Ok, that might have been my bad
No worries and considering how inconsistent 40k can be at times it wouldn't surprise me if both statements are true.
Caves of Ice and Traitor's Hand come to mind, where the imperium sends backup to a planet where orks crash landed on another hemisphere in time to defend the one installation on the planet, and in the latter they not only hear about a Chaos raiding fleet hitting a world, they hear about it in time to anticipate it's next target and bet them to the target.
Is there any hard details on how long the Orks have been on the planet in Caves of Ice? If the Orks landed in another hemisphere and the Promethium refinery is the only installation on it I could see it taking a while for things to progress to where the story started.
The Traitor's Hand does sound like it sharp contradiction to the usual 40k time table. Was it presented as standard or unusual? On the other hand in Death and Glory we find out, through one of the various excerpts of book within the book, that it was "several months" from the time the Orks invaded before the first of the Imperial Guard arrived. Page 44, Defender of the Imperium Omnibus.
The federation can't hit and run and escape unscathed. It takes time drop out, it takes time to get a firing solution, it takes time to fire off a salvo, it takes time to fire up the engines and jump out. Given that imperial ships have guns pointed out at every arc, they can easily return fire during that process. They'll probably miss a lot, but they'll get hits in, and the feds will take those hits a lot worse than the imperials will.
Completely unscathed? No, of course not. Ships will be lost.
But the window to hit a ship is going to be quite small. For an example of how quickly Starfleet can identify and hit a target watch the clip from First Contact that
@Sailor.X where in under a minute the fleet could be directed to concentrate their fire on a key system of the Borg ship. So isn't like a random starship has to sit motionless computing targeting data or anything.
While it various depending on the class, most Starfleet ships can have some maneuverability which will further make it harder to hit anything outside of blind chance. And that this will be part of an ever growing swarm of ships presenting multiple targets appearing and vanishing which is going to perplex Imperial gunners and risk shots being wasted at ghosts of where ships were moments before they jumped back into warp.
Hour after hour, day after day. It can certainly add up.
Yes and no. ST ships tend to run active sensors all the time, so they have an easier time finding one another. 40K ships do not, and so can hide from each other a bit better.
But ST ships are not as good as they're cracked up to be, it's entirely possible for a ship to hide from another ship within the same system without using a cloaking device. Peak Performance comes to mind, where a Ferengi ship ambushed the Enterprise, with the enterprise only detecting them once they got to extremely close range.
Peak Performance is a pretty poor example to cite. The ship was detected approaching at Warp five but was dismissed because they thought it was a sensor trick. If anything the example confirms the Federation have a very long range and the Imperial fleet will be identified and tracked from the moment they land in-system.
As for 40k, if they can scan at the range and detail why wouldn't they? It would make more sense than not using it and risking entering into an unseen enemy's range of fire.
That doesn't make any sense. We know the imperium has
ECM technology, the fact that they're anti-innovation doesn't mean they wouldn't have ECM or use the ECM that they do have. It means they would be slow to develop new ECM tech, and would instead just continue to reproduce the examples they already have.
Yes, and Starfleet both employs technology that uses the completelyunknown to them subspace and are quite good with fiddling their tech. There's no reason to assume Imperial ECM is going to be particularly effective against them.
You assume they don't have sensors capable of detecting the ST ships coming in, assuming the ST ships can fire and disengage within mere seconds, that there torpedoes will penetrate void shells merely because they're physical objects (macro cannon shells are physical, but don't pen void shields), that it'll be a "messy, constantly changing enviroment", that feds can actually put out enough damage to meaningfully hurt the imperials (void shields are layered, regenerate fast and recharge fast, so if you don't make a rapid followup hit they'll just restore thier shields and take no damage), and that return shots from the imperium will be so ineffective that the feds can maintain this for days, rather than bleeding away as they take hits as well.
The inability to detect Starfleet ships is multi-faceted. One their sensor ranges appears to be quite limited as I alluded to earlier and which you kind of agreed with while also not but not further elaborating. So a Federation vessel sitting say a couple of AU's out likely couldn't be reliably detected. Second the ships would be moving in and out at warp speed. To my knowledge the Imperium doesn't have the ability to track FTL targets since no one, outside of maybe the Necron, utilize an FTL along those lines. They instead employ jumpdrives or tunnels outside of space time ect. Much like how the Federation can't detect a Warp engine equipped vessel the Imperium is going to be equally blind to warp-equipped ships.
I have already elaborated on why a few seconds to drop from warp and fire and retreat isn't an unfair assessment. So I won't repeat myself.
In the particular statement you are replying towards I am not assuming the torpedoes will go through Void shields. I said it's a coin toss because their abilities are inconsistent per you.
The fact that dozens if not hundreds of vessels swarming around the Imperial fleet warping in and out will be a messy, constantly changing environment largely goes without saying. I suppose you could put the best possible spin and say its a target rich environment but I've not so far been overly impressed with Imperial accuracy. But again any examples you have I'd be happy to look at.
That the starships can do meaningful damage depends on how many starships there are, how upgunned the Federation has become, how many Imperial ships there are ect.
And of course any examples of how quickly Void shields can be brought back up would be lovely to look at.
Further if you have examples of them instantly nailing targets a few hundred meters in length in the span of mere seconds I will be glad to revise my opinion.
I don't have a quote of it happening, but it's entirely possible. The imperials have pskyers, and some psykters have precognitive abilities, so this is a tactic well within their means.
Without any data on the Pysker(s), how their ability was used, how wide spread it is ect there's really nothing I can determine.