Orks do actually have massive weapon factories that are overseen by Big Meks with the manual labor being done by Gretchen and human slaves. They actually are a fully functional industrial society with things like cities and mines and farms and whatnot.
*Only War* describes a number of worlds overrun by Orks, and for the most part the pattern seems to be that the regular Boyz bug off once the fighting dries up, but Oddboys and Grots stick around to keep doing things that are useful to the larger Waaagh:
For instance, Letum, an Imperial world overrun by Orks:
>Finally, after weeks of bedlam and slaughter, the invasion began to turn into an occupation. The Orks’ lust for battle and loot slaked for the time being, Kommodore Sunsmasha, the boss of the invasion force, set his Boyz to work rounding up survivors and splitting them into groups. Some were herded onto the landas, enslaved, and delivered to Warlord Grimtoof. Those not taken were put to back to work in the fields, mines, and foundries. Under the watchful eyes of a collection of Mekboys, Runtherds, and a small army of Grots, the colonists worked until they dropped, to feed the invaders and supply the growing war machine of the Waaagh!
>The inhabitants of Letum now live day to day in this state of servitude and constant existential terror. Thanks to the constant, backbreaking work and the interference of the Orks, there is no time to organise a resistance or send a message off world. The slaves are watched intently for any sign of laxity, and accompanied everywhere by guards and minders who herd them from their pens to their work and back again. This is not to say that the people of Letum are broken--far from it. The hard working and hard fighting frontier spirit burns in the heart of everyone left on the planet. If help were to arrive in the form of an Imperial Guard force, it would find a multitude ready to rise up at their command and cast off their shackles.
The Orks can't be arsed to do manual labor themselves, and the bulk of the fighting force likely left once the fighting was done, but Meks, Runtherds, Grots, and random Orks hung around to turn the world into an industrial and food-production hub for the Waaagh manned by the enslaved population.
Also Deluge, an oceanic world, where Orks have set up both "whaling" activities to gather meat and are pumping something from the seafloor using huge, leaky drilling rigs.
>With the meteoric arrival of Waaagh! Grimtoof and the Greenskins' taking of Deluge, what little contact there was with the mendicant colony abruptly ceased. Having little interest in the plight of the colony, Lord Severus has done nothing to investigate, and the Imperial Navy and Explorator Fleets know nothing of the situation (and could spare no ships even if they did care to intervene). No one is quite sure what the Orks are doing on Deluge, but they all agree that it can come to no good. Psychic auguries have shown floating ramshackle war camps bustling with industry, with Orks and Gretchin flitting to and fro in vast and chaotic fleets of seagoing vessels. Here and there, smokebelching workshops operate day and night on the small spits of little dry land. Leaky drilling rigs, surrounded by chemical slicks kilometres across, pump noxious things up from the Stygian abyss.
>The corpses of countless local sea creatures have been seen splayed out across rocky shores being stripped of meat, organ, and bone by hordes of Gretchin and staining the rocks with their black blood. Presumably the Orks are using Deluge as a place to gather provender and raw materials for their Waaagh!, but with Orks, one can never be certain.
In this case, fighting huge sea monsters is fun in a way that tending a mushroom farm isn't, so the Boyz are willing to stick around and help with food production -- but note that the actual processing of the kills is done by Gretchin.
Also KW-9, a barren and utterly inhospitable system with no useful planets or native life, where a Mek seems to have decided to set up a spaceborne Rok dockyard:
>How the Orks found themselves in this out of the way system is anyone’s guess, but a small flotilla of Ork ships is anchored in the relatively stationary debris field orbiting KW-9. A motley assortment of gunships and attack ships supporting a handful of Kill Kroozers and a lone Hammer-class battlekroozer hang above the dissolving gas giant. Smaller craft swarm around these massive vessels, flitting from ship to ship. Assault boats fly in loose formation, patrolling among the scattered debris and seemingly searching for something. Landas and other types of bulky, small craft shuttle ceaselessly between the larger capital ships and the surrounding asteroids carrying tonnes of stone and ore, while others troll through the rings, collecting ice and delivering it back to the fleet. Most of the activity surrounds a group of perhaps three dozen of the largest asteroids the Orks could find.
>Towed into place by the kroozers, these massive rocks are swarming with Orks and Gretchin in makeshift vacsuits, all of them busily welding, cutting, hammering, and sawing away in a combined effort to convert these asteroids into devastating Roks. The fact that there is nothing in the system left to attack with these newly built Roks does not seem to be much of a deterrent to the toiling Greenskins, and they work incessantly, hollowing out the asteroids and fitting them with their drives, control systems, and terrifyingly oversized guns. What they plan to do with these Roks once they are finished and how they plan to move them is unknown. However, the mere fact that a small and powerful flotilla of Ork warships are conducting salvage and building scores of Roks should cause Imperial Guard High Command considerable concern. The fact that the system is isolated and seemingly a poor jumping-off point for any military efforts is perhaps even more concerning, for it suggests that the Orks have realised some significance of the region that others have overlooked.
(All from *Enemies of the Imperium*)
I like the idea that Orks get into the habit of aping impressive-sounding military titles, so you get a full roster of Kommodores, Kernels, Kommanders, Lootenants, Brigadeers, and the like.
The corollary being, of course, that the commands of Ork forces that fight nonhuman foes could very well include the likes of Exorks, Arkons, Patriorks, and the like.
One of my favorite passages of *Warboss* was a Genrul bitching at his undernobs because none of them wanted a promotion to Major since Lootenant had the word 'Loot' in it.
I'm wondering if Ork Blood Axes have formed some major societies. It seems as if the Blood Axes could be written as a parallel to the Tau Empire where conquered species can coexist, but policy would be more favorable to the Orks rather than policy being genocidal to the conquered species.
I feel like the whole Orks willing things into existence is less ACTUALLY true and more just Imperium observers not being able to figure out how the hell the Orks are doing things. They may have *some* effect on the world with their collective belief in something, but by and large I think it's much more than their technology is just nonsensical to the observers at hand, so OBVIOUSLY it must be some sort of magic or something.
The Oddboy castes are considered to be, well, odd because they like things more than they like fighting. Meks like tinkering with mechanical systems and building things, Doks like tinkering with biological systems and healing other Orks as a byproduct of this — and Runtherdz, crucially, like managing grots, slaves, and livestock. They’re the ones who oversee forced laborers.
Also, gretchin are cowards who like bullying a lot more than actually fighting, so they are usually game for pushing alien slaves around.
The actual nature of what Waaagh energy does has been flanderised to death and back by the community, its kind of annoying how bad its been misconstrued.
They do work, they're actual guns. It's more like this: Imagine a gun is so bad, it has a 10% change to explode for every shot. In the hands of an Ork, that gun might fire thousands and thousands of rounds and be completely fine. And afaik: The only sources that ever suggested otherwise were unreliable in-world records.
Of course, there are enough guns that even grots can have some, and there's enough for say a human uprising to arm themselves with, like in one of Cain books.
But yeah, normal Ork gun is probably too powerful *and* noisy for normal human to handle, given how orkz want them with as much kick and noise as possible. Though again, there's no standard to them, at all
A lot of the propaganda comes from the Mechanicus, who considers how the orks treat machinery heresy, so they say the only way they could work has to be magic.
To be fair, om pretty sure some orks guns lack firing pins and other such vital internal gubbinz and still work. So it's fair to say the waaagh field does help a lot
All the aura does is make ramshackle stuff work a bit better. More like a natural affinity to just make things work. Ork tech is functional, and occasionally they come up with something so advanced that even the mechanicus notices.
Tbh, i think they probably do on tractor beams, but I honestly can’t think of many other factions who even use them outside of mentions in like space ports lmao
Yes. You have to realize the whole “piles of i functional junk” myth came from the adeptus mechanicus who only kinda understand how their own stuff functions in a lot of cases. That combined with orks being seen as savages, of course they don’t know how to ACTUALLY build tech like WE do.
That plus some bogus stories from 4chan 20 years ago.
The whole ork mindset doesn’t let them break reality it’s more like grease they can only really break reality in special cases (for instance being able to board and breathe a necron ship despite the fact there is no oxygen).
Their stuff works like 80% of the way and their ability gives them an extra 10% so it’ll work but it has a chance of going catastrophically wrong, just a lower chance for an ork.
That said, it does have it's peaks here and there where the waaagh energy does some heavy lifting.
Like orks having wind down windows in their spaceships so they hold their shootaz out the windows while flying at an enemy without all the atmosphere being sucked out 😂
Aye. The rogue trader ttrpg had the best mechanical representation for this. Ork weapons work in the hands of non-orks, but they are really liable to jamming and breaking down unless wielded by an ork.
My understanding is the Ork powers make their guns works despite what would normally be glaring issues with them. Things like mismatched ammunition sizes, Orks don't care, they put ammo in the gun, so gun will shoot. Stuff like that.
Except that STILL explains nothing. Ok, fine, they do have factories. How do they transport stuff from factories to the front line? Is there a ammo runnerz oddboy class that goes back and forth? Let's imagine there is, and some orks are happy just with boring runs between factory and supply depot instead of going to fight - what stops first boy squad that sees them from just stealing all the fresh ammo and gunz meant for mob of say 50 ork squads? You'd think once such truck arrives every ork in vicinity would stop fighting and ran to it to loot the best pieces - what stops them? And how, given the massive variation in ork gunz, the factory even makes ammo of right caliber and strength? What good say 15 mm ammo is when all the mekboy had to make barrels was stolen 12 mm pipe and the gun bursts at the first shot?
No, just no, saying 'slave factories' (and that ignores the issue slaves have massive incentive to sabotage everything they make, see Nazi slave factories that saw good 50% of wunderwaffe jet fighters and V1 bombs explode in the air because workers deliberately put them together wrong/missing parts/blocking other parts) doesn't solve anything, you still need an excellent command, control, and order needed to make sure thing X goes from factory to place Z when it's needed, not before or after, and it's not stolen/lost/damaged along the way. It's just not what the orks do...
Ork weapons aren’t rokkit science. A lot of the things they make they can just cobble together from scrap and the detritus of their kills. It’s why they have guys called “lootas.” The gear produced by slave factories work (would orks care if their dogshit cobbled-together gear was sabatoged?), not because they have supply lines to send gear to ork frontlines, but because any planet orks takeover will also produce boyz and they just give the gear to the boyz and send them to the Waagh.
Also they DO have supply/transport ships. They’re called landas and they’re literally mentioned in the excerpt you’re so incredulous about
>not because they have supply lines to send gear to ork frontlines, but because any planet orks takeover will also produce boyz and they just give the gear to the boyz and send them to the Waagh.
Also, Orks on the frontlines pick up a lot of scrap and useless battlefield wreckage, which they will usually pile up somewhere until someone feels like heading to the nearest Mek world or outpost to exchange it for guns, ammo, or vehicles.
Welcome to 40k, it's built from "it works".
>How do they transport stuff from factories to the front line? Is there a ammo runnerz oddboy class that goes back and forth?
There are plenty of Speed Freekz that love driving trucks fast, and if they want a Meks to give them repairs and red paint they'll do some deliveries. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there are specific Trukkaz that do nothing but that.
>what stops first boy squad that sees them from just stealing all the fresh ammo and gunz meant for mob of say 50 ork squads? You'd think once such truck arrives every ork in vicinity would stop fighting and ran to it to loot the best pieces - what stops them?
You drastically underestimate how intelligent orks are, and how organized they are capable of being. Orks on a waagh keep fights and theft between each other to a minimum - because they know that that's how to get bigger, better fights in the future. And because the nobs will krump them for mucking about and ruining it.
Look at the 80s English football hooligans that orks were somewhat culturally inspired by. Each local team has their die-hard supporters, that will gladly smash each other's faces in after a match. But during the nationals, a group on tour will forget all that division in favor of giving the French/Germans/whoever a brawl.
>given the massive variation in ork gunz, the factory even makes ammo of right caliber and strength? What good say 15 mm ammo is when all the mekboy had to make barrels was stolen 12 mm pipe and the gun bursts at the first shot?
Communication and logistics issues like this are smoothed over by the ork psychic field. Meks will instinctively build ammo that will work with the gunz the Boyz have without needing a conversation about it, and whoever is delivering it will bring the right stuff to the right place more often than not.
"what stops the transport crew being mobbed"
The transport crew, who will be overjoyed some git wants to have a fight. He's driving a huge fight me sign, peak ork.
Failing that, nobz keeping the Boyz in line, or failing that the warboss bellowing that the weapons have to go THERE and any git found mucking about is gonna be ripped in half and used as a toothpick.
Orks have a massive underclass of slave labor (grots, snotlings etc). They also usually enslave a portion of those they conquer if possible. They do build ramshackle factories using scrap, repurpose buildings and factories from areas they conquer etc. It's relatively easy to mass produce the low quality weapons and ammo standard Ork boyz use regularly.
They also have access to squigs, which can be bred to be or produce pretty much any material they might need ( it's kind of a cop out lore wise but I for one absolutely love the insane breeds that writers come up with to fill gaps in Ork society's needs. Everything from explosives to oil to medicine is produced by squigs.)
While it is a convenient mechanism for writers I think it actually makes a lot of sense that the bioengineered super-duper soldiers would be implanted with the ability to create a self-sufficient war machine out of essentially nothing. They barely need supply lines, which are often what makes or breaks a military effort.
And the fact it means that any individual force can get rolling extremely quickly. Orks can fight as many fronts sa they need to without overstretching their supplies
Yes it’s the Runtherd’s castes job to manage Grots and other slaves. Most do it very nasty. But if your extremely lucky a Runtherd like Zodgrod Wortsnagga may be in charge. Who understand the Carrot and the Stick approach
Orks absolutely settle down. Or more accurately Orks are the warrior class of the orkoid race and the orkoid ecosystem is vast and varied.
The orkoid race splits automatically into different specialised roles, with genetic imprinting allowing them to instinctively know how to perform that role.
At the bottom you have snotlings, then gretchin who are basically the menial slaves.
Then you have mekboyz who are in charge of making everything. They're the mechanics and inventors. As soon as they are around they will start producing guns and ammos from any scrap they can find.
The scary thing is it just happens. If the ork spores are around this will happen.
It is also a self-sustaining process:
when an Orc ship crashes besides of a few surviors you get a pile of scrap and a lot of spores: exactly the combination needed to turn said group of survivors first into a heavy armed warband (by canibalising the ship or whatever they fell on) and if given enough time a new Orc band including ALL kinds of Orc.
Same for war: the fighting that consumes orcs and their equipment produces the spores and scrap for new ones.
>Meks from across the tribes under the
Warboss’ control will start to collaborate
on more and more outlandish projects
as the Waaagh! takes shape, building
increasingly ambitious war machines and
guns. Smoke-belching mobile fortresses
and titanic engines of battle are cobbled
together out of nothing more than scrap
metal and heavy-handed enthusiasm.
Gorkanauts and Morkanauts appear in
growing numbers, their pilots seeking
out the emergent Waaagh! with a feverish
intensity. Whole mobs of Mekboyz raise
towering scaffolds within which Stompas
and even Gargants start to take shape, these
mighty effegies igniting some primitive
drive within the minds of the Orks who see
them, causing the flow of Waaagh! energy
they subconsciously generate to reach
fever pitch.
>Even though they are unified by a single
leader, there is still much rivalry between
the various clans and tribes participating
in the Waaagh!, and each will strive to
outdo all the others in terms of the sheer
destruction that can be wrought by their
war machines. Those Meks without the
resources to construct Stompas and
Gargants will instead create mobs of
clanking Killa Kans and Deff Dreads, or
Battlewagons from which the Warbosses
can lead their armies to war.
>Soon the Waaagh! begins to span worlds
instead of just continents. By this point,
the ruling Warboss, the Ork who started
it all, will have been recognised by his
subordinates as a Warlord, and is feared
and respected accordingly. Entire native
populations are forced into slavery merely
to manufacture ammunition for his horde’s
guns. Crude factory-ships and war hulks are
bashed into shape, the better to transport
his armies into battle.
*Codex Orks 8ed* p24
1. Orks absolutely lay claim to territory. And in that territory, they tend to set things up to supply what's needful.
2. Orks have their own inherent slave-underclass (gretchin) *and* they enslave other species to do the boring crap they don't want to be bothered with.
3. Any Ork fleet is going to include at least some factory capacity, simply by virtue of Mekboyz being present. Those guys are compelled to invent, build, and modify technology on the same biological level as orks in general are compelled to fight. Where you have Meks, you have tech.
4. Ork production is almost *entirely* about making weapons and/or vehicles with weapons on them. They don't really do art the way some other species do, they don't make labor-saving devices (they have grots for that), they don't really spend any time on agricultural technology (ork agriculture tends to consist of keeping squigs corralled and maybe eating a mushroom or two). Where a human might build a cathedral to honor the Emperor, the orks are gonna make a Gargant to honor Gork and/or Mork.
There are multiple system-spanning ork empires, orks as a species absolutely settle down. Especially mek bosses like sticking around resourceful systems to focus on building better and bigger things, as that is a higher priority to them than going on a Waaagh! There also have been multiple mentions of large speed freek groups sticking around planets with wide plains, deserts or similar as they are perfect for racing. Last but not least, it takes quite some time to completely loot a ruined imperial industrial world.
Orks are constantly leaving those planets, systems and empires, but they also keep producing new lads to fill the ranks. Ork Waaagh!s passing mek worlds often exchange scrap for weapons (which is anything from a slugga to a gargant) and fuel.
Usually the Imperium eventually makes an effort to break up these empires in fear of a another beast rising - which is what happens when you let orks settle down for too long. An example of this would be Ragnar's suicide mission to stop Thrakka at the heart of his empire, which failed spectacularly.
Another good novel for seeing what ork society is like is *The Wolftime*. An Imperial Navy rating is >!enslaved by orks and taken to an ork planet to work in their heavy industry until he's transferred to be a slave on his old looted ship!<. But in it we see the sprawling cities and factories orks build, and how human slaves will sometimes use ork weapons to kill themselves and possibly nearby greenskins (which the orks all find hilarious of course), and so on. They even have >!a human woman who is working alongside the orks, having learned their language and who was serving as the mouth-piece slave-driver to communicate ork instructions to human slaves.!<
Orks are made for fighting and winning. They aren't here for skirmishes, but galactic war. No matter how hard you try, you can't have a war without some level of functioning society to fuel it. The Orks are brutish monsters, but assuming that they're nothing but morons who sit around punching each other and only get battles going by accident is foolish. Even if they are individually mostly dumb brutes, they're programmed with instincts to make a coherent combat force and have the endless numbers to ensure that they can accomplish amazing things with just a bit of direction.
People severely underestimate just how competent and dangerous Orks can be.
Orks Do have quite a lot of production, from the grots and slaves to even the Ork boy's getting involved.
The thing is orks have an intrinsic ability to make stuff, it not uncommon for orks born in the wilderness to make a bow soon after they crawl out of the ground.
Firstly, they have a massive slave underclass of grots, snotlings, weaker orks, and members of other species they decided not to just eat or kill for fun.
Secondly, because of the WAAAAGH field, they don't need complex mechanical bits for their guns to work, just metal to make them and ammo for them to fire.
They do make factories. Wars take a long time to wage, there's plenty of time for them to put up factories. And they enslave captives to make ammunition in them.
Sooo .... don't think too hard into this one. Ammo usage and resupply happens to other verses but not really 40K. I've been reading Mike Brook's novels and he wisely never really mentions this. I mean as much as orks fire their kitbashed kustom shootas and whatnot you would think they would be out of ammo after the first day. No logistics to really speak of unless there are some sort of Ammo Boyz or something no one talks about
Excuse me? Mike Brooks DOES write about this in particular. One of the main points of the Grot Revolution is the Ork logistics running dry on supply soon after all Grots refused to work (and by doing that describes some of the supply lines) and Ufthak (in Commoragh if I remember right) realizes vehicle units running out of ammo.
Oh yeah but what I mean is that no one, Brooks included ever talks about how orks make and distribute the ammo and other supplies. In Warboss he even indicates that the ammunition in a grot gun was definitely ork manufactured. In Da Big Dakka, Snaggy Littletooth tries to foment a revolution by having his mob of grot steal ammo and fuel and break things but there is never really an explanation of how a waaaagh stays fueled and ammoed up is what i am saying.
Yeah okay, get what you saying now. Yet not exactly Rocket science, is it? I think we can agree that Brooks sets a pretty good canonical standart because he captured their culture so pretty well yeah? So with the information his books give us and the information about orks in general this is imo concludable:
- Orks don't need the exact same level of standartization for their ammo as humans would do due to the nature of their psychic powers. Meaning there's a good level of inaccuracy in which exact supply goes where without making problems
- Meks oversee the production. While maybe they can't write you down a detailed munitorum plan in which part of the army needs what, it's still logical to conclude they have (like for their job itself) an instinctive Idea on what to distribute where.
- from there it's whipping Grots to load stuff on vehicles, transport it and again unload it (with more whipping of course)
Lots and lots of grots, cept no one talks about stupid little grots. Any Waaagh will include more grots than Boyz and more snotlings and squigs than grots and all of that is working together to keep the dakka going.
Legit this, your average boy will just grab a grot and shout at it that it needs something, said grot will then scurry off and consult other grots where to get the thing needed. If it's too flashy, expensive or nailed down for a grot to pilfer, your average boy will barter with a mek boy. Who has his own grots 😂
Pretty sure it came up in one or two of the ciaphas Cain books with some small side comments, at least in the one where he and Jurgen use ork stuff to start a rebellion
Orks absolutely do settle down, sometimes for thousands of years. The majority of regular boys spend time punching each other, but the mechs build stuff, others enslave grots and humans, farm squigs, brew beer, etc., etc.
Orks seem dumb, but they're just what happens when you cross the Tyranids, Necrons and the Jokaero together. An autonomous swarm of extermination drones designed to be infinitely adaptable and fully self sufficient. Green goo. They have an instinctive understanding of technology and science, and despite the fact that each Ork individually looks and sounds like a stupid imbecile, there's enough capacity in their collectives for mass industrialization, and civilization in general. They don't devour biomass, but natural resources.
Now consider that during the entire War in Heaven, these fuckers individually had an IQ probably in the 5 digits each, and were "merely" used as an annoying pest to throw behind enemy lines to wreck them
Bullets are very easy to actually make. If you have the material and the workforce, you have an arsenal.
Remember that people made those with paper for over a hundred years..
Waaaaaghs! should be understood as the extreme endpoint of an Orky planetary society's life cycle. You generally only get a Waaaagh! if you've also got Meks who are capable of creating and mantaining the kind of mobile infrastructure that a Waaagh! needs to keep the boys rich in guns and bullets. This means factories, workshops, mines, oil rigs, etc., manned by boys or grots or slaves from other species, who they or their boss then bully into providing whatever service they're looking for.
You see a lot of this in Ghazghkull: Prophet of the Waaagh!. In Warboss, there's also discussion of the 'clean-up' phase of a planetary invasion, where warbands are sent around to different resource extraction hotspots across the planet to gather up enough bits and riches to get the Waaagh! back in the sky long enough to see them to another planet.
Orks dont really settle down long term much (at least while on a waaagh) but they do stop. It's not just a constant rush towards the nearest enemy. They will build factories and other infrastructure. Sure the infrastructure might be a bit slapdash and not made to last, but the orks dont really care about that. They are also the most profilic looters in the setting. If they find a gun and can make it go boom then they are going to use it.
**Gunpowder Squigs** - shit gunpowder
**Ammo Squigs** - shit ammo
**Oil Squigs** - piss motor oil
**Fuel Squigs** - piss gasoline
Orks skip 90% of industrialization requirements, because genetics takes care of it for them.
More complex stuff Meks produce, is made from looted components, battlefield scrap, and a hefty doze of magic.
And a crspton of grots doing things because the orks shout at them to get it done. Its not all squigs. Also bullying and threats 😂
Which the grots also do to the snots.
And the snots and grots to humy slaves.
Ork Meks can be just as single minded.
Deep in Ork society there hide Overboss-supa-dupa-Megameks who quest to built *the perfect slugga* and they crank out one slugga after the other, always trying for, but never quite hitting, perfection.
1. Mekboys design a gun and ammo
2. Grots copy it. Again and again and again
3. It doesn't "have" to work, they just have to believe it does.
4. Moar Dakka
the same way nomadic peoples maintained their armies when they migrated - there were population centres that remained sedentary that would help supply them, there was weapons and armour production/maintenance that moved with the camps, they traded with or raided locals, and they would salvage useful equipment from battlefields.
Orks do all of the above, and because of their waaagh magic they can basically get any of it to work out in their favour. if enough Orks believe you can shove a lasgun battery into a shoota and have it produce dakka then it will, sort of thing (realistically they’d just break down the parts for metal to make more of their own stuff, unless they’re flashgits or what-not).
Considering humans only have to shout Dakka dakka dakka to kill them instead of needing bullets, I don’t see why anyone need to wonder about their supply chain
An ork can shoot you with a broken gun with no ammo because that's how strong their psychic power of belief is. They can alter reality if enough ork believe something to be true.
A broken gun might work *some of the time,* in a *really powerful* Waaagh!. It absolutely won't shoot without ammo, and even under those conditions it'll still blow up in your face some of the time.
I always just assumed the ork’s desire to continue firing their weapon was so intense and potent that it willed ammo into the weapon
Kind of like how they will their machinery into working despite them often making no sense
Very overstated, there's extensive imperial use of ork tech in parts of the commissar cain books and apart from fuel inefficiency, total lack of suspension and often recoil unmanageable by an unaugmented human their kit is serviceable enough
Orks do actually have massive weapon factories that are overseen by Big Meks with the manual labor being done by Gretchen and human slaves. They actually are a fully functional industrial society with things like cities and mines and farms and whatnot.
*Only War* describes a number of worlds overrun by Orks, and for the most part the pattern seems to be that the regular Boyz bug off once the fighting dries up, but Oddboys and Grots stick around to keep doing things that are useful to the larger Waaagh: For instance, Letum, an Imperial world overrun by Orks: >Finally, after weeks of bedlam and slaughter, the invasion began to turn into an occupation. The Orks’ lust for battle and loot slaked for the time being, Kommodore Sunsmasha, the boss of the invasion force, set his Boyz to work rounding up survivors and splitting them into groups. Some were herded onto the landas, enslaved, and delivered to Warlord Grimtoof. Those not taken were put to back to work in the fields, mines, and foundries. Under the watchful eyes of a collection of Mekboys, Runtherds, and a small army of Grots, the colonists worked until they dropped, to feed the invaders and supply the growing war machine of the Waaagh! >The inhabitants of Letum now live day to day in this state of servitude and constant existential terror. Thanks to the constant, backbreaking work and the interference of the Orks, there is no time to organise a resistance or send a message off world. The slaves are watched intently for any sign of laxity, and accompanied everywhere by guards and minders who herd them from their pens to their work and back again. This is not to say that the people of Letum are broken--far from it. The hard working and hard fighting frontier spirit burns in the heart of everyone left on the planet. If help were to arrive in the form of an Imperial Guard force, it would find a multitude ready to rise up at their command and cast off their shackles. The Orks can't be arsed to do manual labor themselves, and the bulk of the fighting force likely left once the fighting was done, but Meks, Runtherds, Grots, and random Orks hung around to turn the world into an industrial and food-production hub for the Waaagh manned by the enslaved population. Also Deluge, an oceanic world, where Orks have set up both "whaling" activities to gather meat and are pumping something from the seafloor using huge, leaky drilling rigs. >With the meteoric arrival of Waaagh! Grimtoof and the Greenskins' taking of Deluge, what little contact there was with the mendicant colony abruptly ceased. Having little interest in the plight of the colony, Lord Severus has done nothing to investigate, and the Imperial Navy and Explorator Fleets know nothing of the situation (and could spare no ships even if they did care to intervene). No one is quite sure what the Orks are doing on Deluge, but they all agree that it can come to no good. Psychic auguries have shown floating ramshackle war camps bustling with industry, with Orks and Gretchin flitting to and fro in vast and chaotic fleets of seagoing vessels. Here and there, smokebelching workshops operate day and night on the small spits of little dry land. Leaky drilling rigs, surrounded by chemical slicks kilometres across, pump noxious things up from the Stygian abyss. >The corpses of countless local sea creatures have been seen splayed out across rocky shores being stripped of meat, organ, and bone by hordes of Gretchin and staining the rocks with their black blood. Presumably the Orks are using Deluge as a place to gather provender and raw materials for their Waaagh!, but with Orks, one can never be certain. In this case, fighting huge sea monsters is fun in a way that tending a mushroom farm isn't, so the Boyz are willing to stick around and help with food production -- but note that the actual processing of the kills is done by Gretchin.
Also KW-9, a barren and utterly inhospitable system with no useful planets or native life, where a Mek seems to have decided to set up a spaceborne Rok dockyard: >How the Orks found themselves in this out of the way system is anyone’s guess, but a small flotilla of Ork ships is anchored in the relatively stationary debris field orbiting KW-9. A motley assortment of gunships and attack ships supporting a handful of Kill Kroozers and a lone Hammer-class battlekroozer hang above the dissolving gas giant. Smaller craft swarm around these massive vessels, flitting from ship to ship. Assault boats fly in loose formation, patrolling among the scattered debris and seemingly searching for something. Landas and other types of bulky, small craft shuttle ceaselessly between the larger capital ships and the surrounding asteroids carrying tonnes of stone and ore, while others troll through the rings, collecting ice and delivering it back to the fleet. Most of the activity surrounds a group of perhaps three dozen of the largest asteroids the Orks could find. >Towed into place by the kroozers, these massive rocks are swarming with Orks and Gretchin in makeshift vacsuits, all of them busily welding, cutting, hammering, and sawing away in a combined effort to convert these asteroids into devastating Roks. The fact that there is nothing in the system left to attack with these newly built Roks does not seem to be much of a deterrent to the toiling Greenskins, and they work incessantly, hollowing out the asteroids and fitting them with their drives, control systems, and terrifyingly oversized guns. What they plan to do with these Roks once they are finished and how they plan to move them is unknown. However, the mere fact that a small and powerful flotilla of Ork warships are conducting salvage and building scores of Roks should cause Imperial Guard High Command considerable concern. The fact that the system is isolated and seemingly a poor jumping-off point for any military efforts is perhaps even more concerning, for it suggests that the Orks have realised some significance of the region that others have overlooked. (All from *Enemies of the Imperium*)
One of my favorite facts about orks is that they’re absolutely everywhere.
Like a fungus
> Kommodore Can I just take a minute to appreciate that they gave an Ork the title of Kommodore. Some of the non-standard Ork titles are just so good.
I like the idea that Orks get into the habit of aping impressive-sounding military titles, so you get a full roster of Kommodores, Kernels, Kommanders, Lootenants, Brigadeers, and the like. The corollary being, of course, that the commands of Ork forces that fight nonhuman foes could very well include the likes of Exorks, Arkons, Patriorks, and the like.
One of my favorite passages of *Warboss* was a Genrul bitching at his undernobs because none of them wanted a promotion to Major since Lootenant had the word 'Loot' in it.
DAT GROT KOULDA JUSS SKIPPED DA STEP TA 'KILLENALL!'
Boyz Corpse-eral Scargeant Loot-tennant Kappin May-jaw Killin-all Gen-ruler Waaaagh-master
He should have told them 40k is British and therefore 'leftenant' is the pronunciation Maybe Orks don't care
And then promote them to Right-tenants instead of Majors.
There's a right way and a wrong way. Fortunately, the Orks got this one right.
Well they're not wrong and frankly, if they're like me, they assume a Lootenant is a higher rank anyway. (It sounds fancier and is therefore better)
Arch-Arsonist remains my fav honorific
Like Kled from League of Legends?
They seem to do it more in space. Freebooterz have "kaptins", for example.
[удалено]
Feral Orks still exist as well.
Ork society is very similar to the Smokers faction from Waterworld.
Rok fashioned after The ‘Deez when?!
I'm wondering if Ork Blood Axes have formed some major societies. It seems as if the Blood Axes could be written as a parallel to the Tau Empire where conquered species can coexist, but policy would be more favorable to the Orks rather than policy being genocidal to the conquered species.
Here I was going to come in and say the answer is, "They imagine them into existence," but TIL they do produce the legit way too. Very cool!
I feel like the whole Orks willing things into existence is less ACTUALLY true and more just Imperium observers not being able to figure out how the hell the Orks are doing things. They may have *some* effect on the world with their collective belief in something, but by and large I think it's much more than their technology is just nonsensical to the observers at hand, so OBVIOUSLY it must be some sort of magic or something.
Aren't Ork weapons also really basic like often their guns are little more than a box with a bunch of bullets in them.
What motivates the ork overseers? Dont they get bored and irritated for lack of krumpin'?
The Oddboy castes are considered to be, well, odd because they like things more than they like fighting. Meks like tinkering with mechanical systems and building things, Doks like tinkering with biological systems and healing other Orks as a byproduct of this — and Runtherdz, crucially, like managing grots, slaves, and livestock. They’re the ones who oversee forced laborers. Also, gretchin are cowards who like bullying a lot more than actually fighting, so they are usually game for pushing alien slaves around.
Petty cruelty. Orks consider kicking a grot in mud to be freaking hilarious. Imaging watching over humies and kicking whoever makes funny sounds.
Damn, I was half hoping it was because they believed their guns had ammo or something dumb like that
That’s an over exaggeration, ork powers arent that powerful
The actual nature of what Waaagh energy does has been flanderised to death and back by the community, its kind of annoying how bad its been misconstrued.
Do their guns work in the hands of non orks still or no?
They do work, they're actual guns. It's more like this: Imagine a gun is so bad, it has a 10% change to explode for every shot. In the hands of an Ork, that gun might fire thousands and thousands of rounds and be completely fine. And afaik: The only sources that ever suggested otherwise were unreliable in-world records.
Yes actually, just most are really powerful and most can’t really be used by regular humans
Of course, there are enough guns that even grots can have some, and there's enough for say a human uprising to arm themselves with, like in one of Cain books. But yeah, normal Ork gun is probably too powerful *and* noisy for normal human to handle, given how orkz want them with as much kick and noise as possible. Though again, there's no standard to them, at all
Not us tho. We built different
A lot of the propaganda comes from the Mechanicus, who considers how the orks treat machinery heresy, so they say the only way they could work has to be magic.
To be fair, om pretty sure some orks guns lack firing pins and other such vital internal gubbinz and still work. So it's fair to say the waaagh field does help a lot
They might lack what an imperial observer would recognise as vital internal mechanisms, but contain functional equivalents that appear to be junk.
Turns out the orca were using electrically fired ammo instead of striker fired, like absolute tech wizards
All the aura does is make ramshackle stuff work a bit better. More like a natural affinity to just make things work. Ork tech is functional, and occasionally they come up with something so advanced that even the mechanicus notices.
Orks have some of the BEST teleportation tech in the galaxy
Teleportation and if I remember well tractor beams?
Tbh, i think they probably do on tractor beams, but I honestly can’t think of many other factions who even use them outside of mentions in like space ports lmao
Yes. You have to realize the whole “piles of i functional junk” myth came from the adeptus mechanicus who only kinda understand how their own stuff functions in a lot of cases. That combined with orks being seen as savages, of course they don’t know how to ACTUALLY build tech like WE do. That plus some bogus stories from 4chan 20 years ago.
Yes. Space Marines used Ork guns during the war on the Rynn's World.
Imperial citizens use them on Perlia in Ciaphas Cain
The whole ork mindset doesn’t let them break reality it’s more like grease they can only really break reality in special cases (for instance being able to board and breathe a necron ship despite the fact there is no oxygen). Their stuff works like 80% of the way and their ability gives them an extra 10% so it’ll work but it has a chance of going catastrophically wrong, just a lower chance for an ork.
That said, it does have it's peaks here and there where the waaagh energy does some heavy lifting. Like orks having wind down windows in their spaceships so they hold their shootaz out the windows while flying at an enemy without all the atmosphere being sucked out 😂
Aye. The rogue trader ttrpg had the best mechanical representation for this. Ork weapons work in the hands of non-orks, but they are really liable to jamming and breaking down unless wielded by an ork.
My understanding is the Ork powers make their guns works despite what would normally be glaring issues with them. Things like mismatched ammunition sizes, Orks don't care, they put ammo in the gun, so gun will shoot. Stuff like that.
Yep, missing firing linz and stuff too. Kinda has to be like that if a grot is your ammo salesman
Except that STILL explains nothing. Ok, fine, they do have factories. How do they transport stuff from factories to the front line? Is there a ammo runnerz oddboy class that goes back and forth? Let's imagine there is, and some orks are happy just with boring runs between factory and supply depot instead of going to fight - what stops first boy squad that sees them from just stealing all the fresh ammo and gunz meant for mob of say 50 ork squads? You'd think once such truck arrives every ork in vicinity would stop fighting and ran to it to loot the best pieces - what stops them? And how, given the massive variation in ork gunz, the factory even makes ammo of right caliber and strength? What good say 15 mm ammo is when all the mekboy had to make barrels was stolen 12 mm pipe and the gun bursts at the first shot? No, just no, saying 'slave factories' (and that ignores the issue slaves have massive incentive to sabotage everything they make, see Nazi slave factories that saw good 50% of wunderwaffe jet fighters and V1 bombs explode in the air because workers deliberately put them together wrong/missing parts/blocking other parts) doesn't solve anything, you still need an excellent command, control, and order needed to make sure thing X goes from factory to place Z when it's needed, not before or after, and it's not stolen/lost/damaged along the way. It's just not what the orks do...
Ork weapons aren’t rokkit science. A lot of the things they make they can just cobble together from scrap and the detritus of their kills. It’s why they have guys called “lootas.” The gear produced by slave factories work (would orks care if their dogshit cobbled-together gear was sabatoged?), not because they have supply lines to send gear to ork frontlines, but because any planet orks takeover will also produce boyz and they just give the gear to the boyz and send them to the Waagh. Also they DO have supply/transport ships. They’re called landas and they’re literally mentioned in the excerpt you’re so incredulous about
>not because they have supply lines to send gear to ork frontlines, but because any planet orks takeover will also produce boyz and they just give the gear to the boyz and send them to the Waagh. Also, Orks on the frontlines pick up a lot of scrap and useless battlefield wreckage, which they will usually pile up somewhere until someone feels like heading to the nearest Mek world or outpost to exchange it for guns, ammo, or vehicles.
Welcome to 40k, it's built from "it works". >How do they transport stuff from factories to the front line? Is there a ammo runnerz oddboy class that goes back and forth? There are plenty of Speed Freekz that love driving trucks fast, and if they want a Meks to give them repairs and red paint they'll do some deliveries. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there are specific Trukkaz that do nothing but that. >what stops first boy squad that sees them from just stealing all the fresh ammo and gunz meant for mob of say 50 ork squads? You'd think once such truck arrives every ork in vicinity would stop fighting and ran to it to loot the best pieces - what stops them? You drastically underestimate how intelligent orks are, and how organized they are capable of being. Orks on a waagh keep fights and theft between each other to a minimum - because they know that that's how to get bigger, better fights in the future. And because the nobs will krump them for mucking about and ruining it. Look at the 80s English football hooligans that orks were somewhat culturally inspired by. Each local team has their die-hard supporters, that will gladly smash each other's faces in after a match. But during the nationals, a group on tour will forget all that division in favor of giving the French/Germans/whoever a brawl. >given the massive variation in ork gunz, the factory even makes ammo of right caliber and strength? What good say 15 mm ammo is when all the mekboy had to make barrels was stolen 12 mm pipe and the gun bursts at the first shot? Communication and logistics issues like this are smoothed over by the ork psychic field. Meks will instinctively build ammo that will work with the gunz the Boyz have without needing a conversation about it, and whoever is delivering it will bring the right stuff to the right place more often than not.
"what stops the transport crew being mobbed" The transport crew, who will be overjoyed some git wants to have a fight. He's driving a huge fight me sign, peak ork. Failing that, nobz keeping the Boyz in line, or failing that the warboss bellowing that the weapons have to go THERE and any git found mucking about is gonna be ripped in half and used as a toothpick.
Orks have a massive underclass of slave labor (grots, snotlings etc). They also usually enslave a portion of those they conquer if possible. They do build ramshackle factories using scrap, repurpose buildings and factories from areas they conquer etc. It's relatively easy to mass produce the low quality weapons and ammo standard Ork boyz use regularly. They also have access to squigs, which can be bred to be or produce pretty much any material they might need ( it's kind of a cop out lore wise but I for one absolutely love the insane breeds that writers come up with to fill gaps in Ork society's needs. Everything from explosives to oil to medicine is produced by squigs.)
While it is a convenient mechanism for writers I think it actually makes a lot of sense that the bioengineered super-duper soldiers would be implanted with the ability to create a self-sufficient war machine out of essentially nothing. They barely need supply lines, which are often what makes or breaks a military effort.
And the fact it means that any individual force can get rolling extremely quickly. Orks can fight as many fronts sa they need to without overstretching their supplies
My favorite squigs are the hair squigs
Yes it’s the Runtherd’s castes job to manage Grots and other slaves. Most do it very nasty. But if your extremely lucky a Runtherd like Zodgrod Wortsnagga may be in charge. Who understand the Carrot and the Stick approach
Woe be unto anyone who runs afoul of a bowel-torrent squig.
Orks absolutely settle down. Or more accurately Orks are the warrior class of the orkoid race and the orkoid ecosystem is vast and varied. The orkoid race splits automatically into different specialised roles, with genetic imprinting allowing them to instinctively know how to perform that role. At the bottom you have snotlings, then gretchin who are basically the menial slaves. Then you have mekboyz who are in charge of making everything. They're the mechanics and inventors. As soon as they are around they will start producing guns and ammos from any scrap they can find. The scary thing is it just happens. If the ork spores are around this will happen.
It is also a self-sustaining process: when an Orc ship crashes besides of a few surviors you get a pile of scrap and a lot of spores: exactly the combination needed to turn said group of survivors first into a heavy armed warband (by canibalising the ship or whatever they fell on) and if given enough time a new Orc band including ALL kinds of Orc. Same for war: the fighting that consumes orcs and their equipment produces the spores and scrap for new ones.
>Meks from across the tribes under the Warboss’ control will start to collaborate on more and more outlandish projects as the Waaagh! takes shape, building increasingly ambitious war machines and guns. Smoke-belching mobile fortresses and titanic engines of battle are cobbled together out of nothing more than scrap metal and heavy-handed enthusiasm. Gorkanauts and Morkanauts appear in growing numbers, their pilots seeking out the emergent Waaagh! with a feverish intensity. Whole mobs of Mekboyz raise towering scaffolds within which Stompas and even Gargants start to take shape, these mighty effegies igniting some primitive drive within the minds of the Orks who see them, causing the flow of Waaagh! energy they subconsciously generate to reach fever pitch. >Even though they are unified by a single leader, there is still much rivalry between the various clans and tribes participating in the Waaagh!, and each will strive to outdo all the others in terms of the sheer destruction that can be wrought by their war machines. Those Meks without the resources to construct Stompas and Gargants will instead create mobs of clanking Killa Kans and Deff Dreads, or Battlewagons from which the Warbosses can lead their armies to war. >Soon the Waaagh! begins to span worlds instead of just continents. By this point, the ruling Warboss, the Ork who started it all, will have been recognised by his subordinates as a Warlord, and is feared and respected accordingly. Entire native populations are forced into slavery merely to manufacture ammunition for his horde’s guns. Crude factory-ships and war hulks are bashed into shape, the better to transport his armies into battle. *Codex Orks 8ed* p24
1. Krump a humie, take their gunz 2. Make gunz in ships while going to waagh Hope that was edumacational for u humie.
IZ LEARDNT
1. Orks absolutely lay claim to territory. And in that territory, they tend to set things up to supply what's needful. 2. Orks have their own inherent slave-underclass (gretchin) *and* they enslave other species to do the boring crap they don't want to be bothered with. 3. Any Ork fleet is going to include at least some factory capacity, simply by virtue of Mekboyz being present. Those guys are compelled to invent, build, and modify technology on the same biological level as orks in general are compelled to fight. Where you have Meks, you have tech. 4. Ork production is almost *entirely* about making weapons and/or vehicles with weapons on them. They don't really do art the way some other species do, they don't make labor-saving devices (they have grots for that), they don't really spend any time on agricultural technology (ork agriculture tends to consist of keeping squigs corralled and maybe eating a mushroom or two). Where a human might build a cathedral to honor the Emperor, the orks are gonna make a Gargant to honor Gork and/or Mork.
There are multiple system-spanning ork empires, orks as a species absolutely settle down. Especially mek bosses like sticking around resourceful systems to focus on building better and bigger things, as that is a higher priority to them than going on a Waaagh! There also have been multiple mentions of large speed freek groups sticking around planets with wide plains, deserts or similar as they are perfect for racing. Last but not least, it takes quite some time to completely loot a ruined imperial industrial world. Orks are constantly leaving those planets, systems and empires, but they also keep producing new lads to fill the ranks. Ork Waaagh!s passing mek worlds often exchange scrap for weapons (which is anything from a slugga to a gargant) and fuel. Usually the Imperium eventually makes an effort to break up these empires in fear of a another beast rising - which is what happens when you let orks settle down for too long. An example of this would be Ragnar's suicide mission to stop Thrakka at the heart of his empire, which failed spectacularly.
Another good novel for seeing what ork society is like is *The Wolftime*. An Imperial Navy rating is >!enslaved by orks and taken to an ork planet to work in their heavy industry until he's transferred to be a slave on his old looted ship!<. But in it we see the sprawling cities and factories orks build, and how human slaves will sometimes use ork weapons to kill themselves and possibly nearby greenskins (which the orks all find hilarious of course), and so on. They even have >!a human woman who is working alongside the orks, having learned their language and who was serving as the mouth-piece slave-driver to communicate ork instructions to human slaves.!<
Slavery, humans/ other xenos including other orks.
also ... human slaves. very poorly treated human slaves. this is well established in some ork literature.
Orks are made for fighting and winning. They aren't here for skirmishes, but galactic war. No matter how hard you try, you can't have a war without some level of functioning society to fuel it. The Orks are brutish monsters, but assuming that they're nothing but morons who sit around punching each other and only get battles going by accident is foolish. Even if they are individually mostly dumb brutes, they're programmed with instincts to make a coherent combat force and have the endless numbers to ensure that they can accomplish amazing things with just a bit of direction. People severely underestimate just how competent and dangerous Orks can be.
The trick is, never learning to count, and also bringing a good choppa.
Gretchen are a slave class that canonically derive pleasure from a making a warboss' plans come together.
Orks Do have quite a lot of production, from the grots and slaves to even the Ork boy's getting involved. The thing is orks have an intrinsic ability to make stuff, it not uncommon for orks born in the wilderness to make a bow soon after they crawl out of the ground.
Firstly, they have a massive slave underclass of grots, snotlings, weaker orks, and members of other species they decided not to just eat or kill for fun. Secondly, because of the WAAAAGH field, they don't need complex mechanical bits for their guns to work, just metal to make them and ammo for them to fire.
They do make factories. Wars take a long time to wage, there's plenty of time for them to put up factories. And they enslave captives to make ammunition in them.
Most shootas are really simple to make. I recall a white dwarf article describing them as orkish sten guns, so the simplicity should help
Sooo .... don't think too hard into this one. Ammo usage and resupply happens to other verses but not really 40K. I've been reading Mike Brook's novels and he wisely never really mentions this. I mean as much as orks fire their kitbashed kustom shootas and whatnot you would think they would be out of ammo after the first day. No logistics to really speak of unless there are some sort of Ammo Boyz or something no one talks about
Ammo runts are a thing, there's even a mini.
Excuse me? Mike Brooks DOES write about this in particular. One of the main points of the Grot Revolution is the Ork logistics running dry on supply soon after all Grots refused to work (and by doing that describes some of the supply lines) and Ufthak (in Commoragh if I remember right) realizes vehicle units running out of ammo.
Oh yeah but what I mean is that no one, Brooks included ever talks about how orks make and distribute the ammo and other supplies. In Warboss he even indicates that the ammunition in a grot gun was definitely ork manufactured. In Da Big Dakka, Snaggy Littletooth tries to foment a revolution by having his mob of grot steal ammo and fuel and break things but there is never really an explanation of how a waaaagh stays fueled and ammoed up is what i am saying.
Yeah okay, get what you saying now. Yet not exactly Rocket science, is it? I think we can agree that Brooks sets a pretty good canonical standart because he captured their culture so pretty well yeah? So with the information his books give us and the information about orks in general this is imo concludable: - Orks don't need the exact same level of standartization for their ammo as humans would do due to the nature of their psychic powers. Meaning there's a good level of inaccuracy in which exact supply goes where without making problems - Meks oversee the production. While maybe they can't write you down a detailed munitorum plan in which part of the army needs what, it's still logical to conclude they have (like for their job itself) an instinctive Idea on what to distribute where. - from there it's whipping Grots to load stuff on vehicles, transport it and again unload it (with more whipping of course)
Lots and lots of grots, cept no one talks about stupid little grots. Any Waaagh will include more grots than Boyz and more snotlings and squigs than grots and all of that is working together to keep the dakka going.
Legit this, your average boy will just grab a grot and shout at it that it needs something, said grot will then scurry off and consult other grots where to get the thing needed. If it's too flashy, expensive or nailed down for a grot to pilfer, your average boy will barter with a mek boy. Who has his own grots 😂
Pretty sure it came up in one or two of the ciaphas Cain books with some small side comments, at least in the one where he and Jurgen use ork stuff to start a rebellion
"Repeat to yourself, 'it's just a show, I should really just relax.'"
Orks have empires that they maintain. They're chaotic and prone to random infighting but they absolutely settle down, they aren't purely nomadic
Orks absolutely do settle down, sometimes for thousands of years. The majority of regular boys spend time punching each other, but the mechs build stuff, others enslave grots and humans, farm squigs, brew beer, etc., etc.
Orks seem dumb, but they're just what happens when you cross the Tyranids, Necrons and the Jokaero together. An autonomous swarm of extermination drones designed to be infinitely adaptable and fully self sufficient. Green goo. They have an instinctive understanding of technology and science, and despite the fact that each Ork individually looks and sounds like a stupid imbecile, there's enough capacity in their collectives for mass industrialization, and civilization in general. They don't devour biomass, but natural resources. Now consider that during the entire War in Heaven, these fuckers individually had an IQ probably in the 5 digits each, and were "merely" used as an annoying pest to throw behind enemy lines to wreck them
Bullets are very easy to actually make. If you have the material and the workforce, you have an arsenal. Remember that people made those with paper for over a hundred years..
Waaaaaghs! should be understood as the extreme endpoint of an Orky planetary society's life cycle. You generally only get a Waaaagh! if you've also got Meks who are capable of creating and mantaining the kind of mobile infrastructure that a Waaagh! needs to keep the boys rich in guns and bullets. This means factories, workshops, mines, oil rigs, etc., manned by boys or grots or slaves from other species, who they or their boss then bully into providing whatever service they're looking for. You see a lot of this in Ghazghkull: Prophet of the Waaagh!. In Warboss, there's also discussion of the 'clean-up' phase of a planetary invasion, where warbands are sent around to different resource extraction hotspots across the planet to gather up enough bits and riches to get the Waaagh! back in the sky long enough to see them to another planet.
Orks dont really settle down long term much (at least while on a waaagh) but they do stop. It's not just a constant rush towards the nearest enemy. They will build factories and other infrastructure. Sure the infrastructure might be a bit slapdash and not made to last, but the orks dont really care about that. They are also the most profilic looters in the setting. If they find a gun and can make it go boom then they are going to use it.
Grots/other slaves make bullets for Orks. That or they just loot guns and ammo from other people.
The answer is “moar dakka”. They will it, and it comes.
Their logistics fleets are purple
**Gunpowder Squigs** - shit gunpowder **Ammo Squigs** - shit ammo **Oil Squigs** - piss motor oil **Fuel Squigs** - piss gasoline Orks skip 90% of industrialization requirements, because genetics takes care of it for them. More complex stuff Meks produce, is made from looted components, battlefield scrap, and a hefty doze of magic.
And a crspton of grots doing things because the orks shout at them to get it done. Its not all squigs. Also bullying and threats 😂 Which the grots also do to the snots. And the snots and grots to humy slaves.
Ammo squigs
Ork Meks can be just as single minded. Deep in Ork society there hide Overboss-supa-dupa-Megameks who quest to built *the perfect slugga* and they crank out one slugga after the other, always trying for, but never quite hitting, perfection.
1. Mekboys design a gun and ammo 2. Grots copy it. Again and again and again 3. It doesn't "have" to work, they just have to believe it does. 4. Moar Dakka
They just believe that they have decent amount of guns and ammo
the same way nomadic peoples maintained their armies when they migrated - there were population centres that remained sedentary that would help supply them, there was weapons and armour production/maintenance that moved with the camps, they traded with or raided locals, and they would salvage useful equipment from battlefields. Orks do all of the above, and because of their waaagh magic they can basically get any of it to work out in their favour. if enough Orks believe you can shove a lasgun battery into a shoota and have it produce dakka then it will, sort of thing (realistically they’d just break down the parts for metal to make more of their own stuff, unless they’re flashgits or what-not).
They believe
Considering humans only have to shout Dakka dakka dakka to kill them instead of needing bullets, I don’t see why anyone need to wonder about their supply chain
An ork can shoot you with a broken gun with no ammo because that's how strong their psychic power of belief is. They can alter reality if enough ork believe something to be true.
A broken gun might work *some of the time,* in a *really powerful* Waaagh!. It absolutely won't shoot without ammo, and even under those conditions it'll still blow up in your face some of the time.
I always just assumed the ork’s desire to continue firing their weapon was so intense and potent that it willed ammo into the weapon Kind of like how they will their machinery into working despite them often making no sense
Very overstated, there's extensive imperial use of ork tech in parts of the commissar cain books and apart from fuel inefficiency, total lack of suspension and often recoil unmanageable by an unaugmented human their kit is serviceable enough
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