Chapter 25

481. Fuck ocean planets: No seriously, if you ever find a planet where all the land mass is underwater, Exterminatus the fucking place. Get enough warships together and pump enough macro lasers into the thing until the entire fucking ocean boils! Ok seriously, have you ever tried to colonize an ocean planet? There are three ways you can do it. Build settlements on top of whatever bits of land are above the surface, build settlements designed to float, or build underwater settlements. One is the easiest and safest, but it's the most limited in scope, and while two is more flexible, it still runs into some of the same roadblocks that you do with one. Namely that you're limited to harvesting resources from the surface and shallows. The thing about ocean planets is that the really good resources tend to have the highest concentration in the deep sections of the planets. And if you want to reliably harvest them, you have to build underwater settlements. And that can fuck right off.

Not only is it a massive pain in the ass to build a base in deep water (it's literally easier to build one on a barren moon than at the bottom of the ocean, you don't have Emperor knows how many tons of water piling pressure on you on a moon) but it's a pain to resupply, a pain to transport materials out, and this is all if the ocean is completely empty of hostile fauna, and of course it never fucking is! There's sea serpents, giant squids, something that looks like a sea serpent jerked off onto a giant squid's eggs, and there's spikes, electricity, telepathy, and venom galore in the deep dark depths of the ocean where I CAN'T FUCKING SEE ANYTHING AND MY HELLGUN DOESN'T FUCKING WORK! Fuck ocean planets, fuck everything about them, only utter twats would go to one willingly. Which probably explains why I saw an island with a bunch of Orks doing a conga line on the way out. Of fucking course, they would treat a place like that as a resort.

482. Stop sending ships piecemeal to places where ships mysteriously disappear: I mean what the fuck did you think was going to happen? You would find the reason why so many ships are going AWOL except it would go slightly differently this time? There are two ways in which this can go. The thing that made the ships disappear is gone, in which case the whole thing was a waste of time, or it's still there, in which case you need to send a battlefleet because it's usually pirates, human or otherwise. Don't make things easier for the Orks by sending a lone frigate into the middle of their ambush to look for the last frigate that wandered into their ambush. For fuck's sake, they're ORKS! I think they even faked the distress signal, mainly because it called the Emperor "dat grate bige zog on da gold crappah."

483. Mining tools are good improvised weapons, but improvised weapons are inferior to proper weapons: Sometimes you'll find yourself in a situation where you don't have a proper rifle and you have to make do with whatever you have at the moment. More than once in my life, I've witnessed a Guardsman pick up a mining drill, bring it roaring to life, and tear an enemy of man in half with it. It's a good stopgap if and only if you can't just shoot them like we were all trained to do. I blame catharsis for this one, lasguns don't have a lot of kick and don't make a lot of noise, which makes them very practical but not very satisfying. Ripping someone apart with a big ass drill is more fun to use, may or may not be speaking from experience here. Either that or the person using it has a stupid amount of penis compensation going on. But it's better to rely on the humble lasrifle, less you get into a situation where you tried to go into melee with a Warp Spider with a drill. Instead of, you know, running the fuck away from it and shooting it. The drill was sliced in half, a perfect metaphor for how the dumbass was using the drill to compensate for the insecurity issues he had about his penis, and then he got sliced in half vertically, a perfect metaphor for how he was dead due to having half a fucking brain.

484. Don't blow out your own ears: I've mentioned before that a lot of Guardsmen don't really seem to know how to use autoguns that well. Or the basic principles of how they work. I swear there's some problems in giving a recruit a lasgun and then only ever training them to use it and nothing else. Because the thing about autoguns is that they're a lot louder than lasguns due to the fact that fucking EXPLOSIONS are what propels the slugs forward. Have you ever had one of those go off next to your ear? I have, you end up in a lot of fucking pain because of that. Fucking asshole thought she'd play a prank on me, so I played a prank on her by grabbing the rifle and breaking her nose, that's how it works according to her logic. Just don't be the asshole who throws a grenade in a tight metal chamber, it leads to a squad bleeding out of the ears in the middle of a firefight, and there was only one Kroot we were dealing with for fuck's sake!

485. Recognize when it's going to rain: See, water and equipment don't always play nice together. They're like those two asshole dogs that try to kill and/or fuck each other every time they're in the same room. There's a lot of special steps that need to be taken at a camp when rain is on the way or here. Tarps and the like, otherwise things get nasty. My platoon bitched when I made them take care of all of that, but they shut up the next day when the Tyranids attacked. One platoon hadn't taken proper precautions and all the power cells for their lasguns were wet. Most of them didn't work at all, and a trio had overcharged cells, meaning they came up with the fucking genius idea of frying themselves so badly they were cooked to a crisp, denying the Tyranids nourishment. That's the spin the Commissar came up with to keep morale above rock bottom anyway.

486. Service in return for freedom is an awesome deal: What? You've heard some people say that if you're all locked up and colonel or Inquisitor comes by your cell (where my book is probably being used for toilet paper, let's be honest) and says you'll go free for some mission or missions, it's a scam where you'll certainly die and you shouldn't take it? Whaaaaaaat? Nah man, you've been hearing bad news. They never throw you into those kinds of missions unless they can handle it. They see their next special forces operative in you, they don't want to throw you away. The Imperium doesn't entrust that kind of mission to someone they think is expendable. I mean, Colonel Schaeffer never led anyone astray, he's the best in the business! In fact, if Colonel Schaeffer comes to you with an offer, say yes to everything he says, you will not regret it!

487. Tyranids aren't cannibals the way you think they are: Look, you can't make a Tyranic fleet eat itself, ok? They're hardwired to act in the best interest of the hive. The closest you can get to having it harm itself is to eliminate the local Hive Tyrant, and even then that just makes the Tyranids act like normal, wild animals, not things that viciously cannibalizes the fleet to death. I get the idea behind it if you just learned about Tyranids, but it doesn't work that way. They do eat up the ground-based combat spawn, but only after they're done taking over a planet and there's no more use to them. It's strictly structured and eerily intelligent. No idea how the fuck these things evolved, but that's a story for another day. The story for today is the story about the man who airdropped salt, seasoning, and sauce onto the Tyranid horde in the hopes that it would turn them against each other. Well, I'll give him credit. When Gargoyles wrecked his Valkyrie and Gaunts tore him to shreds, they did seem to enjoy what bits of his payload had landed on him.

488. Don't paint your guns gold: Don't be an asshole, ok? Can I get that from you? Five seconds of you not being an asshole who's five seconds away from kissing your ass so hard it can be classified as cunnilingus? Gold guns. Don't. Fucking. Do it. It's stupid, it's tacky, it's impractical, it's gaudy, you might as well be holding a "shoot me now" sign in bright neon, just fuck you. This is without getting into the assholes that use actual gold. Most vain idiots have the decency to just paint their gun gold and stop there, but some rich inbred idiots put actual gold on it and, I swear to the Emperor I'm not making this up, replace some of the internal mechanics with solid gold. Assuming you're strong enough to hold that kind of weight for a campaign, don't act surprised if you fucked up the internal mechanics, and you probably did unless you committed tech-heresy on top of everything else, and even then the Mechanicus probably consider this gaudy shit to be some form of heresy, and die with some dignity when the Eldar slices you in half. It's amazing, she did that and called the woman she had just killed vain and short-sighted, and yet she somehow wasn't a hypocrite for the first time in her fucking millennia-long life.

489. Hunters cannot win a war by themselves: Hunter-killer units are a very useful support force. Lying in wait, hitting targets of opportunity, causing confusion and panic in the enemy army, and being an excellent harassment force. But the key word here is support. Hunter-killer units specialize at moving fast, staying off the grid, and hitting targets and then bugging out. The problem with them is that their strengths mean that they can only take bite-sized chunks out of enemy forces, and that's if they find an opening they can exploit. If they ever get pulled into a prolonged fight, they have a glass jaw and tend to get pounded into the fucking dirt. As such, if an army can afford to take some losses or they learn to counter hunter-killers, there's not much they can do. This is without getting into how in war you need to take and defend territory, and hunter-killers suck at doing both. Didn't stop some cocky assholes from trying otherwise though. Few hundred idiots trying to take an enemy base with fucking Tauroses. Didn't seem to realize that a Tauros is good for firing grenades and running, and they ended up trying to ram directly into Chaos Space Marines. Idiots got torn to shreds and the Chaos Space Marines ended up going through their skulls to see which ones they wanted to add to their collections. You'd think they'd be pickier and not want damaged and malformed skulls.

490. You NEED a centralized chain of command: Look. We all like to complain about the asshole general or colonel, or major, or captain, or lieutenant or whatever. We all like to think that they're just a stuck up Blue Blood (and I've made my views on them quite clear) but two points. There are plenty of good commanders, and there are just as many stupid rank and file assholes. The latter are who I'm going to focus on today because they're just as full of shit as the Blue Bloods, but they think they have "street cred" instead of noble breeding, and frankly, they're both full of shit. Said street cred probably means they robbed a blind, deaf old man/woman at one point. And then a bunch of hive gangers that had been pressed into service seriously killed all of their officers because they thought they would be better off just relying on their initiative. Yeah. A poorly planned Ork attack that was outnumbered 1:3 was able to slam into their flank because no one had thought to keep an eye on that area and they quickly panicked and fell into a route. Meanwhile, the colonel had my daughter-in-law take the scout platoon to screen our approach through the same area, and we were able to see the same force coming our way, using the corpses of the dead idiots to build a little shrine to Gork and Mork. I think they spelled Gork wrong. I think it's Gork, not Gurk. Well, anyway, we were able to interrupt their ceremony to Gurk by waiting for the colonel's order and attacking when their guard was low. Universal intuition just isn't the same as having everyone on the same page, is it you prideful fucking idiots?

491. More primitive technology is not a virtue: I've once seen people say that if we had less advanced technology, we would be happier as a people and more prepared to fight the enemies of man. These people are all idiots and I suspect they drank water that had lead in it. I mean, hey, if you want to forsake lasguns, Baneblades, Titans, battleships, Space Marines, cybernetic replacements for limbs, then feel free. And then feel free to go fuck yourself because you're a pretentious idiot who somehow thinks that doing things less efficiently is better, and you probably fantasize about living with the Exodite Eldar, prancing about together wearing crowns of flowers, when in reality they would probably let their pet dinosaurs tear you to fucking shreds and then piss on what was left! More primitive technology very often sucks compared to more advanced technology, but the people who fantasize about getting spit roasted by the Exodite's Megadons say that it takes more resources to keep them going. WELL OF COURSE IT FUCKING DOES! Better machinery requires better parts, but oh I'm sorry, I get it, you want to fight for the survival of humanity on a budget you fucking delusional piece of shit. Tell you what, next time Tyranids invade, you can be like the last batch of morons and try to fight them off with autoguns and trucks. Hey, nothing more advanced, you'd be complacent and immoral or some shit. Just be sure you say hi to the last band of morons who tried to do that on your way down the Carnifex's small intestine.

492. Militias are not a replacement for a properly trained military: At the best, at the very best, a militia that has been properly trained and drilled with Minitorum approved equipment can be a good auxiliary force for Guard regiments and PDFs to draw on. In a lot of other cases, they're unhelpful or downright harmful. See the problem with a lot of militias is that they tend to be loose and informal, with many of them being militia members as a side activity to the rest of their lives. So often they just choose to not go fight because the farm needs to be tended to, or their Grox got pregnant, or they fucked the Grox and need to hide the rash. And a lot of militias when it comes to training, Emperor help me, I'm downright offended that PDFs get so much shit for being poorly trained and yet no one shits on these morons. Something is very wrong when they fight a Tau force that they outnumber 5:1, they got the drop on, and yet they still ended up taking three times as many casualties. But hey, that was one battle in a war where one planetary governor who decided that having a defense of trained soldiers made too much sense, and he was going to radically innovate with the much dumber idea of having bumblefuck, part-time farmers tend to the defense. The Tau force was only supposed to scout out the area and secure a beachhead. They ended up conquering the planet. BY ACCIDENT!

493. Revolutionaries using other humans as human shields a very bad idea: Let me tell you something. If a revolution has a set of AA guns, and they tie ten different Guardsmen and a couple of civilians to it in an attempt to dissuade attacks, they seem to think it means that the guns are safe. They're not. Either the AA guns get bombed and the hostages die (because, as much as I hate to say it, the kind of people who are willing to use prisoners as human shields were probably going to kill the prisoners anyway) or a rescue mission gets deployed. And let me tell you when I saw fifteen men and women beaten, bloodied, and all tied to rebel AA guns, all I could think of was how badly I wanted everyone who was involved in an organization that situation to fucking die. As much as the Imperial Guard can play home to shitty, unqualified, and incompetent people, let me tell you something. A lot of us joined up to protect each other and humanity as a whole, and no matter how bitter some of us get, we still take that seriously. Fifty rebels were guarding that AA gun, and they all looked rather pleased with themselves. Twenty Chimeras loaded to the brim, sniper support, sanctioned psykers getting them to look the wrong way because they thought Leman Russ tanks were charging them, a few Salamanders, a group of Hospitallers who were chomping at the bit to care for the hostages (and one of them had a look in her eye that suggested she hoped she would get a chance to kill a rebel with her stub revolver) all came crashing down on them in the space of fifteen seconds. No. Fucking. Prisoners.

494. You don't win a war because you were the good guys: This one is more depressing than anything else because it reflects a certain amount of naivety that I almost feel guilty about stamping out, but I really do need to stamp it out hard. We don't win wars because we fight for the Emperor. Saying that is honestly insulting to the Emperor because it implies every fight we lose is his fault, and I won't tolerate that line of thinking. We win by outsmarting, out shooting and out fighting the enemies of man. We have to seize victory with our own hands. So please stop. It honestly kills me a little bit every time I see boys and girls, words chosen purposefully, charging entrenched enemy lines against orders because they think the Emperor will protect them. Not the drunken idiots who do it because they think they've been touched by the saints, those dumbasses are kinda funny.

495. Most small arms are ineffective against aircraft and armored vehicles: Space Marines can ignore this as their small arms can probably actually be filed under AA and AT, but this isn't really for Space Marines. If you see an enemy aircraft, don't bother shooting at it with your rifle. Unless it's a dinky ass piece of shit that's being held together with belts and hope, you're wasting your time. Military aircraft tend to be stupidly heavily armored, mainly because they were built to deal with the heavy bolters, lascanons and missile launchers that were going to be fired in their direction. A lasrifle is going to scorch the paint job, that's it. Some people think that a hundred lasrifles firing at once can make a difference. No. It can't. Rifles just don't have the stopping power to get through that kind of armor, even if countless Guardsmen are all emptying everything they had. But there was one insecure prick who tried to get her entire regiment to act as an AA battery during a bombing run. Let me tell you, it wasn't a good look for her when one bomb crushed her flat.

496. The plan will never go as well as you think it will: I don't care how smart you are, something WILL go wrong. Shipments will go missing, orders will get misinterpreted, a dipshit will earn an entry, something always goes wrong. Sometimes it's a minor nothing that can be ignored, like three bumble fucks getting drunk and disappearing for a week. Other times it's not so minor and we get hit by an ambush when we were planning on catching an enemy base in a pincer move. At that point, we needed to scratch the mission, radio the anvil we were playing hammer to and tell them to break off their assault before bugging out ourselves. That didn't happen. Our commander refused to sacrifice her brilliant plan and ordered us to charge in dick first. Half of the force was wiped out by the end of the battle, and the anvil force was annihilated. She was so damn sure that we just had to push harder for victory that she abandoned her command Salamander and charged. Right into a wall of bayonets. So many that she got stuck standing up dead. The cultists were just as dumbfounded as I was. Which was pretty fucking dumbfounded.

497. Backing money with gold is a bad idea: Do you have any idea how big the Imperium is? Very few people can grasp just how utterly massive it is. I've heard theories that quintillions of humans live in it. Quintillions of humans, with all of them in the Imperium's economy, and you want to back their money with gold. What a pathetically antiquated idea. The Throne Gelt has worth because the Imperium SAYS it has worth, not because we can take it to the bank and get a garbage piece of rock for it. Besides, the galaxy is so huge that it could easily either have nowhere near enough gold to back the Throne or so much the Throne is worthless. Like one noble who found a massive gold mine and backed the Throne with gold on her planet. She mined so much gold that she crashed the local value and was ripped to pieces in a riot where people were using gold for (crappy) weapons. Let's just stick to using gold for tacky decorations, shall we?

498. You can't hide tank strike forces for very long: Tanks are loud, noisy, big, and noticeable. You can keep them hidden for a bit if you have them camouflaged and off, but otherwise, they're gonna get noticed. You can't have a tank guerilla force, you can get a devastating sneak attack in, but that's it. Some Tzeentch big shot tried to have a hundred tanks that we could never find, hidden in the forests and striking at our tears forever. I wonder how smart he felt on the second day when they came out of the forest to find a wall of AT weapons pointed at them because we had figured out their tactics with orbital sensors. Probably not very, he was the first to go.

499. Women are capable Guardsmen, stop pretending otherwise: The number of times I've been to backwater rocks where the pull the old "women can't fight" is eye-roll inducing. If you didn't just skip to the end of the book like a lazy student bobbing for a quote, you should know why I think that, but the reasoning for some is just pathetic. One planet and I swear I'm not making this up, said that women couldn't be good soldiers because they can't piss standing up. Fucking. Priorities. (Also asked the family about this, apparently, women CAN piss while standing up, it's just a little tricky to pull it off) But yeah, a local unit of backwards, black powder idiots, who refused to wait for reinforcements when they learned it was the Sisters of Battle. They ended up charging a bunch of Tau and got fucking annihilated. It wasn't even a good Tau unit, it was a bunch of scattered forces that were making a run for it, and the idiots got routed to a man, and then my sister had to go in and clean it all up. It's weird the Tau has no flame weapons but all the local forces were charred to a crisp when we found them. Funny that.

500. Don't let revenge dictate your battle plan: Well fuck, this one feels weird to write. Namely, because it means that one where I listed myself ended up being accurate in that I myself died stupid, the irony of all ironies, but if this one gets published, it's a stupid death I managed to utilize far better than I could ever imagine. So where do I start?

If you're invading a planet that's playing home to someone you want revenge on, focus on taking the planet. Do that and you'll get your revenge in good time, provided you're a commander worth a shit. Your soldiers will capture or kill your target, and your vendetta will be satisfied. If you're upset that you can't kill them yourself, boo-fucking-hoo. Revenge is revenge, no matter how it happens, so don't be a picky asshole about it. Because if your desire for revenge gets the better of you, it makes you predictable.

See, when you're obsessed with revenge, particularly when it's one of those situations where you're getting all uppity and want to do it yourself, you make dumb choices. Choices that you might have otherwise not made. Like a certain Chaos Lord, who really wanted to avenge her son and her previous defeat at the hands of the Old Wolf, by killing me and conquering the planet where she lost respectively. It might have proven to a lapse in judgment on her part.

See, she committed all of her forces to taking the planet I'm on. All of them. And she'll doubtless be coming down in person to look for me. If you're reading this, it was the last mistake that she ever made. Because we rigged the entire continent to blow and made it so that most of the defenders were penal legionaries no one gave a fuck about. We normally wouldn't do this. We would either fight the enemy head-on or go full Exterminatus if we felt the planet was lost beyond saving. Losing a planet hurts the Imperium, and while losing a dinky little continent is a thousand times more manageable, but Exterminatus is usually more effective because you usually can't reliably concentrate all enemy forces and VIPs to one continent. Usually.

But when you've got a Chaos Lord with double revenge boner, their actions become a lot more predictable, and you can do things. You can arrange for your family to be taken off planet via Webway while you stay behind to make sure the Chaos Lord falls into the trap. You can make sure that her army is broken beyond repair. You can show just how fucking asinine Chaos is, and how their obsession with pleasing their pedophile gods gets them nothing but an early, painful, humiliating death.

If you're reading this, I'm dead, but so is that Chaos Lord while my family is hopefully alive. She took nearly fifty planets over the course of her life, but at the end of the day, she ended up like every other person I've written about in this book. She died stupid. And I, for one, couldn't be happier.

And this is where my story ends. I hope this book keeps you from being too much of a fucking moron. So do me a favor. Go out there, line up the sights on your lasrifle with the nearest cultist, and blow his or her brains out. It's lonely here in Hell, send some company my way. I'll be waiting to crack their skulls wide open.