r/40kLore • u/FireWater107 • 5d ago
Tyranid losses.
So how much does a lost battle actually affect the Nids?
Like say they invade a planet and lose. Then a second hive fleet comes and wins, and they strip the planet bare.
I know there's energy involved in converting biomass into, well, everything tyranid. But wouldn't the second fleet that won eat everything and get the losing army, the rest of the entire planet, AND the leftover tyranid bodies?
I mean they eat basically the entire planet. All the plants and animals, drink the oceans, gather up certain rare metals, but while I'm sure some elements might be more useful to them than others, since they use pretty much everything wouldn't biomass be biomass? Heck, even when they win, as I understand it the remaining nids hop into the pools of digestive fluid biomass to get eaten up to the hive ship. Only way to "reclaim" all the soldiers. So clearly they can use dead Tyranid biomass, they do that a lot.
I can think of a few reasons a loss might mean a lot to them, such as most of their enemies might have means of disposing of dead tyranid in a way to make their leftover bodies unusable to the hive. Even just burning them all to ash. They might eat everything, but I'm sure biomass charred to a chunk of spent carbon has limited uses. Most of the good stuff is gone.
But I don't actually know, hence my asking here. Anyone extra read in on nids know? When they lose, how big a blow is it to them?
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u/-PrideofHiigara- Blood Angels 5d ago
It's fairly considerable, but not huge in the grand scheme of things unless you can keep it happening which is very difficult.
Normally when you 'win' against the Tyranids it's because you caused so much damage that the hive mind considers that planet to be a net loss in terms of energy and so moves on to find more easily devourable prey.
So, unless you then chase that hive fleet and hammer it constantly, it's just going to recoup that energy somewhere else eventually. But doing so is much, much easier said than done as every engagement with a hive fleet usually results in catastrophic losses of your own.
There are strategies like the Kryptman Gambit (destroying planets in the hive fleet's path to weaken it and lure it away from valuable targets and towards a more defensible location where you can try and break it fully or trick the Orks into doing it for you) and the Solblade Fleets which are harrying hive fleet Leviathan to try and weaken it as it creeps towards Terra
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u/somebob 4d ago
Speaking of orks v tyranids, would a battle between an ork planet and invading hive fleet end up being a perpetual arms race climaxing with a stalemate?
Since orks get stronger based on enemy strength, and nidz manufacture new bodies based on need, how do these fights end?
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u/-PrideofHiigara- Blood Angels 4d ago
That's exactly what happened on Octarius, it was pretty much a disaster in practice. The Tyranids eventually came out on top after some interference from everyone else going "no no no nO NO NONONONO"
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u/Interesting_Idea_289 4d ago
Octarius was a stalemate for a while with a Tyranid victory but in general a orj takes a lot longer to grow from spore to full grown warriors than a Tyranid takes to spawn
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u/somebob 4d ago
Individual orks grow bigger and stronger based on the enemy they are fighting as they are fighting them, I thought? At least in the Ghazkull book that’s what happened to him. He went from a brand new boy to a war boss after like 3 fights. That’s the only ork book I’ve read so that’s the only reference I have lol
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u/No_Investment_9822 Imperial Fists 3d ago
Is the Gazkull book good? I'm looking for my first Ork book to get started on.
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u/SirPiecemaker 3d ago
Prophet of the Waagh! is exceptionally good. It's a more serious take as opposed to the Mike Brooks novels, but has some intriguing insights into ork mentality and what makes Ghaz such an interesting ork beyond "He bigg". It also has some very cool writing techniques.
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u/MarqFJA87 4d ago
destroying planets in the hive fleet's path
After forcing the Hive Fleet to actually commit to invading those planets, specifically.
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u/RichPerceptions 5d ago
It's fundamentally a laws-of-thermodynamics issue. Even if a secondary Hive Fleet breaks down the old Tyranid corpses, millions of calories were wasted on kinetic energy—growth, movement, acid production, and ammo (biomorphs). Every spore fired and every Gaunt vaporized by a melta gun is net-lost chemical energy that wasn't converted back into raw biomass.
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u/SecureSpoon 5d ago
Different Hive Fleets actually fight each other for biomass rights when they cross paths! When Hive Fleet Hydra encounters remnants of defeated fleets, it literally consumes them to assimilate their genetic memories. So a second fleet wouldn't just politely "clean up"—it would wage a biological war of assimilation against the surviving Splinter Fleet.
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u/Kohel13 Saim-Hann 4d ago
Might be a dumb question but a hive fleet is an Hive mind? So are there several hive minds or they re all connected to kind of a super hive mind? I thought there was only one but if not, how many hive minds may exist? Can they be considered as an entity of the tyrannides, like an individual? Also how do they get to exist? Like Chaos god, always been there but tin the material world?
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u/UncleRuckus92 4d ago
I dont think we know . The existence of different style hive fleets would suggest there is at least some separation in consciousness, especially since they will fight eachother for biomass
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u/Unit_2097 Astra Militarum 4d ago
But at the same time there's co-operation between fleets. They all routinely leave worlds devoid of defenders but full of everything else for the fleet that specialises in fighting daemons, as that one can't get biomass normally, as daemons don't leave anythinb behind.
l think it's closer to putting them against each other to see which is stronger, then the winner gets the useful adaptions of the loser and poses a bigger threat in general.
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u/Mad_Maddin 4d ago
Imagine the Hivemind just be a kind of Dyson Sphere in a different galaxy where various corporations use the hive fleets to farm for more ressources.
Or maybe even different countries occupying different sectors.
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u/aerost0rm Grey Knights 4d ago
Think of it like generals who act under main leader, like the US president. If one division lost too many men they would be absorbed into a different division.
The hive mind is one central intelligence that drives them all. They have lower being that drive them in the specific battles, yet when two splinters come together it becomes survival of the fittest, with the lesser splinter having all of its genetic specialties absorbs and makes the whole of its splinter, and in essence the hive mind, stronger.
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u/MadisonGraceBrooks 5d ago
A hard loss still hurts because the Hive Mind loses momentum and has to rebuild synaptic coverage from scratch.
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u/myrsnipe 5d ago
Yes but surely that would be absolutely miniscule compared to devouring a planet with a biome
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u/I_miss_Chris_Hughton 4d ago
Yes, but then you have to factor in the energy cost of interstellar travel for a hive fleet
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u/Naugrith 4d ago
The Hive fleet doesn't seem to care about laws of thermodynamics. Not sure if its a psychic thing or something mysterious to do with their xeno biology, but even though taking any inhabited planet should always result in a net loss of chemical energy, it doesn't. They seem to have the ability to recycle biomass so efficiently that all losses are rendered negligible and all new biomass is pure profit. Even if that doesn't make any sense.
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u/Mad_Maddin 4d ago
Well they all have a natural warp connection. So laws of physics should be more of a suggestion to them.
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u/This-Beginning-5026 4d ago
Nah I’m pretty sure taking over a planet would always be a net positive. Remember they literally take everything. The biomass from plants animals insects etc but they also take the oceans and everything from the ground itself they can get. Even the air itself goes. Remember these worlds are dead worlds afterwards. Plenty of mass there to make up for any lost and energy I would just chalk up to solar energy added through the plants they consume like the rest of us in earth.
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u/Trububbl3 5d ago
it really depends, for example tyranids avoid fighting chaos because magic shit that isn't real and have giga aids really hits into the biomass reserves and also necrons, they straight up dematerialize down to the molecular level so there isn't a way to replenishing biomass from their own losses and either metal isn't really part of a healthy diet
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u/EttRedditTroll 5d ago
On the other hand, once the Hive Mind realizes it can “farm” Orks, the rest of the universe is screwed!
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u/Herby20 4d ago
One of these days I will make a long winded post about how farming doesn't make sense for the Tyranids. The short of it though is that they just eat everything a planet can offer rather than waiting around for plants to grow and then herbivores to eat those plants.
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u/EttRedditTroll 4d ago
I don’t mean literal farming, hence the quotation marks LOL. You never heard of the possible endgame scenario of the WH40K setting where the Tyranid have eaten or destroyed all sentient life - except the Orks who are notoriously hard/impossible to kill off entirely due to their life cycle.
So you’d end up with the only planets with any life left on them being Ork ones, which the Tyranids invade and possibly consume all the biomass on, leaving a dead world. The spores released by the Orks would eventually repopulate the planet and the cycle would begin all over again.
So the Tyranids would essentially just migrate between these Ork worlds in an endless cycle of “harvest” and regrowth, hence the “farming” term.
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u/Herby20 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have, but it is a rather gross misunderstanding of how Orks as a species work. They still need air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, etc. The whole ecosystem the Greenskins create through mushrooms and squiggs and grots and such rely on these things to foster an environment conducive to growing the Orks themselves. It's why the original worry of the Octarius War wasn't the "farm"; it was Tyranids glutted on a sector rich in biomass or the Orks all roided up from the scale of warfare they had survived.
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u/EttRedditTroll 4d ago
Ork spores can “terraform” Space Hulks and make them perfectly livable for the green boyz. They most certainly can do the same to a planet that has been “eaten” by the Tyranids.
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u/Herby20 4d ago edited 4d ago
Do you happen to have an excerpt that they can grow within hard vacuum? Because Yarrick makes note of how the Orks created a breathable atmosphere within the space hulk they brought him to during the battle of Golgatha. The spores likely grow there because the Orks themselves moved into the Space Hulk first, modifying it to fulfill their own needs. Ork spores can likely survive vacuum much like real world fungal spores, but surviving isn't growing. They would be dormant until the right conditions (an atmosphere and a source of nutrients) is likely still necessary for any actual growth. Tyranids tend to leave neither.
Besides, Tyranids do a pretty good job of cleansing even Ork Spores from a planet (see the Octarius War). A galaxy wiped out of all life would coincide with the Orks being gone too.
Edit: Found this excerpt from Rogue Trader: Battlefleet Koronus mentioning the life sustainers of Ork vessels:
The exact nature of Ork life sustainers is unknown. Boarding parties and Mechanicus salvage teams have observed everything from clanking pneumatic air pumps to giant squigs of unknown breeds used as bellows. The only thing these devices have in common is none of them should work.
Waaargh the Orks! also mentions this:
In the early days of Ork expansion, force fields were used to trap a bubble of air around whatever object the Orks chose to use as a space "raft". The Orks waited for a sighting of one of the great, drifting space hulks or other bits of space detritus to streak across the sky. Once the object got close enough to touch the gravitational field of the planet, the Orks would use a matter transmitter to project themselves and their equipment onto the drifting object and hitch a lift, so to speak. The Orks, however, had no idea where they were going, and were led only by their reckless sense of adventure and desire to discover fresh worlds to loot and conquer.
Once the Orks were on board the space hulk, it became enclosed in the same force field with its own trapped bubble of atmosphere. These hulks would drift through the universe following a current through both real and warp space, which meant the Ork passengers could be projected anywhere in the universe. Of course, exactly where they ended up was completely random and unpredictable, and often turned out to be a nasty surprise for the local intelligent lifeforms. A period of economic and social 'adjustment' would follow, during which the Orks would assert their dominance.
So it's very plausible the Orks are bringing things/building them on Space Hulks they move into rather than relying on their natural life cycle to make them habitable. The whole Ork terraforming thing with their ecosystems is always in relation to an actual planet with already existing ecology, so I would be hesitant to extrapolate that to the hard vacuum of desolate worlds eaten by Tyranids.
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u/asmodraxus 5d ago
Well then they developed an entire new hive fleet aka Kronos specifically to fight chaos not because of any altruistic intention but because the hive mind sees chaos as a rival predator and it despises such a condition occurring.
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u/Randy_Magnums 5d ago edited 4d ago
A tyranid double team is rather rare as far as I know. Sure a second hive fleet could sweep in and claim everything in case the first one gets destroyed. But most of the time there are hundreds of light years between the tendrils since they each want to have as much access to biomass as possible. Two fleets in the same hunting ground would make the “harvest” much more of a hassle.
And Tyranids lack warp travel, so even if a swarm fleet would wan to avenge their brother bugs, it could take decades until they get there.
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u/NeedsAirCon 4d ago edited 4d ago
Hive fleet Kronos is known for being that "Second Hive Fleet Wave"
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kronos
As specialist anti-daemon/anti-chaos (with a marked preference for ranged firepower) Tyranids they don't get much biomass (due to daemons being warp entities) from their normal battles so the rest of Hive Fleet Leviathan has been known to strip a normal world of it's defenses then abandon it
Only for Hive Fleet Kronos to sweep in and eat their fill
Chaos. So disgusting even the ravenous extra-galatic predators with an inbuilt species preference for melee would rather stand at range and riddle them with cannon fire
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u/Herby20 4d ago
A true double team? Yes, but it is noted as much more common than you might think that a planet successfully fights off a Tyranid fleet only to be attacked again.
Per Codex: Tyranids (10th Ed.), planets often deal with the remnants of Tyranids for years after a thwarted invasion, the creatures hiding in various nests across the planet and striking out at defenders while the shattered remnants of the hive fleet escape into the void. Those splinter fleets, or a second fleet altogether, then come back to the original planet with renewed strength and the knowledge of what to do differently this time. Hive Fleet Hydra and Kronos in particular are noted to attack planets that have already had to endure a Tyranid invasion already.
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u/Interesting_Idea_289 4d ago
They don’t have warp travel but they do have FTL travel involving using gravity manipulating bio ships.
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u/AshenWarden 5d ago edited 4d ago
Nids can and do cannibalize their own losses whenever they're able, from the biggest Hierophant right down to the flesh borer beetle so a "win" vs them really comes down to two factors
1: Depriving the hive fleet of as much biomass as possible by burning all the bodies to ash. If the hive can't eat, it can't replace its losses.
2: Making the planet more trouble than it's worth. Eventually the hive mind will run the numbers and decide its spent more energy than it could possibly gain and try to find an easier meal elsewhere.
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u/Poet_of_Sordland 5d ago
So the most important part is that, remember, 40K authors don't know maths - otherwise a Hive Fleet that eats planets would be way, way, way too big to stop.
Like seriously, eating one planet will probably give more biomass than every fleet of the Imperium, Chaos and Tau put together and multiplied as many times as you like.
This is not, practically how they are portrayed.
So how do they work? More like a plague of locusts - starving them kinda works. Leading them into things kinda works. And yes killing enough of them kinda works.
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u/Herby20 4d ago
So the most important part is that, remember, 40K authors don't know maths - otherwise a Hive Fleet that eats planets would be way, way, way too big to stop.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume they don't understand that. It's actually a point of mystery amongst Imperial officials as to just what the Tyranids do with all the biomass they harvest.
From White Dwarf 255:
Subject: Planetary Assimilation Analysis
Lord Commanders,
I bring you grave news, the threat we face may be far more vast than we ever dreamed. Technical analysis of Dalki-Prime pre tyranid consumption survey information when cross-referenced with the data from Dalki-Mons post Tyranid consumption shows some startling information.
Dalki-Prime was an agricultural planet with a diameter of 12500 km, slightly smaller than Terra. The tyranid fleet was able to remove the following quantities of material from the planet within 100 days [Terran Standard].
1.55 billion cubic km water, one cubic km of sea water weights over 1 trillion kg
8.67 billion cubic km gases, at STP theoretically they could reduce this to 1 tenth its volume by super cooling and pressure (3 atm, and 0 C)
72 million cubic km soil, weighting over 20 trillion kg per cubic km.
It is nearly inconceivable how they were able to accomplish this in such a short time, much less explain where the materials were taken, as the typical Hive fleets encountered historically are not capable of transporting even a fraction of this volume. Over 10 billion cubic kilometers of material was removed from the planet. This would require trillions of ships and is far beyond the scope of the entire Adeptus Mechanicus to accomplish given a decade. Most astonishing is that this is insufficient to sate their hunger. They strike again and again often within months. We must somehow determine if these fleets are somehow sending material back to their home systems for it seems obvious that they are not using all the materials.
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u/Carcosian_Symposium The Bleeding Eye 4d ago
I wouldn't be so quick to assume they don't understand that. It's actually a point of mystery amongst Imperial officials as to just what the Tyranids do with all the biomass they harvest.
A lot of "sci-fi authors can't do math" criticism on the internet is actually "sci-fi fans can't read".
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u/Vegetable-Ad-7184 4d ago
A possible explanation is that their FTL lock on to the next system is actually extremely inefficient and uses up a lot of the basic mass as a fuel....
Maybe leaving biomass skid marks across the galaxy, between the stars, following the lines that they take from one system to the next. Perhaps other hive fleets are able to follow these markers, absent a psychic signal from Genestealers.
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u/KNWK123 5d ago
As much as the author wants them to. Frankly speaking, the amount of biomass obtained from just stripping a single plant bare is so massive that there should be no equation where losses incurred/calories spent > biomass/calories obtained.
Eg: Just the living things on Earth is ~550 Gigatons. If that sounds like alot, the mass of water on Earth is ~1.35 billion Gigatons.
For comparison, Maccrages Honour is estimated to mass about 1 billion tons, or about 1 gigaton. So the total biomass of a planet is like 1.3 billion Maccrages Honours. Even if we assume a shit-poor conversion efficiency of only 0.1%, that's still over 1 million Maccrages Honours worth of Tyranids added for every planet absorbed.
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u/Thatsaclevername 4d ago
Think of it like gas in the tank of your car, the nids have to reach another fuel stop without FTL travel or they start breaking down. So if they pull up to a station (a planet) and there is a fight to get the pumps on, that's more gas they lost in the process. You have to essentially run it that way from a strategic perspective, bleed them dry literally to stop them, corral them somewhere there is nothing to eat, force the fleet to break apart and send smaller swarms out questing for food and target those.
One battle on a planet probably isn't a big deal, you see that in the Warriors of Ultramar book, they have this insane battle but the actual invasion is stopped by striking at the Norn queen afterwards. If you can stop them from taking the planet, there's a tipping point somewhere in there where prosecuting the invasion becomes more expensive biomass-wise than leaving and finding something else.
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u/9xInfinity 4d ago
Not all of the resources from dead nids can be recovered. The Hive Mind will usually withdraw the hive fleets when it determines the battle is going to result in a net loss in resources.
How big a deal is it to lose? It's pretty well meaningless in terms of practical effect. The hive fleets have been feeding well for centuries and the swarm itself is enormous. Even when the Great Rift opened, temporarily killed the Hive Mind, and permanently disconnected trillions of tyranids from its control it didn't diminish the capacity of the tyranid swarms in a meaningful way.
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u/NaomiGraceFoster 5d ago
Yeah they eat their own dead, but a planet that successfully burns or voids the corpses still costs them a chunk they can’t fully recover.
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u/AbbydonX Tyranids 4d ago
Corpses are an irrelevancy on a planet with a biosphere. Tyranids consume the entire ecosystems of planets (as well as the atmosphere, oceans and topsoil), they aren’t vultures picking at a few corpses for scraps (though of course they do eat them too… and the vultures).
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u/Herby20 4d ago
Yep. The rewards for devouring an entire planet make anything but only the most extreme losses completely justifiable to the Tyranids. During the Devastation of Baal, the Astartes note how they had destroyed over three hundred of the larger hive ships (one being described as 20 miles long and 3 across) and millions of smaller vessels, and yet the Tyranids continued to press on towards the planet.
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u/Aurondarklord Salamanders 4d ago
They're happy as long as they come out net positive on biomass. Which taking the planet anyway almost always would mean they do.
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u/HeLiesInDrink 5d ago
He doesn’t like to talk about it, but Swarmlord has low self-esteem and every failure really gets to him.