:00 AM, mc warhammer said:

letsyoudown, hope that wasn’t my reaction that inspired the edit

 

i’m still excited to read it, there were just a few bits i thought were a tad...done before. and honestly, i couldn’t remember who half the characters mentioned were

 

It was somewhat, but I was already very on the fence. Sorry about that.

 

The cast does seem pretty large, but for a ~400 page book it's actually kept relatively tight throughout. A condensed summary doesn't show that well, though.

 

Anyway, enough of you cretins have PM'd me that I'm tentatively putting it back, here, and now with a few annotations. I had also double spoiler-tagged but it was causing wonky formatting problems, so be very sure you want to spoil this before reading:

 

 

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