to what degree can wh40k be reconciled with hard engineering?

[Ya Evyl Aunty]

I am currently mostly trying to figure out, how a "cheap" mail system between Holy Terra and Mars would fit somewhat seemlessly into canon lore.
My first naive assumption, planetary landing shuttles exist, most capital and interplanetary ships in 40k don't exactly look like they would be capable for planetary landing, the sizes involved would lead to highly unpractical consequences for a prime real estate like any location on Holy Terra, (the equivalent of bulldozing half of Manhattan for square-miles of landing strips - not even the greatest idiot or madman would do that) and most of all, given that pratical sized landing shuttles do exist, it isn't necessary to provide a grid of supersized landing sites for interplanetary-capable vessels on Holy Terra, maybe a few big spaceports for actual ships, with a grid of dedicated shuttle ports, that can be each about as big as our contemporary airports. 

So, next thought step, it seems a bit unpractical to always depend on the right ship happening to be in orbit for every spaceport on the ground, so the logical assumption is, that most near-earth logistics would be conducted via satellites in geo-stationary orbit. Holy Terra isn't an agricultural world, that could be perceived as self-reliant, it is the capital of a huge empire, and capitals of empires, by their very nature are not autarch, but provisioned and sustained via imported goods from the periphery. That is what makes the whole structure an empire, after all.

Looking around in canon lore, to figure out, how the appropriate amounts of goods and passengers towards HT could be handled in an approximately plausible fashion, especially looking for geostationary satellites. All I find is the concept of Orbital Plates. And the info, that HT has currently exactly none, zilch, zero, left.

A lot got damaged at the end of the Age of Technology, ok, yadda yadda yadda, accepted, but there is unlikely that there would be much established canon to be had about them. Good for coming up with new stuff, but also not very relevant for most narratives in the current age.
OK, during the Siege of Terra, Rogal Dorn decommissioned most Orbital Plates.... wait, he did what? First of all, how exactly does "decomissioning" look in the case of such a huge platform, where did they disappear to, what physically happened to them? Also, he destroyed crucial infrastructure in preparation of a siege? Was he a bought saboteur and secretly on the attacking side? He deliberately "decommissioned" all supply routes to the fortress he aims to defend? And not even temporarily, but without any prospect of ever rebuilding them? I assume following Sun Tsu's great teaching: "If you really want to confuse the enemy, you have to start confusing yourself. To prevent any enemy from sieging you, just siege yourself, and your foes will inevitably kill themselves with their massive facepalms!"

OK, assume that all still somehow checks out, becuase Rogal Dorn is much more genius than I could ever be. There is a last Orbital Plate up above HT, named Skye Plate. In geostationary orbit, as it should be. OK. It takes damage from incoming fire. OK. As a result it crashes to the ground and hits the Imperial College? What? How? Why? A satellite in geostationary orbit isn't a plane, that crashes to the ground do to engine malfunctions. It is in geostationary orbit, and it stays in geostationary orbit, unless it is subjected to a massive retrograde burn. Some force has to decelerate it massively, so it stops orbiting, before it will start to crash.
How exactly could that be the result of hostile fires? If the incoming fire would have stopped some internal systems from working, that would mean, that it needed those systems just to stay in orbit, and if a failure of this systems would result in it crashing within hours that means to stay in orbit it would depend entirely on this systems. What about good old inertia has been turned off? A geostationary satellite without onboard engine ist still a geostationary satellite, and will stay so for a very, very long time, as there is pretty little air drag on the height of the Clarke Belt.
 

So, if an internal failure couldn't have caused that, what about the forces impacted on the structure by the incoming fire itself?
Here is a mental image, to approximate how that would look. Think about the USS Enterprise, a really, really big ship. It has some drag from the water it is floating above, but compared to the inertia from its mass, it's quite little, so if all the engines of the USS Enterprise suddenly failed while it was heading full steam ahead, it would still drift a long, long way along its route.
Now assume, you want to protect something in its path from being run over. Ideally you would need a wall, that could withstand the entire impulse of this mostrously heavy and fast ship. But you don't have a wall, all you have is an ammo depot of arbitrary size. So in theory you could put up a "wall" of force in front of the ship via a big enough explosion. The sliver of force of this explosion would need to be equal to the mass of the Enterprise times it speed. In other words, with a nuke of a size, that could stop such a vessel in its track, you wouldn't just halt its movement, you would blow the entire ship into smithereens. And the Skye Plate in geostationary orbit would have travelled at a speed of 11.000 km/h! And have been many times the mass of the USS Enterprise, with no drag at all to slow it down!
So, "shooting down" an Orbital Plate in a way, that causes it to crash as a discernible entity into a discrete location on the ground just doesn't work. You could blow it up and cause Kessler syndrome, that would isolate Terra from any space travel for at least decades and maybe centuries, but you can't make it crash to the ground in one big chunk by shooting at it.

The only explanation, that somehow salvages this, is that Orbital Plates do not truely orbit, and they are not satellites. They are just some big vessels, that constantly have to expend power to stay afloat. wh40k seems to have solved cold fusion or some other ways to conjure up energy from literally nothing, so this could be somewhat feasible, if we just silently accept, that the authors that came up with them gig not have the faintest clues about orbital mechanics, and just used the terms as funny adjectives to spice up their narratives.

OK, nbut I ndon nwanna nsink about dad, suspension of disbelief. Thing is, the novel "Warhawk" was published 3 years ago. Disbelief works well, the less it has to work against established intuition. With Starlink in the news, there will be over time more and more intuition build up and leak into pop culture about spaceflight. Which WILL raise the threshold of disbelief, if canon writers just try to keep all their stuff backward compatible to earlier canon, and don't give a flying f about how anything even could remotely work in real life.
Which 


 

[N1SB]

+++ Yes, Planetary Landing Shuttles Exist +++

 

Yeah, I think you're right.  No, you're NOT naive.  I'll just provide some supporting evidence, starting with...

 

 

Arvus Lighters, the real workhorse behind the Imperium, from 30k to 40k.  It's actually a civilian craft, I think it's implied to mostly transport cargo, but is also personnel transport even for wars.  I think it's like Vertical Take-Off and Landing for exactly the reasons you described, less requirement for landing strips.

 

There's definitely a 30k/Age of Darkness/HH game equivalent, they even put guns on them.  Not to tie things to the real world, but it's like how a bunch of Ford and Toyota pick-up trucks somehow ended up in the hands of Islamist groups in the Middle East, then they put machine guns in the back.

 

IIRC, it's fleshed out in the Dark Heresy RPG a bit; I know that's an old licensed thing, but still useful.  We're used to Valkyries or Stormtalons in the 40k game, but that's like full-on war.  On a day-to-day civilian level, people see, use, ride Arvus Lighters.  As my old GM said, 40k describes how people die, the RPGs how people live.

 

So everything you assumed is right, I'm just giving you supporting evidence, this is the obvious example that comes to mind.  But what of bigger ships?

 

 

+++ 30k to 40k "Ports" +++

 

 

Yes, there are ports, no, they don't look like ports.  In the later Siege of Terra books, there's Lion's Gate.  Despite its name, Lion's Gate is actually a port.  It's like an elevator that goes into space.  It's exactly as you say, Terra is already too cluttered for huge landing strips, their idea of a port is a huge tower:

 

 

This comes up in newer games like Aeronautica Imperialis (I'm so sad it got discontinued so soon).  I played Tau, got the Tau Sourcebook and everything, it's a very tidy little thing.  There's a campaign storyline, the Tau were attacking this Imperial planet's space elevator, so it's like a normal thing.  So no landing, just docking in orbit.

 

And just as ports aren't ports in the Imperium, ships aren't ships...

 

 

+++ Ships Are Hive Cities +++

 

 

Also, what you said about Imperium's ships is spot on.  Another friend who GM'd the Rogue Trader RPG, again a 3rd party-licensed game but really plays out these ideas, describes ships not like ships in real life or even in Star Trek; he describes them as 40k Hive Cities (like Necromunda's), tilted sideways, shot into space.

 

People can and do normally live on these ships their whole lives, they're truly Void-born from cradle to grave.  Their ships can dock at a planet along these sky elevators and even then, they might not get off.  It's like living your whole life in a country but not cross the border, like you don't have a passport or visa or anything.

 

 

+++ Orbital Plates +++

 

 

I was considering what you said about Orbital Plates.  It's like you're almost describing an aircraft carrier.  I really liked that.

 

So Rogal Dorn just "decommissioning" them...I guess it's to prevent the Traitors from driving them into the Earth or something.  In the Japanese anime/model franchise Gundam, the iconic thing to do was to drop a space colony onto Earth.  They called it Operation: British.  In fact, Abaddon would later do this on Cadia!

 

I dunno, but I think you're right!  Just 1 final thing...

 

 

+++ End of Empire +++

 

 

You're talking about reconciling with hard engineering, like reconciling 30k/40k with real-life engineering.  It's like, the logistics.  But don't forget another real-life element of the history of how Warhammer started in the late '80s, and the world Black Library authours grew up in.

 

It was the consolidation, the pulling back, of the British Empire.  Not politics (don't worry, mods), almost not even economics, but also logistics.  It was around this point the British government realised it was no longer worth it to maintain such a large empire.  Juice not worth the squeeze.  All this shades 30k/40k.

 

All the issues you raised are absolutely engineering issues.  It's like, efficiency vs. effectiveness, in ridiculous situations like Rogal Dorn had to deal with.  It's worth going through this exercise, and I think you're already concluding, even without all that above evidence...the Imperium is highly inefficient.  You are absolutely correct.

 

TL;DR - you're asking the right question, how does the Imperium work?  And the right answer is, it doesn't...that's what makes it grimdark.

 

It actually makes perfect sense for nothing to make sense, as the Imperium IS a flawed, wasteful, expensive thing (just like GW minis!)

 

You know how Warhammer is official described as like dark satire?  That's part of the joke.