Dear Steve, in the description of the battle for Carpathia II on March 4031, you name "the battle-hardened Janus Corps".
I am still not good at ground combat, so I wonder if being "battle-hardened" allows better performance of this unit.
No, it is purely for flavor.
After two more waves, with eleven and fifteen hits respectively, the senior commander, Lord Captain Arabella Typhon, ordered her two ships to cease point defence fire, relying only on shields, speed and ECM. Four more waves arrived, without any torpedo detonations affecting the cruisers’ armour.
I guess with PD fire costing MSP now, there's a real meta role for heavily-shielded ships to save wear on the gun barrels. I'd almost worry about trivializing the Necrons, but this is against one ship with a huge tonnage advantage and a tech level advantage, so I probably shouldn't draw sweeping conclusions here.
One day later, the survey frigate Tempest investigated a jump point in Macharia, six transits from Sol via the shortest route, and discovered Cadia, a system with an orange K2-V star, three terrestrial planets, a dwarf planet and a single moon, orbiting the fourth planet. Just outside the orbit of the second planet was a strange phenomenon; a vast rift in space ten million kilometres in diameter. Imperium Intelligence designated it as an ‘Aether Rift’, as it appeared to penetrate through both known space and the Aether to somewhere beyond.
Of course the system just happened to be named Cadia, naturally, definitely not a stealthy rename for story purposes at all...
Baneblade Super-heavy Tank
Transport Size (tons) 228 Cost 41.04 Armour 108 Hit Points 144
Annual Maintenance Cost 5.1 Resupply Cost 99
Super-Heavy Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 135 Damage 135
Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel: Shots 6 Penetration 22.5 Damage 15
Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel: Shots 6 Penetration 22.5 Damage 15
Hearts attacks take out anywhere from 5-10% of the Adeptus Munitorum every time these bad boys are deployed to a war zone. An acceptable rate of attrition, of course.
I anticipate hostilities with the T'au at some point, hopefully this will require a ground invasion of the home world so we can get a look at what that looks like from Steve's perspective.