For most of those aboard the Imperial Fleet, watching Chaos take a beating felt like a balm for their souls.
Guilliman alone wore an increasingly grave expression.
The Men of Iron were expanding and evolving far too quickly, and the combat capabilities they displayed troubled him deeply.
The Dark Mechanicum's ships often held a slight technological advantage over Imperial Navy vessels.
Yet these ships had been destroyed so easily.
Would the Imperial Navy have been able to resist in their place?
After he summoned several Tech-Priests to analyze the data, their conclusions left Guilliman feeling strangely helpless.
Clearly, even Imperial Ships would have met exactly the same fate.
Although the combat footage showed that these Chaos Warships had not activated their Void Shields, allowing the enemy's weapons to strike their hulls directly, their thick armor had offered no protection against those plasma weapons.
The enormous ionized masses had burned through the ships almost the instant they made contact.
Under normal circumstances, even if their Void Shields overloaded and failed, ships could withstand several Lance shots with their hulls alone without suffering damage like this.
The only conclusion the analysis could offer was that the Men of Iron's plasma weapons were many times more powerful than Imperial Lances.
Given how little Guilliman knew about the Men of Iron, it was only natural for him to think this way.
A normal Imperial Ships carried an enormous crew and contained countless compartments. Its interior was practically a miniature Hive City.
The Men of Iron's ships, however, contained nothing but equipment and power conduits, with only a handful of compartments and not even a Life Support System.
When not in combat, the Men of Iron's troops could enter suspended animation directly in storage facilities, eliminating the need for vast numbers of compartments.
If all