There is no true 'official' canon in 40K, as Lynata kindly pointed out.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
What about the Void Dragon?
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
I consider Chaos, Necrons and Orks to be the most powerful armies in the galaxy atm.
The Imperium will most likely be destroyed when Abaddon launches a new crusade towards Terra. I could see the battles in the sol system might awaken the Void Dragon which could attract the Necrons and the Eldar to the battle. Thousands of year later it will probably just be Necrons vs Orks vs Tyranids.
The current Hive fleets are but a fraction of the main fleet that has yet to arrive in the galaxy.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
IG: I personally view imperial guard much like modern armies, the training is the true difference between regiments and armies, a SF guy with the exact same equipment as a conscript will beat conscript 9/10
Space Marines: They can take a helluva beating, and dish it out, but they are not immortal
Orks: Tough as they come, generally slow witted and hit like a truck
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Depends on the region, around the Eye its pretty freaking bad as well as in front of hive fleets, areas that are not in those regions are relatively safe
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Really old. The Warp does some crazy stuff with time, heck you can through a police booth with a space marine into a hole in the warp and Tada! Dr. Who
What about the Void Dragon?
Om nom nom I may be the omnissiah
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
30ft+, and if I have any questions on spaceship size I look at RT books
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Very
How large are the Hive Fleets?
I honestly think the sight of an entire hivefleet would be the most depressing demoralising thing in the universe (yes even more depressing than a GUO erupting from sweet old Grandmas chest
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Pretty loyal to the table top honestly. It gets a bit odd here and there (S D, T5 dp, bikers taht are tougher than dps, thousand sons being incapable of divination, etc) but the general strength of a SM is about where they are on the table top, although I nudge them up to be a bit more tanky just because even my suspension of disbelief and rule of cool needs something a bit more. Necrons are really strong but there standard guns don't pierce through the earth. Eldar are hyper advanced but fragile, de same, daemonettes are faster, blah blah blah. Overall, pretty darn accurate to the power level they normally would bar codices being overpowered and underpowered.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Pretty darn bad. There are 3 prime evils with one just edging out the other two (chaos). Chaos from the NW, Nids from (the bottom) East, and then necrons from the SE I think? All and all, it's not going so great. Cadia has (is inevitably) falling with the 13th crusade, the real world and the warp will meld together to the horror of many thus bringing them a threat to necrons and with the loss of much bio force join in the nids clashing extremely often despite the battles being disadvantageous to eachother in each combat. Primarchs will rise but so too will the daemon primarchs. Despite it all, there will be a glimmer of hope for nothing is dark without some small bit of hope to cling onto....
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Depends for loyalists. Are they blood angels? At most 2000 years. Are they pretty much any other marine force? Ah, at best about.... 650 years? *shrugs* Traitors can be 10k years old, younger, and older. The warp does not function like ours and arguably it has tainted them.
What about the Void Dragon?
*shrug* honestly I find it both cool and not so cool having him right next to the planet Terra. Just seems to be the perfect oh we still win. That being said, I want it to be the REAL Void Dragon if it has to be. No stupid shard, not for the Void Dragon.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
As big as you wish O.O depends. We have some reliable values from FFG and the board games.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Extremely effective. One day.... one day tyranids will accept the warp and we will have CHAOTIC GRIBBLIES! And then chaos and the hive mind shall be delighted as they feed on emotions AND the lands! But in general even Gk aren't entirely resistant to them...
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Pretty big. That being said, I dislike it when a single faction straight up dominates another. For example, I disagree with the SW are better than all other loyalists and so too do I dislike the fluff that makes CSM, SoB, and Guardsman look like idiots compared to the murines. Draigo? Glorified tales. Hive fleets? Whilst big they haven't swallowed galaxies that had much resistance and are heavily crippled on each trip as many die on the travel. The slow spreading of chaos and awakening of necrons will buffer them and equal them out whilst the tau begin to prepare ways to fight them. Necrons are nerfed from having a well everything perfect and capable of countering daemons super easily. Chaos corrupts all O.O ya bastards :U. Orks are extremely strong but will never be unified so they are a threat that pops up anywhere and everywhere though cause da orks like to rumble!
The 13th Black Crusade is ongoing and Cadia is besieged. In short, I consider the most important events of the world-wide campaign canon.
Imperium's situation is dire. They aren't dead yet, but the Black Crusade, Tyranid Hive Fleets and Orks attack on multiple fronts.
CSM can become really, really old. Loyalists are extremely long-lived considering the average human's lifespan, and the Chaos-imbued Traitors can actually be several thousand years old and kicking.
I know enough about the new Necron fluff to know that I prefer the older fluff.
Regarding the size of Titans, I acknowledge the dimensions listed in Lexicanum.
Chaos influence can be resisted, but if you're unaware of it or simply not resilient enough, you gonna get swayed.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
I see the average IG infantryperson as being roughly as good as a veteran US marine
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
I see them starting to slowly collapsing after the 13th black crusade
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
2000 years, and the CSM haven't really experienced 10k due to the effects of the warp
What about the Void Dragon?
He's going to awaken and the Emperor is going to ascend after fighting him
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans are 50m high, and the average imperial ship is the size of a star destroyer
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Looking at a chaos symbol will have the average person today turning in a week
How large are the Hive Fleets?
They likely have 300 million gaunts in them
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Common humans, such as Guardsmen and Cultists, die in absolute masses to almost everything. Lasguns are flashlights. The IG pull through by use of tanks, ludicrous numbers, and artillery. Sisters are far tougher than Guardsmen, but their reduced physiology works against them, so they can only use much smaller and thinner armour, and much smaller weapons as well. Necrons are very very very hard to kill, continously selfrepairing from almost anything, and their weapons can 'punch' through tank plate. Marines and Chaos Marines are almost unstoppable oneshot-everything shrugs-off-pretty-much-everything demigods. A fight between a SM and a CSM takes quite some time. Power Armour- including Sororitas Power Armour, though being much smaller means it is less effective in protection- is capable of absorbing a plasma hit or two without breaking. Combined with Astartes toughness, this means that they can take several Meltagun or even Lascannon hits and keep fighting. The same goes for artillery, which really is not that effective against PA, dealing little damage other than the blunt force, as seen below. Terminators take this up to 11.
Grey Knights are ludicrously powerful, being Marines with better training and wargear AND psychic powers. Don't even ask about the demigod Primarchs. Guardian armour is light, and while highly superior to flak armour, still makes them oneshottable by, say, a Bolter. You need to hit them first, though, and they move so fast as to make everyone else seem like moving in slow motion. Aspect Warriors and Space Marines are about on par in combat, the speed of the Eldar matched by the resilience of the Astartes, so fights between them tend to take a long time. Orks are tough, though a bolter shot can still oneshot them as well, and a single Ork can easily kill half a dozen guardsmen if he can get in close. Their weapons are quite powerful but very very very unaccurate. Tyranids are utterly lethal, a Hormagaunt can easily eviscerate a Boy or cut down a Guardsmen squad in seconds, but the larger creatures trade that speed for strength and resilience. Tau are bad in melee, comparable to Guardsmen, though they do have very good ranged weapons. When SM and CSM fight, or Sororitas and CSM and so on, most of the damage is not done from armour penetration. Armour does little to stop blunt impacts, and while PA is fully capable of resisting sustained bolter fire, the force travels through the armour, which is why humans in PA get their bones and innards pulverised quickly by bolter fire whereas SM and CSM can take much more fire.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
The Imperium is being pushed back at key points such as where Leviathan comes, around the Eye of Terror, and various other places. Most of their borders are stable but where there are holes in the perimeter, the holes are very bad. With the rise of the Necrons, onslaught of Chaos, and invasion of the Tyranids, the Imperium is well and truly fethed.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Astartes are functionally immortal. Only death in battle, or by an especially virulent Nurglitch plague (Which arguably counts as a weapon) or similar things can end their lives.
What about the Void Dragon?
Still on Mars, brooding.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Varies. Titans can go from a few dozen meters tall to mind-boggingly massive, reaching above the clouds. An Imperator would be over a kilometer tall, I'd reckon.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Chaos is quite Lovecraftian. A human seeing some of Chaos' symbols can cause nasty things to happen. Normal humans promptly go insane on sight from any Daemon. Sisters, Astartes, Inquisitors and other exceptional individuals can resist this.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Huuuuuuuuge. Nids are definitely the most numerous faction. Billions of hiveships coming right for you. Their fleets are visible on the galactic map.
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
I decided to answer my own questions, as well, and I give you an additional question.
How large do you think a Marine is?
I imagine them to be just above 9 feet, or around 2.8 meters. (Note, the CSM on the pictures below is hunched forward as well as not standing particularly straight with his legs.)
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Spoiler:
Space Marines are tough cookies but they aren't all mighty supermen capable of conquering worlds on their own. They mainly operate as rapid response elite shock teams and excel at this role.
Imperial Guardsmen are very brave soldiers and can do damage but will be killed if anything gets in close quarters with them. A Lasgun can kill anything short of a vehicle or MC with enough luck.
Eldar Dire Avengers are on the level of Stormtroopers in terms of fighting ability but have much better reflexes in close quarters and much better firearms. Guardians are just Imperial Guardsmen with better shooting ability.
Tau Firewarriors are somewhere between a Stormtrooper and a Guardsmen. With good enough support they can be devastating though. On their own they will die horribly to anything.
Sisters of Battle are superb fighters that can stand up to even Chaos Space Marines in a firefight. Though in close quarters they are little better than Guardsmen with fancy armor.
Grey Knights are excellent specialist troops against Daemons and can hold their own against most other armies. Though without support they will be overrun quickly like regular Space Marines.
Tyranids are very weak individually. A gaunt can be beaten up by even regular humans that are well trained in melee fighting. It's only in overwhelming numbers that they'll prevail and they rarely aren't in overwhelming numbers. Their specialist troopers are very good at what they do. The MCs are excellent force multipliers though they are outclassed by MCs from other armies on an individual basis.
Necron warriors are tough to kill and can deal damage in terms of shooting. Though they will be creamed by dedicated assault troopers.
Chaos Space Marines are the best fighters in the galaxy. Thousands of years of near non-stop fighting, the boost from Chaos and the already potent body modifications all Astartes receive make them very good soldiers. Their only weakness is that they are very rarely completely sane so they cannot really come up with very meaningful complex plans.
Orks are tough, mean and good with a choppa. You usually need a ton of killy dakka to deal with them.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
The Golden Throne is failing and the Imperium is losing worlds faster than they can replace them. Stalwart troopers are willing to stand the line but without any significant changes the Imperium will slowly die. Though it will take thousands of years.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
4-500 years old. Theoretically they could be immortal but war will eventually kill them. Especially since the Veterans seems to get the most dangerous jobs. And yes, around 25% of them have been around since the HH.
What about the Void Dragon?
Baseless rumors and nothing more.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans can run the gamut from 30-200 feet tall. It depends on make and model. Spaceships are as big as the race building them wants them to be.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Very but it can be resisted. One must know the nature of Chaos in order to fight it.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Huuuuuuuuuuugggeeeeeeeeee. Thousands of ships each teaming with Billions of Lifeforms.
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Tyranids, Chaos Daemons and Necrons are unstoppable. However, Chaos Gods do not want to destroy or conquer anything (they would die of starvation), Necrons will only be a real danger if they unite. Tyranids is the top predator, and it may cause the unification of the Necrons or cause some form of drastic action from the Chaos Gods.
Then we have Orks and the Imperium. Orks can stop everything, it is what they were created for. The harder you hit them, the more powerful they get. However, I think they are slightly behind the big three. Humanity is too wide spread. It is as powerful as Orks, but it suffer for one weakness: they depend on Terra, the Astronomicon and the Golden Throne.
The Eldar and the Dark Eldar are as powerful one to one as Necrons (incredibly powerful), yet there are few of them. They are a significant force though.
Tau are a minor xeno species. There are lots of them. We know that they have a big role in the future of the galaxy, but at this moment they are a drop of water in an ocean. Too few planets to be "important" in any sense. At the moment.
I would like to point out that many xeno species are described as far more powerful than the Tau, such as the Demiurg, the Hrud or the Fra´al. And the way the Imperium is spread and communications work, it is extremely possible (more like sure) that there are many incredibly powerful sentient species yet to discover. The setting is big and unexplored.
Inside the Imperium, the Imperial Guard is far more important than the rest. The Inquisition does a lot of important work too.
The Adeptus Mechanicus is as powerful as the rest of the Imperium put together.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Catastrophic.
It is the End of Times. The Apocalypsis. There is no hope, everything is falling down.
However, the setting is a legend told to us from a distant future, or at least that is the way I see it. We know that humanity survived this. But the Imperium fell, and this age was called "the End of Times" and described as absolutely horrible.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
My opinion: a normal marine about 300-600 years. A Blood Angel about 2000 years. Not counting dreads. A marine with the help of Chaos may be immortal, or he may die then resurrect again a million times.
Chaos Space Marines trapped inside the Eye have been moving at a different time, and for many of them it has been about 100/200 years since the heresy. For others, it has been an eternity.
What about the Void Dragon?
It exists. It is one of the most powerful C´tan Stelar Gods.
After being wounded by the Eldar, it was tired and sleepy when the Emperor fought with it. Trapped in Mars, it creates around it a "technological-creativity field", so to say, which causes the abilities of the Mechanicus.
The Void Dragon has followers among the Mechanicus (so we have at least three factions inside the admech: the Cult of the Dragon, the Dark Mechanicus and those who fight besides Terra). And it will eventually awake from its dream, causing massive havoc.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans: 12 - 50 meters? Depend on the Titan.
Ships: stupidly big. Kilometers long.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Chaos corrupts everything, if given a chance. For a single person, only an unbreakable faith or an incredible will-power will be a defense.
Fighting against Daemons include hallucinations, voices in your head, developing random psy-powers and mutations and, well, being what the Imperium calls "corrupted". The Inquisition does well in killing all people who has been in contact with Daemons.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
IG are up to SAS standard, but get roflstomped anyway by the horrors of the galaxy. A normal Space Marine is capable of lifting a chimera full of men out of a mudpatch, but can't do much if his guts have fallen out (unlike some BL bolter pron). An Ork boy ranges from 4'5" in height and unable to punch out an IG to about 7' and pounding marines. A normal CSM is like a normal SM, except uber cray.
A Plague Marine laughs off AT rounds, but really drags his feet when marching.
The IOM is on the verge of being totally fethed. An empire in retreat, the arrival of the 'nids has now pushed their defences beyond their limit, and they're having one bastard of a time holding ground.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
A normal marine can maintain upwards of 500 years on his own timeline before deteriorating at a genetic level, usually resulting in a battlefield death. Augments not accounted for.
A marine from the original legions who saw the HH happen has either been blessed with unholy longevity, or has been jumping through time via the warp. Immortality comes with daemonhood only (Cult CSM are daemonic enough to qualify for this, but if their mortal form is destroyed they'll die, unlike a true daemon).
A Warhound/Reaver titan is at the current model scale, a Warlord rides about 1 1/3 the size of a Reaver, and the titan classes above that are never seen enough to get a measurement. An Ork "titan" raanges from Warhound size, to mobile skyscraper size (with some Orky know-wotz and belief-field). Spaceships are ginormous gothic mofos.
Large enough to have the entire milky way galaxy gak itself until it's run out of clean undies.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
Ooh! Freestyle!
A subject hotly debated across the interwebs: Souls.
Every sentient creature has a soul, which resides in the warp. Should the warp be cut off, sentient beings will die. Psykers have souls so large that they can open quantum-level warp portals to allow warp energies into realspace. Given that some fluff points to Psyker and Null genes, there is some kind of link between genetics and the warp, but it is unquantifiable as yet.
Daemons can consume souls to gain power, but if they have a patron god, they must give the soul over or piss off the god in question.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
Ooh! Freestyle!
A subject hotly debated across the interwebs: Souls.
Every sentient creature has a soul, which resides in the warp. Should the warp be cut off, sentient beings will die. Psykers have souls so large that they can open quantum-level warp portals to allow warp energies into realspace. Given that some fluff points to Psyker and Null genes, there is some kind of link between genetics and the warp, but it is unquantifiable as yet.
Daemons can consume souls to gain power, but if they have a patron god, they must give the soul over or piss off the god in question.
There is more, but I'll leave it at that.
Right!
If the Warp is isolated from reality, babies will not get a soul and be soulless abominations. And since the Chaos Gods are the Warp itself, their destruction will cause the same effect. Isolating the Warp is the Great Plan of the Necrons. Pariahs and nulls are people without a soul. Tau do not have a soul or have their souls somehow protected. Humanity becoming psykers due to evolution will eventually turn all humans into something close to gods. The Old Ones were like this.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
-For IG it heavily depends on the regiment but the "average" guardsman who survives past his first engagement will be the equivalent of a veteran modern marine.
-SM and CSM are essentially demigods in battle but are far from immortal and cannot prosecute any campaigns without significant support from local forces.
-Tau fire caste are slightly weaker physically than humans but hugely lack experience and training time compared with human counterparts (largely made up for with technology).
-Necrons largely depends on the state they are in when they wake up but in most cases their arcane science is unbeatable in any aspect.
-Eldar and D Eldar can only perform to the peak of their ability with significant forewarning and hit and run raids. A standard guardian is like a human but better in every aspect (except of course numbers).
-Tyranids Guants=Zerglings
-Orks= Thousands of super tough, super strong gorillas.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Depends very heavily on the local galactic situation but in general the "imperium" is merely an overarching culture that is slowly but surely crumbling. With the arrival of the 'nids its unlikely it will last much longer. The state of the golden throne and the emperor is ambiguous at best.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Marines age depends on their gene seed, for example blood angels tend to live longer than ultramarines. Most marines however die before this becomes an issue or leads them to fulfil non combat duties. Most Chaos marines are not 10k years old due to the effects of the warp. Those that are thousands of years old have been kept that way by the forces of chaos who dont want their favourite pawns to die of old age.
What about the Void Dragon?
A C'tan, subdued by the emperor and imprisoned under mars. Its psychic presence effected generations of martians into having an innate understanding of technology. Unknowingly worshiped as the Omnissiah.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titan scales can be easily found on the web. Ship scales vary hugely from source to source but on the whole a frigate sized escort seems to be about 1.5km long.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Depends entirely on the mindset and psychic profile of the individual(s) being corrupted and the determination and power of the chaotic entity doing the corrupting.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Each have massively varying sizes but a major fleet will number millions of bioships with hundreds of billions of not many trillions of individual tyranid organisms.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
Ooh! Freestyle!
A subject hotly debated across the interwebs: Souls.
Every sentient creature has a soul, which resides in the warp. Should the warp be cut off, sentient beings will die. Psykers have souls so large that they can open quantum-level warp portals to allow warp energies into realspace. Given that some fluff points to Psyker and Null genes, there is some kind of link between genetics and the warp, but it is unquantifiable as yet.
Daemons can consume souls to gain power, but if they have a patron god, they must give the soul over or piss off the god in question.
There is more, but I'll leave it at that.
Right!
If the Warp is isolated from reality, babies will not get a soul and be soulless abominations. And since the Chaos Gods are the Warp itself, their destruction will cause the same effect. Isolating the Warp is the Great Plan of the Necrons. Pariahs and nulls are people without a soul. Tau do not have a soul or have their souls somehow protected. Humanity becoming psykers due to evolution will eventually turn all humans into something close to gods. The Old Ones were like this.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
The troops themselves? I think I really do see them in my mind as they are represented on the tabletop, with the exception of Marines being rather underpowered in the game, especially regarding their survivability. There really shouldn't be much that gets past Power Armour, as the Marines' low numbers otherwise don't make any sense.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Precarious, but I don't subscribe to the "Empire in retreat" idea. The Empire is a juggernaught, counting losses in worlds instead of lives and conquering and settling said worlds at a staggering rate at least on par with their loss. It is the single most powerful political entity in the galaxy, and it can crush pretty much any foe (apart from the "Codex factions") if it puts its mind to it. However, its resources are so stretched that a single major loss, like at Armageddon or Cadia, could begin a series of events that sends the whole war machine spiralling out of control.
So in essence, everything is in the cards right now - everything could be lost tomorrow, even if the cascading into total oblivion would still take centuries to reach its end, or the Imperium might hang on barely as it does now until mankind's evolutionary step-up is completed.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
A couple of hundred years. The same goes for traitors, who just experience a different time-flow in the Eye of Terror - so they are only 10k years old "for us".
What about the Void Dragon?
Who?
Just kidding, but I judiciously ignored ALL of the Oldcron C'tan fluff. Hated it with a passion.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Both on the whacky side of current interpretations. I just love the idea of the largest Titans walking on skyscraper legs.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Absolutely. It corrupts all living things that have a presence in the warp and can even touch AI. That's really the only thing that makes it so dangerous to the Imperium, as the Chaos Marines and Daemons are really "just another" external foe to fight.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Not as large as every Tyranid player seems to believe. I'd say individually they are on par with Abaddon's Black Crusades scale-wise.
I believe most of the Grim Darkness and the more outrageous claims in fluff are pure propaganda. By the imperium, by the eldar, by the tau, and maybe even the necrons.
Anyway about your questions...
How powerful are the troops of each faction really? I believe that they are as though as they are on the table-top (with boosts to vehicles of course) exceptions: Orks (they think they are tougher than they are.) Grey Knights (Actually at Pre-Ward strength, hyped by imperium to unnerve chaos.) Tyranids (Tougher than table top, but only by sear numbers with most, carnifexs can tear open tanks with ease) and Tau (Those guns aren't THAT great, still good though.)
How bad is the Imperium's current situation? For the average civilian, not awful, similar to modern day countries, on the stand point of war, not excellent and will eventually fall, unless they can gain the assistance of the xenos in removing the threats of chaos, orks, dark eldar, and tyranids.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old? Marines vary gene seed to gene seed, averaging at 300 years alive, 225 combat able. (dreadnoughts exempt) Chaos legionnaires age the same but have time traveled via the warp.
What about the Void Dragon? Mars REALLY needs an exterminatious, but it could be defeated with proper firepower, and It's powers are exaggerated by the necrons. (who are far less robotic than the imperium would portray them.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships? titans are slightly smaller than table top scale, (baneblade is spot-on) The spaceships can be the size of small cities, but the average craft can is only a bit a larger than an apartment complex.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually? Through raw warpyness? Not very, but it can happen. Through the promise of power, wealth, and freedom? Extremely. more so than anyone really wants to admit.
How large are the Hive Fleets? About the size of a moderate country in size, in terms of population density? Denser than New Delhi. (Nom Nom)
I have no personal view on 40K fluff. How I look at things is based purely upon what the most consistently shown interpretation is. Whether I approve or disapprove of fluff means nothing.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Human soldiers range from disciplined and formidable (particularly with the use of tanks) to utter trash (conscripts and poorly led guardsmen). In such a dangerous Galaxy, imperial commanders have a tendency to throw men's lives away rather carelessly. Standard guardsmen can never go toe-to-toe with any of the other races, instead relying on superior numbers and the skill and experience of their commanders.
Tau are about the same physically as humans, perhaps a bit weaker, and prefer using their wicked technology from afar rather than up close where they're likely to get butchered almost as easily as imperial guardsmen. Tau in suits are very formidable, put out a lot of firepower and are very mobile.
Orks rely primarily on numbers and tend to die a lot, but can tear most other infantry apart in melee. Particularly nasty orks are on par with Space Marines. Smaller, runtier orks can still pose a threat.
Eldar/Dark Eldar are about the same as humans, but are much much more dexterous and capable and in better gear, preferring to utilize stealth rather than fight head on. Both factions of Eldar rely on hit-and-run attacks and individual skill, performing specific roles in battle.
Tyranids rely almost entirely on numbers but do it incredibly well. Unlike an ork infestation, while still a serious issue, the arrival of tyranid spores on a planet will precede an unstoppable invasion unless there happens to be several regiments of imperial guard nearby or a company of Space Marines.
Space Marines in fluff are incredibly powerful but rare. Some would argue that they are the greatest assembly of warriors in the Galaxy, and to me it seems that without them the Imperium would be not necessarily broken, but crippled.
Chaos Space Marines are outnumbered and less regimented than imperial Space Marines, but often much more powerful, depending on the circumstances.
Chaos Daemons are a terribly frightening foe, often driving imperial soldiers insane before killing them in a fitting and gruesome fashion. Lesser daemons come in a rainbow of personalities and ability, but are all very dangerous. Some are able to call upon psychic powers to zap stuff from afar, but most prefer melee, which they do better than any other race besides dedicated melee specialists.
Necron infantry is only rivaled by Space Marines, unless outnumbered. Standard warriors can easily withstand the small arms fire of other races and have bodies that will repair themselves nearly to the degree of the T-1000 from Terminator 2 is able to reform after taking crippling damage. Necrons are often slow and easily outmaneuvered, like zombies, but androids with insanely powerful tech. Anything that is strong enough can easily overcome most Necrons in melee, mostly due to a Necron's inability to react in time.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
It's been said that the Imperium is "on the brink" of collapse. There's war everywhere, it's difficult and tedious to travel and communicate large distances and the forces of the Imperium are not entirely united and infighting is common. The bureaucracy of the Imperium is seriously dysfunctional and its impossible to get a real idea of if they're "winning the war" in the grand scheme of things or not, but the theme seems to be not.
I don't think the Imperium is about to collapse and will probably go strong for another several thousand years, gradually becoming more and more fragmented. The arrival of the Tyranids, the schemes of the Dark Gods and the eventual reawakening of the Necrons are of great importance to the continued existence of the Imperium.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
It was my understanding that about 1,000 years isn't unreasonable, although most don't live that long due to dying in battle. Other people in this thread have said as low as 200-300, which is criminally low considering that Inquisitor Eisenhorn lived to about that age iirc.
Chaos Marines can easily live to be as old as the Dark Gods want them to be. Spending time in the warp means you're not in sync with the Materium's flow of time, so some Chaos Marines are probably 1k+ years and some emerged from the warp in the 41st millenium seemingly minutes after the end of the Horus Heresy. Chaos Lords are often (or at least give me the impression) of being several thousand years old, if not older, having spent an "eternity" in the warp over 10,000 years. If Chaos Marines are impressive enough, they'll be granted Daemonhood and become immortal.
Mars REALLY needs an exterminatious, but it could be defeated with proper firepower, and It's powers are exaggerated by the necrons. (who are far less robotic than the imperium would portray them.
The Necrons have never communicated their history to humans, the only reliable accounts of the War in Heaven and the subsequent Necron vs. C'tan shenanigans are from the Eldar. Assuming the Void Dragon is not sharded (which it probably isn't), it would treat Necrons with hostility. The weapons used to shard the C'tan were so mind-bogglingly powerful that they were disassembled before going to sleep, so as to prevent lesser species from accidentally finding and using them.
The subject of the Void Dragon on Mars is one of the more ambiguous parts of 40k lore, and it's easily upon to interpretation. The 3rd ed Necron codex, and some other scraps of lore from other sources i'm unaware of, insinuates that a Star God "trapped" or "asleep" on Mars is the subject of worship of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The story of the Emperor subduing the Void Dragon I've not read myself. Apparently the presence of the Void Dragon makes Martians tech savvy.
How large are Titans?
12-50 meters. Larger, more rare classes of titans are several hundred.
How large are spaceships?
Several hundred meters to several kilometers (~25km) in length.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Very, very few humans, only Space Marines, inquisitors and some select few guardsmen know hardly anything about Chaos. I'd say 99% of civilians are unaware Chaos Daemons exist and the other 1% are (or are about to be) cultists. This is convenient, because even by thinking about Chaos Daemons, Chaos Daemons are aware of you to some degree. Chaotic symbols etched in the armor of Chaos Space Marines has been known to make regular humans physically sick or disturbed.
I recall in an Iron Warriors novel, the Iron Warriors used a Tyranid hiveship corrupted by Chaotic paraphernalia to deploy titans. So, according to Graham McNeil, Tyranids are corruptible.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Too many for the Imperium to fight conventionally.
I like to take a pragmatic view of Chaos. In the stagnation and dogmatically ignorant Imperium, Chaos represents a change that is not inherently bad, but simply represents change and a threat to the establishment of the Empire. I'd love to do a Chaos warband who has been enlightened by the prospect of change, and practices such radically and heretically despicable things such as "democracy" and "research and development"
Oh no!
Another thing that I often think about is the comic view of Ork technology and the attitude that if Orks believe it it will come true. I know its funny to go "red ones go fasta", and the whole story about the Imperial agent who recovered an Ork weapon with no working parts inside it, but I don't feel that Ork psychic field actually works that way.
I acknowledge that Orks do have a field that heavily influences reality and probability around them, but when it comes down to black and white things like a gun with no working parts in it, I really feel it just comes down to Orks being too stupid to care, and a more accepting opinion of things like success and failure
Gun with no working parts?
Imperium - failure
Orks - Thats a great gun! You can bash things on the head with it. Success
Gun that will explode and kill the user the first shot
Imperium - failure
Orks - Haha! What a great joke. Success
Actually I'm making a character that is specifically built around the positive side of Tzeentch. Hope . The other is a Lord of Change and Khornate that forever chase eachother down the lord producing change and or hope and then khorne smashing in later to dstroy such things mwahahaha. Anyways, I think that the ork guns work and the only reason red goes faster is because they think it is so so they always innately build the red ones better
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Personally, in terms of pure combat ability, I would take the stats from Inquisitor to be the best definition of individual power. In terms of galactic presence then what we see in the background, ie, the novels and codexes is heavily skewed away from reality. By that I mean, in terms of tabletop and fiction presence the most numerous forces of the Imperium are barely covered. Those would be the PDF first and the Arbites second since they are present on every world to some extent and always form the first line of defense against rebellion and invasion. Do we see an Arbites army on the tabletop though? Nope. So we get oodles of Astartes armies even though the vast majority of humanity will never, ever, ever see one? Yep. In this context the Mechanicus are also woefully underrepresented both in fiction and on the tabletop as well as the civilian hordes that never-the-less fight in the Emperor's name.
The next faction that we never really see are the Lost and the Damned. Arguably these are the Imperium's biggest internal foe and yet all we ever get shown are CSMs!
In terms of aliens then obviously orks are the most likely race the Imperium will face. Tyranids are only just encroaching into the galaxy and so far are in the Eastern Fringe. In time they could well devour the whole galaxy but they have only really got a toe in the door so to speak. Realistically the Necrons are more omnipresent since they have worlds across the galaxy but this is mitigated by them only just waking up. Both races are uncounted legions that, so far, have a small presence and indeed, the Necrons should be hardly heard of by anyone.
Then we have the Eldar and Dark Eldar. They should have a fairly even presence across the galaxy but their presentation in the game and the fiction shows them suffering far too high a rate of attrition for me and since they are far superior to a human, their tabletop power is, like Marines, underplayed. Of course, the game has restrictions and is limited by being a D6 game but still, it doesn't represent them well.
Tau should have the least impact I would say. Their Empire is only about 100 worlds, some contested and they are limited to a tiny section of the galaxy and their current warp capabilities. There are lots of alien races in the background that should be shown more since they've been around longer, cover more of the galaxy and have better means of travel and yet we don't get to see them.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
I would say it is pretty bad for not for the obvious reasons. The Imperium's enemies are either low in numbers or lack leadership to really threaten the Imperium. The biggest threat to the Imperium is its own reactionary nature. Lack of innovation and relgious hysteria are its main enemies and the Imperium is crumbling away. The threats its faces are capitalising on that and bringing it down but even without them it will eventually reach a point similar to the Age of Strife where travel from world to world becomes rare to impossible and at that point the Imperium, as a galactic organisation, would cease to exist.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Functionally immortal. Look at the Salamander from the Tome of Fire trilogy, I don't even think he ate or drank, he just sat in his armour for literally ten thousand years waiting for his brothers to find him and then he basically lets himself die. Of course this is not the same as saying an Astartes would be combat capable for ever, I think they would get to a point like any human where they were simply 'old' and no-longer able to fight. As for the Traitors in the Eye, time has not been consistent for them, some have only experienced a few years and even though they are attacking the Imperium in the 41st Millennium they are only a few hundred years old, the same as a lot of Astartes.
What about the Void Dragon?
I would say a portion of it is on Mars. However, my personal preference for the Necron background is that the Old Ones did not create any races. They may well have helped a few to tap their into the Warp but they did not make any races and for me, the Krork never existed! I hold to the original ork background, reiterated in part, in the current Codex, that the orks origin lies with the Brain Boyz who were suped up snotlings. Honestly, I hate the krork BS.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
I don't think that anything is wholly incorruptable. If Chaos wanted to it could corrupt anything eventually. Normally the anture of Chaos means that those who resist the most die first but I don't see that if Chaos could just hold back then it could corrupt anyone or anything. If you look at the background in RoC then even the Emperor was/is slowly being driven insane and corrupted by Chaos.
In terms of how deadly a threat is to the Imperium then I would say this threat comes more in the form of cults and human renegades. Generally I would hold to the older background that Chaos is something that 99.9% of humanity have no knowledge of. I don't see it being like WFB where most people know of Chaos but just don't speak of it, I think in 40K most people don't even know it exists, hell, on hive worlds people even believe that such notions as 'the sun' and 'outside' are myths!
My own vision of Warhammer 40,000 is less grim-dark. The Imperium of Man stretches across the galaxy from the tip of one end to the other, dominating billions of worlds, and citizens counting in the hundreds of trillions. Resources are stretched thin, and the inhabitants of the galaxy would fight horrendous hundred year wars to lay claim to them. The Imperium churns out guardsmen in the billions each and every day to fight in the name of the Imperium and the Emperor. More often than not, the Imperial Guard outnumbers their enemy and uses numbers, superior firepower, and a combination of traditional and very predictable tactics to overwhelm their enemy. The more serious enemies include the Orks, Chaos, and the Tyranids. They aren't cleansed so easily once they decide to settle a system. Technology, industry, and knowledge aren't always going backwards in relation to progress. However, progression doesn't seem to be moving forward too much either. After ten thousand years, most equipment are relatable to what they were during the Great Crusade. Agriculture, industry, and military technology has increased somewhat however. Ships travel faster in the warp and with better security than they did 10,000 years ago, and communication between neighboring star systems can be achieved easily as long as everything is going well. The Martian priesthood sends out expeditions quite often to retrieve archeological specimens and information. They would often be escorted by a regiment of guardsmen or Astartes. And if the situation is dire, hire eldar or tau pirates. The Eldar are few and far in between, with their Craftworlds numbering just over a hundred. Dark Eldar are more common however, and would raid remote locations on a constant basis. There are nearly fifty chapters of Space Marines dedicated to fending off and tracking down Dark Eldar raiders alone. The Necrons are found very rarely. But in those times when they awaken from their tombs, whole systems are known to go silent very quickly. Whenever there is undeniable evidence that Necron activity is in an area, hundreds of ships are rounded up to fight the Necron threat. The Tau are a very small fledgling Empire. Bigger than most xenos threats, the Imperium is extremely wary of them. All attempts to conquer and annihilate the Tau however have been repelled. The area around the edges of the Tau Empire have been infested with xenos, Imperial outcasts, mutants, and deserters at the turn of the 40th millenium. This group of pirates, deserters, and traitors have gathered around the Tau, viewing themselves as freedom fighters dedicated to overthrowing the Imperial regime. The Tau however are not so pleased to see so many strangers gather at their doorstep demanding help. The typical Imperial soldier is on average much more well equipped than any other faction in the Milky Way. From the one Guardsman that isn't worth anything by himself to the towering avatar of destruction that is the Space Marine, supplies are constantly brought up to the front lines in starships that can feed small cities, and orbital batteries can be called down on enemy positions upon first request. A squad of Guardsmen can hold down an entire street for an entire day with non-stop fire before they run out of ammunition. They lack in each and every field when compared to each faction in the galaxy, but it is fact that they achieve results better and more often than other races. An Ultramarine is always more well trained, stronger, faster, ferocious, and better equipped than a Black Legionnaire. He has to be, because he is expected to fight ten times his own number on any battlefield in any situation. Over all, the Imperium is winning in most of its battles, and are always pushing outwards. This was better than it's situation ten thousand years ago where it was on the verge of collapse, scrambling to survive and rebuild hectically during the aftermath of the Horus Heresy. But now, on the turn of the 41st millenium, the myriad of problems The Imperium faces such as the 13th Black Crusade, the Tau, Tyranids, constant pressure of the Orks, resources stretched to the brink of collapse and the ever increasing reports of Necron activity threaten to overwhelm the delicate balance the Imperium has treaded for ten thousand years. If a miracle doesn't happen soon, the barriers of mankind will collapse and unleash a flood of unstoppable slaughter on the worlds of man. The galaxy is a large place though, and holds many secrets that few have the privilege to know. There has been rumours, that the gods and heroes of old will awaken soon.
I have no single view of the galaxy, it is all based on the planet on which you find yourself.
If you land on Malfi, it is a Hive World of towering palaces and smoke-blackened steel canyons of industrial production, where guns outnumber the populace of billions several times over.
Another world is based on Little House on the Praire, with a devout, conservative Imperial population doing their best to meet the tithe of their Agri-World and serve the God-Emperor the best way they know how.
Other worlds are luxurious Paradise Worlds, held for the richest of the rich and the true elite of the Imperium. They are Hawaii every day, with beautiful beaches and balmy weather, and staff in the thousands trained (and, some say, genetically designed) to fill your every need and desire.
Others are frozen wastelands, where only the hardiest of miners, and their AdMech overseers, survive to scratch frozen promethium, or other resources, from the ice-pack. Death here is frequent, and often bitterly cold, either from the environment, or the things that stalk the hinterlands.
... and that is just a few examples. The Imperium, and the galaxy, is a vast and varied place.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
IG: The average conscript knows the basics, but not much else. Gaurdsmen have about the as a low level current day soldier, increasing from their. SM: Very strong,, almost immposible to beat by current day standers, but not so much in the 40th millennium. Are still very strong, but not to the ridiculous amount of some of the fluff. Eldar: Aspect warriors are some of the best fighters in existence for their equivalents, but there are not that many of them (see as there are (comparability) few elder. Better at fighting than their SM equivalents, but not as well armored or strong. Guardians (being aspect warriors at one time themselves) are better than IG, but slightly worse than SM. Phoenix lords are the best fighters in existence. DE: Pretty much same as the eldar. Tau: Fire Warriors are better armed and armored than IG, and have better aim, but lack close combat abilitiesand are lightly weaker from being slightly smaller. Pulse weapons will punch right through flack armor and it generally takes only one hit to kill "normal" things. Battlesuits are stronger and tougher than power armored SMs, but not as well armored as terminator amour (but they have a jet-pack, so who cares). Orks: Your basic ork is strong, tough, good at fighting, and not particularly bright. Orks have about the same thinking power as the average human, but use a more straightforward way of thinking (A door is blocking my way. I will blow up the door. I blew my arm off, but hey, the door isn't in my way anymore). Chaos: Often better than SM, but usually about the same. Tyranids: Gaunts are mostly animistic (think a caveman). The bigger it is, the smarter it is. Necrons: Tough and strong. Almost impossible to kill unless you destroy the tomb-world itself.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Pretty darn bad.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Probably about 500-750 with no intervention. Legionnaires are not that old seeing as they experence time differently in the warp, but are sill problem 2-7K.
What about the Void Dragon?
Stolen by Trazyn.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans are gigantic, but not skyscraper big. Large ships are about as big as a super star destroyer.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Pretty corrupting, but not to the point were you look at a symbol and are corrupted.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
More lifeform density than than the human density of a hive world. The fleet itself comprised of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of ships depending on the size.
I could have my own views but is much nicer letting it unfold in the books.
It has established it's own esthetic so it is easy to get into the mindset of 40k.
Some rules I could list:
40k life: Picture a boot stomping on a face forever.
If it is a menial task to be done, use a survitor: robot chassis is expensive, human life is worth less.
It is easier and resource effective to perform collateral damage, surgical strikes are only used to make a statement.
If it is not human, it is to be killed in all haste, if it is human, figure out a "good death", if the person wasted their better's time, the person is to be killed in all haste.
It is a fine balance on how much a citizen should be allowed to think, just short of drooling is the target.
Allow no idle hands! If the outside of a building needs insulation from inclement weather, send those out to collect skulls from the streets and mason them in.
A good general that hears he lost 1/3 of his IG force in battle is content that he has 1/3 more supplies for the campaign.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
By troops do you mean grunt infantry? Then the space marines are still top of the line. However in terms of tactics, the Tau and Necrons are up there. And of course when quantity is better than quality the Nids and Orks will always be a big threat.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
IMO Imperium has enough men to hold out the current situation indefinitely. Of course, that meaning the current situation stays the same, and nothing like a huge hive fleet/waagh/black crusade starts up again. I only even say this because we all know GW will keep the Imperium going strong. However I think the Imperium might be becoming stretched a little too thin.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
The traitor legionnaires are only that old because of all those dark pacts made with Chaos. I'd say the average marine lasts for a few hundred years (with no mechanical repairs)
What about the Void Dragon?
Don't believe in it.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans I'd say are fairly accurate to scale (except for crew compartments). Spaceships however, are extremely massive. Modelling one in 40k scale would take, IMO, enough space to cover large gaming tables many times over.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Chaos definitely seems easier to follow than the emperor, and is basically behind every driving emotion in most races. If there is one thing that is as sly and corrupting as Chaos, it is hard to find.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Unimaginable. We haven't seen anything yet. The entire universe is too big for that.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Space Marines: Astartes are extremely powerful soldiers that are almost unmatched in the galaxy. As commonly described, a single company with a techmarine is more than capable of seizing a Hive World fro an opposing force of non outlandish size. However, they're not basic soldiers and are wasted as such- better served as elite shocktroopers/commandos capable of going toe-to-toe with the forces of Chaos and hostile Xenos and exiting victorious. Superhuman, incapable of being reliably killed without special weaponry suited for fighting heavy infantry. Also extremely costly and painful to replace in large numbers. Laughably more powerful than Guardsmen unless heavy ordinance comes into play, however Astartes equivalents are typically better. Best used as paratrooper shock infantry best deployed as the last stand. Equal matches are Chaos and Necrons. Orks and Tyranids in mass numbers. Power chisel of the Emperor capable of shattering the mightiest stone when properly hammered in the right location. Will however win against most troops of other factions in a one-on-one fight, but can be overwhelmed by greater numbers by forces such as Tyranids, Orks, or Chaos Cultists. Armor is impervious to basic energy weapons like lasguns and weak autoguns. Can be cracked open by high powered plasma guns such as those used by Astartes and the Imperial Guard or hotshot/hellguns, although those still are unlikely to be as great of a threat to an Astartes' life, but will punch through the armor with one to multiple hits. Exceptional at nearly every aspect of warfare save attrition.
Note should also be made for their various exceptional skill and extremely fast reaction times which are in the miliseconds coupled with extreme speed, even in armor.
Imperial Guard: Basic.While it differs greatly with regiments, as Cadians are fairly exceptional soldiers thanks to early training and the culture of Cadia, and Catachans are Catachans- the average Guardsmen, including Cadian, will die to nearly every other enemy soldier in a fight save Rippers. Much like the Tau, the average Guardsmen are worthless without vehicular support or range between them and the enemy- unlike most of the other factions. Weapons are also fairly lackluster, lasguns and autoguns aren't extremely lethal against most other enemies, as Orks are able to shrug off multiple shots and enemies like Astartes or Necrons will barely notice such weapon fire. Changes with specialist infantry such as Storm Troopers and Catachans, which can provide a threat to great enemies and with Storm Troopers, often equip weapons capable of lethally harming an Astartes with several shots. Of course, Guardsmen with Plasma Guns and Meltaguns are more than capable of killing Necrons, Astartes, Orks, etc with a single well-placed shot.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
with a side of utterly . Only thing really keeping them intact is the Guard serving as duct tape and the Astartes running around and mashing down the uber threats. Of course, Grey Knights and the rest of the Inquisition also needs to be mentioned for their constant efforts to prevent Chaos and Xenos from popping up and causing threats inside their space. Imperium's in a rather precarious situation where slight imbalance would lead them to failing and Abaddon leading another Black Crusade right out of the Eye of Terror and seizing not only the gate, but all territory around it and letting the legions of hell spill forth. Or Necrons making a push right into Terra and seizing Mars for the Void Dragon.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Chaos Space Marines say hello. Of course, while the originals and Chaos Astartes might be immortal, with the deterioration of gene seed for loyalists without space magic to rejuvenate it, it's entirely possible that it's deteriorated to the point that Astartes are not only mortal, but have a lifespan measured in centuries, not millenniums.
What about the Void Dragon?
On Mars. Unknown if a full C'tan or a shard. Also explains why Mars is a hellhole inside.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Well, scrapcode can turn your Toaster into a ravenous machine hungering for your soul, so there's that. That and it can render even the greatest champions of man a deluded crusader blind to how they are now fighting for the other side. So I'd say pretty good. Helps to have religious tomes and follow the dogma though.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Pretty big. Of course, not really entirely dangerous considering they are losing energy and haven't really had an impressive track record.
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
SM are to normal human soldiers what SEAL Team Six is to middle-schoolers that play paintball occasionally. Magnitudes of difference. But marines see combat so often that "1-in-a-million-hit" happens not so rarely.
Guardsmen are equivalent of a combination of US professional soldiers and US draftees who aren't very professional at all, often in the same units. Some general thought the "Starship Troopers" movie was full of sound tactical advice though.
Eldar/Dark Eldar are as honor-bound as Japanese Samurai, acrobatic as Cirque de Sole', condescending as the Thalmor in Skyrim and as tough as someone with severe anorexia. A normal guardsmen fighting one would be like a drunk oaf fighting a small karate master, they know where to hit and they hit *fast*.
Tyranids are an endless swarm of dog-sized gaunts with a few large creatures thrown in for good measure, though they only show up when swarming doesn't work. Without Space support, any planet is doomed.
Tau are under pheromone influence of the etherals and have no interest in sharing the galaxy with mankind. Even if only those two races were left and on the same side, the Tau would use long term sterilization to deal with humans. A Guardsmen fighting tau at range is like fight Airsoft(guard) against Civil-war rifles(tau) they have range and hit hard, but guard have volume of fire and variety of tactics/squads.
Chaos are weaker than their guard/SM counterparts but make up for it by cheating. Using the warp and heretical knowledge, they can brain-wash entire Hives from within, turn brother against brother, drive men mad enough to kill themselves and project terror into their foes, all without lifting a finger. The best weapon against chaos is master your fear of them, then shoot them in the face.
Orkz are tough(grizzly bear tough), numerous(sold-out concert numerous) and strong(silver-back gorilla strong) as hell. But often get in each others way when attacking something, often hitting each other and starting brawls directly in front of enemies. This also applies on the Macro scale.
Necrons are a seldom seen threat by most of the galaxy, often when they attack there is no report because there are no survivors. Most Dynasties keep to their own business, but that business varies from time-freezing a planet and cutting off all of their thumbs to see what happens to awakening other tombs to see family or wiping out all life. In battle necrons move at a walking pace, but it takes 3 bolter shells to the chest to kill, but they might just get back up in 60 seconds. Overlords are terminator armor from Mars tough and gauss weapons only take 5 good hits to get through SM armor.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Bad, the 13th Crusade has drained the Imperiums man-power to halt, leaving much of the galaxy vulnerable. But as the xenos close in on the weakened worlds, they often fight each other for them, so this gives mankind time to rally.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Marines can be in their prime until they are killed or their centuries of horrific wounds slows them down significantly, which either gets them killed in battle or they "retire" to maintaining the ceremonies of the chapter and train new recruits with their experience. Traitors can be 10,000 years old, but only because the warp is time-travel. Their first post-heresy battle with the imperium could be now, but then re-emerge 2,00 years earlier where they are killed. Adding to the confusion, worthy warriors are revived by sorcerers/Dark gods to fight a new.
What about the Void Dragon?
Buried on mars, mostly intact C'tan shard. My personal twist is that if it wakes up, it will want to conserve its "food source" and aid mankind in its fight so that there will be more Tech-priests slowly giving their life-essence(replacing with cybernetic parts) to it. Like a hate with sodas on it and a straw into your mouth.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Warhounds are 7 stories tall at the top, Warlords are 30-35 meters, Emperor class are 50meters +
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Chaos influence is like a gradual onset of alcohol/weed into your blood stream. Except rather than relaxing and losing motor-control, you start acting schizophrenic and grouchy/nervous/hysterical, whichever you are more prone too. This escalates until you are a violent and mindless rage machine/a paranoid wreck that hears voices and thinks every one is trying to kill him/a inconsolable wailing body on the floor thats rolling in its own excrement. Focus, awareness and determination can greatly hold these feeling at bay, but no one holds out forever...
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Imagine seeing a ring of a planet from a few thousand miles away, you can see each dot that is a chunk of rock or ice. Now imagine that ring is 10 times as thick and each piece of rock or ice is a several mile long tyranid "ship"
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Well, scrapcode can turn your Toaster into a ravenous machine hungering for your soul, so there's that.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Possessed Toasters deserve an entry in at least one Codex. They keep being referenced by the fans.
Scrapcode is like machine STD's. Only worse, because they don't even need to come in contact with an already infected machine for it to spread.
Of course, there's also the human form of scrapcode. Doubtworm. Yikes. Which is also worse as it ends with a warp creature the size of a continent that creatures massive earthquakes when it moves. Only cure is a cyclonic torpedo.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
The regular guardsman is a soldier who has recieved the minimum amount of training in order to know how to follow orders and know his role. Anything else then that is based around the limited equipment he will be expected to use, and then off he goes to fight in the Imperial wars. Obviously some guardsmen are from tougher locals and may well be much smarter and skilled, but that is not the norm.
A Battle sister is what the guard could be if given the very best equipment, gear and training, and then ramped up further with the inclusion of fanatical zeal as part of their daily lives. The real pinnacle of what a normal human can do in battle.
A Space Marine is an elite fighting machine, carefully constructed to deal with impossible situations and turn the tides of humanities problems. They are the best the Imperium has at it's disposal, but they are limited in number and thus ability and power (for good reason). As such, they must be applied in the right situation and way. More of a strike force then an army.
An Ork is more then a match for an untrained human. A smart guardsman who remembers his training and keeps his cool might do alright. A veteran of many campaigns will dispatch an ork without too much trouble (unless they're a particularly powerful ork).
Tyranids are basically apex predators, so without synapse an armed guardsman stands a chance of offing one, though it is dangerous. The issue though is that with synapse, bugs are clever and devious, and they tend to swarm en-masse.
Necrons are designed to create fear and be unkillable. The average human would fall prey to this simple, yet effective design. A veteren would struggle unless he knew what to expect.
Eldar are superior to humans in a fight. They have better awareness, grace, agility and technology, plus long lifespans for more experience. The problem is they are also scared. Every eldar is deathly scared of chaos, of what might happen, of losing the race and most of all losing their soul. I get the impression this effects them more then other races.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Pretty dire, but still salvagable if it gets its act together. It won't, though. It's basically in need of complete regime change in order to survive, and so needs something crucial (like a primarch returning) to make that happen.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
For the average marine, about 1000 years old. Depending on the person though it could be much longer.
What about the Void Dragon?
It is there, but currently not a threat. Better to ignore it and focus on other things, first.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans can be as huge as skyscrapers and twice as wide. Spaceships are the size of super-tankers and sometimes bigger.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Extremely so; I got into 40k through Space crusade. In that game there was an alien event card that would instantly turn one of your marines to chaos! The way I see it, with enough time and energy, more or less anyone could fall to chaos, it just takes the right buttons to be pushed. The thing is though, Chaos gods are careful in who they select. Why waste years of effort turning someone when there are trillions of others in the galaxy who will turn easily? A sister of battle is so hardened and close minded in her faith that it would take chaos far too much effort to sway them, so better to kill them instead.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Unimaginable in size, about 1/3 the size of our entire galaxy. The problem is, they starve easy. It takes a lot of resources to keep that much biomass alive, and once a fleet starts to diminish it's in big trouble.
Regarding chaos corruption, I'd always seen it as temptation. Those who are more strong willed or pure of heart can resist it more readily. Also, certain decisions weaken your "soul" and make you more susceptible to corruption.
Regarding hive fleets, I have a slightly different interpretation.
I have always taken the hive mind to not be a separate entity to the organisms that controls them, but the collective group thinking of all the linked organisms in that hive fleet. The shadow in the warp is simply the oppressive "heaviness" of all the psychic chatter going on between the different organisms, and just the collective presence of all that consciousness in the warp. I view each hive fleet as just one that got isolated and evolved independently, or there was an accidental mutation and a separate consciousness splintered off, or a hive fleet created a "child" fleet and set it off. I don't think the nids have any particular plan, beyond survival and reproduction.
Basically each tyranid organism can be fought of as one individual cell, with entire broods representing a limb or a finger of the overall body that is the hive fleet.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
[extra-heretical headcanon] I don't think the Imperium is 10,000 years old. I think somebody took advantage of missing records and inconsistent dating systems to multiply the duration of major historical events and periods by 10, not just to feth with people's heads but to reinforce the idea that the Imperium has always been around and always will be.
Imagine you're a member of the elite on Planet Whatever. (I say elite because the masses probably don't care). You have reliable records of Whateverian history going back maybe a thousand years, at most, before it all gets blurry and there seems to have been some kind of huge disaster. But, gosh, that's just a fraction of the history of the mighty Imperium, isn't it?
Well, no, it's not. Your civilization has been around just as long as the Imperium, and that cataclysmic period when your historical records go all fuzzy isn't some local disaster when your world was cut off by a warp storm, it's the goddamn Age of Strife.
Why am I constructing such elaborate heresy? Because I can suspend disbelief for Titans and giant flying cathedrals, but I just cannot make myself believe any political system or religion can endure 10,000 years -- that's about the same length of time as there is between the present day and the invention of agriculture: all recorded history from Sumer to the Roman Empire to the iPhone 5 fits in a bit over 5,000 years. I majored in history, I read a lot of history, and when I look at GW's fluff there just isn't enough. Yeah, sure, lots of wars, but major socio-political changes appear to be limited to the Great Crusade, the Heresy, the rise of Emperor-worship and the Ecclesiarchy, and the Age of Apostasy and subsequent reformation. Yes, I know the whole setting is Turned Up To 11, but people are still supposed to be people, and the one thing about people that doesn't change is that they keep changing.
So I developed the rule of thumb that whenever I read about an event lasting more than 100 years, I divided its duration by 10. (You need to do something similar with the lifespans of Sumerian kings and biblical patriarchs).
We already know the Inquisition has an entire Ordo devoted to falsifying history and destroying inconvenient records about the Inquisition itself (the Ordo Redactus). And a lot of people, myself included, already consider the fluff we read to be translations of in-universe propaganda. That's typically Imperial propaganda, but I can imagine that the Eldar really want to come off as tragically awesome and awesomely tragic as their Codex makes them sound ("oh woe is me how the mighty have fallen but I'm still better than you at everything ever" -- bloody emo xenos), and that Chaos really wants to sound that transgressive and, well, icky as a giant middle finger to Daddy Emperor and his conventional bourgeois values, kind of like that "artist" that put a crucifix in a vat of urine. It's not too far a step (at least for me) to wondering if the absurdly long timelines are propaganda, too.
[/extra-heretical headcanon]
Also I don't think the Imperium is as doomed as some fluff makes it out to be -- again, I think of that as propaganda to get people to pay their tithes on time lest the universe end -- and I suspect it can keep blundering along for a few centuries yet. And on a much smaller scale, I imagine most people in the galaxy to be a lot less intense and "there is only WAR!" than the fluff makes them out to be. (That's why I like the Ciaiphas Cain stories). Everybody can't be fighting to the death all the time, they'd all be dead by now. I imagine Imperial forces, from the Guard on up to Sisters and Marines, to be a lot like the people I know in the military, who like all human beings are gloriously inconsistent creatures, sometimes heroic and sometimes petty. (Another reason to like Cain).
[shameless self-promotion]Hence my anti-heroic Sororitas fanfiction, linked in my signature below.[/shameless self-promotion]
In Detail:
The Necrons would not be able to handle the full force of the IOM with the remaining primarchs, and a revived Emperor in a new crusade. Let alone what humanity had in the first Great Crusade or the Age of Darkness.
The Silent King will likely help Mankind fend off the awakened Void Dragon due to his guilt about his actions.
Dark Eldar are the evilest most conniving tossers in the Galaxy. And they don't have cool stuff. They said hurtful things. They are far faster than even Astartes, but to use this they need to get close which means they get minced (unarmed) with even punches.
The Eldar are steadily gaining in numbers. Biding their time for when things finally come to a boiling point.
Phoenix kings are not the equivalent of Primarchs. If the Phoenix Kings were peashooters then Primarchs would be gold plated, .50 cal, full auto, belt fed Desert Eagles
Chaos has an interesting duality due to not being chaotic. For example Khorne has very specific rules to his bloodshed: No champions fighting eachother, no killing the unarmed, no killing infants. Not only this but they purposefully keep the galaxy in a state of strife, despite having all they need to win, so they can stay alive and enjoy their struggles amongst each other. For if either side were to win without everyone converting to Chaos, Chaos would die. In this sense Chaos is very "unchaotic"
The Tyranids are running from worshippers of Chaos from another Galaxy. Chaos Gods being bound to one Galaxy doesn't make sense when the warp is a universal dimension and the Chaos Gods are the most powerful thing in it.
The Chaos Gods have physical forms while they dwell in the warp. How this is not understood is beyond me, when they interact with each other through beating each other up, and some of the best art in the mythos is of Khorne on the Skull Throne. The finer details of his form hidden by the shadows.
Primarchs were capable of absolutely silly gak. Like wrestling titans to the ground, and taking starship weaponry without giving a single crap. This happens in the ONLY detailed descriptions of primarch capabilities but some people aren't as gifted with basic logical reasoning.
Yes the Emperor was capable of firing lasers more powerful than Supernovas. Just as it says in the fluff. For God's sake people the only argument against this is that "the laser would've destroyed the earth or at least the ship". Well someone doesn't understand the concept of "condensed". A duck is a noun, not an adjective. So is a Supernova. It doesn't even say "like" in the description. It literally says "more powerful than a supernova."
Battleships regularly take moonbusting hits and Primarch's flagships are completely unaffected by destructive power of this magnitude.
(Nova cannons can easily destroy relatively large moons, and battleships can handle these, albeit damaged)
The Void Dragon is enslaved unsharded underneath Mars and if the Emperor doesn't revive to kick it's ass again it will tear apart the Imperium before any reinforcements can arrive.
Leman Russ, Alpharius, Omegon, Vulkan, Guilliman, Rogal Dorn, Jaghatai Khan, and Lion El Johnson, are all alive and ready to kick ass when the moment comes.
The Imperium numbers in at roughly a quadrillion lives. The Eldar (CW) number in the small billions. The DE number in the high billions-low trillions. The Orks number in the Pintillions.
There are a million marines, capable of rapidly replacing losses, and they can be called on when the Guard fails. They are 10 times stronger, 10 times faster, 10 time tougher, and 10 times more clever than any Man can normally be even with intense training. And that's unarmored.
The Imperium is keeping their pace, and not losing population. They are however losing resources and are still pretty hard fethed if they don't get their gak together. If the Emperor for some reason revives than they begin to rapidly unite, proliferate, expand, unify, advance, and possibly move on to take on other galaxies.
The Golden Throne is actually keeping the Emperor from reviving due to him being a Perpetual. This is so the High Lords can keep their power.
If the Emperor were to die and he were to go to the warp he would suddenly be empowered by all the worship to him.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
[extra-heretical headcanon] I don't think the Imperium is 10,000 years old. I think somebody took advantage of missing records and inconsistent dating systems to multiply the duration of major historical events and periods by 10, not just to feth with people's heads but to reinforce the idea that the Imperium has always been around and always will be.
Imagine you're a member of the elite on Planet Whatever. (I say elite because the masses probably don't care). You have reliable records of Whateverian history going back maybe a thousand years, at most, before it all gets blurry and there seems to have been some kind of huge disaster. But, gosh, that's just a fraction of the history of the mighty Imperium, isn't it?
Well, no, it's not. Your civilization has been around just as long as the Imperium, and that cataclysmic period when your historical records go all fuzzy isn't some local disaster when your world was cut off by a warp storm, it's the goddamn Age of Strife.
Why am I constructing such elaborate heresy? Because I can suspend disbelief for Titans and giant flying cathedrals, but I just cannot make myself believe any political system or religion can endure 10,000 years -- that's about the same length of time as there is between the present day and the invention of agriculture: all recorded history from Sumer to the Roman Empire to the iPhone 5 fits in a bit over 5,000 years. I majored in history, I read a lot of history, and when I look at GW's fluff there just isn't enough. Yeah, sure, lots of wars, but major socio-political changes appear to be limited to the Great Crusade, the Heresy, the rise of Emperor-worship and the Ecclesiarchy, and the Age of Apostasy and subsequent reformation. Yes, I know the whole setting is Turned Up To 11, but people are still supposed to be people, and the one thing about people that doesn't change is that they keep changing.
So I developed the rule of thumb that whenever I read about an event lasting more than 100 years, I divided its duration by 10. (You need to do something similar with the lifespans of Sumerian kings and biblical patriarchs).
We already know the Inquisition has an entire Ordo devoted to falsifying history and destroying inconvenient records about the Inquisition itself (the Ordo Redactus). And a lot of people, myself included, already consider the fluff we read to be translations of in-universe propaganda. That's typically Imperial propaganda, but I can imagine that the Eldar really want to come off as tragically awesome and awesomely tragic as their Codex makes them sound ("oh woe is me how the mighty have fallen but I'm still better than you at everything ever" -- bloody emo xenos), and that Chaos really wants to sound that transgressive and, well, icky as a giant middle finger to Daddy Emperor and his conventional bourgeois values, kind of like that "artist" that put a crucifix in a vat of urine. It's not too far a step (at least for me) to wondering if the absurdly long timelines are propaganda, too.
[/extra-heretical headcanon]
Also I don't think the Imperium is as doomed as some fluff makes it out to be -- again, I think of that as propaganda to get people to pay their tithes on time lest the universe end -- and I suspect it can keep blundering along for a few centuries yet. And on a much smaller scale, I imagine most people in the galaxy to be a lot less intense and "there is only WAR!" than the fluff makes them out to be. (That's why I like the Ciaiphas Cain stories). Everybody can't be fighting to the death all the time, they'd all be dead by now. I imagine Imperial forces, from the Guard on up to Sisters and Marines, to be a lot like the people I know in the military, who like all human beings are gloriously inconsistent creatures, sometimes heroic and sometimes petty. (Another reason to like Cain).
[shameless self-promotion]Hence my anti-heroic Sororitas fanfiction, linked in my signature below.[/shameless self-promotion]
You're forgetting the Imperium isn't a unified culture. All the Imperium is, is a federation ruled by extremely long-lived individuals/practically immortal lines in control of a massive military force. The Imperium pretty much is just Terra and the main branches of the military. Every single little planet is its own incredibly unique culture with its own development and own falls and rises. The only time the 'Imperium' even comes into existence for the average planet is in the very infrequent times that a large ship with a lot of guns collects the planets respective tithe and moves on. That's it. The IOM really isn't at all that unified and you often have planets being deleted from the database/completely forgotten.
Your average Imperium citizen is also unlikely to experience the 'total war' that grips the galaxy, as even during an eternal state of eternal war- humans control a greater portion of the entire galaxy. Citizens are much more likely to live their lives free of intrusion by Xenos or Chaos- much more likely to die from disease, accidents, or even old age. The lore tends to hammer down that the IOM is one unified massive empire, but the fluff points out that this really isn't the case. The IOM's just a totalitarian federation ruled by a transhuman/posthuman ruling and upper class with the average citizens and entire planetary cultures left to live their own lives so long as they pay their respective tithe and aren't invaded/cause heresy. It's not that unreasonable for them to last ten thousand years. It's not like Star Wars with the Galactic Empire being an overbearing ruler micromanaging everyone and thus tripping over its own bureaucracy. It's more of a distant police state that you're very unlikely to even come into contact with unless hits the fan and Xenos attack or the Archenemy plants down roots.
1) Why the Imperium probably isn't 10,000 years old
Spoiler:
Definitely agreed that "the Imperium" and its wars are a remote presence for many star systems, even most, where local conflicts and forms of governance loom much larger.
But there are two aspects of the Imperium that do touch almost every world and which have endured for thousands of years:
1) The tithe. Yes, the planetary governor collects the tithe however he or she sees fit, perhaps with some Administratum clerks and Arbites to help/watch him. But the very fact the tithe must be collected -- and that failure to collect it triggers Imperial intervention eventually -- affects the politics and economy of almost every world.
2) Emperor worship. The Ecclesiarchy has some presence almost everywhere, even if it's just a few missionaries or a local cult that's barely recognizable as the same religion practiced on Holy Terra. This hasn't been around as long as the tithe, but any form of interplanetary government would collect some kind of taxes: a universal religion, however loosely defined, is much harder to sustain over millennia.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and to finally address the original poster's questions:
Spoiler:
- the Warp is weird, so however old the Imperium actually is, there are Chaos Marines still alive who were part of the original Heresy. Regular Marines who live in normal space-time without capricious daemonic patrons occasionally bringing them back to life don't last so long: even if they don't age at all (unlikely, since they still start life as humans), the law of averages means bad luck will eventually catch up with even the most skilled and well-equipped warrior, and in decades rather than centuries in almost all cases.
I see Marines as supermen but not Super Man. They're much better individually than ordinary humans, but the real secret of their success is not some Mary Sue ability to scythe through hordes of foes unharmed but the canny tactics of a force that only goes after critical targets and makes sure to do so with overwhelming force, speed, and surprise -- much like real-life SEALs or Delta Force. The evenly matched battles we see on the tabletop only occur when something goes terribly wrong.
- the Guard varies all over the place, and I think the in-game terminology has it about right: the Conscripts are half-trained troops thrown more or less unwillingly into the line, like most of the Red Army in World War II; the regular Guardsmen are equal to any modern professional soldier; and the Stormtroopers could qualify for US Special Operations Forces or the Russian Spetznaz. And when they come up against local rebels or minor xenos races, they steamroller them. It's just that the universe is so unrelentingly horrible that they routinely have to face the kinds of armies we see on the tabletop, and then even SOF-level troops die in droves like WWI soldiers at the Somme. Guard commanders aren't callous about casualties because they're idiots (well, not usually), they're callous because they have to be to get the job done against superhuman enemies.
- Sisters of Battle are, I agree, the peak of what a normal human can accomplish with the best possible equipment and a lifetime of training. (Depending on how your interpret Acts of Faith, they may also be the first step towards the Emperor's goal of a race of stable psykers). I don't see them as mindless zealots but as real human beings with a sense of humor and tactics.
- Xenos are a major threat but none of them can defeat the Imperium on its own: Eldar and Necrons have amazing tech but they are too few in numbers and too divided politically; Orks have terrifying numbers and natural fighting skills but poor tech and worse organizational skills; Tau have high tech and political unity, but they're already starting to lose the latter (Farsight Enclaves) as they grow beyond a blip on the galactic map; Tyranids come closest to an existential Xenos threat but I discount the more enormous numbers out there in some fluff.
- So the real threat to the Imperium is Chaos, the traitors within opening the way for the traitors without. But the traitor Marines are few in number and daemons have trouble entering realspace, so they depend on widespread corruption to open the way... and while Chaos can corrupt any individual they capture given sufficient time -- even the strongest have a breaking point -- the Ruinous Powers need time and subtlety to corrupt large populations on worlds they don't always control, which usually gives the Inquisition et al time to realize what's happening and react. Arguably the Ecclesiarchy acts as the Imperium's immune system, purging nascent chaos cults, without necessarily even realizing what they really are, as part of its generalized intolerance. Even if a planet does fall, individual star systems are so isolated by distance that the Imperium can mobilize crushing force to burn out the infection before it spread..
What Chaos needs is a widespread breakdown in order -- eg the kind Abaddon is trying to cause with his crusades -- to overload the Imperial security services and give corruption freedom to fester and thrive. Then the daemons and traitor Marines can move in to take over corrupted worlds faster than the Imperium can crush them, then use those worlds as bases for further offensives that cause further disorder that permits further corruption. If this vicious cycle really gets going, it is the one thing that could rip the Imperium apart.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Spoiler:
[extra-heretical headcanon] I don't think the Imperium is 10,000 years old. I think somebody took advantage of missing records and inconsistent dating systems to multiply the duration of major historical events and periods by 10, not just to feth with people's heads but to reinforce the idea that the Imperium has always been around and always will be.
Imagine you're a member of the elite on Planet Whatever. (I say elite because the masses probably don't care). You have reliable records of Whateverian history going back maybe a thousand years, at most, before it all gets blurry and there seems to have been some kind of huge disaster. But, gosh, that's just a fraction of the history of the mighty Imperium, isn't it?
Well, no, it's not. Your civilization has been around just as long as the Imperium, and that cataclysmic period when your historical records go all fuzzy isn't some local disaster when your world was cut off by a warp storm, it's the goddamn Age of Strife.
Why am I constructing such elaborate heresy? Because I can suspend disbelief for Titans and giant flying cathedrals, but I just cannot make myself believe any political system or religion can endure 10,000 years -- that's about the same length of time as there is between the present day and the invention of agriculture: all recorded history from Sumer to the Roman Empire to the iPhone 5 fits in a bit over 5,000 years. I majored in history, I read a lot of history, and when I look at GW's fluff there just isn't enough. Yeah, sure, lots of wars, but major socio-political changes appear to be limited to the Great Crusade, the Heresy, the rise of Emperor-worship and the Ecclesiarchy, and the Age of Apostasy and subsequent reformation. Yes, I know the whole setting is Turned Up To 11, but people are still supposed to be people, and the one thing about people that doesn't change is that they keep changing.
So I developed the rule of thumb that whenever I read about an event lasting more than 100 years, I divided its duration by 10. (You need to do something similar with the lifespans of Sumerian kings and biblical patriarchs).
We already know the Inquisition has an entire Ordo devoted to falsifying history and destroying inconvenient records about the Inquisition itself (the Ordo Redactus). And a lot of people, myself included, already consider the fluff we read to be translations of in-universe propaganda. That's typically Imperial propaganda, but I can imagine that the Eldar really want to come off as tragically awesome and awesomely tragic as their Codex makes them sound ("oh woe is me how the mighty have fallen but I'm still better than you at everything ever" -- bloody emo xenos), and that Chaos really wants to sound that transgressive and, well, icky as a giant middle finger to Daddy Emperor and his conventional bourgeois values, kind of like that "artist" that put a crucifix in a vat of urine. It's not too far a step (at least for me) to wondering if the absurdly long timelines are propaganda, too.
[/extra-heretical headcanon]
Also I don't think the Imperium is as doomed as some fluff makes it out to be -- again, I think of that as propaganda to get people to pay their tithes on time lest the universe end -- and I suspect it can keep blundering along for a few centuries yet. And on a much smaller scale, I imagine most people in the galaxy to be a lot less intense and "there is only WAR!" than the fluff makes them out to be. (That's why I like the Ciaiphas Cain stories). Everybody can't be fighting to the death all the time, they'd all be dead by now. I imagine Imperial forces, from the Guard on up to Sisters and Marines, to be a lot like the people I know in the military, who like all human beings are gloriously inconsistent creatures, sometimes heroic and sometimes petty. (Another reason to like Cain).
[shameless self-promotion]Hence my anti-heroic Sororitas fanfiction, linked in my signature below.[/shameless self-promotion]
Thank you, my friend. And I mean friend in the highly specific technical sense of "I have just hit the friend button so I can more easily see what you post."
So I saw this thread.... and couldn't resist. Coffee is brewed, there is no official work to be done...
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Hmn... the minis are in 28mm. 28mm(approx 1.5in) = 6ft in scale. The weapons only seem to have an effective range of 24 to 48 inches. (24*1.5)6 = 216 feet or 72 yards. In modern warfare a typical engagment distance is 300 yards and the effective point range for the M4 carbine in 5.56 mm is 500 yards.... So in reality all the weapons in 40K suck. You only get to shoot once a turn. The following discussion posits that a game is only about a minute long:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/392172.page If you get to shoot your bolter or guass weapon four times in a game (or four times a minute) then you only moderately have improved on a rifled musket circa 1860. According to Hardees Light Infantry and Rifle Tactics a good Soldiers should be able to fire a musket three times a minute using the command "Load in nine times."
The Spehs Maurines look really cool in their battleshorts but lets face it, they can only run 288 feet a minute.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
None of the Imperium's enemies have weapons that are any better, but I reckon the huge amount of debt the Imperium has incurred and the massive entitlement spending will hurl the Imperium into Chaos. *Something about that doesn't read right to me.... *
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
There was a story in one of the Heresey novels about an old marine named Cruz who told endless stories "about the good old days" and everybody ignored because he seemed somewhat useless, so I imagine they get very old indeed and tend to ruin Christmas dinner on the Battelbarge Command Mess every year.
What about the Void Dragon?
Not as scary as the Puke Dragon that came out after I drank all that peppermint schnapps.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
The Titans look big, but the Argonauts beat them at the end of the book. The Spaceships make the thing from Spaceballs look tiny, I think the High Lords are compensating for something.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
See me writing this? I earned the mark of Slaneesh in College... its the gift that keeps on giving.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Billions of quadrillions of bioships bristling with terrible weapons, that were all swallowed by a small dog due to a terrible miscalculation of scale.
Definitely agreed that "the Imperium" and its wars are a remote presence for many star systems, even most, where local conflicts and forms of governance loom much larger.
But there are two aspects of the Imperium that do touch almost every world and which have endured for thousands of years:
1) The tithe. Yes, the planetary governor collects the tithe however he or she sees fit, perhaps with some Administratum clerks and Arbites to help/watch him. But the very fact the tithe must be collected -- and that failure to collect it triggers Imperial intervention eventually -- affects the politics and economy of almost every world.
2) Emperor worship. The Ecclesiarchy has some presence almost everywhere, even if it's just a few missionaries or a local cult that's barely recognizable as the same religion practiced on Holy Terra. This hasn't been around as long as the tithe, but any form of interplanetary government would collect some kind of taxes: a universal religion, however loosely defined, is much harder to sustain over millennia.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and to finally address the original poster's questions:
Spoiler:
- the Warp is weird, so however old the Imperium actually is, there are Chaos Marines still alive who were part of the original Heresy. Regular Marines who live in normal space-time without capricious daemonic patrons occasionally bringing them back to life don't last so long: even if they don't age at all (unlikely, since they still start life as humans), the law of averages means bad luck will eventually catch up with even the most skilled and well-equipped warrior, and in decades rather than centuries in almost all cases.
I see Marines as supermen but not Super Man. They're much better individually than ordinary humans, but the real secret of their success is not some Mary Sue ability to scythe through hordes of foes unharmed but the canny tactics of a force that only goes after critical targets and makes sure to do so with overwhelming force, speed, and surprise -- much like real-life SEALs or Delta Force. The evenly matched battles we see on the tabletop only occur when something goes terribly wrong.
- the Guard varies all over the place, and I think the in-game terminology has it about right: the Conscripts are half-trained troops thrown more or less unwillingly into the line, like most of the Red Army in World War II; the regular Guardsmen are equal to any modern professional soldier; and the Stormtroopers could qualify for US Special Operations Forces or the Russian Spetznaz. And when they come up against local rebels or minor xenos races, they steamroller them. It's just that the universe is so unrelentingly horrible that they routinely have to face the kinds of armies we see on the tabletop, and then even SOF-level troops die in droves like WWI soldiers at the Somme. Guard commanders aren't callous about casualties because they're idiots (well, not usually), they're callous because they have to be to get the job done against superhuman enemies.
- Sisters of Battle are, I agree, the peak of what a normal human can accomplish with the best possible equipment and a lifetime of training. (Depending on how your interpret Acts of Faith, they may also be the first step towards the Emperor's goal of a race of stable psykers). I don't see them as mindless zealots but as real human beings with a sense of humor and tactics.
- Xenos are a major threat but none of them can defeat the Imperium on its own: Eldar and Necrons have amazing tech but they are too few in numbers and too divided politically; Orks have terrifying numbers and natural fighting skills but poor tech and worse organizational skills; Tau have high tech and political unity, but they're already starting to lose the latter (Farsight Enclaves) as they grow beyond a blip on the galactic map; Tyranids come closest to an existential Xenos threat but I discount the more enormous numbers out there in some fluff.
- So the real threat to the Imperium is Chaos, the traitors within opening the way for the traitors without. But the traitor Marines are few in number and daemons have trouble entering realspace, so they depend on widespread corruption to open the way... and while Chaos can corrupt any individual they capture given sufficient time -- even the strongest have a breaking point -- the Ruinous Powers need time and subtlety to corrupt large populations on worlds they don't always control, which usually gives the Inquisition et al time to realize what's happening and react. Arguably the Ecclesiarchy acts as the Imperium's immune system, purging nascent chaos cults, without necessarily even realizing what they really are, as part of its generalized intolerance. Even if a planet does fall, individual star systems are so isolated by distance that the Imperium can mobilize crushing force to burn out the infection before it spread..
What Chaos needs is a widespread breakdown in order -- eg the kind Abaddon is trying to cause with his crusades -- to overload the Imperial security services and give corruption freedom to fester and thrive. Then the daemons and traitor Marines can move in to take over corrupted worlds faster than the Imperium can crush them, then use those worlds as bases for further offensives that cause further disorder that permits further corruption. If this vicious cycle really gets going, it is the one thing that could rip the Imperium apart.
Only we also have examples of the administration taking little interest in planets. Their MO is to simply check for signs of heresy, make sure the big god in the sky the locals are worshiping are attributed tot he Emperor, and then they're good. And planets don't have unlimited lifespans. Death of Antagonis (and I think one of the FFRPG books mentions stuff similar to this), and a Hive World featured is acknowledged to be dying, and there even is a scale with which the Imperium classifies such worlds. Planet's aren't infinite in their age and the cultures in them. The people populated in the Hive World are pretty much idiot savages that have forgotten innovation and building and pretty much just live in the grand cities their ancestors built. The planet's mined all possible resources and is vastly overpopulated and about to suffer and imminent collapse into a feral or even a dead world. So it's not unknown within the IOM.
(Plus there's also a big culture change between Ancient Persia and a civilization spanning a galaxy forty thousand years in the future with magitech.)
How powerful are the troops of each faction really? There is no doubt that the imperium is very powerful, space marines are the match of anything out there, but they are very limited in number and rely on superior tactics and combining of operations with massive guard armies and mechanicum deployments. While this coordination is possible (via astropaths, navigators etc), the Imperium will be incredibly tough to destroy. I think the biggest threat, as in 30k, is from within.
Chaos again has undoubted massive power, the fact that daemons are pretty much eternal means that they can effectively bide their time until there is an opportune weakness to exploit, which could be down to another massive heresy, espionage and undermining by agents such as the Alpha Legion, cults etc. Their weakness is that they are divided, fighting each other rather than uniting under a joint cause.
Orks have again access to huge numbers, but once again fall down on not working as a combined species.
Eldar can just about defend themselves, in an even set piece have the tech and ability to give anyone a fight, but I don't see them as ever reestablishing themselves and perhaps one by one their craftworlds will be zapped by Hive fleets or Black Crusades etc.
Dark Eldar suffer the same kind of problems of the Eldar.
Tyranids are a major threat, the descriptions in the new codex suggest vast potential to at any moment swamp the galaxy, blocking all the communication and thus coordination abilities that the Imperium depends upon.
Tau are on the up, no doubt. But still come across as fragile should a massive waaagh or something like a Macharian campaign in their direction. Their less xenophobic nature could be their undoing too, it's a mean galaxy.
Necrons seem like a proper threat too purely because not enough is known about them. At any moment a untold billions could arise.
Incase you meant a more direct question about the individual troops, a list in order (assuming no frills like chaos marks etc)..
Space marine (Tactical marine as codex) / Chaos Marine
Necron Warrior (marginally behind the astartes)
Genestealer
Eldar Guardian
Dark Eldar warrior
Ork Boy (really not sure, on a good day should be above both eldar)
Tau Fire warrior
Imperial Guardsman
I may run a series of head to heads with these just to test out this list, but I take into account fluff such as tactical knowledge, aggression etc so the straight on dice rolls don't tell the whole story.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation? As I mentioned earlier, while the vast spread of the Imperium can communicate and deploy it will probably be ok unless a hive fleet of even more epic proportion than those witnessed already rolls through. The dangers of betrayal and being subverted from within is a real threat. Ofcourse they could if they wanted allow Astartes to have massive legions again but can they risk that..
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Marines can live for hundreds of years, Dante (albeit down to Blood Angels geneseed) is over 1100 years old. Not too hard to conceive that idea if people today are living over 100 without any genetic conditioning and without the benefit of 38000 years of medical science.
As for Traitor Legion marines, time doesn't work the same in the warp or in the eye of terror so although they appear to be over 10000 years old, that much time may not really have been experienced by them. Aside from perhaps the favour of the Chaos gods perhaps preventing death.
What about the Void Dragon? A c'tan god of some sort, seems to be bound under Mars surface. The mechanicum treating the emperor as their god suggests some merit to the legends from the age of strife.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships? According to my old copy of Epic, an Imperator stands at 55.5 metres which is roughly the wingspan of a 777 airliner. A Warhound is about a quarter of the size. Not exactly walking skyscrapers. The ships are regularly described as being several kilometers long for the big battleships etc.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually? Chaos is a real threat to mankind via corruption, it appeals to base instincts and feeds on primal desires (except Nurgle, don't get the appeal atall). First and foremost it promises power, which considering the conditions the vast majority of people have to endure in hive cities, death worlds etc you can see why people take an interest, and why the Inquisition tries to maintain the level of ignorance among the masses. I don't understand why it seems to thrive only among humans though, what puts Khorne off from recruiting a billion Orks?
How large are the Hive Fleets? Hard to guess, the real fear is that they are big enough to encompass the galaxy. Equally, we could have seen them at their zenith, marauding relatively small fleets.
My musings, as someone who has been following 40k for around 25 years. (which means I am a little of a traditionalist with lore, (I'm looking at you Matt Ward ) )
imperialmint wrote: I don't understand why it seems to thrive only among humans though, what puts Khorne off from recruiting a billion Orks?
There are some Orks that follow Khorne, but Orks are usually too thick-headed to swap religions. Only humans really go for religious zealotry.
And Khorne derives power and abstract worship from all battles, angry people, and blood loss/lust.
From Rogue Trader: Ork Freebooters. Pag 14, Khorne Stormboyz: "Worship of the Chaos Powers is not tolerated amongst sane and sensible Orks, but the Cult is rampant amongst Freebooter Stormboyz. The Blood God epitomizes the martial virtues which they hold dear, including a harsh disciplinary code, binding rules governing their conduct as honourable warriors and, of course, a life of almost continous blood-letting".
I liked Khorne Stormboyz, hope they get some attention (or rules) again.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
[extra-heretical headcanon] I don't think the Imperium is 10,000 years old. I think somebody took advantage of missing records and inconsistent dating systems to multiply the duration of major historical events and periods by 10, not just to feth with people's heads but to reinforce the idea that the Imperium has always been around and always will be.
Imagine you're a member of the elite on Planet Whatever. (I say elite because the masses probably don't care). You have reliable records of Whateverian history going back maybe a thousand years, at most, before it all gets blurry and there seems to have been some kind of huge disaster. But, gosh, that's just a fraction of the history of the mighty Imperium, isn't it?
Well, no, it's not. Your civilization has been around just as long as the Imperium, and that cataclysmic period when your historical records go all fuzzy isn't some local disaster when your world was cut off by a warp storm, it's the goddamn Age of Strife.
Why am I constructing such elaborate heresy? Because I can suspend disbelief for Titans and giant flying cathedrals, but I just cannot make myself believe any political system or religion can endure 10,000 years -- that's about the same length of time as there is between the present day and the invention of agriculture: all recorded history from Sumer to the Roman Empire to the iPhone 5 fits in a bit over 5,000 years. I majored in history, I read a lot of history, and when I look at GW's fluff there just isn't enough. Yeah, sure, lots of wars, but major socio-political changes appear to be limited to the Great Crusade, the Heresy, the rise of Emperor-worship and the Ecclesiarchy, and the Age of Apostasy and subsequent reformation. Yes, I know the whole setting is Turned Up To 11, but people are still supposed to be people, and the one thing about people that doesn't change is that they keep changing.
So I developed the rule of thumb that whenever I read about an event lasting more than 100 years, I divided its duration by 10. (You need to do something similar with the lifespans of Sumerian kings and biblical patriarchs).
We already know the Inquisition has an entire Ordo devoted to falsifying history and destroying inconvenient records about the Inquisition itself (the Ordo Redactus). And a lot of people, myself included, already consider the fluff we read to be translations of in-universe propaganda. That's typically Imperial propaganda, but I can imagine that the Eldar really want to come off as tragically awesome and awesomely tragic as their Codex makes them sound ("oh woe is me how the mighty have fallen but I'm still better than you at everything ever" -- bloody emo xenos), and that Chaos really wants to sound that transgressive and, well, icky as a giant middle finger to Daddy Emperor and his conventional bourgeois values, kind of like that "artist" that put a crucifix in a vat of urine. It's not too far a step (at least for me) to wondering if the absurdly long timelines are propaganda, too.
[/extra-heretical headcanon]
Also I don't think the Imperium is as doomed as some fluff makes it out to be -- again, I think of that as propaganda to get people to pay their tithes on time lest the universe end -- and I suspect it can keep blundering along for a few centuries yet. And on a much smaller scale, I imagine most people in the galaxy to be a lot less intense and "there is only WAR!" than the fluff makes them out to be. (That's why I like the Ciaiphas Cain stories). Everybody can't be fighting to the death all the time, they'd all be dead by now. I imagine Imperial forces, from the Guard on up to Sisters and Marines, to be a lot like the people I know in the military, who like all human beings are gloriously inconsistent creatures, sometimes heroic and sometimes petty. (Another reason to like Cain).
[shameless self-promotion]Hence my anti-heroic Sororitas fanfiction, linked in my signature below.[/shameless self-promotion]
You're forgetting the Imperium isn't a unified culture. All the Imperium is, is a federation ruled by extremely long-lived individuals/practically immortal lines in control of a massive military force. The Imperium pretty much is just Terra and the main branches of the military. Every single little planet is its own incredibly unique culture with its own development and own falls and rises. The only time the 'Imperium' even comes into existence for the average planet is in the very infrequent times that a large ship with a lot of guns collects the planets respective tithe and moves on. That's it. The IOM really isn't at all that unified and you often have planets being deleted from the database/completely forgotten.
Your average Imperium citizen is also unlikely to experience the 'total war' that grips the galaxy, as even during an eternal state of eternal war- humans control a greater portion of the entire galaxy. Citizens are much more likely to live their lives free of intrusion by Xenos or Chaos- much more likely to die from disease, accidents, or even old age. The lore tends to hammer down that the IOM is one unified massive empire, but the fluff points out that this really isn't the case. The IOM's just a totalitarian federation ruled by a transhuman/posthuman ruling and upper class with the average citizens and entire planetary cultures left to live their own lives so long as they pay their respective tithe and aren't invaded/cause heresy. It's not that unreasonable for them to last ten thousand years. It's not like Star Wars with the Galactic Empire being an overbearing ruler micromanaging everyone and thus tripping over its own bureaucracy. It's more of a distant police state that you're very unlikely to even come into contact with unless hits the fan and Xenos attack or the Archenemy plants down roots.
The problem with this head cannon is that there are still dreadnoughts from the great crusade and marines in excess of 1000 years old.
GW and Black Library tell us they're over 1,000 years old. But if you consider all the fluff to be in-universe propaganda and the novels to be in-universe historical fiction, maybe somebody lied.
SisterSydney wrote: GW and Black Library tell us they're over 1,000 years old. But if you consider all the fluff to be in-universe propaganda and the novels to be in-universe historical fiction, maybe somebody lied.
Well then there's another problem.
What about the immortal group of 10000 year old crazed Rambo motherf**ckers that are Chaos Marines?
Or Magnus single handedly stopping the advance of tens of thousands of SW, millions of Imperial Army troopers, and the sisters of silence in seconds with glares?
Propaganda is not something you spread about your enemies strength. You don't make them out to be unkillable gods.
What we do know is that time passes seemingly at random in the Warp. Examples have been given of it passing both much slower and faster. For example, a Warboss in the Ork codex travelled in the Warp, but due to the randomness he emerged before he set off, even killing his past self in order to loot him.
I see it often being argued that CSM are much younger than it seems because time flows differently, but they are just as likely to be older. 100K years old Noise Marine who has had some time to savour the pleasantries of Slaanesh's realm? 56K years old Berzerker who has fought in the arenas of Khorne for far longer than he can remember? Fifty-year old Iron Warrior who has only spent moments in the Warp directly after the Heresy, but emerged to the 41st millennium?
SisterSydney wrote: GW and Black Library tell us they're over 1,000 years old. But if you consider all the fluff to be in-universe propaganda and the novels to be in-universe historical fiction, maybe somebody lied.
Well then there's another problem.
What about the immortal group of 10000 year old crazed Rambo motherf**ckers that are Chaos Marines?
Or Magnus single handedly stopping the advance of tens of thousands of SW, millions of Imperial Army troopers, and the sisters of silence in seconds with glares?
Propaganda is not something you spread about your enemies strength. You don't make them out to be unkillable gods.
Also thissssssss so much. It effectively disqualifies the 'propaganda' theory. Horus Rising would NEVER be propaganda since it made him likeable.
Haven't read the Heresy novels, but do note that I allowed for "historical fiction" as well as outright propaganda. Maybe Horus Rising was written by a subversive? Also much of the Chaos fluff may be Chaos propaganda -- "look at us, we're so metal and transgressive and self destructive and feth you Father it's all your fault we did this to ourselves!.
But it doesn't have to be. Propagandists exaggerate the enemy's strength all the time, because nothing unifies and mobilizes your own population better than fear of the Other: Imperial Japan is going to invade California so we'd better round up all the Japanese Americans; the Reds are going to destroy the Free World unless we stop them in Vietnam; the Soviets are an Evil Empire so we'd better build Star Wars and a 600-ship navy; Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and is going to give them to al-Qaeda unless we invade now; al-Qaeda is everywhere so we need to track all your phone calls.
Political aside:
Spoiler:
I'm not saying al-Qaeda, Saddam, the Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan are/were not evil: They are/were genuine bad guys and genuine threats, just not the supervillains they're made out to be. And actually I think the NSA's collection of phone and email metadata is both legal and a good idea, though their putting backdoors in widely used systems is just begging for disaster...
And these are just examples from my own country in the last 75 years, in a modern, democratic country. Anyone who's read much history or lived in an authoritarian country can find much worse examples of not only demonizing enemies but also exaggerating their strength.
Bobthehero wrote: Its something I noticed, apparently propaganda can only be made by the Imperium.
Nope.
A lot of Chaos marines are solitary and they all hate each other anyway.
Propaganda is the last thing they would do.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
SisterSydney wrote: Haven't read the Heresy novels, but do note that I allowed for "historical fiction" as well as outright propaganda. Maybe Horus Rising was written by a subversive? Also much of the Chaos fluff may be Chaos propaganda -- "look at us, we're so metal and transgressive and self destructive and feth you Father it's all your fault we did this to ourselves!.
But it doesn't have to be. Propagandists exaggerate the enemy's strength all the time, because nothing unifies and mobilizes your own population better than fear of the Other: Imperial Japan is going to invade California so we'd better round up all the Japanese Americans; the Reds are going to destroy the Free World unless we stop them in Vietnam; the Soviets are an Evil Empire so we'd better build Star Wars and a 600-ship navy; Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and is going to give them to al-Qaeda unless we invade now; al-Qaeda is everywhere so we need to track all your phone calls.
Political aside:
Spoiler:
I'm not saying al-Qaeda, Saddam, the Soviet Union, or Imperial Japan are/were not evil: They are/were genuine bad guys and genuine threats, just not the supervillains they're made out to be. And actually I think the NSA's collection of phone and email metadata is both legal and a good idea, though their putting backdoors in widely used systems is just begging for disaster...
And these are just examples from my own country in the last 75 years, in a modern, democratic country. Anyone who's read much history or lived in an authoritarian country can find much worse examples of not only demonizing enemies but also exaggerating their strength.
That isn't inspiring to know Magnus alone can do that. That's not rallying to the strength of an ally. It's portraying hopelessness against an unbeatable foe. Not very effective.
That's a very big question! But okay, I'll give my brief view of each. I'm defining "troops" as the average soldiers/warriors in said faction, though.
SoB: Very good military training and equipment, along with apparently super-humans feats bought on by their intense belief. Can hold their own against most, or at least put up a good fight.
Guardsmen: Individually, not all that strong, compared to everybody else. Their strength is in their numbers and heavy armour. With those, they can hold their own against most in a straight fight.
Marines: Superhumans, again with very god equipment and training.
Tyranids: If we're looking at just Gaunts, then not too bad. But they rely on numbers and their Synapse organisation to see them through. So in numbers (which the 'Nids usually have), they'll eventually overcome anyone else, save perhaps Necrons or Chaos.
Chaos Marines: more or less the same as Marines, but potentially boosted by Chaos.
Chaos Daemons: Bad news indeed. As creatures of the warp, they can corrupt and change the things around them, as well as having supernatural abilities. And, if we're thinking long-term, they're not actualy killed by most attacks anyway, just get sent back to the warp. Very dangerous, those fighting them should, ideally, be some sort of fearless or incorruptible.
Necrons: best technology and materials. Assuming they're present in sufficient force, they'll likely overcome anybody else.
Eldar: Technologically superior to most, can comfortably fight just about anybody, ideally.
Dark Eldar: About the same as the Eldar, I think? I don't really know the Eldars in too much depth, so I could be missing some edge that the DE have, here.
Orks: If they have the numbers and the leadership, they can krump anyone.
Tau: Very good technology on hand, though they have a notable weakness in close combat. Though that's what the Kroot are for.
Hmm, looks like I've basically said that the majority of them are more or less even, given ideal conditions. S'pose that's just the fact that they all have fluff that bigs them up. And it was just a biref, casual look over them anyway, so I wasn't expecting anything too accurate or insightful.
Ultimately, they're screwed. They can probably hold out for a while yet, but there's three key threats amassing agianst them. Chaos is stronger than ever, with cults being a constant problem and the 13th Black Crusade gaining a foothold on Cadia itself. Then there's the Necrons, far more advanced technologically and ever increasing in number. And if those two don't do it, then the Tyranids will. What's been seen so far are mere scouts, the Tyranids have several galaxies worth of biomass behind them. When they arrive in force, their numbers will be too great to withstand.
So yeah, in the face of these enemies, the Imperium will likely collapse. Of course, the Emperor could revive somehow and keep his Empire together, but with the above view I'm assuming that everything continues "as normal" without anything too miraculous happening.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Don't know, I think it's something that the canon may be a little unclear on. I think that they could become too old and eventully die at some point, but am unsure exactly when, or even if this is correct. As for traitor Marines, as others have no doubt said, their being in the warp lets them cheat time in the Materium.
Unsure, it's all a bit vague, really. Assuming he is what he's thought to be, a C'tan god, he'll do a lot of damage if he wakes up. It is, perhaps, something that the Imperium could survive, with Mars, Terra and Titan all being nearby to combat the thing. But it'd probably damage Mars quite a bit.
Against an unprepared mind, very, assuming that it has opportunity and desire to bring its full "corruptive power" forward. Those that have strong enough wills and beliefs can resist it, though. And those who are just fighting against it without it making a concentrated effort to corrupt them can, perhaps, come out allright. But perhaps not always.
I suppose one random detail that I'd call my own interpretation is that at least some SoB are allowed to know about Daemons, even though knowledge of them is meant to be kept tightly under wraps. We have a story where the SoB leave a Daemon world in view of a GK ship (and apparently aren't killed for fighting against Daemons), and the Battle-Prayer of the Sisters of Battle references Daemons. This makes sense, IMO. SoB are highly resistant to corruption, so they coudl probably be trusted with the knowledge that Daemons are a thing.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
IG troopers are the baseline. Some are good, some are bad, depending on their training and the battlefield they fight on.
Space Marines are basically pointless, and are only kept around because of a decaying Imperium's traditions.
The Adeptus Mechanicus, I believe, have the most powerful Human military force.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Not as bad as it sounds. Most Imperial citizens don't even know that there are bad guys - that means it can't be all bad.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
The Warp alters time...
What about the Void Dragon?
I believe he is either 1) an intact C'Tan on Mars or 2) The Machine-God, really and truly, whom the Necrons misunderstood (and who is not a C'Tan).
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Huge and huger.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Pretty damn sneaky - it'd be my worst fear as a human in the setting, if I knew about it.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Massive. But they're coming in piecemeal, making them easier to deal with.
Brother Haraldus, Primordial, we're going to have to agree to disagree. You make good points, but rather than refuting point by point (and then y'all coming up with more reasonable refutations of my refutations), I'll just say that I consider all narrators in 40K unreliable ones and l don't feel bound by any of the fluff. Remember, there is no canon in 40K.
So if something strikes me as implausible or just dumb (and there's, ah, a fair bit of this), rather than let it interfere with my enjoyment, I just shout "propaganda!" or "legend!" and happily move on.
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Too big question But for IoM, backbone is IG. Humans, but in huge numbers and in times of greater need, IoM can muster able bodies from all planets boosting IG strenght A LOT. But it can/ will have cruel consequences on world's economics and demograpgics. Beginning of the end. Astartes are interesting posterboys and with chapters united can muster formidable power, but even after that, its force suitable rather for surgical strikes than mass frontline warfare.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Not so bad as is used for propaganda (fear gives you power over people). Pretty bad in future.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Warp. So...dunno. Maybe. Some of them. Warp.
What about the Void Dragon?
Dunno
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans - depends on type, but some are really HUGE. Bigger than tabletop scale, much much bigger.
Ships - Some of them are floating cities or rather fortresses.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Very effective. If its officers act reasonably and dont just murder whole population of the planet
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Biggest threat for every race and faction in WH40K. I expect that in final, whem GW decides to move plot, Necrons will make thin metal line protecting humans, eldars etc. Because with Nids isnt so much fun. Im expecting huge waves of epicness and metal baked with biomass together!
Bobthehero wrote: Its something I noticed, apparently propaganda can only be made by the Imperium.
I guess why people don't really think propoganda is there for other factions is partially because.... what do they have to gain? Chaos Daemons? What do they benefit from propoganda? Heck the gods hardly have their own personality besides a vague one focused on what they embody. Necrons? Why would they hide the weapons of doom that they have? Tyranids? Why would they bother to have propoganda when bar genstealer cults they are ravenous creatures that just want to consume. And Chaos? Why would chaos have propoganda for not a single one of their planets and have it so they are the bad bad evil guys gonna kill you we backstab eachother and mutate and become spawn and die terribly but oh the freedom except we are slaves to the gods sometimes!
Onto another note, Sydney brought up something that has spawned some debate. Now, then, what of how the Imperium would stay united for so long? Heck, even 1000 years is a long time. Well I say the administratum isn't what keeps the Imperium together as much as they claim. Yeah, it keeps it so revolts get crushed, resources get shipped around, etc... all important. But I believe much of it also has to do to the Ecclesiarchy that keeps the majority worshipping the Emperor. That is the social glue that keeps them together (coupled with the threat of Admin war and also removing supplies from getting to you)
StarTrotter wrote: Wait how does preaching of how sucky CSM life is = propaganda for chaos?
Life as a CSM is bad?
Huh.
I thought it was great fun. Apart from all the depravity, but when you're insane that's just a fact of life...
I was talking for the standard individual. For me it seems like a jolly good time. Selym did you seal the pilots into the hell talons yet? We don't want another mutiny on this ship. And I have had enough of those plague marines leaving their rotting food at the same place every day! We need some change here! Anyways what do you want to pillage next? I'm thinking we sneak some members in as sleeper agents, wait a few years, and then activate them as they promptly reveal the realities of the warp and that their God is a corpse? Sounds jolly fun does it not? (So are we supposed to get along or be at each other's throats? *coughyouarenurgleandiamtzeentchcough*)
Chaos now hiring all fooli- brave mortals willing to become slav- mighty beyond your imagination.
When I think of 40K, I immediately get visions of the artwork from the 3rd Edition 40K rulebook. That book was so dark with such great visuals, Blanche happiness and lots of other black and white stuff. As a kid I spent hours reading it and re-reading that rulebook, I still have it here in very good condition, such fond memories.
Ya know, it's kinda funny, but sometimes, I get the feel (not the exact imagery but the "feel" that you get in some of the batman movies. You know, the set of them where Jack nicholson played the joker and the penguin and all? The gloomy gothic feel they pushed in those movies. Picture that feel in a sci fi setting.
I have no "mental picture" of 40K's setting. Everything I know about how the universe works is directly shaped by what the source material tells me. No personal interpretation needed.
There are some aspects of the Universe that I don't like or don't make sense to me, like Necrons or how inefficient and Lawful Stupid the Imperium is, but I'm not going to dip my head in the sand and pretend these things don't exist or behave differently just because I don't like them. They are what they are; my preferences are irrelevant.
EDIT- Ha, I forgot that I already posted in this thread. Well, consider this an extrapolation on my earlier thoughts then.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Well I would say that astartes are strongest followed by their warp tainted brothers who I would say are string except there line to be between daemon (which are weak to me ) and being astartes is very small but then would be the nids and guardsmen because of there large numbers then tau and necrons only due to the fact they fight amongst each other in hopes of establishing each other as a pharaoh and orks are here too only cuz dem b derpin bout with da boyz last all the elder no explanation needed
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
Well it could be worse but I feel there story arch is like that of Europe Rome (the founding of the imperium and crusade) brought civilization to the barbarians thn the dark age and now they need a rebirth maybe by revolution or perhaps the emperor returning but at this point it is kinda bad but they will over come
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Well as said before pretty much immortal look at commander Dante, well the traitors are a different ball game being the warp says to hell with time and all of that yea I mean abandon is older then that I mean even warp jumps show this as you go in today exit in the right place 100 years later so yea they can become very old and there "blessings" will help
What about the Void Dragon?
It's just going to stay locked up the mechanicum has him under wraps but if he did escape I feel some thing would happen with the emperor
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Well titans can be huge I mean 500m tall maybe but then again it can change by how they are built and ships I have seen charts that say they can be 10km long or more so again it varys
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
How weak is the persons mind or body in Nurgels case so it can do a lot of bad like how the things in lovecraft effect people some people see a fish man and go mad others see a reanimated body and brush it off like "oh another one of those"
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Trillions of bugs they are as big as they want and need to be
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
StarTrotter wrote: Wait how does preaching of how sucky CSM life is = propaganda for chaos?
Life as a CSM is bad?
Huh.
I thought it was great fun. Apart from all the depravity, but when you're insane that's just a fact of life...
I was talking for the standard individual. For me it seems like a jolly good time. Selym did you seal the pilots into the hell talons yet? We don't want another mutiny on this ship. And I have had enough of those plague marines leaving their rotting food at the same place every day! We need some change here! Anyways what do you want to pillage next? I'm thinking we sneak some members in as sleeper agents, wait a few years, and then activate them as they promptly reveal the realities of the warp and that their God is a corpse? Sounds jolly fun does it not? (So are we supposed to get along or be at each other's throats? *coughyouarenurgleandiamtzeentchcough*)
Chaos now hiring all fooli- brave mortals willing to become slav- mighty beyond your imagination.
Yess... mighty...
Though I'll probably have to get the meltagun out for the pilots...
On the plus side, when we get onto an imperial world, we'll be able to make enough sacrifices to the dark gods to get us all closed to daemonhood.
Powerlevel-wise I usually assume things to be rather more down to earth than many other people here. Space Marines are tough, but they cannot beat entire armies by themselves. Many of the wondrous stories about the Emperor, Primarchs, Saints and other heroes are full of exaggeration, misconceptions and myths. Emperor probably looked more like Sir Ian McKellen than the Incredible Hulk in a golden armour. And now he might be dead anyway.
However, psychologically and visually I assume the world to be weird. Everyone is somewhat crazy. The Imperium is a huge, mindless, uncaring bureaucratic machine fuelled by insanity and superstition. Entire worlds die because of a clerical error, and no one even notices.
Ian Mckellen as the Emperor = awesome. Though at some point he presumably would've augmented himself in a manner similar to a space marine...so a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound Ian Mckellen?
As for Chaos, even people sufficiently well-informed to know about Spawn might join up because of the profound human tendency to think "oh, that won't happen to me." Ambitious young people flock to Hollywood/Broadway/Nashville to become stars, even though by definition only a handful of them can land starring roles and they know that before they go.
SisterSydney wrote: Ian Mckellen as the Emperor = awesome. Though at some point he presumably would've augmented himself in a manner similar to a space marine...so a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound Ian Mckellen?
He doesn't really need to, he can buff himself with psychic powers when needed. I see him more as a jedi master and less as a superhero.
He spends tens of thousands of years trying to guide humanity and study the warp, and yet seems to make failures at a fundamental level in his decisions.
And them makes them again...
And again...
Warning: This gets a bit ranty.
Spoiler:
He makes the SM with the probable intent to have them all killed once they're finished, but then wusses out of killing Horus after witnessing Horus do the things he did.
And then kills him anyways shortly after.
He sets up "The Imperial Truth" as a way to combat chaos, but all it really leads to is allowing Chaos to run unopposed.
He bans the use of a Librarium, as he's getting rather Psyker-phobic, but he's perfectly happy with Rune Priests to use unwarranted amounts of warp energy.
He sends the Wolves to put down (not kill) Magnus, knowing that:
1) Magnus was trying to help him, and thus had good reason to use the warp to communicate.
2) That the Wolves are probably the only legion that would think it's okay to just outright kill another legion.
Selym wrote: I've always seen ol' Empy as a bit of a fool.
He spends tens of thousands of years trying to guide humanity and study the war...
Propaganda! Maybe the Emperor was just an unusually talented warlord and psyker who united Terra and recruited the best genetic augmentation experts around to make supersoldiers for him? Maybe he was "only" a couple hundred years old (thanks to anti-aging drugs & genetic enhancements) when Horus put him in the Golden Throne and the whole "around since 30,000 BC" thing is a legend or a lie?
That would explain him being brilliant but not wise -- Napoleon or Alexander the Great, not Kung Fu Jesus.
Selym wrote: I've always seen ol' Empy as a bit of a fool.
He spends tens of thousands of years trying to guide humanity and study the war...
Propaganda! Maybe the Emperor was just an unusually talented warlord and psyker who united Terra and recruited the best genetic augmentation experts around to make supersoldiers for him? Maybe he was "only" a couple hundred years old (thanks to anti-aging drugs & genetic enhancements) when Horus put him in the Golden Throne and the whole "around since 30,000 BC" thing is a legend or a lie?
That would explain him being brilliant but not wise -- Napoleon or Alexander the Great, not Kung Fu Jesus.
That does make sense - there are only speculations as to the pre-crusade days.
If this is the case, there are greater grounds for the Spehss Emprah being just another tyrant who took the chance to gain power.
This talk of the glorious God-Emperor being a fraud is very disturbing. I demand you all stem this nonsense otherwise there will be consequences and repercussions. *cocks pistol*
PrehistoricUFO wrote: This talk of the glorious God-Emperor being a fraud is very disturbing. I demand you all stem this nonsense otherwise there will be consequences and repercussions. *cocks pistol*
How powerful are the troops of each faction really? >Imperial Guard has billions if not a few trillion troops, hell, if we go off the %10 population tithe of every planet then it's probably up to a quadrillion...The individual soldiers are NOT equipped to be on par with the other factions, except Orks I guess because of the technological level. But each Imperial Guardsmen is like a heavily trained veteran United States Marine. They're badass. but it only goes so far.
>Eldar are extremely proficient in what they do on their Path+technology+psychic powers+agility=Monsters of combat NEARING Space Marine levels, but I think on average a Space Marine would win 7/10 times them and an eldar would fight individually. WAYYY better vehicles.
>Dark Eldar are pretty much the same as CW Eldar but with spikes and poisons, and twisted biological constructs. They're on par with Eldar IF NOT BETTER, due to drugs and psychotic training.
>Tyranids are fething crazy, their numbers are their advantage. I think a Space Marine or Eldar could kill just about everything the Tyranids could send at them but the Hive Tyrants and ESPECIALLY the Swarmlord is going to kill them individually most of the time unless they have good ranged weapons.
>Necrons are OP as feth.
>Tau are individually ALOT better in range then Imperial Guard, and probably in matters of discipline as well. But in melee it goes down the drain. Also, while the Tau are technologically advanced, I don't consider their armors to be advanced enough to do much against a few rounds of lasgun. One of their Suits against a dreadnought? The Dreadnought would make a nightmare out of it. Space and Air craft though..probably alot more superior to their Imperial equivalents.
> Orks are crazy and have bolters, but not great range or accuracy or technological level to speak of. Absolutely a horror in melee though. I like their improvised weapons and vehicles.
>Space Marines wreck them all except higher tier characters and units. A Space Marine Chapter Fleet could wreck a planet in an hour or less. The Marines themselves could wreck a planet within a month probably.
Chaos Marines and Traitors=The Traitor Regiments are less equipped but make up for it in bloodlust. The mutations and unholy blessings make up for lack of equipment and repair but they can take alot of damage.constructs like Helldrakes are important too.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation? Its screwed really really bad when it comes to logistics.If ships got to their location faster I actually think the Tyranids and Necrons probably wouldnt be a problem.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old? Marines in my canon can live forever. They just die from combat.
What about the Void Dragon?
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships? Titans can get as big as the The World Trade Center used to be, and bigger.
Imperial warships get to be miles long.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually? VERY effective, very Lovecraftian.
How large are the Hive Fleets? Trillions of Tyranids in a big hive fleet.
However, the setting is a legend told to us from a distant future, or at least that is the way I see it. We know that humanity survived this. But the Imperium fell, and this age was called "the End of Times" and described as absolutely horrible.
I like this. As in 40k is a historic recount from a far distant future source.
It's a similar concept to the one in Babylon 5, where there is a Human from 1 million years AD recounting historic records before having to evacuate Earth before the Sun goes nova.
- How powerful are the troops of each faction really? The difference between raw capability of each faction's individual soldiers is not as extreme as others make it out to be. Firepower and tactics matter more than biology in all but he most extreme (Necrons, Orks, Tyranids) situations; but even then, firepower and tactics frequently wins, and besides, those factions USE firepower and tactics too. It's just that the other factions (such as the Imperial Guard and Tau) use MORE firepower on average to compensate.
- How bad is the Imperium's current situation? It'll live; even if it suffers, it endures.
- How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old? I don't really care, most of them don't become old enough for the question to matter anyway.
- What about the Void Dragon? What about it? Not really all that important to me. He gone.
- How large are Titans? How large are spaceships? Titans are varying sizes, anywhere from Mechwarrior to low-level Lagann. And the bigger ships are capable of holding hundreds of thousands, if not millions of infantry, so they're pretty damned big!
- How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually? Varies with the agent that tries to corrupt, and the victim that they are trying to corrupt. Necrontyr, Orks, and Sisters are practically immune to it. I usually tend to ignore the existence of Grey Knights at the moment, though I used to like them. Tau aren't resistant to corruption so much as they're just undesirable targets and thus they haven't really had any widescale attempt at corrupting them. Non-Sisters humans vary with personality, but weak-willed individuals could probably be convinced fairly easily.
- How large are the Hive Fleets? Varies. Large enough to contain billions of human-sized organisms, at least, plus storage units for biomass and other necessary items. Most of it would likely be biomass storage, as they are shown to create new organisms in reaction to strategic or tactical necessity.
Short answer, the most hopeless world imaginable, whatever you do in its scale is nothing, a billion lives matter little. A world can be lost and not be noticed.
Inquisition will kill you for even being on same planet as a deamon or cult. Its a world where your value is basicly zero. No ones gonna miss or probably even count you.
Imperial guards depends a lot on the regiment, but most really are real though guys, with very good training and equipment. Able to deal with common menaces on the galaxy, and even able to face very strong horrors like the Orks. Regiment like Armaggedon Ork Hunters are total badasses. They have true grit.
Tau have even better equipment and are very dedicated, but when they go to war, they do not expect to die. They expect to be saved by their brother in arms, and their superior technology. They are good, but they do not have true grit.
The Eldars are extremely graceful. They are mainly hindered by their love of elegance and their reluctance to apply blunt force, but they still have awesome technology to avoid damage. They will also avoid to fight as much as possible.
The Dark Eldars are the stuff of nightmare. Kind of like their Craftworld brethren, except maybe even more powerful, and certainly way way more painful. But they have their weakness : pride, and not actually wanting to fight anymore than the Craftworld eldars. When facing any kind of serious opposition, they will retreat if the very first assault is not successful. Their victims will stiff have nightmares for the rest of their lives. They can even frighten a goddamn HERO OF THE IMPERIUM.
The orks are a bioweapon gone mad. Cut an arm, glue it back, it works again. They only die because lasgun are actually VERY powerful weapons (and mono-molecular knifes for the Ork Hunters). And even then, after a battle, just cut the head of every ork you can find, because many of them are likely still alive. Their problem ? Lack of discipline, and that is what wins wars.
The Sisters have even better armor, weapons and training than Imperial Guards. They are basically immune to normal anti-personal weapons, and only military-grade weapons will likely have an effect. Of course, lasguns are still very powerful weapons, so if a Sisters is hit by 50 lasguns, it is very likely she will die, but they manage not to get shot by that many weapons. And meltas, or plasma weapons, will straight up toast them. Also, faith make them do what other troops could not.
Marines are marginally better than Sisters because of their augmentation, but that does not matter much : a melta or a plasma weapon will still toast them anyway. Most of what will be able to bypass the huge protection of the power armor will be powerful enough that the augmentations do not matter. Their great weakness is pride. They do not work well with other imperials organization, and mostly do their things. They are not numerous enough to have an effect on planetary campaigns most of the time. In good case, they disrupts the enemy lines, helping a little the Imperial Guard. In bad case, they disrupt more the Imperial lines, and are a bit counterproductive.
Chaos space marines are quite a bit more powerful than loyal marines, because they have been around longer and got supernatural rewards. However, they do not show up much. They mostly inspire, command and bully human traitors.
Tyranids are another stuff of nightmare. Each gaunt is a barbed killing machine, all focused on killing. It will try to claw at you for many seconds after you blew up its head. Its blood will be toxic to you. Easy to kill though, but so many of them. You will get nightmare even before the Hive is even visible from radars or whatever the Imperium use to scan nearby space, because of the Shadow. There again, survivors will have nightmare for the rest of their lives, but in this case, survivors are much, much rarer as a planet resisting absorption is an extremely rare event !
The Necrons rely on sending (relatively) huge numbers of extremely hard to kill automaton at you. Those damn thing just wont go down ! But they come slowly, stumbling a bit stupidly.
Stale. Maybe a slow decline, but very slow because it is so huge. Tyranids are a new huge threat, though, because they are hardly ever stopped ! Hopefully the sheer number of stars means loosing a few to the tyranids is not the end of the world, but should a huge hive fleet come to Terra… that would be extremely disastrous.
BrotherHaraldus wrote: How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Depends on corrupting who. Corrupts pariah very easily. Can corrupt civilians on most world pretty easily, starting cults, but it needs to be on a society where the cults can survive hidden, else it cannot do much. Can corrupt marines if it really focus on it. Imperial Guard are usually harder than Marines, because they do not have the same very easy strings to pull (pride, etc). Corrupting a Sisters is almost impossible, not because magic protection (physical corruption is a very rare exception, not the rule, and even then wont work if the will to resist of the victim is strong enough) but because no strings to pull here.
So large your planet do not stand more of a chance than a sheep facing a wolf. Even if it is a Space Marine homeworld. And the sad truth about the result of the Battle for Maccrage is that the Tyranids won, and tragically the rest of the Imperium is not yet aware of it.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really? I like to think of guard as truly the most pathetic troops that the Imperium can muster. Almost guaranteed to pee their pants and run away at the first sign of trouble. Though obviously this can very depending on the professionalism of the regiment.
For Space Marines I imagine them being something akin to Captain America. I never felt the need for them to be especially tall or muscular either. I think most of their badassery comes from their armour.
Genestealers are pure death, (I probably picked that notion up from Space Hulk, and them having WS7 in 2nd ed).
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old? Yeah I like the idea of the traitors being immortal, and being able to recall deeds for 10,000 years ago. For ordinary marines I would say 300-600 (if they survive that long), older for Blood Angels.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships? I imagine an Imperator Titan to be about a mile high. Which would translate to about 70 feet in 40k scale. Certainly much bigger than things like Godzilla or modern skyscrapers. And much bigger than they are currently being depicted as (for good reason obviously). I imagine the space ships as being among the biggest in all of sci-fi.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
I deliberately choose not to try and conceptualize an overall interpretation of the 40k setting. Everything about 40k is ridiculously big, and at the same time shrouded in mystery. If it was neatly and completely revealed and set down, it would probably be even more over-the-top that it appears now and probably less enjoyable. I like that about the setting, so I just try to enjoy the stories that are presented in the setting in which they are presented. I don't mind that Gaunt's Ghosts and Eisenstein seem to exist in a somewhat different setting than Ciaphas Cain or whatever Bolter-Porn novel is coming out next, or the Horus Heresy, or whatever. I'm content that it's a "big universe…" and one big enough to contain these disparate points of view and experiences.
As to some of the big questions regarding faction size, age of characters, etc, these are great meta-mysteries that will probably never be completely revealed and I like it that way.
This is not to say that I like opacity in all my sci-fi universes. I'm also a big fan of the Battletech universe. By no means perfect, it's still one of the largest, best developed, most carefully curated and cohesive fictional universes in existence. There are still mysteries waiting to be explored, but you can track 150 years of it's history in great depth and detail. Further, the timeline is continually moving forward as well as the periodic revealing of various parts of the history previous to that 150 years. Every couple of years, the timeline advances another 5-20 years, lots of new stuff happens, a bit of history is also revealed and nothing that went before get's invalidated.
Both approaches to a fictional universe have their place, but I approach them in very different ways.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Guardsmen aren't the useless human tide they're painted as. Space Marines are almost unstoppable to anything short of a lascannon. Orks are stubborn enough that they'll keep fighting headless for almost a minute. Gaunts are fast but pitifully weak. Necrons are unkillable and self-repair within a minute of-near destruction.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
The majority of the worlds in the Imperium have no idea what Chaos is. Most of them are at peace, although all raise regiments for the Imperial Guard if required.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Bleedin' ancient. Dante's 1000-year lifespan is pretty attainable for all of them. Traitors can live for millenia.
What about the Void Dragon?
I choose to ignore it as anything other than a dead god.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
All of them are larger than they're shown in models. Imperators have heads the size of a house. Some of the older spaceships are bigger than current-day earth cities.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Not very effective at unwilling corruption, but fantastic with even the smallest spark of willingness.
How large are the Hive Fleets?
Literally without number in terms of aliens contained, hundreds of ships in a hive fleet
The C'Tan are laughing at the weaker (read: all other) races, spreading lies about them and their adorable little struggles among them while they themselves see their mindless Necron minions re-awakening to full force, ready to crush the galaxy once and for all.
My head canon is largely unchanged from before. Everyone can die to a big enough gun. Hell, a Lasgun can take down a Space Marine. Good luck getting into a position where you would be able to get enough Lasgun shots off on him though. They are the masters of warfare.
Tau Firewarriors are pretty crappy physically. Inferior to a human in every way. Earth caste and water caste are even worse. However, they have so much fancy gear that any physical short comings are easily negated.
Ashiraya wrote: Soloed one arena and a half of Chaos Exterminatus in Space Marine as a Raptor. I would have gotten further but it was practically impossible to kill the 6 man melee squad of Space Marines- when I tried to separate one from the group, he was just too tough for me to kill before his buddies could come and tear me to pieces.
Still, before that, I managed to kill over 650 enemies, including dozens of Nobs, 16 Primaris Psykers, and various other Imperial and Ork foes without dying a single time.
Don't you agree that Space Marine is wonderfully fluffy, Melissia?
But for some reason things like that never happen in the tabletop... Strange, very strange.
Not saying Space Marine should be taken as canon, but this is a fun tidbit.
Ooo, I have one! Terminator suited space marines can be killed in one shot by pulse weapons. That's written fluff! Admittedly the slaughtered squad were each shot through the eye-piece, but it's still pretty impressive.
I always imagined the Warhammer setting to have a bit of everything. Its set in the future, so society has to be very advanced. Its been at war for the last 10,000 years. So advanced, but everything is worn down. Society is terrified and tired by war. Economy is stressed, with The Imperium constantly needing larger and larger quantities of resources to fuel its defenses and war machines. However, 10,000 years of it has made them very efficient and skilled in regards to that area. To fuel a war engine spanning an entire galaxy for 10,000 years, you'd need more than a million worlds and billions of guardsmen. You need a billion worlds and billions of guardsmen from each world. It just seems logical to me, so that's the way I interpret the fluff. Factories spew out millions of guns per day, gazillions of ammunition, and hundreds of thousands of vehicles. I've always deemed the Imperium to be very cultured, if a bit old fashioned. A bit of Star Wars, a bit steampunky. Very victorian, 17th to 19th century art style, themes, and dressing. The dressing would be more modern though, not too much frillings, trimmings, and decoration. People must have a bit of electronics with them when they go out, like a device that tells the current time of 1000 worlds across the Imperium. It probably has a communication device, maybe virtual intelligences. On the black market, probably even AI's. The black market is also probably very prosperous, widespread and has a comparable measure of power. You cant control markets to the extent that you can here on modern day Earth as you can in space. I don't think you can at least. You'd need the same amount of security that my interpretation of the Imperial Guard provides. And a whole lot of prison ships.
When building my own personal headcannon I have a hierarchy sources* liberally mixed with common-sense mitigations, and lots of adjustments for 'unreliable narrator' & 'obvious propaganda'.
That said; let me answer some of the OPs direct questions:
Ashiraya wrote: How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
As to the power of 'troops' I take the table-top as a good source for relative strengths of different things. Sometimes this falls down, or runs up against a wall of 'I just can't accept that', but usually it is fine. It's certainly more consistent than the novels or third party material.
Ashiraya wrote: How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
If I could sum it up in one word it would be 'Precarious'. The Imperium is one of, if not 'the' most powerful faction, but it is 'besieged on all sides', if it falters, or fails too far, the cascade effect would see everything fethed pretty quickly.
Ashiraya wrote: How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
A regular space marine, left to die of old age, would die somewhere between 300 & 500, depending on geanseed, personal biology, and lifestyle. Chaos Space Marines are a whole different kettle of fish, the Warp & Chaos itself let rules be broken. There a almost certainly CSM who fell the weight of 10000 years, but there are others who still have the dust of Istavan clinging to their boots.
Ehhhhhh, the business with Necron fluff I largely leave alone, I have a love-hate relationship with both versions, so it sits in a box until can resolve it.
Ashiraya wrote: How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Titans are probably as big as they were in Epic. Starships are another matter, I wish they were smaller, just so as they made more sense (I once did a calculation on a troop carrier, when, with even only 20% of the ship given over to barracks, each soldier gets a football field worth of space), but I've heard good ideas about how they work that makes me more amenable to the listed sizes. (That and 40K is not alone in Sci-fi settings with scale issues.)
Ashiraya wrote: How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Totally terrible don't trust your friends at it. Seriously they are plotting against you I don't know why anyone you must strike first think they are any we will give you that power good at it at all.
We don't really know how many more are lurking beyond the edge of the galaxy, maybe they are all already here, maybe there are so many they could blacken the skies of every world in the galaxy. We don't know. And nothing is more terrifying, than the unknown.
This is Guardsmen versus basically everything ever. (Replace Tau with IG and SM with basically everything ever)
Why do you hate them so much ?
TheCustomLime wrote: What Blaxican said. Do you have something against the Imperial Guard, Ash? Sometimes I wonder.
Though if you're talking about their close combat ability I agree. Imperial Guardsmen do not want to be in close combat.
Contrary to popular belief, I do not actually hate the Imperial Guard. I really like them. I just think them having the role of the ultimate uber-grimdark meatgrinder faction is cool. The assault succeeded? Who cares if we lost twenty million men in the process? Far, far, FAR more where that came from! Need recruits? Just conscript some farmers or hive citizens, slap on some mediocre wargear on them, give them some mediocre training on the way to the warzone, and use them with less care than you do with ammunition. Life is cheap! Cheeeeeeap!
Hey, someone needs to be worfed in order to show how cool others are, right? Guardsmen take that spot and get a nice unique role for themselves in the process.
And by having almost everything else making quick work of us normal humans (Who are the only ones we somewhat know the capabilities of), we make the enemies of Man seem really dangerous and nasty, adding to the grimdark.
Yes, in my headcanon a Tactical Marine can basically kill Guardsmen indefinitely since they just can't penetrate their armour in either melee or at range.
I mentioned my love for crazy scaling earlier, which Oxayotl complained on with a Carnifex example. But the scaling is crazy just because it is not only extreme but also irregular.
Not only Marines are awesome™. We also have Eldar, Daemons, Tyranids, Necrons etc., even if Marines naturally fit best in the role because, well, with the way they are designed they are pretty much begging for it!
So Guardsmen basically take the role of the ultimate mass punching bags, a role they should hold with respect and pride.
Ashiraya wrote: How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Totally terrible don't trust your friends at it. Seriously they are plotting against you I don't know why anyone you must strike first think they are any we will give you that power good at it at all.
I felt a strange compulsion to Exalt this and can't say why.....
Ashiraya wrote: I just think them having the role of the ultimate uber-grimdark meatgrinder faction is cool.
Well, you know, the guard is very varied (actually much more so than rainbow snowflake marines), and some regiments explicitly and very efficiently fill this trope. But “meatgrinder faction” does not fit the Catachans, or the Mordians, or…
Ashiraya wrote: Just conscript some farmers or hive citizens, slap on some mediocre wargear on them, give them some mediocre training on the way to the warzone, and use them with less care than you do with ammunition. Life is cheap! Cheeeeeeap!
Except the fluff has always insisted that Imperial Guard are not like that, except for a few exceptions like penal regiments. Mediocre wargear, mediocre training has always been a PDF thing.
Ashiraya wrote: Hey, someone needs to be worfed in order to show how cool others are, right?
Not if you are doing it right . But if you want to, the official weaklings of 40k are the PDF. The grots do not count.
Ashiraya wrote: I just think them having the role of the ultimate uber-grimdark meatgrinder faction is cool.
Well, you know, the guard is very varied (actually much more so than rainbow snowflake marines), and some regiments explicitly and very efficiently fill this trope. But “meatgrinder faction” does not fit the Catachans, or the Mordians, or…
Ashiraya wrote: Just conscript some farmers or hive citizens, slap on some mediocre wargear on them, give them some mediocre training on the way to the warzone, and use them with less care than you do with ammunition. Life is cheap! Cheeeeeeap!
Except the fluff has always insisted that Imperial Guard are not like that, except for a few exceptions like penal regiments. Mediocre wargear, mediocre training has always been a PDF thing.
Ashiraya wrote: Hey, someone needs to be worfed in order to show how cool others are, right?
Not if you are doing it right . But if you want to, the official weaklings of 40k are the PDF. The grots do not count.
The same goes for traitor guard, actually, and even more so for cultists.
Catachans are a rare, almost one-of-a-kind regiment.
Mordians may have decent enough training but that is nowhere near enough on the hellish battlefields of 40K. You're going to need something like Kasrkin or Stormtro- Scions for that, and even then their mere humanity makes them severely outmatched against many foes.
But manpower is just so cheap so the Guard as a whole survives anyway, and so do the traitor guard. If I am a Chaos commander and I notice that there's an annoying Space Marine up to stuff over there, I 'distract' him a bit with 888 or so (KHORNE!) cultists.
Spoiler:
(Yes, they are actually exactly 888. Could not even fit them all onto the screen.)
There is no shame in being the cannon fodder faction!
But, as far as I know, throwing a gak ton of incompetent men at a competent enemy in a setting featuring too many ways of evaporating those gak tons of men isn't practical. It's a waste of the Emperor's currency, his equipment and ammunition. Sure, throw enough men at the problem and you'll win but by that point if you actually trained those guys and gave them decent equipment you would have been far better off logistics wise.
Then you have to consider how difficult it would to transport all of those guys. You have to feed and equip every single man. Even if you have the guy running around in gakky equipment and feed him rat meat you still have to transport them. Ship travel isn't cheap or easy in the 41st Millennium. So, as a High Lord of Terra, wouldn't it make more sense to actually train these these men and give them proper equipment so you can ultimately save on logisitics? It's not like it's that hard anyway. If you give each squad a Meltagun, an easy thing to make, and knows how to shoot right congrats. You have a squad that can down a Space Marine and you only need 10 guys. Seems like a better better deal than throwing 1,000 cheap men at the issue.
I can see the sense of having supeiror numbers. After all, the AdMech is weird about producing good gak for the Imperium. Sure, they'll devote centuries of work to a big warmachine than can die in seconds but make enough Bolters to equip the entire Guard? Blasphemy and a waste of resources. So, since Lasguns aren't all that effective you'll need more.
I see the Guard either operating like black powder era line infantry or using their troops as buffers for the good stuff like the WW2 Germans did.
The Imperium's irrational, inefficient, but effective: It's survived 10,000 years, after all. I'd say the genuinely crap troops are represented on the table by those WS:2 BS:2 Ld:5 Conscripts and that regular Guardsmen are pretty respectable soldiers -- it's just that the situations they face are so fething horrific that they die in droves anyway.
SisterSydney wrote: The Imperium's irrational, inefficient, but effective: It's survived 10,000 years, after all. I'd say the genuinely crap troops are represented on the table by those WS:2 BS:2 Ld:5 Conscripts and that regular Guardsmen are pretty respectable soldiers -- it's just that the situations they face are so fething horrific that they die in droves anyway.
Oh, I think the basic 3s-in-almost-everything statline for IG is great as a baseline. Just that almost everything else has unfluffy stats.
Ashiraya wrote: Catachans are a rare, almost one-of-a-kind regiment.
Why? Because they come from a very dangerous world? Really, most regiment are described as competent and well-trained. Chem dogs are not, obviously, but that is the exception rather than the norm. Let me remind you of Armageddon's Ork Hunter. They fight orks. With knifes. And somehow, they manage not to die at every encounter. They are described as really badass.
Ashiraya wrote: Mordians may have decent enough training but that is nowhere near enough on the hellish battlefields of 40K.
Ashiraya wrote: There is no shame in being the cannon fodder faction!
Yeah. Some people love playing special character with rules like “Send in the second wave” that says unit destroyed can enter the game a second time because the tactics of their regiment involve blindlessly sending people to the meatgrinder without any regard for human life. And that is cool, really. But there is way more than just that to the Imperial Guard.
[edit]Cultists are usually like PDF, very incompetent and very weak compared to about anything.[/edit]
Eh, everyone is free to their own interpretations. If Ash here thinks a Guardsman is no better than a blade of grass before a lawnmower, then she is free to do so.
Like I think that a Leman Russ tank (Depending on load out) is the best main line tank out there outside of the Necrons. Superbly armored, packs a really mean punch, easy to use and cheaply replaced.
Yeah, she is free to do so. And we are free to discuss about it too .
I am not being aggressive or rude (well, at least I hope I am not), I am just discussing this lightly.
I never accused you as such but you're right. However, opinion is a hard thing to debate with people since it doesn't rely much on facts.
Also, SisterSydney, the Imperium doesn't survive because it's effective in it's own way. It survives because it's too big to fall in a single day, so to peak.
True. But the nice thing about the Imperial Guard is that you can have that "10,000,000 casualties crossing no man's land? I call that a good day" regiment if you want. DKoK and the Valhallans are good for that.
Of course, it's a huge setting. If it is in someone's headcanon it's probably in the galaxy somewhere.
Also, a lot of treadheads will hate me for it, but I consider the Guard tanks to be generally poor. Poor design in general aside, I guess the blueprints are OK... But they are designed to be massproduced and commonly built with subpar skills and materials.
MORE men! MORE tanks! I don't care if that Fire Prism blows up a Leman Russ with every shot while moving so fast so our men's eyes can't keep up with it, much less the guns, but we must get MORE tanks into the field!
Ashiraya wrote: I think the ultimate despair of being part of such a nightmarish military is the perfect breeding ground for a story's hero, but that's just me.
Well, if a normal human have absolutely no chance of accomplishing anything noteworthy, how can they distinguish themselves for the thousand of other normal humans sent to the slaughter ?
Ashiraya wrote: I think the ultimate despair of being part of such a nightmarish military is the perfect breeding ground for a story's hero, but that's just me.
Well, if a normal human have absolutely no chance of accomplishing anything noteworthy, how can they distinguish themselves for the thousand of other normal humans sent to the slaughter ?
Because those extremely few but significant people can still accomplish things.
That Guardsmen do not run around slaughtering everything by the dozen like in the Bobtheheroverse ( ) does not mean that they are incapable of anything at all. It's just that when a Guardsman manages to do something special, it quickly becomes very special indeed.
You know, I always saw Rhinos like that. Not to sound like I'm trying to get back at your favorite faction but they're cheap vehicles that can be easily, easily mass produced and made out of subpar materials. The only reason they don't blow up like chumps is because their users are usually the most competent troops there is. I'm sure that during the great crusade and heresy would have seen fields of knocked out Imperial Army Rhinos and Predators. And, like the Sherman, the Army commanders didn't give a rats behind about it since that Rhino has been replaced 10 times over.
It's weird what the Imperium decides to stop making en masse, tbh. You'd think the Rhino would be cheap and plentiful as dirt.
TheCustomLime wrote: You know, I always saw Rhinos like that. Not to sound like I'm trying to get back at your favorite faction but they're cheap vehicles that can be easily, easily mass produced and made out of subpar materials. The only reason they don't blow up like chumps is because their users are usually the most competent troops there is. I'm sure that during the great crusade and heresy would have seen fields of knocked out Imperial Army Rhinos and Predators. And, like the Sherman, the Army commanders didn't give a rats behind about it since that Rhino has been replaced 10 times over.
It's weird what the Imperium decides to stop making en masse, tbh. You'd think the Rhino would be cheap and plentiful as dirt.
Huh, my headcanon says it's right the other way around (Which is why GK, Inquisitors, SM etc use it instead of Chimeras)
Heh, well, I am one of those people who think that the 40kTT game does reflect the fluff to one degree or another. Though Space Marines could use a buff.
You know, I wouldn't actually mind having the Leman Russ be a total piece of cheap trash if it meant I could have more of them on the TT. Just give the Guard a good tank and I'd be happy as a clam. After all, a zerg rush of a Horde of tanks looks awesome. Certainly fit with the way they look.
TheCustomLime wrote: Heh, well, I am one of those people who think that the 40kTT game does reflect the fluff to one degree or another. Though Space Marines could use a buff.
You know, I wouldn't actually mind having the Leman Russ be a total piece of cheap trash if it meant I could have more of them on the TT. Just give the Guard a good tank and I'd be happy as a clam. After all, a zerg rush of a Horde of tanks looks awesome. Certainly fit with the way they look.
I am one of the people who think that not only is the TT game an absurd arcade version of the fluff where everyone is supposed to be able to have armies that will almost never need to be more than 50% or so larger than the opponent's, and where both are supposed to be able to just put down two armies and blast themselves some kills. I am also firmly of the belief that it is impossible to represent the fluff accurately in the game without making it complicated enough to be unplayable.
I guess I could just sit and modify RT, but that too has its limits.
For me, I personally enjoy the weird mix of down-to-earth grimdark, cosmic horror, heroic mythology and all kinds of things in one setting.
Ashiraya wrote: Because those extremely few but significant people can still accomplish things.
The way you described it, there is no way a imperial guard hero could kill a marine. If you think this is unusual, but still possible, then it becomes way closer to my headcanon .
Ashiraya wrote: That Guardsmen do not run around slaughtering everything by the dozen like in the Bobtheheroverse ( )
What? The only guard that goes around slaughtering everything that have the misfortune of being in his path (or rather, in the path between him and safety ) is Ciaphas Cain.
I think it does a fair enough job as it is depending on your interpretation of the fluff. I would prefer it to be on a D10 or D12 based system to allow more nuanced stats to give units more variety but it gives you a good picture.
Ashiraya wrote: I am one of the people who think that not only is the TT game an absurd arcade version of the fluff where everyone is supposed to be able to have armies that will almost never need to be more than 50% or so larger than the opponent's, and where both are supposed to be able to just put down two armies and blast themselves some kills.
Heh. Me? I'm so far at the other end of that spectrum it's not funny. I treat the TT (at least where it is applicable) as a primary source (or at least the first among secondary sources). I do have to use several VERY important cravats (weapon ranges are not absolutes, turn time is consistent but not directly representative, etc etc) to make this work, but that's how I do things. Given how wildly the fluff varies, I like having the TT game as firm anchor at the heart of it.
Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote: The way you described it, there is no way a imperial guard hero could kill a marine.
With bayonet or lasgun, in normal combat? Pretty much impossible.
Shoot a Chaos Marine in the back with a Meltagun as the CSM is about to execute the Lord General? Very possible. I mean, the CSM will probably not die from it, but it certainly hurts, and it can make a lot of difference.
Ashiraya wrote: I mean, the CSM will probably not die from it, but it certainly hurts, and it can make a lot of difference.
That weapon is used to kill Land Raiders. How would it fail to kill a CSM when fired at close range in the back (where the spinal cord is)? I mean, except if that marine was already half a daemon or something.
The weapon is really not that efficient against Land Raiders either thanks to the ceramite plating. You'd need to hit weak-ish spots like certain engine parts or tracks.
Well, that was never represented on the tabletop (where melta and multi-melta are basically the best man-held weapons to deal with a land-raider afaik), and I have never heard about it in the fluff. As far as I know, chances are that the ceramite plating will be vaporised with the rest.
Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote: Well, that was never represented on the tabletop (where melta and multi-melta are basically the best man-held weapons to deal with a land-raider afaik), and I have never heard about it in the fluff. As far as I know, chances are that the ceramite plating will be vaporised with the rest.
Look up the Ceramite plating special rule- it overrides Melta.
LRs do not have it in the game for whatever reason but they do have ceramite plating in the fluffffff.
I think this is adding 1 and 1, thus getting 2 and not 0, but that's just me. YMMV
Automatically Appended Next Post: In fact, seeing how easily we humans IRL die to everything, it is borderline immersion-breaking for me to see guardsmen take hits from the weapons of most races and survive.
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
Guardsmen are the best. They're cool guys that don't afraid of anything
Alright, on a serious note. Individually, Space Marines of both flavours are easily the most effective. However, other races generally have so many troops as to counteract their advantage through numbers. Tau and Eldar suffer in this regard, but make up for it in other ways - tech, physical abilities, cunning, etc. The Tau (or more specifically, the Farsight Enclaves) may be the most gifted strategists in the universe, with only Eldar and Necrons challenging this.
Oh, almost forgot, I subscribe entirely to the Oldcron fluff. The C'tan are still a thing in a big way, and there's none of this silly divided Egyptian robuts in spess rubbish... The Red Harvest will continue.
IG are usually meat grinder armies. However, their tanks are top tier (although the crew are only as good as their regiment's training, meaning the operation of these tanks is as variable as other regiments - so meat grinder Armoured companies are somewhat common). However, a very rare few regiments are trained efficiently and effectively; these are the "special ops" regiments, such as the Catachan, Elysians, etc. These regiments are rare, but undoubtedly effective, and able to effectively fight Eldar, Tau, and other more adept armies. For immersion's sake, it's usually these kinds of armies we see on the table top.
Total snafu. Everyone wants them dead, or worse, to some degree. Chaos wants total corruption of humanity before waging eternal war on the rest of the universe. Orks, Tyrranids, Necrons, - they're gonna do what they do. Eldar will probably try and kill them because reasons, Dark Eldar will probably try to enslave the entire race. That's a lot of meat for the flesh labs, and a lot of warriors for the arenas. Whole lotta pain either way. You know the story. "The enemy of my enemy", as they say - and the IOM has made it its business to make as many enemies as possible.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Well Dante clocks in at 1100 years old, IIRC. There's nothing that suggests marines are immortal, but they clearly have longer lifespans than normal. I'm wiling to bet it's a long, long time after 2000 years though. As for legionnaires - well, it's the Warp. I don't usually like to handwave something away so easily, but, well... it's the Warp. I ain't gotta explain gak
Of course, those are just examples that I thought up in a few minutes. Post anything from your own interpretation!
:O
Hokay, here we go.
Legions, officially, no longer exist. However, warbands still adopt and hold the traditions for their former legion, and sometimes unite to fight for a similar cause.
There's a metric fethton of things we don't see on the table for the legions - for example, the Night Lords, which use Raptors and Warp Talons (Right. We'll get onto that in a moment) traditionally on the tabletop also have access to specialised Havocs and chosen, the Talon Lords, a useful version of Fear, and so so so much more. And that's just the Night Lords. This goes for all the legions.
Chaos marines are also far smarter than most fluff sources make them out to be; though there are far less Chaos Astartes than Loyalists, they are generally much more cunning and unpredictable. In fact, loyal Astartes usually lose to Chaos Astartes, due to their reliance on the Codex Astartes, and the fact that Chaos Marines already know the Codex themselves. Older legions and those that do not rely on the Codex usually put up a far better fight.
Ashiraya wrote: Look up the Ceramite plating special rule- it overrides Melta.
Yeah, but the Land Raider never had it, did it? And the fluff never spoke about a Land Raider being protected from Melta by its ceramite armor, did it?
Actually, I think adding this stupid rule to those stupid fliers made no sense to begin with, anyway.
Ashiraya wrote: In fact, seeing how easily we humans IRL die to everything, it is borderline immersion-breaking for me to see guardsmen take hits from the weapons of most races and survive.
Consider it as them being hit on non-vital body part. Maybe they are just taking arrows in the knee or something!
Well, if your to-wound roll fails it doesn't necessarily mean the person who took the hit "tanked it". Maybe it hit a piece of intervening terrain. Maybe the guy ducked at the last minute. Use your imagination. It's what I do when a Lascannon doesn't wound a fraggin batttlesuit.
TheCustomLime wrote: Well, if your to-wound roll fails it doesn't necessarily mean the person who took the hit "tanked it". Maybe it hit a piece of intervening terrain. Maybe the guy ducked at the last minute. Use your imagination. It's what I do when a Lascannon doesn't wound a fraggin batttlesuit.
Stupid battlesuits.
With battlesuits it could also be just a bit of damage to the leg or something, you only hurt the pilot if you hit the body.
That would still knock them out. You don't have to kill something in order to take it out of battle unless it's a Tyranid or a Nurgle thing. Then you really have to murderize it or it'll keep on coming.
Ashiraya wrote: Look up the Ceramite plating special rule- it overrides Melta.
Yeah, but the Land Raider never had it, did it? And the fluff never spoke about a Land Raider being protected from Melta by its ceramite armor, did it?
Codex Armageddon / Salamanders Vehicle Equipment.
Page 25. Land Raider +25 pts, rhino chassis based vehicles and Dreads +10 pts. Land Speeders had no access.
Adding Ceramite against melta did exist before the SR.
TheCustomLime wrote: That would still knock them out. You don't have to kill something in order to take it out of battle.
Hitting the leg would have no real affect considering that they have the jetpacks and can do a continuous float.
Well it wouldn't be able to kick. Because we all know how much... Tau... rely on...
Oh God, I'm sorry but I just can't say that and keep a straight face. Close Combat Tau... and it works, too. That's the hilarious thing about it. It works.
I personally consider Marine weapons vastly superior to the ones used by the Guard, not only in quality but more importantly sheer size (Bigger gun = bigger rounds = more firepower). This is something that is not entirely unsupported by the fluff.
Pg.320 Blood Angels Omnibus wrote:He saw Tycho’s combi-weapon lying on the floor and took a half-step toward it. The idea of taking it up himself died in this mind; the gun was so massive he would never have been able to lift it.
Pg.20 The First Heretic wrote:The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.
Pg.21 Deus Encarmine wrote:His gun clattered, the barrel spitting hot as rounds big as fists tore into the foe.
In the same way, grenades are really ineffective against Astartes.
Pgs.7+9+10 H&B 15 – Beneath the Flesh wrote:He could hear Maion’s footsteps as he moved down the corridor; the other Flesh Tearer was halfway to the stairs, the fizz of the electrical cables as they spat in their death throes… and the shifting of metal – Harahel pivoted left as a grenade hit the ground. His ocular sensors dimmed, shielding his eyes from the piercing flash that flooded the chamber. With a dense clatter, a half-dozen of the ceiling grilles fell to the ground. A cluster of figures in sodden fatigues dropped down after them and opened fire. ‘Contact!’ Harahel shouted into the vox even as a hail of las-fire pattered off his armour.
Bathed in blood-spatter and faced with an opponent whose armour bore their comrade’s eviscerated innards, the traitors fell back. One held his ground, staring wide-eyed at Harahel as he pulled a clutch of grenades from a harness. Harahel decapitated the man as he advanced on the others. The grenades fell from the headless corpse’s fingers. A cloud of flame and shrapnel washed over Harahel’s battle-plate as they detonated. A slew of warnings lit up on the Flesh Tearer’s retinal display. Harahel blinked them away; his armour’s integrity was intact. Ahead of him, the traitors had rallied behind a pillar. He could see the fear on their gaunt faces as he emerged unscathed from the billowing fire.
Pg.16 H&B 16 wrote:A grenade exploded, showering Harahel in shrapnel. The noise reminded him of a Cretacian thunderstorm.
They are also rather fast...
Pg.93 VS wrote:Sire, I believe we should save them for–’ The human said nothing more. The front of his face came free with a sickly crack, the flesh and jagged bone crunching in the Night Lord’s fist. Talos ignored the body as it toppled, spilling the insides of its halved skull onto the decking. No one had even seen him move, such was the prophet’s speed, clearing ten metres and vaulting a console table in the time it took a human heart to beat once.
Also, they can fall pretty far. Do not try this at home.
Pg.223 H&B 16 – Redeemed wrote:[...] wakefulness. His cheek was wet, and he could feel fluid pooling. Rafen blinked, scanning the visible glyphs across the line of his field of vision. His helmet had been damaged, along with some of the actuators in his legs, but the cowl of ceramite and steel that surrounded him had taken the brunt of the crash. He took stock of himself, feeling for injuries. Some minor breaks in his bones, contusions and the like, things that would have been deadly to a common human but little more than an irritant to a Space Marine. [...] Rafen took a step and then halted, looking up. Wreaths of smoke and wedges of debris made it hard to see far up the ascent shaft, but he estimated that they must have fallen several kilometres before colliding with the end of the passage.
Oh, and Space Marines can fight for a looooong time.
Pgs.3-4 Kill Hill wrote:Priad of Damocles, of the Iron Snakes of Ithaka, has been here for fifteen years. To the human mind, that is a great chunk of a lifetime. To an Imperial Guardsman, that would be a long and heartless tour in hell. To Priad, it is an undertaking, a period of occupation, a duty. Onerous, perhaps, grueling even, but in the end just another mission notch on his service history, just another action to while away a life that will be functionally immortal if violent death does not claim him.
Not long. Fifteen years. Entirely reasonable. For a moment, Priad had been concerned that it might be a significant length of time. Great Petrok’s two centuries spent holding Ankylos might have become tedious by the end. Steelmen are less entertaining to hunt than Greenskins.
They are also pretty big. The following quote describes one outside of armour.
Pg.94 25 for 25 – The Last Detail wrote:It’ll be dark soon,’ the boy’s father said. ‘We should perhaps stay here another night and then set off at dawn.’ ‘No time,’ the Astartes said. Now that he was upright he seemed even huger, half as tall again as the man in front of him, his hands as big as shovels, his chest as wide as a dining table. ‘I see in the dark. You can follow me.’
Assuming the man is 6 feet, rather average, this would put the Marine at nine feet!
This one is for you, Eldar. Seems your Shuriken are not as PA-piercing as one might think.
Pg.612 - The Rewards of Tolerance wrote:A fusillade of bright blasts and blurring discs filled the stairwell. Gesart recognized the shuriken catapult fire amongst the laser shots. He leaned over the railing and unleashed a hail of fire from his storm bolter, the explosive ammunition ripping a trail of splintering metal across the landing below. Slender shapes darted from the shadows and he was engulfed by a hail of razor-sharp projectiles. Pushing himself back, he glanced down and his armor and saw a row of barbed discs embedded across his chest pauldron.
SM are also stronk.
Pg. 196 Warriors of Ultramar wrote:“That is good to know, Major Satria. The warrior spirit of Ultramar is in you.” Satria beamed with pride at the compliment as they eased past a madly revving supply truck. Laden with two-dozen frightened citizens of Erebus, its back wheels had sunk into the churned soil of the road and, behind it, angry horns blared continuously, as though their owners believed sheer volume of noise alone could shift the immobilised truck. Fountains of mud and chunks of grit from its spinning back wheels sprayed the limousine behind the truck, cracking its windscreen and leaving streaks of bare metal where they ripped across its pristine bodywork. The driver of the truck continued gunning the engine, oblivious to the damage he was causing, gasoline rainbows forming in the clouds of filthy blue oilsmoke jetting from the track’s exhaust.
...
Major Satria banged on the cab of the truck and made a chopping motion across
his throat to the driver. Immediately, its engine shut down and the noise of the protesting motor faded to a throaty rumble as Satria made his way towards the limousine.
...
“Did you see what that imbecile has done?” he snapped. “I did indeed, Mister van Gelder, and if you’ll just bear with us, we’ll get you on your way as soon as we can find some planks to put under the back wheels of this track and get it out of the mud.”
“I want that wretched driver’s name so that I can be properly compensated upon my return to Tarsis Ultra.”
“I assure you that I shall attend to the matter, sir,” soothed Satria. “Now, if you’ll just return to the lovely heated interior of your limousine, we’ll soon have you out of the city.”
Before van Gelder could reply, a groan of metal sounded from behind the major. Satria turned to see Sergeant Learchus effortlessly lifting the back end of the fully laden truck from the sucking mud and push it forwards to more solid ground. The sergeant dropped the truck to the road and almost immediately it sped off to the spaceport.
Satria had heard of the great strength of Space Marines, but had thought that most were overblown exaggerations. Now he knew better.
Flesh and Iron wrote:During a particular training exercise in ambush methods, a fledgling Disciple was crushed by his own poorly-rigged log trap. One of the four - Gabre - simply levered the half-tonne log off the dead man and Mautista saw with his own eyes the way Gabre barely strained to lift it.
SM are main battle tanks.
Death of Antagonis wrote:With no home world, the Dragons had no infrastructure to produce and properly maintain vehicles. Those they had were for ultimate measures. But what did they need with vehicles when each Space Marine was a main battle tank with legs? Vritras’s spearhead began its destruction of the enemy with fire from the rear. The Devastators of Squad Lanx unleashed their heavy bolters. Rounds with the destructive punch of artillery shells tore the cultists apart.
Here, CSM sodomizing IG.
Death of Antagonis wrote:There was a flash over his head, and a lascannon shot punched into a Bane Wolf’s gas reservoir. The tank exploded, spreading its angry death for dozens of metres around it. This time, it was the men of the Mortisian Guard whose screams were awful and short, and whose skin was puddling in the road. Bisset’s jaw dropped and he threw himself flat. The Leman Russ’s turret rotated in his direction, and the heavy bolter sponson chugged rounds. The turret hadn’t moved half its arc before a second lascannon beam blasted it from the chassis.
Armoured beings stormed past him. They were terrible, golden angels, and they fell upon the Guard with bolter and chainsword. They savaged the units that had escaped the release of the gas and tore the tanks apart. They were monsters who bore the garb of beauty. They were giants in the service of war turned into art. There were only five of them. There were a hundred times as many Guardsmen, and that was far too few. The battle was even more one-sided than the attack on the rebels had been. Within seconds, hulls had been ripped open, treads yanked from wheels and used as whips, and men scythed into shrieking meat. The Chaos Space Marines stood proudly in the carnage, gods well pleased by their allotment of blood. The surviving rebels emerged from their hiding places. They began to cheer, and the cry was taken up by more and more people pouring into the streets.
On another less Marine-related topic. Vanquishers are not as good against the more heavily armoured targets as one may be misled to think.
Titanicus, pg. 72 wrote:They got off a second shot.
Nothing. The giant engine [a Titan, unknown class but sub-Warlord] strode on, closing ground. Its vast left heel mashed a Vanquisher underfoot and kicked the mangled wreck aside.
"Full ahead!" Varco yelled. Queen Bitch hurtled forward, and the gun team got off a third shot. Varco saw it burst like a firework against the tarnished chest plate of the advancing monster.
I deliberately left out my Goto quotes because, well, Goto.
In my mind the 40k setting is quite different in some areas but it's mostly the more practical and technical areas - I use this background in my games with Inquisitor rules:
I need a single Space Marine to be awesome... He mustn't be several heads shorter than the world's tallest man was (about 2.77 metres). A normal Space Marine is roughly 2.50 - 2.75 metres in Power Armour and Alpha Legionnaires in Power Armour are roughly 2.75 - 3.00 metres. Add about 0.25 metres when in Terminator Armour. Canon states that there's about 1 million Space Marines right? I must remember that compared to all military conflicts which include the Imperium of Man only a very few include Astartes but they still have to be extreme powerful with so few numbers, so in my set up almost none actually dies and every single one which gets near to death will be blessed with a sarcophagus and a Dreadnought.
Space Marines were engineered to possess several aspects, one is to wear Power Armour which were developed on Mars to be perfect and which took no consideration of the horrific surgeries a human body would need to wear the armour. This means that a naked Space Marine is quite ugly and nowhere near the cool HULK-like Space Marine bodies which are mostly drawn. This underlines the sacrifices made by warriors which aspire to be a Space Marine and the determination of the Emperor when he agreed to this - his Space Marines didn't have to look good, they're tools and killing machines and that's it. For me it's very important that when a warrior ascends to being a Space Marine it's a huge sacrifice but the honour rivals the sacrifice. There must never be the kind of feeling waking up after the surgeries, looking at yourself and thinking "Oh yeah - upgrades" like in so many super hero movies.
Boltpistols, Boltguns, Stormbolters and Heavy Bolters are Space Marine weaponry only - no Astra Militarum infantry or vehicle carries this kind of weaponry. The technology is strictly guarded by the Chapters' Techmarines and besides a normal man would not be able to lift and fire such an awesome weapon. Only the ankles and down will be left of a man hit by a Bolt Pistol or Boltgun.
The 4 Gods of Chaos as we know them are only the most popular ones but there's many more and there's so many other powerful and less powerful Daemons which don't belong to a Chaos God - a huge Hive World which worships a Chaos entity in secret could very well worship a single Daemon less powerful than a Greater Daemon - it would still be extremely powerful in the way of corrupting and scheming.
Like every Space Marine squad has a Special Weapon bearer, a Heavy Weapon bearer and maybe a Standard Bearer, there's also a Space Marine with a small Teleport Homer incorporated in his palm. Every squad have their own vault of ammo, grenades, gear etc. with a Servitor in a ship in orbit. The Servitor has it's own mini teleporter equipment which teleports clips and whatever is needed to the bearer of the small Teleport Homer.
The Power Armour around the shins of the Space Marines are so big because there's small boosters incorporated which make Space Marines able to run about 50-60 km/h. Rhinos aren't used directly in battles though they are needed for transporting Space Marines longer distances.
Aspect Warriors are maybe even more lethal in close combat than Space Marines because of their speed and agility but Aspect armour and Heavy Aspect armour give far from the same protection as Power Armour, so it's difficult to compare them. A normal Aspect warrior possess movement and agility no Homo Sapiens (in our world) could ever dream of of possessing.
Some less useful alterations of the 40k background:
Horus never repented in the end - he was fuelled by the power of Chaos but his motives were his very own to the end.
Fulgrim hasn't been completely possessed - his will and personality is still very much there - if there's a conflict or agreement between Fulgrim and the Daemon, I'm not sure.
No mortal has ever slain an Avatar of Khaine in hand to hand combat.
(Imagine a Bloodthirster the size of that from the Mark of Chaos intro) -> Sanguinius never broke the back of a Bloodthirster by breaking it over his knee.
Also, Space Marines (actually, World Eaters) are less proficient close combat warrior than commissars, and die from a single melta shot that vaporize their torso. Or their head. I would quote the book, but I got the crappy French edition. It is in The Traitor's Hand, though.
By the way, we also get a suicide-bomber cultist that kills a space marine (where is your grenade immunity now!).
But the part you will really love if how when the 3 remaining World Eater berserkers face 100 cultists, with 50 that are already dead, and we get to know that if it were even PDF instead of cultists, they would have been assured to win by numbers alone (you do not like that already), and without taking even a tenth of the casualties of the cultists!
So, 150 PDF (which are way inferior to guardsmen) against 3 space marines means the PDF win with 5 casualties.
How do you like that ?
What about that maintenance servitor that just pops the head of one of the world eaters? Apparently maintenance servitor are very, very capable of killing space marines too.
Yeah, it is all from one book, but that is because I do not read much 40k fiction, and the few I read usually involves no space boringus .
But you leave out the most awesome parts of the setting? Eldar and DEldar running around too fast for humans to follow, Tyranids being too many for humans to comprehend, Marines being too badass for humans to contain and Necrons being too unkillable to make Guardsmen feel comfortable at night!
The jovial green punching bags and the Imperial Speedbump are nice and all, but they are just a part of the whole.
Ashiraya wrote: Let's just say that there is a reason I did not bring up my Goto quotes.
Do you mean to imply that my quote were from a biased novel?
Every faction is treated fairly: they are all Ciaphas Cain's toy thing, or punching-ball!
Equal opportunity worfing for everybody!
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:The Custodians hewed the orks with precisely aimed blows of their guardian spears. They could wield them in lethally inventive ways, but this was not the place for elaborate fighting styles. Here it was kill or be killed. Strikes that would end any other life form thrice over had to be repeated again and again just to put a single beast down.
The orks fought back with all the primal, animalistic fury that made them so dangerous. Even terminator armour could be breached, their legionaries killed.
The orks were doing both.
At least a dozen Custodians were dead. Perhaps the same again in Justaerin. Horus saw Ezekyle go down, a colossal spiked mace, twice the height of a mortal, buried in his shoulder. An ork war-captain, ogryn-huge, wrenched the mace clear and swung the weapon around its immense body to deliver the death blow.
A shimmering sword sliced in to block the descending mace.
Bluesteel, two handed and wreathed in fire.
The Emperor rolled his wrist and the monstrous weight of the spiked head fell from its wire-wound haft. The Master of Mankind spun on his heel and the fire-edged sword licked out in a shimmering figure-of-eight.
The towering greenskin collapsed in four keenly-sliced segments. Its iron-helmed head still bellowed defiance as the Emperor bent to retrieve it from the deck. He waded into the orks, the roaring war-captain’s truncated torso in one fist, sword in the other.
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:A thousand or more greenskins roared to see several hundred armoured warriors appear without warning in the midst of the wide chamber. Every ork was encased in rusted plates of hissing iron, strapped and bolted to their swollen bodies. Horus’s suspicion of a ruling tech class was all but confirmed at the sight of the wheezing pneumatics, cracking power generators and hissing, lightning-edged weapons.
‘At them!’ bellowed the Emperor.
Much to Horus’s chagrin, the Custodians moved first, bracing their spears and letting fly with an explosive volley of mass-reactives from their guardian spears. The Justaerin opened fire a heartbeat later and the ork line bloomed with fiery detonations.
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:Then the Emperor was amongst them.
His sword was a bluesteel shimmer, too fast to follow with the naked eye. He moved through the orks without seeming to move at all, simply existing at one point to kill before appearing elsewhere to reap greenskin lives by the score. Each blow struck with the force of an artillery impact, and shattered bodies flew from his sword as though hurled aside by a bomb blast.
Nor was his sword the Emperor’s only weapon.
His outstretched gauntlet blazed with white-gold fire, and whatever the flames touched disappeared in explosions of red cinders and ash. He battered orks to bonelessness with bludgeoning blows, he crushed them with invisible coils of force and he repelled their gunfire with thoughts that turned their rounds to smoke.
They came at him in their hundreds, like iron filings to the most powerful magnet, knowing they would never find another foe so deserving of their rage. The Emperor killed them all, unstoppable in his purity of purpose.
A crusade of billions distilled in one numinous being.
Horus had fought alongside the Emperor for well over a century, but the sight of his father in battle still had the power to awe him. This was war perfected. Fulgrim could live a thousand lifetimes and never achieve anything so wondrous.
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:As blinding and mesmerising as the runaway plasma reaction was at the scrapworld’s heart, it was to a beleaguered golden light that Horus’s eye was drawn.
The Emperor was fighting his way through a howling mob of the largest greenskins Horus had ever seen. Most were the equal of a primarch in stature. One even dwarfed the Emperor himself.
His father fought to reach a fragmenting ring of iron surrounding the blinding plasma core, but the greenskins had him surrounded.
This was a fight not even the Emperor could win alone.
But he was not alone.
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:In the course of the Great Crusade, Sejanus had seen many examples of the crudely effective greenskin technology, but what lay beneath the surface of the scrapworld were orders of magnitude more advanced and abhorrent
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:Horus’s sword was broken, his twin bolters empty of shells. The sword had snapped halfway along its length, the edge dulled from hewing countless greenskin bodies. He’d fought his way onto a stepped bridge, killing scores of monstrously swollen orks to reach a crumbling ledge just below the Emperor.
Blood drenched him, his own and that of the orks.
His helmet was long gone, torn away in a grappling, gouging duel with an iron-tusked giant with motorised crusher claws for arms and a fire-belching maw. He’d broken the beast over his knee and hurled its corpse from the bridge. Rogue gravity vortices hurled it up and away.
More of the greenskins followed him onto the bridge, grunting and laughing as they stalked him. Their grim amusement was a mystery to Horus. They were going to die, whether he killed them or they were burned to ash by the colossal plasma reactor’s inevitable destruction.
Who would laugh in the face of their death?
Wolf of Ash and Fire wrote:The Emperor fought an armoured giant twice his height and breadth. Its skull was a vast, iron-helmed boulder with elephantine tusks and chisel-like teeth that gleamed dully. Its eyes were coal-red slits of such vicious intelligence that it stole Horus’s breath.
Horus had never seen its equal. No bestiary would include its description for fear of being ridiculed, no magos of the Mechanicum would accept such a specimen could exist.
Six clanking, mechanised limbs bolted through its flesh bore grinding, crackling, sawing, snapping, flame-belching weapons of murder. The Emperor’s armour was burning, the golden wreath now ashes around his neck.
Chugging rotor cannons battered the Emperor’s armour even as claws of lightning tore portions of it away. It was taking every screed of the Emperor’s warrior skill and psychic might to keep the mech-warlord’s weaponry from killing him.
‘Father!’ shouted Horus.
The greenskin turned and saw Horus. It saw the desperation in his face and laughed. A fist like a Reductor siege hammer smashed the Emperor’s sword aside and a fist of green flesh lifted him into the air. It crushed the life from him with its inhuman power.
I have seen lots of people wondering how the Emperor could possibly have a mere Ork crushing the life out of him. Some have seen this as proof that the Emperor was not so stronk in combat after all.
The explanation is different.
Those Orks that they fought during the great crusade... They were pretty nasty Orks.
In comparison the idea that Ghazghkull would be the greatest warboss ever seems like utter farce.
Ashiraya wrote: In comparison the idea that Ghazghkull would be the greatest warboss ever seems like utter farce.
Well, Ghazghkull, in the fluff at the very least, is a pretty nasty beast. And since it is rumored to be a Lord of War now, I guess its profile will reflect that.
Orks are like that, super-powerful and pretty nasty and very adaptable (because kunnin'. Brutally kunnin'. And kunnin'ly brutal too). And that is why the galaxy's finest is required to battle them, i.e. the Imperial Guard, with brilliant men like Commissar Yarrick. When the Eldars need protection from the Ork, who do they call for (and by call for, I mean manipulate into being in front of the Waaagh)? The Imperial Guard.
Mhmm, the part where a Captain and a squad Kasrkins take out a Death Guard Dreadnought in melee with a power sword, a hellpistol, a chainsword and winging it on the damage an autocannon did to it is an all time favorite of mine. Taken from the same book, a squad of Kasrkins and a psyker take out two Plague Marine, lose three men in return.
Or the good ol' swamp ambush in one of the Gaunts book.
Was that the fight where a single marine resisted dozens of hits to the bare face from arrows so poisonous that they instantly killed normal men on contact, and where Gaunt needed to get a drop on the second marine with his power sword in order to kill him and the third marine was killed by an entire belt of grenades exploding right in his face?
I agree, definitely one of the best examples of the sheer superiority Space Marines have over normal humans.
Remember when like 500 Salamanders brought Commorragh to its knees despite being outnumbered by essentially the entire Dark Eldar race? That was fantastic. Truly representative of what 40k is about.
That reminds me of when a Salamanders force of 10,000 men managed to hold the line against millions of Orks in the Forgeworld codices, fighting back an army that was over 100 times larger than them every day for a full year and then wiping them off the face of the planet after reinforcements arrived.
Was that the fight where a single marine resisted dozens of hits to the bare face from arrows so poisonous that they instantly killed normal men on contact, and where Gaunt needed to get a drop on the second marine with his power sword in order to kill him and the third marine was killed by an entire belt of grenades exploding right in his face?
I agree, definitely one of the best examples of the sheer superiority Space Marines have over normal humans.
It'll do, apparently guardsmen killing SM is not a thing that should happen ever, at all, so I'll take that, besides, aren't marines mmune to grenades anyways?
You forgot how the 4th one got demo charge'd and the last one was offed by a plasma pistol.
I remember there being only three, maybe the guy who I thought was killed by the grenades was actually killed by the demo charge? It's been literally years since I read Traitor General.
I remember there being only three, maybe the guy who I thought was killed by the grenades was actually killed by the demo charge? It's been literally years since I read Traitor General.
Pgs.7+9+10 H&B 15 – Beneath the Flesh wrote:He could hear Maion’s footsteps as he moved down the corridor; the other Flesh Tearer was halfway to the stairs, the fizz of the electrical cables as they spat in their death throes… and the shifting of metal – Harahel pivoted left as a grenade hit the ground. His ocular sensors dimmed, shielding his eyes from the piercing flash that flooded the chamber. With a dense clatter, a half-dozen of the ceiling grilles fell to the ground. A cluster of figures in sodden fatigues dropped down after them and opened fire. ‘Contact!’ Harahel shouted into the vox even as a hail of las-fire pattered off his armour.
Bathed in blood-spatter and faced with an opponent whose armour bore their comrade’s eviscerated innards, the traitors fell back. One held his ground, staring wide-eyed at Harahel as he pulled a clutch of grenades from a harness. Harahel decapitated the man as he advanced on the others. The grenades fell from the headless corpse’s fingers. A cloud of flame and shrapnel washed over Harahel’s battle-plate as they detonated. A slew of warnings lit up on the Flesh Tearer’s retinal display. Harahel blinked them away; his armour’s integrity was intact. Ahead of him, the traitors had rallied behind a pillar. He could see the fear on their gaunt faces as he emerged unscathed from the billowing fire.
Pg.16 H&B 16 wrote:A grenade exploded, showering Harahel in shrapnel. The noise reminded him of a Cretacian thunderstorm.
Void__Dragon wrote: Remember when like 500 Salamanders brought Commorragh to its knees despite being outnumbered by essentially the entire Dark Eldar race? That was fantastic. Truly representative of what 40k is about.
Was that a different event from when Vect manipulated some marines in doing the dirty job for him by getting them to kill some minor kabal in a sealed portion of Commorragh?
Because that seems a tad less glorious .
Void__Dragon wrote: Remember when like 500 Salamanders brought Commorragh to its knees despite being outnumbered by essentially the entire Dark Eldar race? That was fantastic. Truly representative of what 40k is about.
Was that a different event from when Vect manipulated some marines in doing the dirty job for him by getting them to kill some minor kabal in a sealed portion of Commorragh?
Because that seems a tad less glorious .
Sure it was. That is why this article only mentions one imperial raid on Commoragh, which is more detailed here. Note how it involves Vect bringing in some Salamanders in Commoragh, then getting them to kill Lord Xelian and basically all his other rivals, and then him becoming the undisputed most powerful Dark Eldar.
I really, really wonder how the Salamanders found a way to enter the Webway. Certainly not Vect's doing . It was just some very convenient coincidence, was it not?
Space Marines are 7 feet tall, IN their power armor. I internally edit any fluff I'm reading that says otherwise.
Spoiler:
The scale on Jes Goodwin's famous life size drawing even starts at 2, not 1, and tops out at 8, showing that a fully armored marine is 7 feet tall. If there is one thing I'd like to eliminate from popular perception it's this idea that marines are 8 foot tall or more, which so far as I can tell originated in the BL fluff (Horus Rising being the first book I recall reading that obsessively went on about how big the marines are - to the point where I wonder if Dan Abnett has some kind of fetish...)
The tabletop models may be out of scale, but they're not that out of scale.
ashcroft wrote: Space Marines are 7 feet tall, IN their power armor. I internally edit any fluff I'm reading that says otherwise.
Spoiler:
The scale on Jes Goodwin's famous life size drawing even starts at 2, not 1, and tops out at 8, showing that a fully armored marine is 7 feet tall. If there is one thing I'd like to eliminate from popular perception it's this idea that marines are 8 foot tall or more, which so far as I can tell originated in the BL fluff (Horus Rising being the first book I recall reading that obsessively went on about how big the marines are - to the point where I wonder if Dan Abnett has some kind of fetish...)
The tabletop models may be out of scale, but they're not that out of scale.
Chaospling wrote: @ashcroft: Please change your perception to that of mine... (You can find it in the first post of this page). Your life is better that way...
ashcroft wrote: Space Marines are 7 feet tall, IN their power armor. I internally edit any fluff I'm reading that says otherwise.
Spoiler:
The scale on Jes Goodwin's famous life size drawing even starts at 2, not 1, and tops out at 8, showing that a fully armored marine is 7 feet tall. If there is one thing I'd like to eliminate from popular perception it's this idea that marines are 8 foot tall or more, which so far as I can tell originated in the BL fluff (Horus Rising being the first book I recall reading that obsessively went on about how big the marines are - to the point where I wonder if Dan Abnett has some kind of fetish...)
The tabletop models may be out of scale, but they're not that out of scale.
Chaospling wrote: @ashcroft: Please change your perception to that of mine... (You can find it in the first post of this page). Your life is better that way...
Your perception is boring and silly.
Mine's more fun
Hehe at what page have you posted yours? I thought I would at least read yours before calling it outrageous By the way, were you talking about all my perceptions or only that about the height of a Space Marine?
Chaospling wrote: Hehe at what page have you posted yours? I thought I would at least read yours before calling it outrageous
Here:
Melissia wrote: My mental image of 40k is basically the Third War of Armageddon, with less focus on spehss muhroonz and more on the Imperial Guard and Orks.
That's what defines 40k for me, basically-- IG vs Orks, with a smattering of other factions having conflicts as well.
Chaospling wrote: By the way, were you talking about all my perceptions or only that about the height of a Space Marine?
Chaospling wrote: Hehe at what page have you posted yours? I thought I would at least read yours before calling it outrageous
Here:
Melissia wrote: My mental image of 40k is basically the Third War of Armageddon, with less focus on spehss muhroonz and more on the Imperial Guard and Orks.
That's what defines 40k for me, basically-- IG vs Orks, with a smattering of other factions having conflicts as well.
Chaospling wrote: By the way, were you talking about all my perceptions or only that about the height of a Space Marine?
Why would I talk about Space Marines?
Jokes aside, the answer is yes.
I don't know why you single the Third War of Armageddon out, but I agree as far as a story should include Space Marines and other legends as a spectacular bonus. This makes Space Marines so more... unique and... not-common. I would love if the first real film or TV-series showing the 40k universe would be like Band of Brothers. Keeping down spectacular parts like Space Marines, huge war machines etc. to a minimum and instead focussing of the awesome atmosphere of the 40k universe.
Chaospling wrote: I don't know why you single the Third War of Armageddon out, but I agree as far as a story should include Space Marines and other legends as a spectacular bonus.
From my perspective, there's nothing really spectacular about Space Marines. They're about as generic as they come as far as literature tropes go.
Individual chapters-- such as blood angels or salamanders-- can be interesting. Space Marines as a whole, however, not so much.
Chaospling wrote: I need a single Space Marine to be awesome... He mustn't be several heads shorter than the world's tallest man was (about 2.77 metres).
The world's tallest men don't tend to be notable for sheer strength and bulk - quite the reverse really. Part of my dispute with this is that marines aren't built like basketball players - they're built like boxers or body builders.
Or to phrase it slightly differently, David Prowse was 6'6 when he played Darth Vader - that's not imposing enough?
The models are perhaps a little shorter than they should be, but based on some sources and much fanon a space marine would be close to the size of an Ogryn, and that they most definitely are not.
Boltpistols, Boltguns, Stormbolters and Heavy Bolters are Space Marine weaponry only.
The Sisters of Battle disagree. The Ecclesiarchy has immense wealth and influence and so can afford to equip its personal army with the very best weapons and equipment money (and power) can buy.
ashcroft wrote: Space Marines are 7 feet tall, IN their power armor. I internally edit any fluff I'm reading that says otherwise.
Spoiler:
The scale on Jes Goodwin's famous life size drawing even starts at 2, not 1, and tops out at 8, showing that a fully armored marine is 7 feet tall. If there is one thing I'd like to eliminate from popular perception it's this idea that marines are 8 foot tall or more, which so far as I can tell originated in the BL fluff (Horus Rising being the first book I recall reading that obsessively went on about how big the marines are - to the point where I wonder if Dan Abnett has some kind of fetish...)
The tabletop models may be out of scale, but they're not that out of scale.
How old is it though? Old fluff is always overridden by new fluff, especially when the eight to nine foot tall space marines outnumber the single statement by Goodwin like hell, easily over ten to one.
And yeah Melissia, I actually have to agree with you there and it's why I never liked the Ultramarines, they're not unique in any way. My favorite Legions have always been the Salamanders, Dark Angels, and the Imperial Fists. I've also got a growing interest in the Iron Hands due to being a transhumanist myself. But really. The Ultramarines... just what's interesting about them? The only special thing about them is how they assimilated loyalist Iron Warriors IIRC, and that's just like it. Otherwise they're all similar with the only differences being purely cultural.
Chaospling wrote: I don't know why you single the Third War of Armageddon out, but I agree as far as a story should include Space Marines and other legends as a spectacular bonus.
From my perspective, there's nothing really spectacular about Space Marines. They're about as generic as they come as far as literature tropes go.
Individual chapters-- such as blood angels or salamanders-- can be interesting. Space Marines as a whole, however, not so much.
.
Well that's because you only see the clones of the Space Marines or a bunch of Power Armour suits. What I focus on and what make Space Marines exceptional are their back ground from their home worlds. Can't remember how much of a Space Marine's memory gets erased when ascending from a unique human warrior to an even more unique Space Marine but some remains and much of his personality does as well. The trials of the Space Marine Chapters are such (at least in my perception of the 40k setting) that more than martial arts are needed to be accepted and so who ever succeeds will definitely be a very interesting individual - not much of this kind of thinking are used in 40k books.
Boltpistols, Boltguns, Stormbolters and Heavy Bolters are Space Marine weaponry only.
The Sisters of Battle disagree. The Ecclesiarchy has immense wealth and influence and so can afford to equip its personal army with the very best weapons and equipment money (and power) can buy.
I'm not even sure the Space Girls have a place in my perception of the 40k universe
I find having an army of people who are not portrayed as unkillable in some fluff helps you see everything in a bit more neutral light. I love tau, but they still get killed quite easily. It's the same with IG, when you basic warriors are not heavily armored killing machines, it's easier to see weaknesses. SMs are obviously not as powerful as some people think, considering a single good shot to the head will take them down. They are much harder to kill than most, but a blast from anti-tank weaponry will kill them as much as anything else. The bolter, although a good weapon in regards to to humans, is not that good being bulky, expensive, and not all that strong (although the fact that a middling power weapon like a bolter can kill a human in one hit tells you something about the power or, for example, pulse or gauss weaponry).
For hights, I imagine a tau fire caste would average 5', humans 6', eldar 6'6", unarmored SM 7'-7'6", and armoured SM 7'6"-8'. There would be, of course, exceptions, especilally with SM gene-seed.
Hi everyone, im new (even tho iv been lurking for forever)
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
- I read somewhere that Space Marines are "toned down" for the game rules, and not as epic as they are in the fluff.
- I personally imagine an Ork to be as strong as silver-back gorilla that talks like an eastend bruiser.
- Nids are just the aliens from Aliens, the bigger and uglier they are the more deadly and powerful they are. Someone said earlier about numbers being their main strength.
- IG are just like the russians
- Necrons are just like Terminators ( the Arnie type)
How bad is the imperium's current situation?
- As bad as GW wants it too be... £££
How old can Marines become? Can traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old ?
- This varies alot. Most marines, a few hundred years ( apparently they are functionally immortal, but are always eventually killed in battle). Dante is like 1200 years old or somin,
one of his sergeants is older i think. Someone found a Salamander in a cave who had been sitting there for 10,000 years, but he couldn't move because his armour had fused,
so they granted him the emperors peace and shot him in the face... So who knows.
- Apparently yes they can be, but only because of the warp.
What about the Void Dragon?
- Isnt he inside mars ?
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
- Just researched this. The biggest titans are 55 meters tall, the smaller ones are only like 10 meters... Massively disappointed. I always thought they were about a kilometer tall!
I imagined looking out across a landscape and seeing one of these goliaths on the horizon. Massive, lumbering strides shaking the earth whislt it kills everything... Thats the end
of that wet dream. The ships on the other hand are ridiculously huge, like really long cities. I think the Imperial Fists one is like the size of a moon...
The Imperial Guard also disagrees, Chaospling. They are the largest users of Bolt weaponry in the 41st millennium even more so than the Space Marines and the Sisters of Battle.
Chaospling wrote: What I focus on and what make Space Marines exceptional are their back ground from their home worlds.
Which is not unique to Space Marines.
No, probably not... Haven't said that... Were you thinking of a specific Imperial faction?
It's a shame that some of you don't look deeper and emerge yourself deeper into this lovely universe - if you did you wouldn't find Ultra Marines boring.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
TheCustomLime wrote: The Imperial Guard also disagrees, Chaospling. They are the largest users of Bolt weaponry in the 41st millennium even more so than the Space Marines and the Sisters of Battle.
Hehe guys... I know... This is just one of my own alterations. It just works better this way in my head - makes the bolt weapons more unique and it's part of the differentiations between the Astra Militarum and the Astartes. I've always felt that the ammunition of Bolt weapons are much more complicated than other solid ammunitions of other weapons.
Chaospling wrote: It's a shame that some of you don't look deeper and emerge yourself deeper into this lovely universe - if you did you wouldn't find Ultra Marines boring.
It's a shame that you don't look deeper and immerse yourself deeper in to this lovely universe-- looking far beyond the generic Space Marines to see the great lore that exists.
Have you ever participated in a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader roleplay? Ever? 40k is bigger than Space Marines. Indeed, Space Marines are such a tiny, insignificant part of it that if they're the only part you like, you don't like 40k.
What makes Astartes unique isnt necessarily their equipment or weaponry. Its the way they use their stuff. With their genetic enhancements, superb training and mastery of warfare they stand head and shoulders above the Imperial Guard. Besides, arent all of their exclusive tanks and walkers enough to make then stand out?
TheCustomLime wrote: What makes Astartes unique isnt necessarily their equipment or weaponry. Its the way they use their stuff. With their genetic enhancements, superb training and mastery of warfare they stand head and shoulders above the Imperial Guard.
Doesn't make them unique. Things like this exist in just about every sci-fi universe. Halo's Spartans, Mass Effect's marines (of which Shepard is one), and so on and so forth-- there's countless examples of genetically enhanced super-soldiers throughout science fiction. Many of them done far better than GW's example.
Thus, they aren't the focus of my vision of 40k. They're not particularly well done in my mind.
(also, "mastery of warfare" is disputable, given the quality of GW's writing staff )
Chaospling wrote: It's a shame that some of you don't look deeper and emerge yourself deeper into this lovely universe - if you did you wouldn't find Ultra Marines boring.
It's a shame that you don't look deeper and immerse yourself deeper in to this lovely universe-- looking far beyond the generic Space Marines to see the great lore that exists.
Have you ever participated in a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader roleplay? Ever? 40k is bigger than Space Marines. Indeed, Space Marines are such a tiny, insignificant part of it that if they're the only part you like, you don't like 40k.
I wrote this earlier:
Chaospling wrote: ... Keeping down spectacular parts like Space Marines, huge war machines etc. to a minimum and instead focussing of the awesome atmosphere of the 40k universe.
so I fully agree that there's much more than Space Marines. The atmosphere of the 40k universe is much more than Space Marines - I don't think I can underline with my vocabulary in short terms how much more there is to the 40k universe.
I have the Dark Heresy books which I only use for background material so when I role play it's with Inquisitor rules but no, I don't role play much. I'm intrigued to find more material about the Adepta Sororitas, when I see how "fierce" this faction is defended, though I have a hard time taking this faction seriously at first sight.
I meant unique in the context of 40k. Space Marines, in the greater sci fi realm, are fairly generic.
I agree, though. Their tactical mastery seems to be "Run at the enemy and shoot them". They're sort of like the Imperial Guard in Black Library except they have the power of plot armor on their side.
Melissia wrote: Doesn't make them unique. Things like this exist in just about every sci-fi universe. Halo's Spartans, Mass Effect's marines (of which Shepard is one), and so on and so forth-- there's countless examples of genetically enhanced super-soldiers throughout science fiction. Many of them done far better than GW's example.
Thus, they aren't the focus of my vision of 40k. They're not particularly well done in my mind.
(also, "mastery of warfare" is disputable, given the quality of GW's writing staff )
The same could be said of the Imperial Guard. Halo's Marines, Starship Trooper's, well, troopers, etc.
TheCustomLime wrote: What makes Astartes unique isnt necessarily their equipment or weaponry. Its the way they use their stuff. With their genetic enhancements, superb training and mastery of warfare they stand head and shoulders above the Imperial Guard. Besides, arent all of their exclusive tanks and walkers enough to make then stand out?
Yes of course... It wasn't because I actually needed more to make them stand out... Now when they're so huge it didn't make sense for me that their huge guns could be held by normal men, and the complex ammunition was the argument for that it couldn't be produced at scales necessary for the Astra Militarum. It also helped that the Boltgun often are referred to as being holy and so being technology exclusive guarded by Techmarines supported this view... In my opinion.
Well, having tech being excessively complex has never stopped the Imperium before. The thing is that, even though the bolt round and weapon may be hard to make, the Imperium has a lot of resources and manpower at their disposal. If they stopped being weird about their tech they could equip elite regiments with the things.
But, you know, they got more important things to make. Like Titans. Totally not a waste of time and resources.
TheCustomLime wrote: What makes Astartes unique isnt necessarily their equipment or weaponry. Its the way they use their stuff. With their genetic enhancements, superb training and mastery of warfare they stand head and shoulders above the Imperial Guard. Besides, arent all of their exclusive tanks and walkers enough to make then stand out?
Yes of course... It wasn't because I actually needed more to make them stand out... Now when they're so huge it didn't make sense for me that their huge guns could be held by normal men, and the complex ammunition was the argument for that it couldn't be produced at scales necessary for the Astra Militarum. It also helped that the Boltgun often are referred to as being holy and so being technology exclusive guarded by Techmarines supported this view... In my opinion.
A plausible possibility is that Astartes weaponry simply is bigger and nastier than equivalent IG or SoB weaponry.
Pg.320 Blood Angels Omnibus wrote:He saw Tycho’s combi-weapon lying on the floor and took a half-step toward it. The idea of taking it up himself died in this mind; the gun was so massive he would never have been able to lift it.
Pg.20 The First Heretic wrote:The angel’s brethren emerged from the dark interior of their landing craft and descended to the plaza. All wore armour of the same blue. All of them carried great weapons too heavy for a mortal man to lift unaided.
I like those quotes. The models where two Guardsmen are firing a Heavy Bolter and tanks equipped with Heavy Bolters should in my opinion have been equipped with Heavy Stubbers instead. I get the image of the machine guns firing much more rapidly than huge Heavy Bolters firing mini rockets.
TheCustomLime wrote: What makes Astartes unique isnt necessarily their equipment or weaponry. Its the way they use their stuff. With their genetic enhancements, superb training and mastery of warfare they stand head and shoulders above the Imperial Guard. Besides, arent all of their exclusive tanks and walkers enough to make then stand out?
Chaospling wrote: I'm intrigued to find more material about the Adepta Sororitas, when I see how "fierce" this faction is defended, though I have a hard time taking this faction seriously at first sight.
For the Ecclesiarchy in general, see Codex: Sisters of Battle 2nd edition. Dolan Chirosius is some goddamn badass. Sebastian Thor story after the fall of Vandire is actually pretty cool, in retrospect. And it sheds a new light on that whole “Decree passive” stuff.
For the Sisters of Battle, see the Liber Sororitas from WD293UK. Since it must be pretty hard to find, maybe just send me an MP if you are interested.
Chaospling wrote: Now when they're so huge it didn't make sense for me that their huge guns could be held by normal men
They are not held by average normal men. They are held by awesome super-soldiers normal men. Or tanks. Beside, bolters are hardly the biggest, heaviest weapons the marines carry with them anyway.
Ashiraya wrote: I agree. The Heavy Stubber is a weapon unique to the IG, neither in use by the SoB nor the SM, so they should use it more often.
No. The Heavy Stubber is also used by Imperial Knights. So the IG should use heavy bolters! We want to keep Knights unique, do we not?
Chaospling wrote: I'm intrigued to find more material about the Adepta Sororitas, when I see how "fierce" this faction is defended, though I have a hard time taking this faction seriously at first sight.
For the Ecclesiarchy in general, see Codex: Sisters of Battle 2nd edition. Dolan Chirosius is some goddamn badass. Sebastian Thor story after the fall of Vandire is actually pretty cool, in retrospect. And it sheds a new light on that whole “Decree passive” stuff.
For the Sisters of Battle, see the Liber Sororitas from WD293UK. Since it must be pretty hard to find, maybe just send me an MP if you are interested.
Thank you very much, I may contact you some time. I just missed sale of an old used Codex: Sisters of Battle 2nd edition but maybe I have the White Dwarf magazine.
Chaospling wrote: Now when they're so huge it didn't make sense for me that their huge guns could be held by normal men
They are not held by average normal men. They are held by awesome super-soldiers normal men. Or tanks. Beside, bolters are hardly the biggest, heaviest weapons the marines carry with them anyway.
No of course not, but now it's the Bolter weaponry which is discussed.
Ashiraya wrote: I agree. The Heavy Stubber is a weapon unique to the IG, neither in use by the SoB nor the SM, so they should use it more often.
No. The Heavy Stubber is also used by Imperial Knights. So the IG should use heavy bolters! We want to keep Knights unique, do we not?
Come now hehe You know what he meant: weaponry of non-super-human factions. I think it's a nice detail that Imperial Knights are wielding Heavy Stubbers the way they are. Especially the co-axial Heavy Stubber makes the Imperial Knights super heavy tanks with legs.
My personal hypothessis as to the disparity in weight between Guard/SoB issue bolters and Space Marine issue bolters isnt necessarily due to a larger round as it due to their construction. Space Marines are very, very strong and they tend to need something to club their enemies with. So, Astartes bolters are probably built with a lot more material to keep them nice and sturdy so that they don't crumble in the hands of these giant men. So, while a Space Marine Doug's bolter is comparable to the one Sister Josephine Schmoe lugs around in terms of punch Schmoe's can't hold a candle to how much abuse Doug's can.
Or "True" Boltguns are the ones regular humans carry around and what the Astartes have is actually something in between a "regular" Bolter and a Heavy Bolter.
Chaospling wrote: What I focus on and what make Space Marines exceptional are their back ground from their home worlds.
Which is not unique to Space Marines.
No, probably not... Haven't said that... Were you thinking of a specific Imperial faction?
It's a shame that some of you don't look deeper and emerge yourself deeper into this lovely universe - if you did you wouldn't find Ultra Marines boring.
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TheCustomLime wrote: The Imperial Guard also disagrees, Chaospling. They are the largest users of Bolt weaponry in the 41st millennium even more so than the Space Marines and the Sisters of Battle.
Hehe guys... I know... This is just one of my own alterations. It just works better this way in my head - makes the bolt weapons more unique and it's part of the differentiations between the Astra Militarum and the Astartes. I've always felt that the ammunition of Bolt weapons are much more complicated than other solid ammunitions of other weapons.
The Ultramarines are boring. The only Black Library material on them besides the Horus Heresy, the McNeil books, paint the Ultramarines as incompetent idiots with absolutely zero foresight instead of the logistical geniuses they're supposed to be.
Hey guys, I found something interesting. Codices are supposed to be the kings of canon, right?
Codex: Space Marines 6th edition, page 79, 3rd paragraph wrote:A Chapter Master has the authority to act as he wishes and is answerable only to others of his rank.
Emphasis mine.
Seems this misconception with Inquisitors being able to command Chapters is well and truly broken, eh?
It does make sense- with the Emperor incapable of giving commands and the Primarchs all lost in one way or another, there is no one left with sufficient authority.
As for the chapter that was assassinated over time by the Inquisition for not complying with their demands? Well, that seems to me like plain ol' backstabbing! After all, if the Inquisition had actual authority to order them, they would not have needed to bother persecuting them in secret for refusing, now would they?
Codex: Space Marines 6th edition, page 79, 3rd paragraph wrote:A Chapter Master has the authority to act as he wishes and is answerable only to others of his rank.
Emphasis mine.
Seems this misconception with Inquisitors being able to command Chapters is well and truly broken, eh?
I think he is answerable to other of his rank or higher. I think an Inquisitor is higher ranked than him. I think this sentence is just there to show he is not answerable to planetary governors or people from the administratum.
However, I know an Inquisitor can declare a Chapter as Excomunicate Traitoris and have it wiped out, as it happened to the Fire Claws for instance. That is a deeply established part of the fluff. So, think twice about pissing an Inquisitor, especially if you have a few skeletons in your closet. And we know you do, if you are a marine!
Ashiraya wrote: It does make sense- with the Emperor incapable of giving commands and the Primarchs all lost in one way or another, there is no one left with sufficient authority.
Do you mean, except for the High Lords of Terra?
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TheCustomLime wrote: My personal hypothessis as to the disparity in weight between Guard/SoB issue bolters and Space Marine issue bolters isnt necessarily due to a larger round as it due to their construction
Where did you even get the idea that there are disparity in weight? I do not remember reading about any disparity ever. Guards do not issue bolter to infantry as far as I know, and Sisters have power armor, that can lift the bolter for them.
It's mentioned in the Guard codex that Boltguns are an uncommon sight but some NCOs/Officers get them. As for the weight disparity it's just as assumption on my part since Astartes bolters are described as being too heavy for normal guys to lift.
That's exactly why I think they are heavier. That or Space Marine bolters are more akin to an intermediate weapon between regular Boltguns and Heavy Bolters and that they aren't stated as such due to the limitations of a D6 system.
TheCustomLime wrote: It's mentioned in the Guard codex that Boltguns are an uncommon sight but some NCOs/Officers get them.
Well, maybe those are the light version, rather than the other way around. Like a cross between a bolter and a bolt pistol. Or those officiers have bionics. Or those bolters are especially crafted with better, lighter materials since they are designed for officers. What does NCO means, by the way?
Co'tor Shas wrote: No, they are the same caliber, probably better quality however.
You sure?
Depends on the officer. Lord General Whatsit probably has a nicer Boltgun than your average Tac marine but I don't think your typical Sergeant would get anything better than the Imperium's finest unless he looted it. It's probably made out of lighter materials but that makes it more fragile than better quality.
An Inquisitor can not command a Space Marine chapter, against its will. No one in the Galaxy besides maybe the HLoT can.
Space Marines exist in a weird grey area of Imperial authority. They're like the bummy son of a mob boss. Yeah, the mob boss' goons technically don't answer to the dope fiend, spoiled son. Buuuut he's still the mob boss' boy, so they give him a wide berth and generally do what he asks.
An Inquisitor can't walk up to a Chapter Master and say "you will attack this planet", or whatever. He can suggest it, or make an appeal, but if the CM tells him to feth off he will.
That doesn't mean that the Inquisitor won't report it back to his superiors and henceforth consider the Chapter with suspicion, but he's not going to force the issue with the Chapter Master.
Most Inquisitors wouldn't even want to, as getting in good with a Chapter is one of the greatest perks in the Galaxy.
Co'tor Shas wrote: No, they are the same caliber, probably better quality however.
You sure?
Depends on the officer. Lord General Whatsit probably has a nicer Boltgun than your average Tac marine but I don't think your typical Sergeant would get anything better than the Imperium's finest unless he looted it. It's probably made out of lighter materials but that makes it more fragile than better quality.
I was talking about the quality. If you are going to bother spending tons of resources to buff up a man to superhuman levels, train him for years, and give him a suit of super-armour, then not giving him a weapon with more punch seems to be a waste... Especially since I imagine 'being able to carry and shoot a bigger gun' to be a significant reason for making them so crazy strong to begin with.
Well, they do have a weapon with better punch: The Boltgun. It's better than the oh-so prolific Lasgun by leagues and miles and thanks to their super-strength they can fire the thing without having to brace themselves like Imperial Guardsman do. The Imperial Guard has more Bolters in their collective armory than the Astartes does but they can never match the skill the Space Marines have with the weapon.
Ashiraya wrote: One may want to add that the case with the Celestial Lions was literally one of a kind.
Why do you think so? Anyhow, chapters being declared Excomunicate Traitoris is certainly not a one of a kind event. And Chapter Masters still have rules they have to follow.
Ashiraya wrote: I was talking about the quality. If you are going to bother spending tons of resources to buff up a man to superhuman levels, train him for years, and give him a suit of super-armour, then not giving him a weapon with more punch seems to be a waste...
Except that not only is a high-ranking officer much more important in deciding the fate of the Imperium than random space marine John Doe, but also resource allocation is not based on pure efficiency logic like that. People in power will get to choose the best stuff, even if they do not need it more. Just because they can .
Why do you think so? Anyhow, chapters being declared Excomunicate Traitoris is certainly not a one of a kind event. And Chapter Masters still have rules they have to follow.
Because no other example of Chapters being 'punished' for defying the Inquisition is shown- aside from extreme cases like the Space Wolves, but that was not merely the Space Wolves not feeling like obeying an Inquisitorial order.
Except that not only is a high-ranking officer much more important in deciding the fate of the Imperium than random space marine John Doe, but also resource allocation is not based on pure efficiency logic like that. People in power will get to choose the best stuff, even if they do not need it more. Just because they can .
Not only high-ranking Guard officers walk around with boltguns.
TheCustomLime wrote: Well, they do have a weapon with better punch: The Boltgun. It's better than the oh-so prolific Lasgun by leagues and miles and thanks to their super-strength they can fire the thing without having to brace themselves like Imperial Guardsman do. The Imperial Guard has more Bolters in their collective armory than the Astartes does but they can never match the skill the Space Marines have with the weapon.
Still, if you have a super-stronk guy capable of using a better weapon, why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? Give him a weapon that makes use of his capabilities instead!
I don't get why not. They can easily handle the recoil of two bolters if a normal human can handle one, they pour out a lot of fire which fits their shock trooper MO and they aren't terribly difficult to make. Maybe some marines would prefer the precision of a regular boltgun but it's not like their role is to engage opponents as extreme distances. That's the duty of the scouts.
Ashiraya wrote: Because no other example of Chapters being 'punished' for defying the Inquisition is shown- aside from extreme cases like the Space Wolves, but that was not merely the Space Wolves not feeling like obeying an Inquisitorial order.
For not obeying the Inquisition, maybe. But there are tons of example of Chapter being purged because an Inquisitor said “Let us purge those guys, they are impure/traitors”.
And if an Inquisitor has the power to do so, is pretty susceptible, and is refused by some chapter…
Ashiraya wrote: Not only high-ranking Guard officers walk around with boltguns.
Who else?
Ashiraya wrote: Still, if you have a super-stronk guy capable of using a better weapon, why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? Give him a weapon that makes use of his capabilities instead!
Yeah, let us have space marines squads will every one in it using a special weapon or a heavy weapon. After all, why not?
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Ashiraya wrote: The Space Marine commanders are not fools, though, not when it comes to equipping their soldiers.
Ashiraya wrote: The Space Marine commanders are not fools, though, not when it comes to equipping their soldiers.
But the Imperium at large is. Hence why Bolters and not Stormbolters,
Even if they can't use them right, Commanders in the IG and PDF will take a bolter if they can, because it's a bolter. Why wouldn't they take it? It's there to be taken. They're not about to say no because a Space Marine can make better use of it.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? "
This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? " This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes against the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probably on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earth sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is classified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? " This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes againt the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probebly on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earthn sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is calssified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Feats are feats, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it still happened.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
Here are some things that I commonly see debating over:
How powerful are the troops of each faction really?
In quick ranking for basic troops and their strength?
1) Grey Knights
2) Lesser Daemons
3) Tactical Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines
3.5) Necron Warriors
4) Eldar Dire Avengers, Dark Eldar Kabalites, Sisters of Battle
5) Tau Firewarriors
6) Tyranid Genestealers
7) Ork Boyz
7.5) Imperial Guardsmen
8) Tyranid Gaunts
I'll go into more detail later.
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
fethed, fethed fethed, fethed, fethed. On all accounts. Chaos could destroy them whenever the hell they wished, Orks would drown them in bodies and leave them crippled (I doubt Orks would wipe them out completely, but rather maim them and leave a hapless, limbless body for the vultures.) if they ever rally to the needed numbers, the Tyranids also drown them in numbers and threaten the industry of the Imperium, Necrons can bolostomp them if wished, and the Dark Eldar could do serious damage if they were bothered to. The only lower guy on the totem pole is the Tau. The Imperium had better start looking into options of allying with the Eldar, and fast.
How old can Marines become? Can the traitor Legionnaires really be 10K years old?
Functionally infinite by several examples, key word is "functional". They'll all eventually die unless they become metahax like some loyalists or ascend to godhood as a Daemon Prince under Chaos.
What about the Void Dragon?
On Mars (obviously), but like all C'tan, shattered.
How large are Titans? How large are spaceships?
Imperial, Eldar, and Ork titans range between a hundred meters to multiple kilometers. Starships are as stated, with them capping at around twenty kilometers for the Imperium, although IIRC there are some far, faaar larger ones. Space Stations/Mobile Monasteries are the size of planetoids, as also state. Tau built small space ships and have started to produce continent-sized space stations, and Eldar Craftworlds are continent-planetoid sized. Space Hulks range in size, but could certainly get upwards of the size of a large planetoid from some examples.
How effective at corrupting is Chaos actually?
Almost instant with unwarded technology and weak minds, as has been shown with Scrapcode and Doubt Worm. Depends largely on the will of the individual and the power of the daemon.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? "
This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes againt the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probebly on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earthn sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is calssified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Feats are feats, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it still happened.
How did this 'feat' happen anyway? It's pretty iffy, if you ask me. I'm sure space marines are involved (and probably psykers as well).
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? " This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes againt the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probebly on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earthn sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is calssified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Feats are feats, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it still happened.
How did this 'feat' happen anyway? It's pretty iffy, if you ask me. I'm sure space marines are involved (and probably psykers as well).
A Chaos Champion/Aspiring Champion was explicitly stated to take a shot at greater than two kilometers to knock out a sniper that was behind some glorified forklift/truck like vehicle. He aimed and bounced the shot off the ground so it deflected under the vehicle and bounced into the stomach of the sniper behind it. She died instantly, her "lover" then lost it and ran out of the building at the Iron Warrior and died.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? " This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes againt the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probebly on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earthn sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is calssified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Feats are feats, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it still happened.
How did this 'feat' happen anyway? It's pretty iffy, if you ask me. I'm sure space marines are involved (and probably psykers as well).
A Chaos Champion/Aspiring Champion was explicitly stated to take a shot at greater than two kilometers to knock out a sniper that was behind some glorified forklift/truck like vehicle. He aimed and bounced the shot off the ground so it deflected under the vehicle and bounced into the stomach of the sniper behind it. She died instantly, her "lover" then lost it and ran out of the building at the Iron Warrior and died.
That's....
What.
Some times I just get depressed at GW/BL writers. The amount of force to do that would be ridiculous, and the chance for the bolt to not just bury itself into the ground. I might make a example scenario later, probably tomorrow if I get around to it.
Any other info, size of planet relative to earth, height differences, was a scope used, ect.? At this point, I think I'm ready to put this is the "PH-ridden, plot-armoured, outlier" pile. In any statistical analysis, this would defiantly be an outlier, compared to the other info we have..
Co'tor Shas wrote: Bolters are .5" and heavy bolters are 1" (I think that means .5 and 1 caliber right?). This is FFG fluff, but it's all the same.
"why bother giving him a weapon anyone can use? "
This is the Impirum were talking about, don't expect sense .
Wat.
Astartes bolters are .75 while heavy bolters are 1.00 Caliber. I haven't heard of .50 caliber bolts, but I presume those would be what are loaded in the bolt pistols made for mortal humans like Commissars.
Also, no competent commander would give his troops storm bolters- they're terrible compared to standard bolters and jam all the damn time. Combi-bolters would be the better guns for standard firearms, providing tactical flexibility and superior firepower while retaining all the positive traits of a standard bolter. Then there's always good 'ol volkite guns. Plus better accuracy, as bolters are accurate upwards to two and a half kilometers.
Probably just not remembering correctly, I'll check.
Also, I've had this argument before, bolters are not able to shoot that far in 'reality' because it goes againt the laws of physics. Unless you are on a planet much smaller than earth, with optimum condition (and probebly on top of a building). Assuming a bolter is fired from a height of 2 meters from an earthn sized planet, it would take 0.63855...s to hit the ground The bolt would have to be traveling at a speed of 3915 m/s. That's more than ten times the speed of sound (340m/s). That is calssified as high-hypersonic. That fastest bullet in the world has only reached speeds of up to 4000m/s. That fancy navy rail weapon has only gotten up to 8000m/s. Even if the shot occurred at the top of a 50 foot building, that would still have to be 783m/s, twice the speed of sound. Even if it was, the energy required to accelerate the bolt that fast would be ridiculous, as bolts are quite large, not to mention air resistance, as bolts are not very air resistant.
Feats are feats, it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense, it still happened.
How did this 'feat' happen anyway? It's pretty iffy, if you ask me. I'm sure space marines are involved (and probably psykers as well).
A Chaos Champion/Aspiring Champion was explicitly stated to take a shot at greater than two kilometers to knock out a sniper that was behind some glorified forklift/truck like vehicle. He aimed and bounced the shot off the ground so it deflected under the vehicle and bounced into the stomach of the sniper behind it. She died instantly, her "lover" then lost it and ran out of the building at the Iron Warrior and died.
That's....
What.
Some times I just get depressed at GW/BL writers. The amount of force to do that would be ridiculous, and the chance for the bolt to not just bury itself into the ground. I might make a example scenario later, probably tomorrow if I get around to it.
Any other info, size of planet relative to earth, height differences, was a scope used, ect.? At this point, I think I'm ready to put this is the "PH-ridden, plot-armoured, outlier" pile. In any statistical analysis, this would defiantly be an outlier, compared to the other info we have..
To my knowledge it was a normal grav world, I was largely focused on the "oh gak" factor as the Iron Warriors got obliterated by the Ork WHAAAGH!.
On the other hand, I could just use this to pump up how good pulse rifles are .
Which is just table top rules, which has nothing to do with the fluff. Especially given that IIRC pulse rifles just blow off limbs like a lasgun, while a single bolter round can outright "vaporize" somebody.
On the other hand, I could just use this to pump up how good pulse rifles are .
Which is just table top rules, which has nothing to do with the fluff. Especially given that IIRC pulse rifles just blow off limbs like a lasgun, while a single bolter round can outright "vaporize" somebody.
No, pulse weapons are supposed to act the same as plasma weapons is the damage department, just less so. So a glance would look like burning, a direct hit would literally vaporize armour and flesh, instead of the bolters, blown to bits. And they are described (actually quite specifically) as being more powerful and longer ranged than bolters.
Although, I have only heard of bolters do damage like completely removing limbs and heads, not completely destroying the body. I geuss with enough shots it would .
On the other hand, I could just use this to pump up how good pulse rifles are .
Which is just table top rules, which has nothing to do with the fluff. Especially given that IIRC pulse rifles just blow off limbs like a lasgun, while a single bolter round can outright "vaporize" somebody.
No, pulse weapons are supposed to act the same as plasma weapons is the damage department, just less so. So a glance would look like burning, a direct hit would literally vaporize armour and flesh, instead of the bolters, blown to bits. And they are described (actually quite specifically) as being more powerful and longer ranged than bolters.
Although, I have only heard of bolters do damage like completely removing limbs and heads, not completely destroying the body. I geuss with enough shots it would .
“With a small movement, the warrior raised the barrel of his bolter and shot the Governor at point-blank range, blasting his body apart.”
Pg.600 Nemesis
“I saw one of the red-coated figures burst as a bolt from Aeska’s gun struck him.”
Pg.646 PB
“Natraj was dead before Tirtha hit the ground. Uttam’s guardian spear spat a bolt from the weapon beneath the blade and the man’s body blew apart into vaporised blood and bone shrapnel. Two of the nearest soldiers went down with the force of the explosion, but Uttam was already moving as alarm klaxons and warning bells filled the cavern with noise.”
Pg.397 OD
“'I'll never forget the noise,' he said. 'It was like a thunderstorm had suddenly sprung into existence, and our first five ranks were completely cut down, dead to a man without even the time to scream. The enemy's bolts tore limbs from bodies or simply burst men apart like wet sacks. I turned to shout something, I forget what exactly, when I felt a searing pain in the back of my head and I fell over the remains of a man who'd had his entire left side blown off. It looked like he'd exploded from the inside out.” / Tales of Heresy, p.353 - The Last Church
“Barsabbas reacted as he was drilled, pressuring them witha wide spread of automatic fire. The sudden volley of crackling bolt shells cut out in a semicircle. Rounds so heavy that even their passing shockwave haemorrhaged the brains nd organs of any target in a one-metre radius.” / Blood Gorgons, p.245 - **
I'm also looking for more as well. But the feats for bolters laughably outstrip those of tau pulse rifles. Plus there's a quote somewhere of Heavy Bolters being able to kill APC's.
It is still specifically stated that pulse weapons are more powerful than bolters. There is also another very important thing, we don't know the feats of pulse weapons. Compare how many books and stories of SMs, to how many on tau. They can't outstrip pulse weapons at all, because there is nothing to compare to.
Aye, Pulse Rifles are described as being stronger in lore. I would think the effect they would have on a target would be similar to that of a Bolter except without as much fire. After all, they work by firing lobs of superheated gas. That would boil and pop the organs of anything it hits.
Yep, like plasma, but less of it. Pulse Weapons also use a coil-weapon tech, meaning that plasma burst is traveling very fast, and a gyro-stabilizer* combined with a scope mean greater effective range right there.
*The gold thing that looks like a screw in the front. It acts a bit like a bi-pod without needing to set up, reducing jittering/wandering, and making it easier to bring to bare, move, and shoot.
Yep. And knowing the Tau, it has less recoil, doesn't jam as often and is easier to supply ammo far. Probably not as complex or as difficult to make...
Why am I playing Space Marines again? The Tau have all of the best gear.
It's their point . The one thing tau have not been able to do is efficiently make power-armour class armour for their basic troops. Just wait until next codex though, well get them through the power of retcon .
Nah, that would make them too powerful and that means the Eldar would lose. And Phil Kelly would never stand for such a thing!
The Imperium does make better AFVs, though. Or at the very least can field a lot of good AFVs so that any technological disparity is mitigated by weight of fire.
Co'tor Shas wrote: It is still specifically stated that pulse weapons are more powerful than bolters. There is also another very important thing, we don't know the feats of pulse weapons. Compare how many books and stories of SMs, to how many on tau. They can't outstrip pulse weapons at all, because there is nothing to compare to.
I just checked the 6th Edition Codex. There is no mention of Pulse weapons being superior to bolters besides rules, which are purely game mechanics.
TheCustomLime wrote: Nah, that would make them too powerful and that means the Eldar would lose. And Phil Kelly would never stand for such a thing!
The Imperium does make better AFVs, though. Or at the very least can field a lot of good AFVs so that any technological disparity is mitigated by weight of fire.
Pretty much. Armoured tractors might no be as advanced, but they get the job done, and they are a lot cheaper.
Co'tor Shas wrote: It is still specifically stated that pulse weapons are more powerful than bolters. There is also another very important thing, we don't know the feats of pulse weapons. Compare how many books and stories of SMs, to how many on tau. They can't outstrip pulse weapons at all, because there is nothing to compare to.
I just checked the 6th Edition Codex. There is no mention of Pulse weapons being superior to bolters besides rules, which are purely game mechanics.
Deathwatch:
Even the Fire Caste's standard issue weapon, the pulse rifle, is a marvel of technology, surpassing even the Adeptus Astartes boltgun in its destructive capability.
"The arsenal available to Fire Warriors is formidable, with individuals carrying a pulse rifle or a pulse carbine.... Their range and hitting power outclasses the standard weapon of every race the Tau have yet encountered". (Pg. 37)
This might be referring to the Lasgun but often race=faction in 40k. Plus, that would mean the Pulse Rifle is stronger than a Gauss Flayer and a Shuriken Catapault. Both weapons which are, AFAIK, comparable to the Bolter.
One should always be careful with absolutes in 40K. It was not well recieved when I gave quotes of Marine Chapters being above command of everyone but the Chapter Masters, or that they are the most important defense of the Imperium.
Ashiraya wrote: I thought people considered Deathwatch something you should not go by?
It does tend to pump up SMs in game-play, but it's fluff is solid.
No, it actually tends to pump them down. Also, if I remember every single FFG book has a statement with their fluff simply being "optional" or an "opinion" and not factual.
Also, Gauss Guns laughably outstrip boltguns and can vaporize parts of tanks with single shot, or erase entire buildings when turned to the setting that puts them on a continuous steam of energy as they atomized everything they're pointed at.
Well, I don't think most chapter masters are going to any Inquisitor boss them around, even if they have to technically, probably nothing less than a Lord Inquisitor, but yeah, I see what you are getting at.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Well, I don't think most chapter masters are going to any Inquisitor boss them around, even if they have to technically, probably nothing less than a Lord Inquisitor, but yeah, I see what you are getting at.
I am not sure if I understand what you are saying, but.
In a quote from the latest SM codex, it was explained that a Chapter Master can't be commanded by anyone except his fellow Chapter Masters. It did not say anything about CMs being able to command Inquisitors.
Ashiraya wrote: I thought people considered Deathwatch something you should not go by?
It does tend to pump up SMs in game-play, but it's fluff is solid.
No, it actually tends to pump them down. Also, if I remember every single FFG book has a statement with their fluff simply being "optional" or an "opinion" and not factual.
So, SMs caber-tossing terminator-suited Chaos warlord is pumping them down now, is it .
And no, fluff is not "optional" The fluff for the Dark Heresy book was even written by Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Well, I don't think most chapter masters are going to any Inquisitor boss them around, even if they have to technically, probably nothing less than a Lord Inquisitor, but yeah, I see what you are getting at.
I am not sure if I understand what you are saying, but.
In a quote from the latest SM codex, it was explained that a Chapter Master can't be commanded by anyone except his fellow Chapter Masters. It did not say anything about CMs being able to command Inquisitors.
I was saying that (as I see it) a Chapter Master would not allow themselves to be commanded by anyone short of a lord inquisitor or CM.
Co'tor Shas wrote: So some higher ranked than them, lets say, High lord of terra isn't?
Indeed not.
If the High Lords and a Chapter Master disagree really heavily on something, of course, the HLOT may take some kind of action, but this is outside of their technical jurisdiction.
Ashiraya wrote: I thought people considered Deathwatch something you should not go by?
It does tend to pump up SMs in game-play, but it's fluff is solid.
No, it actually tends to pump them down. Also, if I remember every single FFG book has a statement with their fluff simply being "optional" or an "opinion" and not factual.
So, SMs caber-tossing terminator-suited Chaos warlord is pumping them down now, is it . And no, fluff is not "optional" The fluff for the Dark Heresy book was even written by Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.
Astartes range from the Failbearers dying to pointy sticks to Super Saiyan Librarians who slice capital ships in half. Yes indeed they do go lower than the high end. Also, it doesn't matter who wrote something, the fame of the author does not make it any more absolute.
I can give you a quote of five Chaos Marines killing a Guard company by ripping off the treads from their tanks and whipping the Guardsmen to death with them.
TheCustomLime wrote: Do you two keep a list of quotes proving how great Space Marines are?
I'm from Spacebattles. There's a general thread with feats for almost all of the W40K factions for versus debates on the forum. Quite handy now that they added and index.
That reminds me, I should scan Siege of Castellax for feats.
TheCustomLime wrote: Do you two keep a list of quotes proving how great Space Marines are?
What Wyzilla said. It's awfully useful given how often people attack SM in various ways. Attacking back is always fun.
When some IG fan comes saying 'Look at how good my battlecannon is at killing SM! ((((((((((:' then I can just pull up a quote explaining that SM care not for your puny battlecannons.
Ashiraya wrote: I thought people considered Deathwatch something you should not go by?
It does tend to pump up SMs in game-play, but it's fluff is solid.
No, it actually tends to pump them down. Also, if I remember every single FFG book has a statement with their fluff simply being "optional" or an "opinion" and not factual.
So, SMs caber-tossing terminator-suited Chaos warlord is pumping them down now, is it .
And no, fluff is not "optional" The fluff for the Dark Heresy book was even written by Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.
Astartes range from the Failbearers dying to pointy sticks to Super Saiyan Librarians who slice capital ships in half. Yes indeed they do go lower than the high end. Also, it doesn't matter who wrote something, the fame of the author does not make it any more absolute.
How about this, on average, SMs in deathwatch are freakishly OP.
Also, so it doesn't matter who wrote it then, even if it is in FFG, it's all the same. So Pulse rifles are more powerful than bolters.
You just really don't want pulse weapons to be more powerful than bolters do you? You have gone from outright denying to attacking my sources. Well, I need to got to bed, see you tomorrow .
Ashiraya wrote: I thought people considered Deathwatch something you should not go by?
It does tend to pump up SMs in game-play, but it's fluff is solid.
No, it actually tends to pump them down. Also, if I remember every single FFG book has a statement with their fluff simply being "optional" or an "opinion" and not factual.
So, SMs caber-tossing terminator-suited Chaos warlord is pumping them down now, is it . And no, fluff is not "optional" The fluff for the Dark Heresy book was even written by Dan Abnett and Ben Counter.
Astartes range from the Failbearers dying to pointy sticks to Super Saiyan Librarians who slice capital ships in half. Yes indeed they do go lower than the high end. Also, it doesn't matter who wrote something, the fame of the author does not make it any more absolute.
How about this, on average, SMs in deathwatch are freakishly OP.
Also, so it doesn't matter who wrote it then, even if it is in FFG, it's all the same. So Pulse rifles are more powerful than bolters.
You just really don't want pulse weapons to be more powerful than bolters do you? You have gone from outright denying to attacking my sources. Well, I need to got to bed, see you tomorrow .
Wat? Except they aren't. There's feats for space marines who are not in Deathwatch (and to our knowledge, never were) and are utterly beyond what's in the book. Like Dak'ir the Alpha Psyker, that one CSM who I can never remember the name of and is flat out invincible, individuals who demonstrated instant scar tissue regeneration over wounds, etc. The fluff goes both sorely below and laughably beyond what's in the Deathwatch rulebook.
Also, Deathwatch is only a single source. IIRC the Firewarrior book (never read it) and the Deathwatch Xenos Hunters short story collection with the Tau/Iron Hand teamup both put pulse weaposn below bolters. The only feat that would put pulse weapons above bolters is true vaporization of an adult human, not the "vaporization" done by bolters. Well, most of the time. I think one of the quotes I posted had the author stating a bolt vaporized somebody.
Wyzilla wrote: A Chaos Champion/Aspiring Champion was explicitly stated to take a shot at greater than two kilometers to knock out a sniper that was behind some glorified forklift/truck like vehicle. He aimed and bounced the shot off the ground so it deflected under the vehicle and bounced into the stomach of the sniper behind it. She died instantly, her "lover" then lost it and ran out of the building at the Iron Warrior and died.
What? Where they aiming for the “so bad it is good” kind of writing? Maybe that champion was called Chuckus Norrisas ?
Wyzilla wrote: Especially given that IIRC pulse rifles just blow off limbs like a lasgun, while a single bolter round can outright "vaporize" somebody.
Uh? No. Melta vaporize people. Because melta use extreme heat to do damage. Bolts use explosions to do damage. They just blow away chunks of the target's body.
Co'tor Shas wrote: The one thing tau have not been able to do is efficiently make power-armour class armour for their basic troops.
Neither did the Imperium, though.
Ashiraya wrote: It's awfully useful given how often people attack SM in various ways. Attacking back is always fun.
Do not say ridiculous things like that. It is not about “attacking back”, you silly. We all know what you find fun is just attacking, this very unnecessary “back” is here just as an excuse when really you do not need any provocation to start demeaning the guard .
Do not say ridiculous things like that. It is not about “attacking back”, you silly. We all know what you find fun is just attacking, this very unnecessary “back” is here just as an excuse when really you do not need any provocation to start demeaning the guard .
Well, the first rock was thrown before I even joined Dakka, and many were thrown before I even could make a post on the topic...
I love how only on Dakka can a topic on the absolute subjectivity of GW's fluff devolve into how something must absolutely be better than something else, and how something must suck.
It could be my headcanon that Power armour actually doesn't work at all, there are billions of space marines, but they're all actually armed with nerf guns.
"What's that? You have sources that disprove that? Why, that's merely propaganda! Lies, my friend "
Come on guys. Really. Rule 1 of 40K, there is no canon. Even says so on the OP. Yes, we usually reach levels of mutual understanding and agreement, but anything could or could not be canon. It's all pick and choose, and we know this. Let's stop acting like the case is otherwise, shall we?
But arguing is fun !
But yeah, I love how we are all correcting each other when the title of this thing is "Your own mental picture of 40K's setting" .
Wyzilla wrote: A Chaos Champion/Aspiring Champion was explicitly stated to take a shot at greater than two kilometers to knock out a sniper that was behind some glorified forklift/truck like vehicle. He aimed and bounced the shot off the ground so it deflected under the vehicle and bounced into the stomach of the sniper behind it. She died instantly, her "lover" then lost it and ran out of the building at the Iron Warrior and died.
What? Where they aiming for the “so bad it is good” kind of writing? Maybe that champion was called Chuckus Norrisas ?
Wyzilla wrote: Especially given that IIRC pulse rifles just blow off limbs like a lasgun, while a single bolter round can outright "vaporize" somebody.
Uh? No. Melta vaporize people. Because melta use extreme heat to do damage. Bolts use explosions to do damage. They just blow away chunks of the target's body.
Hence why I put vaporize in quotations. It vaporizes people in the same shot an M1A1 Abrams vaporized people according to the gunner. While they claim it vaporized somebody, it just turned them into a pile of goo. Which depending on the feat, bolters can indeed "vaporize" people, or rather blow them apart into little tiny giblets and a large gory puddle. Plasma guns also do vaporize people however IIRC.Or well, instantly cremate them.
There is canon. Everything is canon. Although ignore those you argue that it exists in-universe or that some of it are lies as that just really doesn't work in practice, especially with Dark Angel fluff or anything that would get you immediately executed. Only explanation I can think of is Tzeentch's library as he's omniscient. There's low end, mid end, high end, and HOLY feth DBZ Warhammer 40k. They're all separate and all exist simultaneously. But as a TES fan I guess I'm used to quantum canon.
Ashiraya wrote: Well, the first rock was thrown before I even joined Dakka, and many were thrown before I even could make a post on the topic...
I see. Your notion of “attacking back” is “throw bombs at those people that might or might not be related to the people that threw bombs at you yesterday” .
Wyzilla wrote: It vaporizes people in the same shot an M1A1 Abrams vaporized people according to the gunner.
Oh. Then pulse rifle do too. Everything points to them being more powerful than bolters. That is the whole basis of the tau, their superior firepower!
Ashiraya wrote: Well, the first rock was thrown before I even joined Dakka, and many were thrown before I even could make a post on the topic...
I see. Your notion of “attacking back” is “throw bombs at those people that might or might not be related to the people that threw bombs at you yesterday” .
Wyzilla wrote: It vaporizes people in the same shot an M1A1 Abrams vaporized people according to the gunner.
Oh. Then pulse rifle do too. Everything points to them being more powerful than bolters. That is the whole basis of the tau, their superior firepower!
There's only one source stating pulse rifles are more powerful than bolters. However IIRC there's at least two or more that provide evidence against this with fairly lackluster feats for pulse weapons that put them between a lasgun and a bolter.
With this in mind, in a setting with tons of contradictory sources where we are allowed, even encouraged, to cherrypick, what is your own personal interpretation of 40K's setting?
How bad is the Imperium's current situation?
I just wanted to address this one point. The largest problem the galaxy currently faces are the 'Nids and it is in everyone's interest to defeat them. The Imperium has spent thousands of years beating into the population that anything non-imperium must die. That is a tremendous amount of history which needs to be overcome because all of the races need to band together to defeat the 'Nids. If the Imperium was able to stop keeping forces tied up on things like Abbaddon's crusades then they would have the man power and equipment necessary to stop the nids.
So how does one overcome their "education" and extend a hand to their former opponents? (Assuming the various other major races can stop attacking the Imperium) Well, it turns out that it may very well be impossible. Organizations like the Inquisition have an entire branch of members dedicated to making sure crap like that doesn't happen. It would take the High Lords of Terra to make such a decree and without prep work would result in a schism amongst the various armies. The inquisition would try to assassinate the high lords, some space marines would start attacking the Imperium because "they lost their way", etc.
In short, the only possible way the Imperium can live is if the High Lords can change the current "nature" of humanity. To do so they would have to remove a section of the Inquisition, stop supporting SM chapters which would never ally with xenos and start a reeducation plan for everyone else. Ultimately it would take a couple generations... which might not be fast enough. This plan would have to be put in place with the support of the leaders of the other groups and with the knowledge that it's going to take quite awhile before an actual ceasefire could be declared... Obviously this is ripe for abuse by all sides.
Imagine you have a hated foe. Someone you would remove from existence with your own bare hands if given half a chance. More, you know that others are watching you and your own life depends upon the death of this foe. Now imagine trying to be buddies with them...with the knowledge that it's just a matter of who betrays who first. There isn't likely to be a good outcome from this and it's far more likely everyone becomes dinner.
Wyzilla wrote: There's only one source stating pulse rifles are more powerful than bolters.
There is only one source outright stating it, and that is if you disregard the profiles that are VERY explicit at how a pulse rifle is better in every aspect than a bolter .
Wyzilla wrote: However IIRC there's at least two or more that provide evidence against this with fairly lackluster feats for pulse weapons that put them between a lasgun and a bolter.
Evidence? You call that evidence?
Let me see any story in which the Tau are protagonists, and the pulse rifle do less damage than the bolters. And I am not speaking about those wielding the bolter doing more damage by aiming better, it is well-known that tau are not good at aiming. I am talking about the projectile itself doing more damage.
Or let us just look at the profile from RPG for both weapons.
Even the Fire Caste's standard issue weapon, the pulse rifle, is a marvel of technology, surpassing even the Adeptus Astartes boltgun in its destructive capability.
The stats have the bolter being 2d10+5 instead of 2d10+2 for the pulse rifle for the reason I said before (your PCs are supposed to be OP), but if we go by RT, a pulse rifle is 2d10+3 and a bolter is 1d10+5. For a min/avg/max that's 5/14/23 for the pulse and 6/10.5/15 for the bolt.
But you forget, Wyzilla already decreed that were not allowed to use game rules .
Forgot about that. For those of you who don't know, tearing means you roll an extra die for damage and discard the lowest result. this my increase the effective average, but I find it mostly makes it not get bad results quite as often.
TheCustomLime wrote: Yeah, there are three sources stating the Pulse Rifle is better. Codex: Tau, the 40k stats and the RPG stats.
Make that five : Codex: Tau, the 40k stats, the RPG fluff, the other RPG's rule, that piece of fluff when pulse rifle one-hit headshot kill terminators.
Luckily I have the shield of headcanon protecting against all those unpleasant claims of pulse weapons somehow being superior to the Bolt weaponry of Chaos' finest.
I see. Your notion of “attacking back” is “throw bombs at those people that might or might not be related to the people that threw bombs at you yesterday” .
Randomly firing in the general direction of the enemy did work for the Orks, yes?
Co'tor Shas wrote: Forgot about that. For those of you who don't know, tearing means you roll an extra die for damage and discard the lowest result. this my increase the effective average, but I find it mostly makes it not get bad results quite as often.
It also offers a third chance of getting a Righteous Fury, which Pulse Rifles cannot get.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Forgot about that. For those of you who don't know, tearing means you roll an extra die for damage and discard the lowest result. this my increase the effective average, but I find it mostly makes it not get bad results quite as often.
It also offers a third chance of getting a Righteous Fury, which Pulse Rifles cannot get.
True, but that's only for the "astartes boltgun" (utter bunk IMO, but whatever), the regular boltgun rolls only one dice, whereas the pulse rifle rolls two, so it's the same thing. The problem with that however, is it is a PC thing, not a weapon thing.
I have always played with bolters that any SMs have base (as in it's theirs, not one they happened to pick up off the ground) is make them best quality. It seems to me that they would have the same weapon, just always get the best quality as they can afford it.
Co'tor Shas wrote: Forgot about that. For those of you who don't know, tearing means you roll an extra die for damage and discard the lowest result. this my increase the effective average, but I find it mostly makes it not get bad results quite as often.
It also offers a third chance of getting a Righteous Fury, which Pulse Rifles cannot get.
True, but that's only for the "astartes boltgun" (utter bunk IMO, but whatever), the regular boltgun rolls only one dice, whereas the pulse rifle rolls two, so it's the same thing. The problem with that however, is it is a PC thing, not a weapon thing.
I have always played with bolters that any SMs have base (as in it's theirs, not one they happened to pick up off the ground) is make them best quality. It seems to me that they would have the same weapon, just always get the best quality as they can afford it.
Actually, in DW, all the Astartes stuff should have the Mastercrafted Quality by default... it's like Best Quality from DH, +2. And is reserved solely for Astartes. Also, any PC can get a Righteous Fury, as that mechanic is present in DH as well. However, "by the book", it applies only to PCs, all of which are Humans (without certain GM permissions)... so the Xeno can do nothing but fail.
Though I think this topic came up a few months ago, and it was determined that the Pulse Rifle is not, in the end, a superior weapon to the boltgun. Description notwithstanding, the bolter had better damage output and higher RoF, while the pulse rifle had better range and armor penetration, but lower base damage. Comparing a field-standard Fire Warrior to a baseline DW Marine, however indicated that the crisis suit of the FW was no match for the Pen of a Boltgun, while Astartes PA offered at least some protection, depending on where the Marine was hit. Also, the higher baseline TGH of the Marine (coupled with the Unnatural Toughness trait) required the Tau to roll above-average damage to even scratch the Marine. The Marine could roll fairly average and lay waste to a Fire Warrior.
A fight between a 
(Nom Nom)
with a side of utterly 
.
.
