Aren't power armor EMP protected?
And people already said that they would just ignore mortar fire.
Terminators also have personal teleporters, so those mortar positions would be dead if Termies just teleported in center of them.
Really now... I'd imagine a 120mm mortar would turn them into jelly in their own armor. And even if they were emp hardened, it's actually not a guarantee to work and definitely not going to be functioning at 100% capacity. So you still would be dealing with somewhat incapacitated space marines.
King Pariah wrote:Really now... I'd imagine a 120mm mortar would turn them into jelly in their own armor. And even if they were emp hardened, it's actually not a guarantee to work and definitely not going to be functioning at 100% capacity. So you still would be dealing with somewhat incapacitated space marines.
If you actually managed to hit a Space Marine, directly, with a 120mm mortar round then yes, he's probably dead or at least very badly injured.
But against a human-sized target (and an evading target, at that) you are practically never going to do so. And since even leaving aside the protective qualities of power armor Space Marines are physically much denser and more robust than humans, a near-miss isn't going to take one out; the shock wave is probably not going to kill them unless the shell actually hits them.
Honestly, I think using indirect artillery against Space Marines would be a mug's game. Fuel-air bombs might do it.
A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.
King Pariah wrote:A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.
Think about how those mortars kill people.
There's two ways; penetration and pressure. Either you are killed by the red-hot shrapnel that's being hurled everywhere, or you're killed by the massive kinetic impact of the atmosphere being pushed away from the blast. Right?
Shrapnel we can certainly argue about. I don't think hardly any would get through power armor; but yeah, with some luck you might hit a flexible joint and do some real damage.
The shockwave? Well, pressure (which is what a shockwave is) damages the human body by compressing and decompressing it rapidly. That causes all kinds of problems, biologically; but Space Marines are much denser than humans, and increased density means that they're much harder to compress and decompress like that, which means that pressure effects are going to be much less dangerous to them.
tsz52 wrote:
But if we're talking modern weapons vs SMs well most of the squadies I've conversed with who've fought in our contemporary wars have told me that nearly all of the actual killing is accomplished by air strikes, mortars and shoulder launched missiles, then a bit by artillery and the heavy and medium MGs, with everything less (with the exception of grenades, now and then) doing not much more than suppress (to allow those 'proper' weapons to work).
So you're not having to wheel these weapons out specially just to fight the dread SMs - a modern military fights pretty much that way already. There're a few bits of doctrine that you'd have to tweak (eg most small arms won't suppress SMs) but not much.
Space Superiority: Whomever's got that wins: End of. Imperial Navy wins.
But that invalidates just about every 40k warfighting premise... so should be used sparingly in such a debate as this.
Gah... I'm going to have to read the thread aren't I?
I think you're spot on with this, but I echo the previous poster who said "if you have to bring anti-tank to fight infantry, you're in trouble", because Astartes, pretty much by definition, would not be lining up and waiting for you to call in support weapons. Nor would they be suppressed by any fire a modern infantry squad could put out, so good luck pinning them down long enough to get your air support lined up.
I think we can safely ignore tabletop 40k in discussions like this. Lining up and charging across open fields - t's just WHFB in space. If you want to talk about "real" space marines, it's 7.5' tall bipedal light tanks deploying directly from orbit into your backyard, killing your governor/president/whatever, then being airlifted back out before anyone really knows what's going on. Or, if you're crewing an enemy spacecraft, and you enjoy the sensation of being alive, you had better arm yourselves with HEAT RPGs and train to fire them down hallways at rapidly advancing walls of armor firing .70 cal RPGs back at you, or else you and your whole bridge crew will be piles of goo.
For the purposes of this thread we can discuss all the various ways in which a .50 cal or a 120mm artillery shell would kill a marine, but if a space marine finds himself squaring off against an enemy who is ready and able to bring heavy weapons to bear across open ground, he's already screwed the pooch. If the Adeptus Astartes did exist, they would outgun, outlast, and outmaneuver a modern military force the same way NATO forces outfight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Space Marines, like any soldier from any time, would do everything within their power to avoid a "fair" fight and bring all their advantages to bear as ruthlessly as possible.
Aye, if we're talking realistic SMs fighting realistically* (the very exemplar of SOF) then that presents a logistical problem since your 'safe' rear echelon is the front line where them pesky Astartes are concerned.
But if we lived in a universe where SMs existed and we were embarking upon a path where SM assault seemed likely at some point then we'd have solved this problem pre-emptively in the same way that all logistical problems are solved.
And if SMs aren't signatories of the Geneva Convention and Hague Protocols then even our tech can chuck some nasty stuff at them Astartes - if we've got enough time to ditch the 5.56 mm ARs and SAWs and replace with proper battle rifles and GPMGs with 'exotic' ammo for everyone (plus underslung GLs, beefed up grenades, more anti materiel rifles and Browning .50 Cal MGs everywhere), with more folks and more training.
Not saying that it'd be easy nor 100% reliable, but not impossible/'OMG We're Doomed!' either.
*Except for the what you'd actually do if you had complete space dominance part, this being 40k.
King Pariah wrote:So you're saying that something that is known to have effectively killed tanks can't kill space marines?
They can kill tanks BY HITTING THEM DIRECTLY, because a tank is much, much larger and much, much less maneuverable than a person. Faster, but less maneuverable.
I already said; if you managed to hit a SM directly, yes, you'd kill him. But doing that will be nearly impossible.
King Pariah wrote:A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.
Think about how those mortars kill people.
There's two ways; penetration and pressure. Either you are killed by the red-hot shrapnel that's being hurled everywhere, or you're killed by the massive kinetic impact of the atmosphere being pushed away from the blast. Right?
Shrapnel we can certainly argue about. I don't think hardly any would get through power armor; but yeah, with some luck you might hit a flexible joint and do some real damage.
The shockwave? Well, pressure (which is what a shockwave is) damages the human body by compressing and decompressing it rapidly. That causes all kinds of problems, biologically; but Space Marines are much denser than humans, and increased density means that they're much harder to compress and decompress like that, which means that pressure effects are going to be much less dangerous to them.
Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).
King Pariah wrote:Not even the relatively cheap guided mortars?
Yes. Guided mortar rounds are barely accurate enough to hit moving armored vehicles dead on, and a tank has a massively larger cross-section than a Space Marine. If you have a margin of error of even two meters each way, you've got only about a 30% chance or so to actually hit a man-sized target; and the accuracy of a guided mortar round is far coarser than that.
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tsz52 wrote:
Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).
Not exactly. Flexibility is what lets you survive a shockwave, while a brittle substance will shatter.
Density matters for two reasons; first, denser materials absorb more energy per cubic inch, or whatever unit you want to use; and second, denser materials are commonly more brittle (relatively) and so shatter more easily. A Space Marine would absorb more kinetic energy from a shockwave than a human would, both because he's larger and because he's denser; but if the structural strength of his muscles/organs/bones has been increased more than the added density has reduced his flexibility, he'll still survive better the shockwave better than a human.
Also, a thick, hard, rigid material like power armor will protect against the blast. Not perfectly, certainly, but it will soak up a good deal of the force before it ever reaches flesh, particularly since power armor is described as being a layered composite rather than a solid, homogeneous mass.
Now here's the finale, direct fire mortars (yes, they exist and are considered to possibly be just about as good, if not better, at popping tanks as a 105mm direct fire cannon). How about that?
I assume you're using 'mortar' as a jargon term here, because a mortar is, by definition, an indirect-fire weapon.
Direct-fire artillery could well be effective; as I said, if a nice, big, explosive shell scores a direct hit on a Space Marine, that Space Marine is up gak creek without a paddle. That's actually how I interpret the AP3 of a krak missile, honestly; even if the missile doesn't blow clean through the armor the concussive force is still going to mess the Space Marine up, so in game terms there's exactly no chance that the armor will save him from a direct hit.
You'll still have accuracy problems; unless you've got a ballistic computer calculating trajectory, hitting a man-sized target with a weapon that big is always quite difficult for a human. If you DO have a ballistic computer, you could probably ace any Space Marines who popped up in the open pretty effectively, though.
Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).
Not exactly. Flexibility is what lets you survive a shockwave, while a brittle substance will shatter.
Density matters for two reasons; first, denser materials absorb more energy per cubic inch, or whatever unit you want to use; and second, denser materials are commonly more brittle (relatively) and so shatter more easily. A Space Marine would absorb more kinetic energy from a shockwave than a human would, both because he's larger and because he's denser; but if the structural strength of his muscles/organs/bones has been increased more than the added density has reduced his flexibility, he'll still survive better the shockwave better than a human.
Also, a thick, hard, rigid material like power armor will protect against the blast. Not perfectly, certainly, but it will soak up a good deal of the force before it ever reaches flesh, particularly since power armor is described as being a layered composite rather than a solid, homogeneous mass.
This would only work if SMs were made up of radically different materials than regular organic stuff. I always took it that their organs were made of organic stuff but beefed up a bit with redundancy and so on, but I am by no means an expert on Astartes. If their organs and bones aren't held together by carbon nanoweave sheaths or whatever then you're looking at the same effects happening as happens to regular humies but moreso (assuming a wave strong enough to overcome the extra absorption afforded by the extra volume and density).
The extra density provides a more efficient medium for the wave to pass through, to more effectively reach the less elastic and/or more vulnerable bits that will fail under pressure from that wave (liver, brain, central nervous system, vessels that can burst, skeleton which can shatter or at least spall). Again, he'd be better off filling that increased volume with less dense and more elastic organs with a lot more ability to move as gross structures to absorb the momentum, with as empty as possible cavities insulating the major bits and bobs.
Likewise with his armour.
But yeah, as you say, there is a cross-over point where increased density ceases to be an advantage and becomes a liability with a given force hitting it, with given materials - we don't have any of those crunchy numbers and facts. All I'm saying is that you can't claim the increased density as a definite boon, since it might be the exact opposite sometimes.
Also don't forget that you don't need to kill him outright, since however tough he is, inside he is still a meatbag; hit him with enough force close up enough to drop him for a few seconds, his central nervous system and hearts momentarily stunned, and then you can hit him square on with your mortars or whatnot since he isn't going anywhere.
All armor still has soft spots for movement and they all still have dudes in them. The same basic weaknesses apply. Kinetic force from sufficiently large anti-tank rounds and explosive pressure waves close enough to the softer spots should be sufficient to damage the tissue inside the armor even without penetrating it.
Have you ever skinned your knee through your pants without tearing them? Think about that only much more upscaled and involving explosives.
Well custodes have even stronger armour than astartes, and terminators have even their joints hidden behind layers of armour, with grey knights having psychic shielding which I don't think we could penetrate. A primarch we likely would have immense trouble killing WITHOUT armour even.
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But we don't know what velocities Tau Railguns run at (?), so this might be academic but I wanted to just point that out to BeRsErKeR as a possibility (and it benefited your argument, by the way);
I remember hearing a figure in the vicinity of mach 8?
Milisim wrote:Just make a Space Marine get a wife.... Yoou'll soon see who wear the power armour pants then.... 9ft guys gibbering in the corner saying Yes Dear!
The wife is the ultimate weapon in any era for destroying a man =]
Just don't tell my wife that.
Please, haven't you realized? SM aren't interested in...women. HINT HINT HINT.
Really, very few modern weapons could beat a space marine in power armour. Let's go over some of the theories, Shall we?
Nuke: Maybe
An Orbital bombardment is more powerful than a Nuke and marines have survived them before.
Copied weapons: Yes
There was a suggestion that the army would take the power armour and bolter form a marine and copy it to kill the others. this could work...if you could reproduce it. Ceramite it made form materials that humanity currently lacks the ability to forge. Bolter rounds require Diamond for basic rounds and Adamantium for Anti-Power Armour.
Sniper rifles: Maybe
Could work for blinding the marine, but the sniper would be weaker than a bolter and marines can take a bolt round to the face without a helmet and live. (example listed in chaos codex, and done by a scout no less)
Flamethrowers: no
Modern flamethrowers would be too cold to work, with the cooling systems in the Armour overwelming the heat form the fire
Tank shells: Maybe
Power armour is designed to be hit by modren tank shells and the marine would be more likely to be injured by the collision from the shell than the blast.
Mortars: No
Coupling inaccuracy with lower firepower while deminishing both makes this a horrible choice.
I thought a Direct fire mortar was called a Howitzer? I imagine Power armour has similar protective qualities to CHOBHAM armour on both the M1A1/2 Abrams and the Challenger II in which case if you could get close enough to get an acurate shot, an RPG-32 would probably do the job. It is the only weapon that has penetrated CHOBHAM, other than AFPDS/Sabot rounds because you're essentially firing a massive needle at the target at something close to mach 3
No, a howitzer is an artillery piece thus "indirect" fire
Direct fire mortars are simply mortars configured to fire straight at the target instead of a high angle. For all intents and purposes, the old definition of mortar is pretty much kaput as we do use direct fire mortars.
A Tank fired 120mm APFSDS round traveling at 1 700 metres per second should do it. Add DU for extra damage and secondary detonations- ammo pouches, power cells
A 65cm grouping of hits is not difficult at 1000m.
Now the million dollar question is how fast that Space Marine can cover the 1000m?
Or you could try a HESH round if he was standing still.
APFSDS Armour Piercing Fin Sstabilised Discarding Sabot
HESH High Explosive Squash Head
DU Depleted Uranium (actually Staballoy)
This would only work if SMs were made up of radically different materials than regular organic stuff. I always took it that their organs were made of organic stuff but beefed up a bit with redundancy and so on, but I am by no means an expert on Astartes. If their organs and bones aren't held together by carbon nanoweave sheaths or whatever then you're looking at the same effects happening as happens to regular humies but moreso (assuming a wave strong enough to overcome the extra absorption afforded by the extra volume and density).
The extra density provides a more efficient medium for the wave to pass through, to more effectively reach the less elastic and/or more vulnerable bits that will fail under pressure from that wave (liver, brain, central nervous system, vessels that can burst, skeleton which can shatter or at least spall). Again, he'd be better off filling that increased volume with less dense and more elastic organs with a lot more ability to move as gross structures to absorb the momentum, with as empty as possible cavities insulating the major bits and bobs.
Likewise with his armour.
But yeah, as you say, there is a cross-over point where increased density ceases to be an advantage and becomes a liability with a given force hitting it, with given materials - we don't have any of those crunchy numbers and facts. All I'm saying is that you can't claim the increased density as a definite boon, since it might be the exact opposite sometimes.
Also don't forget that you don't need to kill him outright, since however tough he is, inside he is still a meatbag; hit him with enough force close up enough to drop him for a few seconds, his central nervous system and hearts momentarily stunned, and then you can hit him square on with your mortars or whatnot since he isn't going anywhere.
Mmm. . . see, here's the thing. There's a point at which extra density is more valuable than extra flexibility.
For instance; get a two-inch-thick sheet of rubber and drape it over yourself. Set off a grenade on the other side. Now you're dead or at least badly injured, right? Partially from the shrapnel, but even if none of the shrapnel takes you out, the overpressure is still going to hurt, maybe burst your eardrums and pop veins in your eyes, under your fingernails, etc.
Get a two-inch-thick molded steel dish (large enough to cover your whole body) and hide underneath it. Set off a grenade just outside it. Not only are you totally protected from the shrapnel, but the pressure isn't as great, either.
That's because rigid materials like steel transmit less of a shockwave. When the shockwave hits, a dense, rigid material like steel flexes less; there's simply a lot more material in a certain thickness of steel than there is in the same thickness of rubber, and as a consequence a lot more of the kinetic energy of the shockwave is expended in making it move. All that energy which goes into overcoming the mass of the steel is gone, and can't hurt whatever (or whoever) is behind it; the person wearing a suit of rigid steel plate armor only gets what's left over. Furthermore, this effect is greatly increased if you've got multiple layers attached to each other, since EVERY layer absorbs some of the energy, and forces it to transfer repeatedly between the steel and whatever you have between the layers. That bleeds even more energy away.
A Space Marine is wearing, conservatively, a couple inches of layered metal and ceramic over his vital organs, though the helmet is probably thinner. On top of that, his physical makeup is also significantly heavier than a human body is, with a higher proportion of thick but compressible muscle fiber and hardened, interlocking bone to vulnerable, squishy organ-meat. In order to hurt him the shockwave first must pass through the armor itself, expending a lot of energy in forcing the various layers of ceramite and adamantine to flex against each other in order to transmit the energy; it then has to move through several layers of muscle fiber, and finally pass through his bones, in order to reach the organs. It's got a longer distance to travel, with less-vulnerable material to move through, before it can ever reach the places where it might do serious damage.
With all that taken together, I'm quite confident that a Space Marine would be massively resistant to overpressure, much more so than any normal human is.
Steel transfers energy really well actually, the rigidity of it absorbs the energy, and instead of dissipating significantly as seen with flexible materials, it conducts a significant amount of energy through it to whatever happens to be on the other side. As seen with the Newton Cradle.
According to Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermy AKA The Gunny a Howitzer is capable of both direct and indirect fire or at least the super-duper-uber-complicated ones are
King Pariah wrote:Steel transfers energy really well actually, the rigidity of it absorbs the energy, and instead of dissipating significantly as seen with flexible materials, it conducts a significant amount of energy through it to whatever happens to be on the other side. As seen with the Newton Cradle.
So, are you saying that a 2-inch-thick sheet of rubber will protect you from a blast better than a 2-inch-thick sheet of steel? Because I was using steel merely as an example of a hard, dense substance vs. a softer, less-dense substance. Molecules packed closer together transmit energy more efficiently, yes, but denser materials also have a lot more molecules present, and every single one still causes a loss of energy. This is exactly why hard, rigid materials have been used as armor for millenia; they protect people from kinetic energy, on an equal-size basis, better than soft, flexible materials do.
Actually a combo of dense and flexible is best. You need the hard to prevent penetration, not shock absorption. The more flexible material absorbs and dissipates the shock. If it was just a concussive grenade with no shrapnel, I'd take the rubber, with shrapnel I'd take a steel exterior with rubber behind it. Millenia of armor has shown the combo is best, never just a steel shell, that's a terrible idea. You get a bell like affect that way which is extremely dangerous to the body.
This is an exercise in futility, a marine is a powerful super science enchaned solider with bionics, redundant implants and stupid super armor. They exist in space and are able to eat a bit of flesh and get a whole bunch of information about a person and his skills... all this equates into a simple "duh, you could kill a space marine with a over-the top super structure destroying weapon.... so why is the marine facing those odds? Why is it that this guy who is bigger, stronger, tougher, more technologically and tactically advanced than us (lets not even throw in wisdom of centuries of combat). that he would ever find himself in that position?
Personally I think if you start comparing this sort of thing then you need to think about what the marine would do as a counter-measure? You say a tank cannon? I say he dodges the first blast by swiftly dodging and absorbing the explosion with his armor before pulling a pin on a krak gernade killing everyone inside and using the wreckage as cover to track and kill it's spotters for him. You say motors for long range fighting? I say jammed radio signals and improved stealth and gorilla tactics all the while waiting out till a change of the guard just to move during that time due to his heightened sleep depredation methods.
You say chopper? I say bolter fire being superior to most anti-vehicle weapons. You say gernade launcher? I say he grabs your frag round and crushes it in his hand as it explodes for the lawls. To the people who say las fire kills marines... in theory you are correct because you play the board game, however in the fluff it is so amazingly rare for a marine to die in such a fashion normally in the fluff he would lob a flash bang into the unit and walk out killing everyone but the sergeant so he could account for his squads actions at chainsword point.
All and all i understand the point was "just to see" but some people here sound smuggly confident they could kill the marine easily when i am thinking "most countries in the world want the weapons we are talking about there to use against us or someone else... what makes you think they would readily endanger these things to fight 1 man? or for that matter who hear knows a marine dumb enough to charge a base alone when he could review all avenues to avoid damage."
It's a wash, the mighty predator was beaten by a humble log ... so could a marine if it was unlucky enough. In order to kill that marine you need to remember he will elude gunfire and damage if you want him to be a proper marine and not a dude standing there to die.
Big Mek Wurrzog wrote:This is an exercise in futility, a marine is a powerful super science enchaned solider with bionics, redundant implants and stupid super armor. They exist in space and are able to eat a bit of flesh and get a whole bunch of information about a person and his skills... all this equates into a simple "duh, you could kill a space marine with a over-the top super structure destroying weapon.... so why is the marine facing those odds? Why is it that this guy who is bigger, stronger, tougher, more technologically and tactically advanced than us (lets not even throw in wisdom of centuries of combat). that he would ever find himself in that position?
Personally I think if you start comparing this sort of thing then you need to think about what the marine would do as a counter-measure? You say a tank cannon? I say he dodges the first blast by swiftly dodging and absorbing the explosion with his armor before pulling a pin on a krak gernade killing everyone inside and using the wreckage as cover to track and kill it's spotters for him. You say motors for long range fighting? I say jammed radio signals and improved stealth and gorilla tactics all the while waiting out till a change of the guard just to move during that time due to his heightened sleep depredation methods.
You say chopper? I say bolter fire being superior to most anti-vehicle weapons. You say gernade launcher? I say he grabs your frag round and crushes it in his hand as it explodes for the lawls. To the people who say las fire kills marines... in theory you are correct because you play the board game, however in the fluff it is so amazingly rare for a marine to die in such a fashion normally in the fluff he would lob a flash bang into the unit and walk out killing everyone but the sergeant so he could account for his squads actions at chainsword point.
All and all i understand the point was "just to see" but some people here sound smuggly confident they could kill the marine easily when i am thinking "most countries in the world want the weapons we are talking about there to use against us or someone else... what makes you think they would readily endanger these things to fight 1 man? or for that matter who hear knows a marine dumb enough to charge a base alone when he could review all avenues to avoid damage."
It's a wash, the mighty predator was beaten by a humble log ... so could a marine if it was unlucky enough. In order to kill that marine you need to remember he will elude gunfire and damage if you want him to be a proper marine and not a dude standing there to die.
Except that wasn't the question asked.
What was asked was "What modern weapons could kill a Space Marine?" and the answer to that question is, most of them, if not all of them.
The likelihood of it working is not important to answering the question.
Big Mek Wurrzog wrote:I say bolter fire being superior to most anti-vehicle weapons. You say gernade launcher? I say he grabs your frag round and crushes it in his hand as it explodes for the lawls.
And this children, is why Matt Ward should not be allowed to write fluff.
He is poisoning your minds.
A marine is more resistant to pain, doesn't suffer shock much, has slightly thicker bone and tends not to bleed out, but that doesn't make them much harder to damage than a regular human. They are still squishy lumps of flesh.
Big Mek Wurrzog wrote:I say bolter fire being superior to most anti-vehicle weapons. You say gernade launcher? I say he grabs your frag round and crushes it in his hand as it explodes for the lawls.
And this children, is why Matt Ward should not be allowed to write fluff.
He is poisoning your minds
A marine is more resistant to pain, doesn't suffer shock much, has slightly thicker bone and tends not to bleed out, but that doesn't make them much harder to damage than a regular human. They are still squishy lumps of flesh.
And if he actually does grab a grenade, he's going to be fighting the rest of the battle with only one hand.
I bet the Space Marine wouldn't really car that much if he lost his. He can fire his bolter one handed. He wouldn't die from blood loss or shock, he would just be very pissed of
redkommando wrote:I bet the Space Marine wouldn't really car that much if he lost his. He can fire his bolter one handed. He wouldn't die from blood loss or shock, he would just be very pissed of
He wouldn't, no, but it would still put him at a disadvantage; sure, he can fire his bolter one-handed, but not as effectively, and he would have problems in other ways too.
This would only work if SMs were made up of radically different materials than regular organic stuff. I always took it that their organs were made of organic stuff but beefed up a bit with redundancy and so on, but I am by no means an expert on Astartes. If their organs and bones aren't held together by carbon nanoweave sheaths or whatever then you're looking at the same effects happening as happens to regular humies but moreso (assuming a wave strong enough to overcome the extra absorption afforded by the extra volume and density).
The extra density provides a more efficient medium for the wave to pass through, to more effectively reach the less elastic and/or more vulnerable bits that will fail under pressure from that wave (liver, brain, central nervous system, vessels that can burst, skeleton which can shatter or at least spall). Again, he'd be better off filling that increased volume with less dense and more elastic organs with a lot more ability to move as gross structures to absorb the momentum, with as empty as possible cavities insulating the major bits and bobs.
Likewise with his armour.
But yeah, as you say, there is a cross-over point where increased density ceases to be an advantage and becomes a liability with a given force hitting it, with given materials - we don't have any of those crunchy numbers and facts. All I'm saying is that you can't claim the increased density as a definite boon, since it might be the exact opposite sometimes.
Also don't forget that you don't need to kill him outright, since however tough he is, inside he is still a meatbag; hit him with enough force close up enough to drop him for a few seconds, his central nervous system and hearts momentarily stunned, and then you can hit him square on with your mortars or whatnot since he isn't going anywhere.
Mmm. . . see, here's the thing. There's a point at which extra density is more valuable than extra flexibility.
For instance; get a two-inch-thick sheet of rubber and drape it over yourself. Set off a grenade on the other side. Now you're dead or at least badly injured, right? Partially from the shrapnel, but even if none of the shrapnel takes you out, the overpressure is still going to hurt, maybe burst your eardrums and pop veins in your eyes, under your fingernails, etc.
Get a two-inch-thick molded steel dish (large enough to cover your whole body) and hide underneath it. Set off a grenade just outside it. Not only are you totally protected from the shrapnel, but the pressure isn't as great, either.
That's because rigid materials like steel transmit less of a shockwave. When the shockwave hits, a dense, rigid material like steel flexes less; there's simply a lot more material in a certain thickness of steel than there is in the same thickness of rubber, and as a consequence a lot more of the kinetic energy of the shockwave is expended in making it move. All that energy which goes into overcoming the mass of the steel is gone, and can't hurt whatever (or whoever) is behind it; the person wearing a suit of rigid steel plate armor only gets what's left over. Furthermore, this effect is greatly increased if you've got multiple layers attached to each other, since EVERY layer absorbs some of the energy, and forces it to transfer repeatedly between the steel and whatever you have between the layers. That bleeds even more energy away.
A Space Marine is wearing, conservatively, a couple inches of layered metal and ceramic over his vital organs, though the helmet is probably thinner. On top of that, his physical makeup is also significantly heavier than a human body is, with a higher proportion of thick but compressible muscle fiber and hardened, interlocking bone to vulnerable, squishy organ-meat. In order to hurt him the shockwave first must pass through the armor itself, expending a lot of energy in forcing the various layers of ceramite and adamantine to flex against each other in order to transmit the energy; it then has to move through several layers of muscle fiber, and finally pass through his bones, in order to reach the organs. It's got a longer distance to travel, with less-vulnerable material to move through, before it can ever reach the places where it might do serious damage.
With all that taken together, I'm quite confident that a Space Marine would be massively resistant to overpressure, much more so than any normal human is.
See I'd say 'There's a point [at *struck out, however you do that...*] below which extra density is more valuable than extra flexibility.'
Don't forget quilted armour with hard plates on top in your millenia of armour (that being essentially what we have now, for that reason - and this is how various 40k personal armours have been described, so I'm already allowing for this).
Think of when HESH rounds were all the rage; they were defeated not by adding extra density to the armour, but by reducing the (overall) density of the armour - add less-dense inner layers to better attenuate the compression wave.
Here's a model for you in return: A very large warhead is set off a meter away from a warship. There is no shrapnel nor other physical products, so the destructive effect is entirely due to the medium in between ship and warhead conducting the compression wave from the explosion. In decreasing order of density of medium:-
Water: Breaks keel, sinks ship (how modern heavy torpedoes work);
Air: Compresses well enough to form a superficially damaging over-pressure (lots of buckling on the super structure and ship is mission-killed though her vital innards are mostly fine and she can be repaired);
Vacuum: Zilch, zero effect.
* * *
That's the principle I'm talking about, when dealing with human-sized, fleshy targets and large/close-by explosions; the cross-over point at which increased density is increased liability (but below this you're correct).
See I'd say 'There's a point [at *struck out, however you do that...*] below which extra density is more valuable than extra flexibility.'
Don't forget quilted armour with hard plates on top in your millenia of armour (that being essentially what we have now, for that reason - and this is how various 40k personal armours have been described, so I'm already allowing for this).
Think of when HESH rounds were all the rage; they were defeated not by adding extra density to the armour, but by reducing the (overall) density of the armour - add less-dense inner layers to better attenuate the compression wave.
Here's a model for you in return: A very large warhead is set off a meter away from a warship. There is no shrapnel nor other physical products, so the destructive effect is entirely due to the medium in between ship and warhead conducting the compression wave from the explosion. In decreasing order of density of medium:-
Water: Breaks keel, sinks ship (how modern heavy torpedoes work);
Air: Compresses well enough to form a superficially damaging over-pressure (lots of buckling on the super structure and ship is mission-killed though her vital innards are mostly fine and she can be repaired);
Vacuum: Zilch, zero effect.
* * *
That's the principle I'm talking about, when dealing with human-sized, fleshy targets and large/close-by explosions; the cross-over point at which increased density is increased liability (but below this you're correct).
Ah, I see where the disconnect is.
Adding MORE layers of more flexible material, in conjunction with hard material, can be productive. What is not productive is replacing hard material with an equal thickness of soft material, for exactly the reasons we've been talking about. If I had to choose between a quilted arming jacket and a solid steel breastplate of equal thickness I would take the breastplate every time, regardless of what I anticipated being slammed into my torso; but given the option, I would rather take both than either.
Yes, a thicker transmission medium means more of the total energy is transmitted for a given amount of the medium. But an airburst shell does a much, much better job putting down infantry than one that explodes underground at the same distance away, because even leaving aside fragmentation, the shockwave simply will not travel very far through solid earth. The heavy, dense material soaks up the energy in fairly short order compared to the air; there is so much more material which the force of the explosion needs to move in order to propagate that it bleeds away rapidly.
It's funny that everybody is debating about killing a Marine on range and totally forgetting that they have Assault marines that would rip us apart in melee.
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
Here's the real problem: we're comparing real world weapons to 40k. If SM are governed by the same laws that govern reality, they'd die from their own bio-enhancment.
Pulling out my supposedly canon 40kRPG rules from FFG...
An assault rifle has an outside chance of killing a space marine. .50 anti-materiel rifle or even the old Browning HMG will almost certainly do the job as long as he's not in Terminator armor. Termies will require either a large amount of explosive, or a shaped charge, or anti-tank ord. The concussive force of a sufficiently powerful explosion (something that seems to not exist in 40k) would break bones and liquify internal organs, despite the armor.
Further, you don't have to fully pen the target for spalling to kill the occupant.
Edit: as far as other SM toys: Jump packs exist in few enough numbers that outside of certain tactical situations, they're almost useless.
Land Raiders: Same way they beat tanks that couldn't be penned back in WWII. Drop enough explosives on them, and the crew dies anyway. Wreck the tracks and call in an airstrike. After all, only early patters can elevate enough to hit targets above the horizon.
Thawks: easily out maneuvered by F-22 raptor. Thawks are designed for anti-ground and star-ship operations, and can be damaged with a krack missile.
Preds: current MBts would have a hard time with them, however, they'd die fast to infantry in close terrain and close air support.
Dreads: slow and slab sided, mbts would make quick work of them, but in theory even a stryker or a ATX-13/90 could kill one.
Brother Coa wrote:It's funny that everybody is debating about killing a Marine on range and totally forgetting that they have Assault marines that would rip us apart in melee.
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
I assumed we were just taking the standard Tactical Marine and dropping him into a modern-day environment.
In answer to your question, though, if a guardsman can kill a marine with a bayonet (which they can, though rare) so can a modern soldier.
Brother Coa wrote:It's funny that everybody is debating about killing a Marine on range and totally forgetting that they have Assault marines that would rip us apart in melee.
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
Brother Coa wrote:It's funny that everybody is debating about killing a Marine on range and totally forgetting that they have Assault marines that would rip us apart in melee.
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
A gun of some sort.
.50 AE might work if you shot them in the joints or other 'soft' parts of the armor. Remember, folks, SM armor is actually very poorly designed from a combat point of view. This is why they need so much Plot Armor.
Brother Coa wrote:It's funny that everybody is debating about killing a Marine on range and totally forgetting that they have Assault marines that would rip us apart in melee.
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
A gun of some sort.
QFT. Again, if we have time to prepare our forces (rather than SMs just appearing in our reality from nowhere) then give folks PDWs with something like CBJ's 6.5 mm ball ammo (6.5 mm plastic sabot with 4mm tungsten penetrator at the best part of 1000 m/s from a ~30 cm barrel - your Uzi can now shoot through a steel armoured personel carrier up close).
Give him a face full of that as he closes.
If there're loads of AMs about then bring back the pike (using modern materials); two 'man' teams of pike'man' and PDW shooter.
* * *
BeRzErKeR: I don't think that there's a disconnect so much, but that we're dealing with generalisations that are sometimes true, sometimes not, depending upon stuff that we don't have numbers and facts for - it's a case by case basis thing. But yeah, take as given that I'm not advocating rigid either/or, but best qualities of both (that being the point to using composites).
All I'm saying is that 'more dense = always better' is manifestly not true: my above model shows that with proper design 1mm of vacuum (can't get less dense than that) is better than 6" of steel. Against blast waves, HESH or HEAT, an inch of exactly nothing is better than an inch or more of steel. If mass limits are the primary driver (rather than thickness limits) then adding more thickness of less dense (to some layers of dense) pulls even further ahead.
So you'd be better off using some of the given armour thickness to have a cage that diverts the wave around his body, with shock-absorbing plates with enough room to move as gross objects, with layers to break the wave up and get it to interfere with itself, with as-not-dense-as-possible attenuation layers (vacuum bubbles in a gel, say), than you would using that thickness to add more ceramite (and you're now way ahead in mass-efficiency too).
You'd apply the same approach to his internal layout, if possible - elastic nanoweave sacs holding each of his components together with insulating vacuum-gel packs (or whatever) around the major bits and bobs - rather than filling that space with tightly packed slabs of beef.
I didn't want to say it but 'In a storm, bend like the sapling' and all that.
King Pariah wrote:Actually a combo of dense and flexible is best. You need the hard to prevent penetration, not shock absorption. The more flexible material absorbs and dissipates the shock. If it was just a concussive grenade with no shrapnel, I'd take the rubber, with shrapnel I'd take a steel exterior with rubber behind it. Millenia of armor has shown the combo is best, never just a steel shell, that's a terrible idea. You get a bell like affect that way which is extremely dangerous to the body.
Space marines have a ~mesh layer under their armour for just that scenario.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Let's build stuff out of carbon nanotubes and aerogel and hit them with it!
Too extreme.
I restate; if there's a chance a guardsman can bayonet a marine to death, then so can a modern trooper.
Doesn't matter if it's unlikely; fact is, it's still got a chance of working and therefore fulfils the criteria of the thread's question.
I think a Airborne assualt would catch them off guard. as they land and disembark there drop pods looking for the us then a laser guided hellfire barrage from 2 miles away thanks to the apache followed up by a-10 strafing runs and missles then probably a wave of blackhawks infront of chinooks.
WARHAMMER40KWARGAMES wrote:I think a Airborne assualt would catch them off guard. as they land and disembark there drop pods looking for the us then a laser guided hellfire barrage from 2 miles away thanks to the apache followed up by a-10 strafing runs and missles then probably a wave of blackhawks infront of chinooks.
As I said earlier, 'close air support'. Since by the time the troops get there to mop up, you're going to need buckets.
redkommando wrote:I bet the Space Marine wouldn't really car that much if he lost his. He can fire his bolter one handed. He wouldn't die from blood loss or shock, he would just be very pissed of
He can, but poorly. Very poorly. Not to mention that reloading becomes a tad more difficult.
*sigh* shot placement matters. You can kill a Space Marine with a pointy wooden stick (well okay a spear) if you aim for the right area and you hit him just right or hard enough. It even happened in First HEretic. But that doesn't mean it would always happen. Same with gunfire of any kind.
Brother Coa wrote:
Ok, with what weapon could we oppose him in melee? Electrified Katana?
Close combat bazooka.
Now we have to remember that different laws of physics apply in the 40k universe and ours. So this question is relevant only in the case of some sort of an dimension shift.
When it would be up to the author.
Remeber that WWI tanks can be made into swiss cheese with assault rifles of the 21:st century. So its likely that future assault weapons will make our current tanks into swiss cheese.
And the SM armor is what? over 10,000 years in the future?
So the SM armor might withstand weapons that penetrate over 2000mm of steel in our universe while orks can chop them up with primitive axes in the 40k universe.
Or their armor becomes heavy and slow in our dimensions, its up to you for the story is not tied into reality or logic.
King Pariah wrote:This thread back up? Sigh... Anything that exerts enough G-forces would be enough, their size and mass is their downfall here (if in out dimension).
King Pariah wrote:This thread back up? Sigh... Anything that exerts enough G-forces would be enough, their size and mass is their downfall here (if in out dimension).
As apposed to the 453534TH dimension?
As opposed to whatever dimension they happen to be in where the laws of physics are all skewed.
King Pariah wrote:This thread back up? Sigh... Anything that exerts enough G-forces would be enough, their size and mass is their downfall here (if in out dimension).
As apposed to the 453534TH dimension?
As opposed to whatever dimension they happen to be in where the laws of physics are all skewed.
You guys do realize that if we use nukes against Space Marines that we will basically nuke ourselves? Radiation poisoning anyone? Not to mention natural damage that last thousands of years... just ask yourself why none is using nukes today in some war?
Brother Coa wrote:You guys do realize that if we use nukes against Space Marines that we will basically nuke ourselves?
Radiation poisoning anyone? Not to mention natural damage that last thousands of years...
just ask yourself why none is using nukes today in some war?
Simple there either has been no need for it or it would mean risking retaliation. You know some Russian generals would have authority to use tactical nukes on will in the case of an war.
The overall danger of nukes is highly exaggerated thanks to hollywood and some anti nuclear factions spreading false information.
Also nukes wouldn't be very effective against Space Marines for they are wearing an NBC-protected armor and are naturally more resistant to radiation.
You did hear about Krieg and Chernobyl?
I wouldn't call that "anti nuclear factions spreading false information".
The point is that they are not used because they are poisoning the area they are detonated. If everyone would use them radiation level on Earth would increase and we would be living like Kriegsmen.
Brother Coa wrote:You did hear about Krieg and Chernobyl?
I wouldn't call that "anti nuclear factions spreading false information".
The point is that they are not used because they are poisoning the area they are detonated. If everyone would use them radiation level on Earth would increase and we would be living like Kriegsmen.
Chernobyl is nowadays an tourist attraction and people live relatively close to it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are totally radiated ruins and not blooming cities.
And you know most modern nukes are heat nukes that burn more cleanly than old nukes. ( They create less radiation but an stronger blast with the same amount of uranium/plutonium. )
I'm not sure about other countries but the Russians would totally try to nuke them if they are hostile.
Fire almost anything just below the neck, they call that spot the shot locker for a reason. Most shots will bounce up under the helmet under the jaw and into the brain.
Well, considering that a regular human punching kills a space marine every 18 punches or so, I'd say that just about anything can kill a Space Marine. They're actually really wimpy.
Brother Coa wrote:
The point is that they are not used because they are poisoning the area they are detonated. If everyone would use them radiation level on Earth would increase and we would be living like Kriegsmen.
That is true, but the main reason is like the cold war (1950s), the Americans had nukes, the Russians had nukes, but using a nuke meant they would nuke you back and nobody is prepared to make those decisions in good conscience
Brother Coa wrote:
The point is that they are not used because they are poisoning the area they are detonated. If everyone would use them radiation level on Earth would increase and we would be living like Kriegsmen.
That is true, but the main reason is like the cold war (1950s), the Americans had nukes, the Russians had nukes, but using a nuke meant they would nuke you back and nobody is prepared to make those decisions in good conscience
It's the whole M.A.D. senario (Mutually Assured Destruction).
One nation fires some nukes, another fires some of theirs, and next thing you know, everyone with nukes are launching all of them at everyone else. Eventually there is not a single patch of livable land, and Earth ends up like Krieg, except no one is alive here.
CrazedVaultBoy wrote:Its probably been said before but i'll say it again..... Chuck Norris?
DON'T YOU DARE GO THERE.
Too late.
Besides, Chuck Norris would probably be spending too much time weeping over his failed career in the hopes that his tears can cure it to risk his life against an SM.
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Why woudl they do that when they can bring a fertile agg-world in to the fold instead? I mean our planet is pretty damned fertile, add in some Imperial technology to make it moreso, and we could probably ship off plenty of food.
It would take a daemonic or tyrranic infestation of major proportions for the Imperium to turn away such a viable planet.
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Why woudl they do that when they can bring a fertile agg-world in to the fold instead? I mean our planet is pretty damned fertile, add in some Imperial technology to make it moreso, and we could probably ship off plenty of food.
It would take a daemonic or tyrranic infestation of major proportions for the Imperium to turn away such a viable planet.
Ah, but chuck Norris would send the fools running.
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Why woudl they do that when they can bring a fertile agg-world in to the fold instead? I mean our planet is pretty damned fertile, add in some Imperial technology to make it moreso, and we could probably ship off plenty of food.
It would take a daemonic or tyrranic infestation of major proportions for the Imperium to turn away such a viable planet.
We would take some serious converting, i dont think the imperials would enjoy greenpeace or muslims or any other religion for that matter
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Unless they realise that they have traveled 38,000 years into the past and exterminating pre-historic terra would create an time paradox.
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Unless they realise that they have traveled 38,000 years into the past and exterminating pre-historic terra would create an time paradox*.
In theory*
We have no clue if time paradoxes can even happen
Besides. They would probably go all covenant(halo reference) on our asses, ignore all the signs, and destroy us for our heresy, claiming to be terra and all.
FuryTheBerserker wrote:LOL! Do you really think that the Imperium will bother sending Space Marines for you?! They will exterminatus the planet for heresy!
Why woudl they do that when they can bring a fertile agg-world in to the fold instead? I mean our planet is pretty damned fertile, add in some Imperial technology to make it moreso, and we could probably ship off plenty of food.
It would take a daemonic or tyrranic infestation of major proportions for the Imperium to turn away such a viable planet.
We would take some serious converting, i dont think the imperials would enjoy greenpeace or muslims or any other religion for that matter
They'd work to convert religions in to variations on the Imperial Cult over a few generations before coming in.
I'd say anything to the right places would kill a plain ol SM, but what about being chapter specific? BA feel no pain so it'd be kill em out right or your fethed.
IHateNids wrote:I'd say anything to the right places would kill a plain ol SM, but what about being chapter specific? BA feel no pain so it'd be kill em out right or your fethed.
Also Mr T could wipe the floor with a SM.
I pity the fool, whos being chapter specific!
In all seriousness though, I agree with your first comment completly.
Almost anything could kill a Space Marine with a lucky enough shot. After all, a Space Marine is just an improved person. It's harder to kill 'em, but they ain't invulnerable.
Also, just a thought. Someone was listing all the stuff the Astartes have and our stuff to equal it, then someone else said "bipedal tanks" and I thought 'Titans'.
The question is not what weapons can kill a space marine but would the user be able to operate it before being killed or wounded too badly to operate the weapon. With a .75 automatic AP explosive shell assault rifle as standard equipment and reactions 10 or 20 times that of normal combat personel I don't think we would stand much of a chance. I could quite believe A single company taking much of the middle east at least. From there they could quite feasably destroy the war effort of the western world via the destruction of oil refineries. If they had aircraft (like stormravens or thunderhawks) they could feasibly hit all major oil refineries in the western world destroying our ability to fight. If they used a strike cruiser or cobra destroyer then there would be no ground engagements what so ever. We could statisticly kill one but in the field it would be very unlikely especially since the 'hundred to one' figure is based on an army with greater arms, better armour and probably better training.
Drop a satellite on him. Or a railgun like in the transformers 2 movie. They really exist it just will kill/put a hole in everything between it and the SM and Most likely destroy itself with the recoil. Operate remotely and be Safe from a distance.
Or remote pilot a stealth jet armed with explosives into him, send a few so he can't shoot Them all down.. OR wait till his bolter runs out of ammo gunning down the fodder.
DeathRex wrote:Drop a satellite on him. Or a railgun like in the transformers 2 movie. They really exist it just will kill/put a hole in everything between it and the SM and Most likely destroy itself with the recoil. Operate remotely and be Safe from a distance.
Or remote pilot a stealth jet armed with explosives into him, send a few so he can't shoot Them all down.. OR wait till his bolter runs out of ammo gunning down the fodder.
IHateNids wrote:Also, just a thought. Someone was listing all the stuff the Astartes have and our stuff to equal it, then someone else said "bipedal tanks" and I thought 'Titans'.
Yeah, we're pretty much f*cked.
Space Marines don't have access to Titans. Only the armies of the Mechanicum have Titans.
A Space Marine is, in the final analysis, a person. He isn't TOTALLY immune to anything, and there are always vulnerabilities. So, if the question is "What is theoretically capable of killing a Space Marine given ideal circumstances", the answer is practically anything. Rocks, sharp sticks, small fuzzy animals, loose change; anything that can conceivably kill a person can also conceivably kill a Space Marine, although it will be harder.
The question that's fueled most of the discussion in this thread, by contrast, is "What modern weapon has a reasonable probability of killing a Space Marine in a combat situation". The answer to that is, well, not much small enough for a person to carry. All that genetic manipulation, all those extra organs, the increased muscle mass, hypno-therapy, and super-powered weapons and armor combined make a Space Marine a much, much tougher nut to crack than a normal soldier. Yes, you MIGHT kill or cripple him with a battle rifle; but I would say that you'd be a fool to count on it.
If a modern army wanted to fight Space Marines, in my opinion, they would have to deploy armor against them in massive numbers, Yes, I AM saying that it would take modern MBTs to fight Space Marines in a military engagement, and even they wouldn't be highly effective due to the smaller size and greater maneuverability of the Space Marines. Sending infantry against Space Marines would result in a massacre; a few Space Marine casualties, probably not even dead but rather temporarily incapacitated, and hundreds or thousands of infantry casualties in a very short period of time.
IHateNids wrote:Well yeah, but some one earlier was on about what an imperium army has and our stuff to equal/beat it.
I pointed out something that we can't equal.
Space ships alone mean we are fethed. Void shields on those things can take direct hits from nukes.
If the rules for using a nuke against one from RT are correct, no, not really, and if you can get one onto the ship itself, it's autodies. Oh, and 40k nukes are actually weaker on average than modern nukes. Most of what is in the modern US arsenal would be considered 'best quality' or 'mastercrafted'.
If the rules for using a nuke against one from RT are correct, no, not really, and if you can get one onto the ship itself, it's autodies. Oh, and 40k nukes are actually weaker on average than modern nukes. Most of what is in the modern US arsenal would be considered 'best quality' or 'mastercrafted'.
First point; I would be highly skeptical about the continued validity of anything from RT.
Second part; source? What makes you think that modern equipment is higher-quality than Imperial equipment? I don't know of anything that talks about that subject, but my assumption would honestly be the reverse. . .
BeRzErKeR wrote:
First point; I would be highly skeptical about the continued validity of anything from RT.
Second part; source? What makes you think that modern equipment is higher-quality than Imperial equipment? I don't know of anything that talks about that subject, but my assumption would honestly be the reverse. . .
Since this particular RT book was printed just last year, I would hope it's still valid.
A standard imperial nuke has a total devastation area of just five to ten km. That's only a 340kt bomb, or slightly less then the Soviet Union's first H bomb, Joe-4. Compare this to the US Mk28 mod 5 (the bomb used in Doctor Strangelove), a 1.4mt bomb produced throughout the 60's. The last was retired in 1991.
Against a starship's shields, that same 340kt bomb counts as 1d5+4 macrobattery hits, (1d10+6 damage per hit) or slightly better then the firepower of single Lunar class cruiser.
TheAngrySquig wrote:Nova Cannon, space marines can use them and they can destroy anything they damn well please
Nova cannons are weaker then nukes. 1d5 hits for a nova canon, 1d5+4 for a 340kt nuke. WIthin a planets atmosphere they both have about the same aoe as well.
TheAngrySquig wrote:I think we should go by fluff, not RT stats, and I don't think a space marine can just throw a nuke, whereas one can use a NC by himself
Please explain how one space marine is fireing this by himself???
And, again, if you want to talk fluff.SM do not have access to nova cannons by law according to fluff, so how would they use one?
TheAngrySquig wrote:Nova Cannon, space marines can use them and they can destroy anything they damn well please
One Space Marine.
One SM can carry around, load, and fire a gun so large it dwarfs most buildings.
A nova cannon is not as portable as you seem to think it is.
BeRzErKeR wrote:
First point; I would be highly skeptical about the continued validity of anything from RT.
Second part; source? What makes you think that modern equipment is higher-quality than Imperial equipment? I don't know of anything that talks about that subject, but my assumption would honestly be the reverse. . .
Since this particular RT book was printed just last year, I would hope it's still valid.
A standard imperial nuke has a total devastation area of just five to ten km. That's only a 340kt bomb, or slightly less then the Soviet Union's first H bomb, Joe-4. Compare this to the US Mk28 mod 5 (the bomb used in Doctor Strangelove), a 1.4mt bomb produced throughout the 60's. The last was retired in 1991.
Against a starship's shields, that same 340kt bomb counts as 1d5+4 macrobattery hits, (1d10+6 damage per hit) or slightly better then the firepower of single Lunar class cruiser.
Its not that the books might be old, its that the RT books are FFG, not GW. And they have had a very liberal interpretation of the fluff in some cases...
Master of the Forge Jurisian of the Black Templars chapter Fired a Nova Cannon from the Ordinatus vehicle Oberon in Helsreach, thusly killing the ork gargant "Godbreaker"
I'm also strugling to concieve how a nova cannon is weaker than a nuclear device. In [Cadian Blood[/i], "a sizeable chunk of the Terminus Est's Prow simply ceased to exist
Randomonioum wrote:
Its not that the books might be old, its that the RT books are FFG, not GW. And they have had a very liberal interpretation of the fluff in some cases...
GW says whatever FFG prints is canon, and GW rides FFG's fluff writers like they suspect the writers are trying to steal the setting. You would not believe the inane crap they throw fits over. (unfortunately, spelling, punctuation and grammar are not among them, as HBMC would probably be happy to mention if you ask him. That's his job.)
Sadly, I would say that FFG is higher than BL on the sliding scale of fluff.
Master of the Forge Jurisian of the Black Templars chapter Fired a Nova Cannon from the Ordinatus vehicle Oberon in Helsreach, thusly killing the ork gargant "Godbreaker"
Pretty much proving that the average SM wouldnt have one just lying around.
Also, that this particular shot was taken under exceptional circumstances, as the Ordinatus machines are used solely by the AdMech.
Master of the Forge Jurisian of the Black Templars chapter Fired a Nova Cannon from the Ordinatus vehicle Oberon in Helsreach, thusly killing the ork gargant "Godbreaker"
I'm also strugling to concieve how a nova cannon is weaker than a nuclear device. In [Cadian Blood[/i], "a sizeable chunk of the Terminus Est's Prow simply ceased to exist
And...? Not having gotten Helreach yet, I can only postulate, but a volcano cannon, with a damage output far less then a nuke, can do the same thing. (BTW: that thing I posted a picture of *is* that Ordinatus, from Epic.)
What the master of the forge was doing with it, I have no idea. They're exclusively the property of the AdMech, who consider them even more precious than Titans.
As far as Terminus Est goes:
Might notice that the prow is pretty small, with the two forks of it being thin. You could sever a fork, and do relatively little damage, but still blow off a sizeable chunk of the prow.
It could also have been a Jovian Pattern Nova cannon, which is a much different beast from a standard Nova cannon. A Jovian Pattern nova cannon is a vortex weapon, and would have produced an effect similar ot what you seem to describe.
Preds: current MBts would have a hard time with them, however, they'd die fast to infantry in close terrain and close air support.
Dreads: slow and slab sided, mbts would make quick work of them, but in theory even a stryker or a ATX-13/90 could kill one.
I'd say a modern MBT could wreck a Predator. Considering it doesn't have much more armor than a dreadnought, especially on the sides and rear. Only the front is sloped, the sides are nice and big, with glaring weak points around the sponsons. The area below the front manlet is a nice big shot trap as well. The predator is a 40k Pz V Panther, thick, sloped frontal armor, very weak sides, pop one track and hit em in the sides.
EmilCrane wrote:
I'd say a modern MBT could wreck a Predator. Considering it doesn't have much more armor than a dreadnought, especially on the sides and rear. Only the front is sloped, the sides are nice and big, with glaring weak points around the sponsons. The area below the front manlet is a nice big shot trap as well. The predator is a 40k Pz V Panther, thick, sloped frontal armor, very weak sides, pop one track and hit em in the sides.
No, the Pred doesn't have the same armor degradation issues as a modern MBT fitted with chobham. Further, lascannons would do a number on modern armor due to how modern composite armor works. If you look at the cutaway diagram from FW, the pred has fewer places that you could wreck it with well placed shot, your best odds are to track it and let the foot sloggers kill it.
And I would hope that a SM tank would have brains enough to use cover and not show you his sponson sides. That's just asking for trouble.
To rebut, yes, it's like a panther, but if you have ever tried to get a experience Pz V driver to show you his flanks, it's not as easy as it sounds.
Edit: the shot trap is good but it's also a double thick spot on the armor, and there's nothing behind it that would take out the tank. Same issue with the sponsons, if I read the diagram right. You'd wreck the sponson, but even if you penned, there's nothing mechanical right there to knock the tank out. Crew are farther forward and shielded from spalling from that spot. Where you'd need to aim is the aft portion of the turret, where the lascannons power feeds are, or hit the batteries, but you'd have to get an ass shot on the pred.
Oops sorry misquoted, it just says a sizeable chunk of the diseased ship simply ceased to exist. And I would thouroughly recommend Helsreach
Also I imagine that Predator MBT's would be able to operate for significantly longer than a modern equivalent, I think its something like 3-12 hours for an Abrams and 24-36 for a Challenger 2, Leopard 2 and such like
The Crusader wrote:Oops sorry misquoted, it just says a sizeable chunk of the diseased ship simply ceased to exist. And I would thouroughly recommend Helsreach
Also I imagine that Predator MBT's would be able to operate for significantly longer than a modern equivalent, I think its something like 3-12 hours for an Abrams and 24-36 for a Challenger 2, Leopard 2 and such like
Still, easily explained by a hit from the vortex weapon variant, since that's hwo a vortex weapon does damage, it makes part of the ship go away without saves. Granted, I'm using 'crunch' for this, however, Terminus Est would have been destroyed entirely without a saveing throw, so to speak, by an atomic weapon (if used in boarding attack rather then a projectile) Fortunately, that whole 'Mark of Nurgle' thing prevents that.
The Imperium still classifies atomics as a exterminatus weapon. Nova cannons and lances are considered heavy support.
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IHateNids wrote:
Also, what would a Lascannon do to modern MBT armour?
Quite a bit. Remember that Chobham only works well against projectiles and explosions. While the ceramics and metal don't burn, the elastic backing can, depending on the date of manufacture.
But what does a Lascannon fire, because I doubt an army who's main firearm is a .75 Automatic magasine-wed RPG can have a weapon that fires pure energy
IHateNids wrote:But what does a Lascannon fire, because I doubt an army who's main firearm is a .75 Automatic magasine-wed RPG can have a weapon that fires pure energy
Guess your wrong then. It's a pure energy based weapon, just like lasguns.
Ok, but what kind of damage would it do, because if it is not a projectile it can't be kinetic penetration. It cant be an Armour Piercing explosive because it is a laser, so it must be like a jet of pure heat which will melt right through, am I not wrong?
IHateNids wrote:Ok, but what kind of damage would it do, because if it is not a projectile it can't be kinetic penetration. It cant be an Armour Piercing explosive because it is a laser, so it must be like a jet of pure heat which will melt right through, am I not wrong?
Ever see what a laser cutter does to sheet metal? Lascannon does that to the side of your tank.
IHateNids wrote:Ok, but what kind of damage would it do, because if it is not a projectile it can't be kinetic penetration. It cant be an Armour Piercing explosive because it is a laser, so it must be like a jet of pure heat which will melt right through, am I not wrong?
Well, yes and no, laser weapons in the 40k universe are a bit odd. Cause for some reason Las guns do knock people over just by being hit. So, TBH, I don't think real world physics entirely aply to las weapons.
This is how it's described in 3ed big book:
The lasgun uses the same basic technology and operates along the same lines as other las weapons, emitting a beam of focused light. The high amount of energy in the beam causes the immediate surface area of a target to be vaporized in a small explosion.
Well in theory in suppose a lascannon wouldnt really have a maximum range in the atmosphere other than what you can draw a bead on.
I doubt the atmosphere would reduce the power much of a beam that can blast through several inches of exoctic future tech armor so the beam would just keep going till it hits something or flies off into the upper atmosphere.
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
LOL Actually the problem is the lack of consistent information on 40k in general. You would not believe how space ships expand and contract.
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
There is very consistent information on 40k technology (gameplay mechanics). But, people tend to get upset by it, because it's very clear that the weapons used in 40k are really poor, and they don't like to face the fact that a modern military could absolutely crush anything 40k has to offer (apart from space combat).
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
There is very consistent information on 40k technology (gameplay mechanics). But, people tend to get upset by it, because it's very clear that the weapons used in 40k are really poor, and they don't like to face the fact that a modern military could absolutely crush anything 40k has to offer (apart from space combat).
That's. . . not actually why people don't like to use gameplay mechanics. People don't use gameplay mechanics because they are radically inconsistent with the fluff. A game has to be balanced for gameplay. That does mean that, often, the conclusions one would draw from the way the game plays flatly contradict what is stated as fact in the background material.
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
There is very consistent information on 40k technology (gameplay mechanics). But, people tend to get upset by it, because it's very clear that the weapons used in 40k are really poor, and they don't like to face the fact that a modern military could absolutely crush anything 40k has to offer (apart from space combat).
That's. . . not actually why people don't like to use gameplay mechanics. People don't use gameplay mechanics because they are radically inconsistent with the fluff. A game has to be balanced for gameplay. That does mean that, often, the conclusions one would draw from the way the game plays flatly contradict what is stated as fact in the background material.
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Grakmar wrote:
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Except for all the fluff presented in third-person omniscient format. If it's stated as a fact, it's a fact.
Now, all the fluff presented from someone's point of view, yes, that might be propaganda, or mis-interpreted, or simply wrong. But there is factual information, as well; and that factual information commonly contradicts what you see on the tabletop. Like I said; the tabletop game has to be balanced, so as to make for a fun game to play. The background fluff is not balanced in the same way.
I don't have access to those IA diagrams, so thanks for the info, I think in general our problem is the lack of consistent information available on the specs of 40k equipment
There is very consistent information on 40k technology (gameplay mechanics). But, people tend to get upset by it, because it's very clear that the weapons used in 40k are really poor, and they don't like to face the fact that a modern military could absolutely crush anything 40k has to offer (apart from space combat).
That's. . . not actually why people don't like to use gameplay mechanics. People don't use gameplay mechanics because they are radically inconsistent with the fluff. A game has to be balanced for gameplay. That does mean that, often, the conclusions one would draw from the way the game plays flatly contradict what is stated as fact in the background material.
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Nope, rules just doesn't equal facts. Or are you going to tell me an assault cannons rate of fire is only twice as fast as regular automatic weapons?
Grakmar wrote:
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Nope, rules just doesn't equal facts. Or are you going to tell me an assault cannons rate of fire is only twice as fast as regular automatic weapons?
That is exactly what I'm telling you. The weapons used in 40k are really slow rate of fire, weak, and incredibly limited range.
Grakmar wrote:
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Nope, rules just doesn't equal facts. Or are you going to tell me an assault cannons rate of fire is only twice as fast as regular automatic weapons?
That is exactly what I'm telling you. The weapons used in 40k are really slow rate of fire, weak, and incredibly limited range.
Grakmar wrote:
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Nope, rules just doesn't equal facts. Or are you going to tell me an assault cannons rate of fire is only twice as fast as regular automatic weapons?
That is exactly what I'm telling you. The weapons used in 40k are really slow rate of fire, weak, and incredibly limited range.
Yeah, keep on trollin mate.
It's not trolling. I'm simply saying that in the 40k universe, technology is really poor compared to our own in some ways. Weaponry is one of those ways.
BeRzErKeR wrote:
Except for all the fluff presented in third-person omniscient format. If it's stated as a fact, it's a fact.
Now, all the fluff presented from someone's point of view, yes, that might be propaganda, or mis-interpreted, or simply wrong. But there is factual information, as well; and that factual information commonly contradicts what you see on the tabletop. Like I said; the tabletop game has to be balanced, so as to make for a fun game to play. The background fluff is not balanced in the same way.
Actually, there's none of that either. The supposedly omniscient narrator has been known to contradict itself in the same paragraph, and is considered an Unreliable Narrator (and is stated to be such by GW) so, sorry, no, it's not 'factual' either.
Grakmar wrote:
Right, but the fluff is all considered to be in-universe propaganda. So, gameplay mechanics are the only consistent and reliable information we have.
Nope, rules just doesn't equal facts. Or are you going to tell me an assault cannons rate of fire is only twice as fast as regular automatic weapons?
That is exactly what I'm telling you. The weapons used in 40k are really slow rate of fire, weak, and incredibly limited range.
Yeah, keep on trollin mate.
It's not trolling. I'm simply saying that in the 40k universe, technology is really poor compared to our own in some ways. Weaponry is one of those ways.
So, every time a vehicle runs over a piece of rubble, there is a 1 in 6 chance of it stopping dead in its tracks? Or if I am hiding behind some razor wire, there is a one in six chance of it outright stopping a missile flying at me? Or a vehicle moving at a certain speed straight up can't fire anything? Or the greatest swordsman in the galaxy having a 1/3rd chance in every swing of missing outright against a man who was drafted into the military a day before? The rules are abstractions of what could be happening, not concrete examples of what is going on. So, the rules are, AFAIC, even less valid than the worst fluff.
Which doesn't actually hurt that much if you hold it in the palm of your hand and don't enclose your fist around it.
This is why boltguns penetrate flak armor. If they did not penetrate flak armor, they'd not hurt guardsmen (flak armor being specifically designed to absorb blasts, shockwaves, and shrapnel, as well as being ablative).
Relatively, your skin is pretty tough, especially wrapped in flak armor. You lose a bit of energy breaking it. But if you can get through it before exploding, all the explosiony goodness can be used on the squishy bits
Randomonioum wrote:
So, every time a vehicle runs over a piece of rubble, there is a 1 in 6 chance of it stopping dead in its tracks? Or if I am hiding behind some razor wire, there is a one in six chance of it outright stopping a missile flying at me? Or a vehicle moving at a certain speed straight up can't fire anything? Or the greatest swordsman in the galaxy having a 1/3rd chance in every swing of missing outright against a man who was drafted into the military a day before? The rules are abstractions of what could be happening, not concrete examples of what is going on. So, the rules are, AFAIC, even less valid than the worst fluff.
Since the rules are designed with tanks in mind, and based on the weights of those tanks relative to their tracks, proportionately.. yeah, 1 in 6 sounds about right for throwing a tred. (and you might laugh, but I've see that missile into razorwire actually happen, not sure what the odds really are though.) Also, where the feth did you get a guy drafted into the military the day before? You might want to check your IG fluff if that's what you think...
IHateNids wrote:
And weak weapons? So a .75 automatic RPG is weak is it?
Because I can load a high X round into a 12 gauge shotgun, and get comparable damage and better range, since a 12 gauge is roughly .74 caliber
IHateNids wrote:I'd say anything to the right places would kill a plain ol SM, but what about being chapter specific? BA feel no pain so it'd be kill em out right or your fethed.
IHateNids wrote:I'd say anything to the right places would kill a plain ol SM, but what about being chapter specific? BA feel no pain so it'd be kill em out right or your fethed.
Also Mr T could wipe the floor with a SM.
Poor Draigo
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BaronIveagh wrote:
IHateNids wrote:
And weak weapons? So a .75 automatic RPG is weak is it?
Because I can load a high X round into a 12 gauge shotgun, and get comparable damage and better range, since a 12 gauge is roughly .74 caliber
I didn't know a 12gauge was that big. Thanks for correcting me thinking it was like a .58
BaronIveagh wrote:Since the rules are designed with tanks in mind, and based on the weights of those tanks relative to their tracks, proportionately.. yeah, 1 in 6 sounds about right for throwing a tred. (and you might laugh, but I've see that missile into razorwire actually happen, not sure what the odds really are though.) Also, where the feth did you get a guy drafted into the military the day before? You might want to check your IG fluff if that's what you think...
Fair enough on the tank tracks point, I don't know too much about tanks or the like, I assumed they would be of sturdier stuff, especially if you look at how wide the tracks are. Im sure that it probably does happen, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that razorwire will magically stop anything you throw at it, pretty much, 1 in every 6 shots. I am also well aware that the imperial guard are well trained, not just picked off the streets and handed a gun, although I can see how you might have reached that conclusion from what I wrote. I was meaning a conscript, who going by the rules, may as well have just been picked up anywhere. Ok, better example. Replace the guardsman with a grot. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the stats are incredibly coarse. They may be constant, but they sure don't make sense if you were to apply them literally. They were designed to abstract what would be going on in a fight, not be a literal interpretation, as I said in my last post. Sure, you can conclude from the rules that everything in the universe is underpowered, can only fire incredibly slowly, and everyone is just really weak, and that is your opinion. But I personally think it is utterly ridiculous.
Randomonioum wrote:
Fair enough on the tank tracks point, I don't know too much about tanks or the like, I assumed they would be of sturdier stuff, especially if you look at how wide the tracks are. Im sure that it probably does happen, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that razorwire will magically stop anything you throw at it, pretty much, 1 in every 6 shots. I am also well aware that the imperial guard are well trained, not just picked off the streets and handed a gun, although I can see how you might have reached that conclusion from what I wrote. I was meaning a conscript, who going by the rules, may as well have just been picked up anywhere. Ok, better example. Replace the guardsman with a grot. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the stats are incredibly coarse. They may be constant, but they sure don't make sense if you were to apply them literally. They were designed to abstract what would be going on in a fight, not be a literal interpretation, as I said in my last post. Sure, you can conclude from the rules that everything in the universe is underpowered, can only fire incredibly slowly, and everyone is just really weak, and that is your opinion. But I personally think it is utterly ridiculous.
I always considered the lower cover saves to be just it was harder to hit because the target is obscured (since smoke also gives a cover save) and higher cover as it stopping the round. But that aside. The problem is that as many have pointed out the rules are the only thing that is consistent. After all, some fluff has space wolves leaping thousands of km in a single bound (Take THAT Superman!) while other occasions they die from a simple fall. Captain Ventris briefly holds up a building made from Leman Russ tanks (meaning he's able to lift over 120 tonnes!!!!) without his power armor. Let's not even start on Draigo or the whole Grey Knights bathing in blood thing.
As far as the omniscient narrator, I can point to books printed within a month of each other that directly contradict, because the narrator will ALWAYS make the current codex army out to be the baddest asses in the universe.
Randomonioum wrote:
Fair enough on the tank tracks point, I don't know too much about tanks or the like, I assumed they would be of sturdier stuff, especially if you look at how wide the tracks are. Im sure that it probably does happen, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that razorwire will magically stop anything you throw at it, pretty much, 1 in every 6 shots. I am also well aware that the imperial guard are well trained, not just picked off the streets and handed a gun, although I can see how you might have reached that conclusion from what I wrote. I was meaning a conscript, who going by the rules, may as well have just been picked up anywhere. Ok, better example. Replace the guardsman with a grot. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that the stats are incredibly coarse. They may be constant, but they sure don't make sense if you were to apply them literally. They were designed to abstract what would be going on in a fight, not be a literal interpretation, as I said in my last post. Sure, you can conclude from the rules that everything in the universe is underpowered, can only fire incredibly slowly, and everyone is just really weak, and that is your opinion. But I personally think it is utterly ridiculous.
I always considered the lower cover saves to be just it was harder to hit because the target is obscured (since smoke also gives a cover save) and higher cover as it stopping the round. But that aside. The problem is that as many have pointed out the rules are the only thing that is consistent. After all, some fluff has space wolves leaping thousands of km in a single bound (Take THAT Superman!) while other occasions they die from a simple fall. Captain Ventris briefly holds up a building made from Leman Russ tanks (meaning he's able to lift over 120 tonnes!!!!) without his power armor. Let's not even start on Draigo or the whole Grey Knights bathing in blood thing.
As far as the omniscient narrator, I can point to books printed within a month of each other that directly contradict, because the narrator will ALWAYS make the current codex army out to be the baddest asses in the universe.
Im not debating that the rules are consistent, and that the fluff isn't. What I am saying is that if you WERE to take the rules to be the gospel of what the universe is like, then it ends up being a pretty bizarre universe. Go ahead, continue to believe it if you want, it sounds like you enjoy it. But I don't treat the rules in any way as fluff, because I personally think it is silly. I don't think either of us are going to convince the other, but hey, we can continue to bat the arguments back and forth if you like.
As an aside, it says at the start of the 5th ed rule book that the most important rule is that the rules aren't important, fun is Not strictly on topic, but I feel its worth mentioning if we are going to take the rules as truth.
There are lots of different 'gauges' of shotgun, so they can be of different size.
Again, its going to matter more where you hit the marine than the weapon neccesarily. You have to overcome their natural toughness and redundancy and ability to heal/coagulate. That's why headshots tend to be so favored.
Randomonioum wrote:
Im not debating that the rules are consistent, and that the fluff isn't. What I am saying is that if you WERE to take the rules to be the gospel of what the universe is like, then it ends up being a pretty bizarre universe.
I think if you accept anything they write about 40k outside some of FFG's stuff (that makes a little sense), it's a pretty bizarre universe.
I mean, stop and think about it:
Space is flat and starships don't have guns that face up or down or backwards?
All learning everywhere is somehow prevented?
Hiveworlds in a setting where space travel is less than reliable?
That's not even getting into some of the more esoteric stuff, like the fact that close air support has been up till now a near unknown, even in fluff, (though with fliers in 6th I'm betting that changes) or why titans are able to walk at all, not due to their composition, but because unprepared ground won't support that much weight.
Randomonioum wrote:
Im not debating that the rules are consistent, and that the fluff isn't. What I am saying is that if you WERE to take the rules to be the gospel of what the universe is like, then it ends up being a pretty bizarre universe.
I think if you accept anything they write about 40k outside some of FFG's stuff (that makes a little sense), it's a pretty bizarre universe.
I mean, stop and think about it:
Space is flat and starships don't have guns that face up or down or backwards?
All learning everywhere is somehow prevented?
Hiveworlds in a setting where space travel is less than reliable?
That's not even getting into some of the more esoteric stuff, like the fact that close air support has been up till now a near unknown, even in fluff, (though with fliers in 6th I'm betting that changes) or why titans are able to walk at all, not due to their composition, but because unprepared ground won't support that much weight.
Perhaps. But I'm willing to accept these things, because they make for a good story, although I have varying opinions on some of those points, I'm not going to bring that up here because its not relevant. The idea that the rules are the constants of the universe doesn't sit well with me, I don't much like it. And being as there has been no official comment that, yes, the rules are the universe's truth, all this is just opinion. And my opinion is that 40k would be more badass with awesome guns. As interesting as your hypothesis is, thats all it is - a hypothesis. Theres no hard evidence backing your side up, just as there is no evidence disproving it. Until there is, this is all meaningless :')
Killing a marine is all fair and well... but this is just a single marine... But a single terminator? They can survive the foot falls of titans... We can't compare to that...
Von Chogg wrote:Killing a marine is all fair and well... but this is just a single marine... But a single terminator? They can survive the foot falls of titans... We can't compare to that...
I wouldn't get too happy there: that was due to plot armor more then Terminator armor. In stories that are less about how uber SM are, they get peeled open by genestealers on a regular basis. I think something that can be torn apart by chitin and brute strength can probably be penned by a anti-material rifle.
I wouldn't get too happy there: that was due to plot armor more then Terminator armor. In stories that are less about how uber SM are, they get peeled open by genestealers on a regular basis. I think something that can be torn apart by chitin and brute strength can probably be penned by a anti-material rifle.
Not necessarily.
Point one; Genestealers have just as much handwavey sci-fi magic as Terminators do. They, and tyranids in general, routinely do things that should be flatly impossible for biological organisms as we understand them.
Point two; A Genestealer can dig its claws into a ridge or the lip of a plate, and if it's strong enough, tear the plate off. A bullet cannot; it has to break through the plate.
Point 3; A Genestealer strikes multiple times. Terminators are not simply wtfpwnt by a single claw strike; rather, the inhumanly-fast Genestealers swarm over them, peel them open, and kill them. A bullet, by contrast, expends its energy in a single impulse and then is done. You could certainly argue that an anti-material round would do DAMAGE to Terminator armor, or even that it could slam right through if it struck a weak point, but really, Terminator armor is ludicrously tough.
I mean, take the weakest numbers for 40k armor; you know, the ones that indicate that a Land Raider is less well-armored than a modern IFV. The indication there (which, I should point out, most people seem to dismiss as ludicrously weak compared to the fluff) is that 1mm of Land Raider armor is worth 3mm of RHA, the standard for measuring modern tank armor in terms of thicknesses of steel. Terminator armor is made of ceramite, plasteel and adamantine, the same stuff Land Raiders are.
So. . . just from looking at pictures of Terminators, I would guesstimate that it's at least six or seven inches thick. That would be 150-175mm, which would (once again, according to the weakest comparison) provide protection equal to 450-525mm of RHA.
This is a good place to note that the side armor of the T-44 MBT, which was actively in service through the end of the 1970s, was 75mm thick and composed of RHA steel. That armor was completely invulnerable to the anti-tank rifles of the time. According to this highly conservative, back-of-the-envelope calculation, Terminator armor is approximately six or seven times as resilient. That would indicate that the VERY WEAKEST parts of the armor literally cannot be penetrated by anything short of an anti-tank rocket. It also, incidentally, would seem to indicate that just regular old power armor is immune to small-arms; even if you asserted that PA is only, say, one-fifth as protective as Terminator armor, it would still be the equivalent of about 90mm of RHA. Good luck finding a modern infantry rifle that can punch through five inches of steel. And once again, remember that these are the WORST numbers, the ones that make 40k tanks out to be far, far more poorly armored than modern vehicles.
I'm not seeing how this supports the assertion that modern infantry could fight Space Marines.
I wouldn't get too happy there: that was due to plot armor more then Terminator armor. In stories that are less about how uber SM are, they get peeled open by genestealers on a regular basis. I think something that can be torn apart by chitin and brute strength can probably be penned by a anti-material rifle.
Not necessarily.
Point one; Genestealers have just as much handwavey sci-fi magic as Terminators do. They, and tyranids in general, routinely do things that should be flatly impossible for biological organisms as we understand them.
Point two; A Genestealer can dig its claws into a ridge or the lip of a plate, and if it's strong enough, tear the plate off. A bullet cannot; it has to break through the plate.
Point 3; A Genestealer strikes multiple times. Terminators are not simply wtfpwnt by a single claw strike; rather, the inhumanly-fast Genestealers swarm over them, peel them open, and kill them. A bullet, by contrast, expends its energy in a single impulse and then is done. You could certainly argue that an anti-material round would do DAMAGE to Terminator armor, or even that it could slam right through if it struck a weak point, but really, Terminator armor is ludicrously tough.
I mean, take the weakest numbers for 40k armor; you know, the ones that indicate that a Land Raider is less well-armored than a modern IFV. The indication there (which, I should point out, most people seem to dismiss as ludicrously weak compared to the fluff) is that 1mm of Land Raider armor is worth 3mm of RHA, the standard for measuring modern tank armor in terms of thicknesses of steel. Terminator armor is made of ceramite, plasteel and adamantine, the same stuff Land Raiders are.
So. . . just from looking at pictures of Terminators, I would guesstimate that it's at least six or seven inches thick. That would be 150-175mm, which would (once again, according to the weakest comparison) provide protection equal to 450-525mm of RHA.
This is a good place to note that the side armor of the T-44 MBT, which was actively in service through the end of the 1970s, was 75mm thick and composed of RHA steel. That armor was completely invulnerable to the anti-tank rifles of the time. According to this highly conservative, back-of-the-envelope calculation, Terminator armor is approximately six or seven times as resilient. That would indicate that the VERY WEAKEST parts of the armor literally cannot be penetrated by anything short of an anti-tank rocket. It also, incidentally, would seem to indicate that just regular old power armor is immune to small-arms; even if you asserted that PA is only, say, one-fifth as protective as Terminator armor, it would still be the equivalent of about 90mm of RHA. Good luck finding a modern infantry rifle that can punch through five inches of steel. And once again, remember that these are the WORST numbers, the ones that make 40k tanks out to be far, far more poorly armored than modern vehicles.
I'm not seeing how this supports the assertion that modern infantry could fight Space Marines.
One, the RussianT-44 was classified as a medium tank, not an MBT. And it's unknown if it was invulnerable to anti-tank rifles of the time, as it never saw combat, and was never tested against anti-tank rifles, because it was quickly replaced by the T-54/55 (which is still used in some placed today.)
Two: In The Emperor's Finest a genestealer neatly bites through the helmet of a terminator in one nice neat crunch. Indeed, he was wtfpwned.
Three: This theory would hold together except I own a few terminators and compared them to the Mk7 armor. While there is superior protection to the chest, shoulders, and shins, the thighs are just as thin as on a regular SM Mk 7. The tac dread also has the same lack of armor in many of the joints. Also, since the mk 7 is not appreciably thicker then the mk 6...
You may notice that SM armor is not solid, but rather a thin layer of armor over a more complex layer that includes microservos and life support functions. (This is also mentioned in The Killing Ground about how complex the inner workings of a SM armor are, and how thin the armor itself really is)
Even if we take your 3 to 1 numbers into account, your SM in mk 6 and 7 is protected by...about the same as modern body armor with trauma plates installed, it just covers the whole body.
BTW: IRL Landraiders would be deathtraps for the people inside, not due to their armor being strong or weak, but because they have no spall liners to protect the troops awaiting deployment.
Connor MacLeod wrote:*sigh* shot placement matters. You can kill a Space Marine with a pointy wooden stick (well okay a spear) if you aim for the right area and you hit him just right or hard enough. It even happened in First HEretic. But that doesn't mean it would always happen. Same with gunfire of any kind.
Except that marine bodies alone would be capable of blocking most/all damage from a wooden spear, and even their joints are armoured.
The average dakkadakka forum user could kill a space marine if enough of us were armed.
Average dakkadite=IG conscript stats
Those with police/military background=guardsmen stats
All modern small arms=stubbers=same stats as a flashlight.
The advantage of flashlights over stubbers is purely logistical, which is huge at the strategic level, but not the tactical.
50 cal=heavy stubber
RPG=krak grenade
Hellfire missile=krak missile
10 kilograms of C4 strapped to your chest=ig demo charge.
An entire chapter of space marines would have a hard time destroying the armed forces of North Korea.
schadenfreude wrote:
An entire chapter of space marines would have a hard time destroying the armed forces of North Korea.
In a head on fight, certainly. That is kind of the point. They really aren't supposed to act as a front line, conventional warfare army. Obviously in a head on head confrontation they would fare poorly against any conventional military. While they are virtually immune to small arms fire (not totally obviously), against many of the heavy weaponry a conventional military can bring to bear they have little defense. Most special forces teams suffer similar weaknesses. That doesn't make the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, or British SAS any less useful, it just means they have to be carefully applied to the correct situation.
Which is why they are a rapid strike, special forces group. Heavy weapons take a certain amount of coordination to use, and SMs meant to utilize rapid insertion and deep striking to make that impossible. When drop pods land in your base, or in the midst of your lines you can't use artillery, tanks, air support, or even most forms of anti-tank weaponry.
When they strike where and how they are meant to they will rarely have to deal with more than small arms fire. And not concentrated small arms fire, which might pose a threat, but disorganized, panicked small arms fire.
So while they would certainly lose in a head on confrontation with North Korea, that is the type of fight they wouldn't engage in. They would strike at infrastructure and leadership positions. True conquest would be performed by the IG.
So to answer the original question, for the hundredth time, What modern weapons could kill a SM? Most anti tank weaponry will have little problem. Small arms have a small chance of kill them, but not reliable. But most modern, centeralized militaries would have a difficult time dealing with their rapid insertion tactics.
I wouldn't get too happy there: that was due to plot armor more then Terminator armor. In stories that are less about how uber SM are, they get peeled open by genestealers on a regular basis. I think something that can be torn apart by chitin and brute strength can probably be penned by a anti-material rifle.
Not necessarily.
Point one; Genestealers have just as much handwavey sci-fi magic as Terminators do. They, and tyranids in general, routinely do things that should be flatly impossible for biological organisms as we understand them.
Point two; A Genestealer can dig its claws into a ridge or the lip of a plate, and if it's strong enough, tear the plate off. A bullet cannot; it has to break through the plate.
Point 3; A Genestealer strikes multiple times. Terminators are not simply wtfpwnt by a single claw strike; rather, the inhumanly-fast Genestealers swarm over them, peel them open, and kill them. A bullet, by contrast, expends its energy in a single impulse and then is done. You could certainly argue that an anti-material round would do DAMAGE to Terminator armor, or even that it could slam right through if it struck a weak point, but really, Terminator armor is ludicrously tough.
I mean, take the weakest numbers for 40k armor; you know, the ones that indicate that a Land Raider is less well-armored than a modern IFV. The indication there (which, I should point out, most people seem to dismiss as ludicrously weak compared to the fluff) is that 1mm of Land Raider armor is worth 3mm of RHA, the standard for measuring modern tank armor in terms of thicknesses of steel. Terminator armor is made of ceramite, plasteel and adamantine, the same stuff Land Raiders are.
So. . . just from looking at pictures of Terminators, I would guesstimate that it's at least six or seven inches thick. That would be 150-175mm, which would (once again, according to the weakest comparison) provide protection equal to 450-525mm of RHA.
This is a good place to note that the side armor of the T-44 MBT, which was actively in service through the end of the 1970s, was 75mm thick and composed of RHA steel. That armor was completely invulnerable to the anti-tank rifles of the time. According to this highly conservative, back-of-the-envelope calculation, Terminator armor is approximately six or seven times as resilient. That would indicate that the VERY WEAKEST parts of the armor literally cannot be penetrated by anything short of an anti-tank rocket. It also, incidentally, would seem to indicate that just regular old power armor is immune to small-arms; even if you asserted that PA is only, say, one-fifth as protective as Terminator armor, it would still be the equivalent of about 90mm of RHA. Good luck finding a modern infantry rifle that can punch through five inches of steel. And once again, remember that these are the WORST numbers, the ones that make 40k tanks out to be far, far more poorly armored than modern vehicles.
I'm not seeing how this supports the assertion that modern infantry could fight Space Marines.
One, the RussianT-44 was classified as a medium tank, not an MBT. And it's unknown if it was invulnerable to anti-tank rifles of the time, as it never saw combat, and was never tested against anti-tank rifles, because it was quickly replaced by the T-54/55 (which is still used in some placed today.)
Two: In The Emperor's Finest a genestealer neatly bites through the helmet of a terminator in one nice neat crunch. Indeed, he was wtfpwned.
Three: This theory would hold together except I own a few terminators and compared them to the Mk7 armor. While there is superior protection to the chest, shoulders, and shins, the thighs are just as thin as on a regular SM Mk 7. The tac dread also has the same lack of armor in many of the joints. Also, since the mk 7 is not appreciably thicker then the mk 6...
You may notice that SM armor is not solid, but rather a thin layer of armor over a more complex layer that includes microservos and life support functions. (This is also mentioned in The Killing Ground about how complex the inner workings of a SM armor are, and how thin the armor itself really is)
Even if we take your 3 to 1 numbers into account, your SM in mk 6 and 7 is protected by...about the same as modern body armor with trauma plates installed, it just covers the whole body.
BTW: IRL Landraiders would be deathtraps for the people inside, not due to their armor being strong or weak, but because they have no spall liners to protect the troops awaiting deployment.
@the italisized part, irrelevant, as Main battle tank is a role classification, a main battle tank can be light, medium, heavy or even super heavy.
@ the bold part, they have acid saliva of undocumented strength, for all we know it could be ridiculously powerful, plus they have magical hand-waivium plot armour (if they never made termies die ever it would get silly)
@the rest, your image clearly shows that PA is very thick. we can see that the breast plate is at least two inches thick if not more. The ridiculous thickness, paired with the complex internal workings, and with the additional factor of the strength of these sci-fi materials...
You may notice that SM armor is not solid, but rather a thin layer of armor over a more complex layer that includes microservos and life support functions
...if it was solid, there wouldn't be room for a marine to wear it...
Automatically Appended Next Post:
riplikash wrote:
schadenfreude wrote:
An entire chapter of space marines would have a hard time destroying the armed forces of North Korea.
In a head on fight, certainly. That is kind of the point. They really aren't supposed to act as a front line, conventional warfare army. Obviously in a head on head confrontation they would fare poorly against any conventional military. While they are virtually immune to small arms fire (not totally obviously), against many of the heavy weaponry a conventional military can bring to bear they have little defense. Most special forces teams suffer similar weaknesses. That doesn't make the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, or British SAS any less useful, it just means they have to be carefully applied to the correct situation.
Which is why they are a rapid strike, special forces group. Heavy weapons take a certain amount of coordination to use, and SMs meant to utilize rapid insertion and deep striking to make that impossible. When drop pods land in your base, or in the midst of your lines you can't use artillery, tanks, air support, or even most forms of anti-tank weaponry.
When they strike where and how they are meant to they will rarely have to deal with more than small arms fire. And not concentrated small arms fire, which might pose a threat, but disorganized, panicked small arms fire.
So while they would certainly lose in a head on confrontation with North Korea, that is the type of fight they wouldn't engage in. They would strike at infrastructure and leadership positions. True conquest would be performed by the IG.
So to answer the original question, for the hundredth time, What modern weapons could kill a SM? Most anti tank weaponry will have little problem. Small arms have a small chance of kill them, but not reliable. But most modern, centeralized militaries would have a difficult time dealing with their rapid insertion tactics.
I feel like it would take ridiculous amounts of small arms fire to fell a marine because we saw in the dark hunters short that a full lasgun clip (lasguns being worse at penetrating and better at unarmoured damage than regular weapons) to the torso of an unarmoured marine failed to kill him, along with the fact that they are not just standing still, along with the fact that better penetration=less damage and vice versa, and as a final point, modern military doctrine would have no ready response to such attackers would make small arms a very small factor.
Though I agree they are not invincible.
Also, tanks would have a difficult time fighting them; usually, tanks rely on their secondary, automatic weapons for dealing with infantry. Those guns would have little effect against them, and the larger guns would have a hell of a time hitting them, plus a melta gun would wreak HAVOC against tanks (even bolters would likely be able to incapacitate most tanks <45 tons à la penetrating and detonating amongst the crew).
The amount of force North Korea would have to marshall in one place would be near total to defeat an entire chapter, though I agree that most larger nations would be a hell of a fight for a single chapter.
im2randomghgh wrote:
@the italisized part, irrelevant, as Main battle tank is a role classification, a main battle tank can be light, medium, heavy or even super heavy.
@ the bold part, they have acid saliva of undocumented strength, for all we know it could be ridiculously powerful, plus they have magical hand-waivium plot armour (if they never made termies die ever it would get silly)
@the rest, your image clearly shows that PA is very thick. we can see that the breast plate is at least two inches thick if not more. The ridiculous thickness, paired with the complex internal workings, and with the additional factor of the strength of these sci-fi materials...
@Tank classification: WRONG. You're combining the old classification system and the modern one. (Current system separates lights from MBT)
@the genestealers, yes, but acids take more then a split second to work. This thing jumps down the from the ceiling and bites right through. Even powerful acids take longer then that through regular metals.
@ The rest: Very thick and very hollow. Which seems to escape you. Oh, it's 2 inches thick! Yes, but that 2 inches is not made up of the armor, which is only a thin outer layer. Those tubes and servos are not going to provide as much protection as you seem to think...
im2randomghgh wrote:
...if it was solid, there wouldn't be room for a marine to wear it...
Technically there isn't room of them to wear it anyway.
im2randomghgh wrote:
@the italisized part, irrelevant, as Main battle tank is a role classification, a main battle tank can be light, medium, heavy or even super heavy.
@ the bold part, they have acid saliva of undocumented strength, for all we know it could be ridiculously powerful, plus they have magical hand-waivium plot armour (if they never made termies die ever it would get silly)
@the rest, your image clearly shows that PA is very thick. we can see that the breast plate is at least two inches thick if not more. The ridiculous thickness, paired with the complex internal workings, and with the additional factor of the strength of these sci-fi materials...
@Tank classification: WRONG. You're combining the old classification system and the modern one. (Current system separates lights from MBT)
@the genestealers, yes, but acids take more then a split second to work. This thing jumps down the from the ceiling and bites right through. Even powerful acids take longer then that through regular metals.
@ The rest: Very thick and very hollow. Which seems to escape you. Oh, it's 2 inches thick! Yes, but that 2 inches is not made up of the armor, which is only a thin outer layer. Those tubes and servos are not going to provide as much protection as you seem to think...
im2randomghgh wrote:
...if it was solid, there wouldn't be room for a marine to wear it...
Technically there isn't room of them to wear it anyway.
@the tank part, so now tanks that are light enough to be light tanks cannot be MBT's regardless of their role?
@the genestealer part, this is magical 40k acid, and magical 40k stuff is magical.
@the rest, not hollow. You can clearly see on the breast plate 2+ inches of armour which is what I was referring to.
ANd yes, there is room for them to wear it. If there wasn't...they wouldn't be able to wear it.
im2randomghgh wrote:@the genestealer part, this is magical 40k acid, and magical 40k stuff is magical.
Bad argument is bad. The acid spit does not work instantly on it's target and takes time to burn through even human flesh, as shown in ADB's Night Lord books.
im2randomghgh wrote:
@the tank part, so now tanks that are light enough to be light tanks cannot be MBT's regardless of their role?
@the genestealer part, this is magical 40k acid, and magical 40k stuff is magical.
@the rest, not hollow. You can clearly see on the breast plate 2+ inches of armour which is what I was referring to.
ANd yes, there is room for them to wear it. If there wasn't...they wouldn't be able to wear it.
@ irrelevant tanks business: Yes, because once you reach a certain point, it's can fulfill the all the necessity roles of an MBT.
@genestealerpart: No, because fluff even shows it's not. Your response there is composed of magical fail dust.
@ the rest. Yes, it is, if you look along the connection points with the arms on the chest piece, you'll see that the front of the chest is just as hollow as the back of the chest. Further, it has to be light, as the suit enviromental sensors are mounted in the chest. They would not work very well behind inches of super metal.
And, no, there's not. basic human anatomy would show you that. The hips and legs in particular are not arraigned in a manner matching human anatomy or even allowing bipedal walking in the human fashion, due to the excessive gap between the legs. The helmet would be impossible to put on or take off and the neck piece would prohibit them from turning their heads.
A sniper rifle with AM rounds, an assault cannon, or a tank (maybe on the tank). And running Space Marines over dosn't work. In a book, a chimera drives over a Space marine without a helmet, and he survives to rip off the hatch, kill the driver, rip out the seat and drive home.
CaptainAWESOME117 wrote:Running Space Marines over dosn't work. In a book, a chimera drives over a Space marine without a helmet, and he survives to rip off the hatch, kill the driver, rip out the seat and drive home...
To be honest almost any 20th century weapon could kill a space marine if either lucky or in the right condition. Not all of their power armour is well armour. Consider the neck and arm joints. There was a story in WD with a dark angel taking a sniper round in the neck in a lucky well aimed shot. Anti armour weaponry is almost certain to do some damage as is artillery and field gun aslong as they use high explosive and not shrapnal or gas shells.
Speaking of tanks. Wouldnt be funny if a space marine got a pair of trousers wrapped round his head because the soldier got the sticky bomb stuck to them by mistake lol
im2randomghgh wrote:
@the tank part, so now tanks that are light enough to be light tanks cannot be MBT's regardless of their role?
@the genestealer part, this is magical 40k acid, and magical 40k stuff is magical.
@the rest, not hollow. You can clearly see on the breast plate 2+ inches of armour which is what I was referring to.
ANd yes, there is room for them to wear it. If there wasn't...they wouldn't be able to wear it.
@ irrelevant tanks business: Yes, because once you reach a certain point, it's can fulfill the all the necessity roles of an MBT.
@genestealerpart: No, because fluff even shows it's not. Your response there is composed of magical fail dust.
@ the rest. Yes, it is, if you look along the connection points with the arms on the chest piece, you'll see that the front of the chest is just as hollow as the back of the chest. Further, it has to be light, as the suit enviromental sensors are mounted in the chest. They would not work very well behind inches of super metal.
And, no, there's not. basic human anatomy would show you that. The hips and legs in particular are not arraigned in a manner matching human anatomy or even allowing bipedal walking in the human fashion, due to the excessive gap between the legs. The helmet would be impossible to put on or take off and the neck piece would prohibit them from turning their heads.
@irrelevant tank business (I agree is is irrelevant), you have no stated what area you reach a certain point in. Armour? Tonnage? Firepower? And they are fundamentally different because a light tank is designed for rapid movement and low-intensity conflicts, whereas a main battle tank functions exactly as it's name would imply: larger battles. While medium and heavy are no longer tank classifications, merely being main battle tanks of different sizes, light tanks are still a distinct thing.
@Genestealer stuff, that would indicate an inconsistency, as in the fluff helmets have deflect even bolt round before.
@the rest, we have no idea of the means used to scan the environment used by marine sensors, so that cannot be a part of your argument. It could have small barometers, it could have technology that wouldn't work at all IRL.
If you look at it, you'll note that the armoured part is white and the rest is grey. See how much white there is on the breastplate? 2+inches easily.
For the neck part, you can see that only the ring at the top and the part at the bottom that connects to the suit are solid metal, the rest is armoured rubber, or rubberized armour, whichever, meaning it would be flexible. That's the only reason why lasguns shots can hurt them at all; the negligible armour piercing abilities of lasguns means that only hits to joints and eye pieces will ever hurt a marine.
And your theory about the hips and legs sounds good...until you see how it fits together, and notice how it is obviously perfectly suitable for a human.
CaptainAWESOME117 wrote:A sniper rifle with AM rounds, an assault cannon, or a tank (maybe on the tank). And running Space Marines over dosn't work. In a book, a chimera drives over a Space marine without a helmet, and he survives to rip off the hatch, kill the driver, rip out the seat and drive home.
Yes, and, again, Titans step on them and they are unharmed. It's called plot armor. I can point to another one were the SM is killed by a kid with a knife. The knife is poisoned, but it's still a kid with a knife.
im2randomghgh wrote:
If you look at it, you'll note that the armoured part is white and the rest is grey. See how much white there is on the breastplate? 2+inches easily.
For the neck part, you can see that only the ring at the top and the part at the bottom that connects to the suit are solid metal, the rest is armoured rubber, or rubberized armour, whichever, meaning it would be flexible. That's the only reason why lasguns shots can hurt them at all; the negligible armour piercing abilities of lasguns means that only hits to joints and eye pieces will ever hurt a marine.
And your theory about the hips and legs sounds good...until you see how it fits together, and notice how it is obviously perfectly suitable for a human.
You might want to read the article that's from: Phil altered the armor to fit, it is not the canon armor.
"My aim was to match a marine design as closely are possible to this template while maintaining a shape that would allow a suitable 'marine' body to fit inside. Some modification to the design had to be made to make the body look reasonably proportioned and suitably heroic (strong man), but I hope the feel of the marine has been retained."
Interestingly enough, he could make it fit sideways, but the model human still suffered poke-through when it moved, meaning the range of motion in the joints still was not enough for the armor to match a human.
CaptainAWESOME117 wrote:A sniper rifle with AM rounds, an assault cannon, or a tank (maybe on the tank). And running Space Marines over dosn't work. In a book, a chimera drives over a Space marine without a helmet, and he survives to rip off the hatch, kill the driver, rip out the seat and drive home.
Yes, and, again, Titans step on them and they are unharmed. It's called plot armor. I can point to another one were the SM is killed by a kid with a knife. The knife is poisoned, but it's still a kid with a knife.
Plus there was Tu'shan bench-pressing a land raider in the last Salamander book.
LORD_PANTERA wrote:I reckon a 50 calibar rifle shot could kill a space marine if you could get a shot to the head.
APDS round will go through pretty much anywhere. Regular rounds the joints in the armor would be a good shot. the way they're designed they'd be excellent shot traps.
LORD_PANTERA wrote:I reckon a 50 calibar rifle shot could kill a space marine if you could get a shot to the head.
APDS round will go through pretty much anywhere. Regular rounds the joints in the armor would be a good shot. the way they're designed they'd be excellent shot traps.
The joints are rubberized armour, so small arms likely still could not get through.
Also, sabot round would NOT get t through anywhere, as we saw in Savage Scars that sarik's pauldron is more than capable of taking multiple direct hits from plasma weaponry, which has superior AP to sabot rounds. Also, the Space Marine game tells us that they have reactive armour.
Yeah but a game is worse that the worlds worst fluff and statistics from the rules (i.e.dropping to the ground on your belly offeres a 1 in 6 chance of not being killed by a lascannon, Yeah right).
IHateNids wrote:Yeah but a game is worse that the worlds worst fluff and statistics from the rules (i.e.dropping to the ground on your belly offeres a 1 in 6 chance of not being killed by a lascannon, Yeah right).
If you drop to your belly and it roars away over your head, then yeah.
If lascannnons are as powerful and fast as i am lead to belive, by the time youve seen the shot coming and have decided to hit the deck, its already punched clean through your head
IHateNids wrote:If lascannnons are as powerful and fast as i am lead to belive, by the time youve seen the shot coming and have decided to hit the deck, its already punched clean through your head
It's a beam of light, so essentially you would never even see it coming. As oxymoronic as that sounds. If you are close enough to be targeted by it, then you may see it charge up, but avoiding the beam would be like dodging a flashlight pointed at you as it turns on. Impossible.
IHateNids wrote:If lascannnons are as powerful and fast as i am lead to belive, by the time youve seen the shot coming and have decided to hit the deck, its already punched clean through your head
It's a beam of light, so essentially you would never even see it coming. As oxymoronic as that sounds. If you are close enough to be targeted by it, then you may see it charge up, but avoiding the beam would be like dodging a flashlight pointed at you as it turns on. Impossible.
no matter the fluff, any weapon of today has a chance to kill one just as today rubber bullets still have a chance to kill a man.
Without armor any knife properly thrust or any firearm properly aimed would do damage although one shot would likely not stop them. Several though would probably do the trick.
With armor most of todays modern anti infantry weapons would have negligible chances of doing the job. A 30mm gatling gun with the right shells would have a good chance though. It has the momentum to knock even a SM down and provided the aim stays on him successive shots would eventually penetrate the armor.
CaptainAWESOME117 wrote:A sniper rifle with AM rounds, an assault cannon, or a tank (maybe on the tank). And running Space Marines over dosn't work. In a book, a chimera drives over a Space marine without a helmet, and he survives to rip off the hatch, kill the driver, rip out the seat and drive home.
That particular marine was possessed by a Daemon at the time, so actually that's not all that representative of what a SM can survive.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Also, sabot round would NOT get t through anywhere, as we saw in Savage Scars that sarik's pauldron is more than capable of taking multiple direct hits from plasma weaponry, which has superior AP to sabot rounds. Also, the Space Marine game tells us that they have reactive armour.
Well, one, other then, again, it's bad to kill off the main character of a novel right away, so, yeah, again, miraculous plot armor protects him.
And nonexplosive reactive armor, (as explosive would kill the wearer in this case) does nothing against APDS rounds. (Actually most explosive reactive armor also does next to nothing against APDS rounds. For reactive armor to have any effect, the projectile has to be longer then the thickness of the armor.)
IHateNids wrote:If lascannnons are as powerful and fast as i am lead to belive, by the time youve seen the shot coming and have decided to hit the deck, its already punched clean through your head
It's a beam of light, so essentially you would never even see it coming. As oxymoronic as that sounds. If you are close enough to be targeted by it, then you may see it charge up, but avoiding the beam would be like dodging a flashlight pointed at you as it turns on. Impossible.
My point exactly.
My point was that if you see someone pointing a lascannon at you and hear it charging up, you can throw off their aim by diving to the ground or in a crater etc.
pure sillyness though is how kroot who g2g in jungle terrain get a 2+ against lascannons. They must be pretty ninja
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BaronIveagh wrote:
im2randomghgh wrote:
Also, sabot round would NOT get t through anywhere, as we saw in Savage Scars that sarik's pauldron is more than capable of taking multiple direct hits from plasma weaponry, which has superior AP to sabot rounds. Also, the Space Marine game tells us that they have reactive armour.
Well, one, other then, again, it's bad to kill off the main character of a novel right away, so, yeah, again, miraculous plot armor protects him.
And nonexplosive reactive armor, (as explosive would kill the wearer in this case) does nothing against APDS rounds. (Actually most explosive reactive armor also does next to nothing against APDS rounds. For reactive armor to have any effect, the projectile has to be longer then the thickness of the armor.)
He is one of the main character of a novel, and this is the final push towards the end of the book. Perfect time to kill him.
Also, plot armour is like how Luke miraculously is never hit by a single shot form stormtroopers. Having sturdy armour, not so much. I grant you that from the crisis suit's PoV the story would have roasted Sarik, but then again that's from the pilot's PoV. If you had a neutral outside observer, his shoulder pad would likely still stop the first shot.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BaronIveagh wrote:
im2randomghgh wrote:
Also, sabot round would NOT get t through anywhere, as we saw in Savage Scars that sarik's pauldron is more than capable of taking multiple direct hits from plasma weaponry, which has superior AP to sabot rounds. Also, the Space Marine game tells us that they have reactive armour.
Well, one, other then, again, it's bad to kill off the main character of a novel right away, so, yeah, again, miraculous plot armor protects him.
And nonexplosive reactive armor, (as explosive would kill the wearer in this case) does nothing against APDS rounds. (Actually most explosive reactive armor also does next to nothing against APDS rounds. For reactive armor to have any effect, the projectile has to be longer then the thickness of the armor.)
A sabot round from a tank cannon would most likely be longer than PA is thick.
A sabot round smaller would not have sufficient penetrating power.
I've not read the whole thread but has anyone stopped to consider that regardless of whether the SM's armour is penetrated the energy of what ever he is hit by is going to transfer to him.
So even if the sabot doesn't penetrate his armour there is still somewhere around 15 to 20 MegaJoules of energy to go somewhere. Even if that energy just hurled our hero backwards, accelerating from 0 to God knows how fast in a split second is going to turn even the toughest to goo.
Still don't know why this thread is still going on...
ANYTHING can kill a space marine, it's the tactics, methods, and situations that determine whether or not they will actually succeed.
A pointy stick could slice the throat of a marine if they're helmetless, don't have errant armour (with the neck guard), and being swarmed by hundreds upon thousands of savages. (read First Heretic).
There armour is no doubt impressive but they all have their faults, pretty sure non marines are told to aim for the joints when facing sphez marines.
schadenfreude wrote:The average dakkadakka forum user could kill a space marine if enough of us were armed.
I very much doubt that, most of us don't have any training or contact with firearms. Not to mention actual basic training...
Average dakkadite=IG conscript stats
Less then that.
Those with police/military background=guardsmen stats
Please do not insult Imperial Guard by comparing them with us.
All modern small arms=stubbers=same stats as a flashlight.
Lasgun is more powerful then any our modern firearm. It is 100% accurate, reliable, easy to maintain, recharge, and las-shots works by making mini-plasma explosion on the target area. That is much more powerful then standard 5.56 or 7.62 bullet.
An entire chapter of space marines would have a hard time destroying the armed forces of North Korea.
I very much doubt that, Marines are not some average joe solders - they are Mankind's finest warriors.
With all their brothers in one place, with all of their support they will not just destroy North Korean army but several more before we actually kill some of them.
And what do we have to fight a Battle Barge? They can just bomb us into oblivion until we surrender.
Those with police/military background=guardsmen stats
Please do not insult Imperial Guard by comparing them with us.
That was unintentionally hilarious of you.
IG have the same level of training generally as a modern soldier, dude. I'd say the average professional soldier easily had the same in-game stats as a Guardsmen.
schadenfreude wrote:The average dakkadakka forum user could kill a space marine if enough of us were armed.
I very much doubt that, most of us don't have any training or contact with firearms. Not to mention actual basic training...
It must be nice to have had such a sheltered upbringing. My parents started teaching me to shoot when I was six.
Brother Coa wrote:
Please do not insult Imperial Guard by comparing them with us.
Wow, either you think we're all like you and have no grasp of how to use weapons, lay traps, set up an ambush, or handle and produce improvised explosives without looking it up on the internet.
All modern small arms=stubbers=same stats as a flashlight.
Sadly, in game, stubbers can have better stats then a lasgun.
Brother Coa wrote:Lasgun is more powerful then any our modern firearm. It is 100% accurate, reliable, easy to maintain, recharge, and las-shots works by making mini-plasma explosion on the target area. That is much more powerful then standard 5.56 or 7.62 bullet.
Sadly, no it's not. While it has superior dependability and is easily recharged, it's not 100% accurate (according to both fluff and game rules) and one thing that never seems to come up is that as a laser it's potency s a weapon goes to pot in rain, dust,fog, snow or any other sort of atmospheric condition beyond cool, dry air. 7.62 Nato has no such issues. Ever wonder why IG vets use shotguns? This is why. The reason IG get them has nothing do do with stopping power, etc, it has to do with lines of supply. Since a lasgun powerpack as a long lifespan, fewer of them must be transported from forgeworlds to the front.
Brother Coa wrote:
I very much doubt that, Marines are not some average joe solders - they are Mankind's finest warriors.
With all their brothers in one place, with all of their support they will not just destroy North Korean army but several more before we actually kill some of them.
Again, kid with poison knife kills SM captain in Souldrinkers. Ogryns can beat them to death. In Nightbringer, some die to mortar fire from rebel PDF. You grotesquely underestimate modern weapons.
Brother Coa wrote:
And what do we have to fight a Battle Barge? They can just bomb us into oblivion until we surrender.
I would recommend any number of powerful anti satellite weapons or your friendly neighborhood ICBM. (Which has better stats than the average Imperial Torp)
On the APDS issue earlier: a .50 could be loaded with APDS and pen. You do realize that in game explosives are not that much more powerful then modern ones? For that marine's reactive armor to stop a tank round, his armor would have to be a good foot thick or so. And even then it would only work... once.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
That was unintentionally hilarious of you.
IG have the same level of training generally as a modern soldier, dude. I'd say the average professional soldier easily had the same in-game stats as a Guardsmen.
No, Guard is taking the best that certain planet has to offer and then trained them a little more to be Guardsmen.
Meaning that bet of US army would be in IG while the rest would remained in Earth PDF.
BaronIveagh wrote:For that marine's reactive armor to stop a tank round, his armor would have to be a good foot thick or so. And even then it would only work... once.
Then it would explode inside the hole = Spehz marhen jelly
Brother Coa wrote:Please do not insult Imperial Guard by comparing them with us.
Thats either a overexageration of guardsmen or a bad joke
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
That was unintentionally hilarious of you.
IG have the same level of training generally as a modern soldier, dude. I'd say the average professional soldier easily had the same in-game stats as a Guardsmen.
No, Guard is taking the best that certain planet has to offer and then trained them a little more to be Guardsmen.
Meaning that bet of US army would be in IG while the rest would remained in Earth PDF.
That depends on the planet. Some are conscripted, others are a sign-up service. There would easily be current day armies better than some IG regiments, since they can either be crippled by loss of a leader due to it being constantly drilled into them from birth not to question or modify anything, while a current day army member would have more initiative.
BaronIveagh wrote:
It must be nice to have had such a sheltered upbringing. My parents started teaching me to shoot when I was six.
And I have golden medal for sharpshooting and license for a pistol and carbine. I also lived trough 3 wars in my lifetime, 1 revolution and second worst inflation in history ( after German one ). Sheltering eh? You are from US right? Just remember when was the last time Americans fell war and destruction in their homeland before asking Europeans that question.
BaronIveagh wrote:
Wow, either you think we're all like you and have no grasp of how to use weapons, lay traps, set up an ambush, or handle and produce improvised explosives without looking it up on the internet.
No, I am just thinking that we are normal Human beings who are totally inferior to 8 feet tall superhuman who can tear rough tank armor like knife trough butter. We can use weapons, traps etc... but against armored marines or Terminators that is useless.
Sadly, no it's not. While it has superior dependability and is easily recharged, it's not 100% accurate (according to both fluff and game rules) and one thing that never seems to come up is that as a laser it's potency s a weapon goes to pot in rain, dust,fog, snow or any other sort of atmospheric condition beyond cool, dry air. 7.62 Nato has no such issues. Ever wonder why IG vets use shotguns? This is why. The reason IG get them has nothing do do with stopping power, etc, it has to do with lines of supply. Since a lasgun powerpack as a long lifespan, fewer of them must be transported from forgeworlds to the front.
We dabated in several threads and conclusion was that Lasgun is better, not by stooping power ( it doesen't need stopping power when it creates mini-plasma explosion on impact that can blow up limbs in one shot at unarmored target ) but by it's all other characteristics. I never heard that Lasgun have strong recoil ( since it is light and light don't have mass ) nor that light depends on conditions like rain, dust etc...
BaronIveagh wrote:
Again, kid with poison knife kills SM captain in Souldrinkers. Ogryns can beat them to death. In Nightbringer, some die to mortar fire from rebel PDF. You grotesquely underestimate modern weapons.
So? Draigo raised entire city by himself in Warp. Beat countless Grater Daemons again and again. Grimdalus have entire building crash at him and he still get out unharmed, Calgar beat Avatar of Khaine with single blow from his fist. You clearly underestimate the Astartes skill and superiority.
Brother Coa wrote:
And what do we have to fight a Battle Barge? They can just bomb us into oblivion until we surrender.
I would recommend any number of powerful anti satellite weapons or your friendly neighborhood ICBM.
Great, and what will you do against Astartes Space Fleet? Point lasers at them?
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Durza wrote:
That depends on the planet. Some are conscripted, others are a sign-up service. There would easily be current day armies better than some IG regiments, since they can either be crippled by loss of a leader due to it being constantly drilled into them from birth not to question or modify anything, while a current day army member would have more initiative.
You do realize that all our army's use universal tactics while certain Guard Regiments use their special tactics.
For example we would beat the Tau and Eldar but lose miserable against Orks or Tyranids.
Of course some of our army's can beat some IG Regiments when they are accustomed to certain tactics. But against Cadians, Elysians or Krieg we would lose.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
That was unintentionally hilarious of you.
IG have the same level of training generally as a modern soldier, dude. I'd say the average professional soldier easily had the same in-game stats as a Guardsmen.
No, Guard is taking the best that certain planet has to offer and then trained them a little more to be Guardsmen.
Meaning that bet of US army would be in IG while the rest would remained in Earth PDF.
The US army is actually less well trained than several other military forces, thus displaying that you know very little about the military of Earth.
Also, nope. As Durza just pointed out, Guardsmen suffer from various issues in terms of training that modern armies don't have, such as the overdependence on higher-ups in command.
Though this isn't the case for all regiments, there's enough of it going around to make an IG regiment somewhat less flexible than a modern army.
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Brother Coa wrote:
So? Draigo raised entire city by himself in Warp. Beat countless Grater Daemons again and again. Grimdalus have entire building crash at him and he still get out unharmed, Calgar beat Avatar of Khaine with single blow from his fist. You clearly underestimate the Astartes skill and superiority.
Guy who complains about how much he hates Mat Ward's fluff in other threads claims that it represents SM abilities in others. Also, the one bit of fluff that isn't Wardian there is something you've not reported correctly, unless Grimaldus coming out of that ruin more dead than alive counts as "unharmed" to you.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote: The US army is actually less well trained than several other military forces, thus displaying that you know very little about the military of Earth.
I know very well that you don't have to insult peopel around you know, I wanted to study military history so this is offensive. I just pointed out an US military as basic example of modern military standard. I know that Russian or Chinese or French Legion would kick their b*** every day.
Also, nope. As Durza just pointed out, Guardsmen suffer from various issues in terms of training that modern armies don't have, such as the overdependence on higher-ups in command. Though this isn't the case for all regiments, there's enough of it going around to make an IG regiment somewhat less flexible than a modern army.
True, but note that some Guard Regiments are raised from age of 1 to be solders, and great number of them are professional troops - not conscripts. And you are right, Guardsman are trained even harder because their enemy are not just Humans - but alien races. And that gives them an edge against us because they are also trained to kill non-Human opponents that are superior to them ( like Orks or Chaos Space Marines ).
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote: Guy who complains about how much he hates Mat Ward's fluff in other threads claims that it represents SM abilities in others. Also, the one bit of fluff that isn't Wardian there is something you've not reported correctly, unless Grimaldus coming out of that ruin more dead than alive counts as "unharmed" to you.
As much as I hate it it is also part of official canon recognized by many 40k fans. If one guy can alone level down entire city then what weapon we have that can bring him down? And as far as i know Grimdalus was fine, he just said: "I fell like not dying yet".
IMo guardsmen training is more akin to WW1 level than modern day level. I don't see why they would waste so much time training the guardsmen when the combat life expectancy is minuscule.
Durza wrote:But the Cadians, Elysians and Krieg live a lifetime of war before joining the IG anyway. That's not exactly a fair comparison.
So? My nation alone had 8 wars in just last 100 years on our soil, Israel to had many wars since it is founded and has some of the best weapons and trained troops in the world.
We also had their counterparts, we only had to search. That doesn't mean that we can kill Astartes as easy as we can kill a pig with a sledgehammer like some peopel here are pointing out.
Sure, we can kill Astartes using just knife, the problem is actually doing that to 8 foot tall superhuman.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
Guy who complains about how much he hates Mat Ward's fluff in other threads claims that it represents SM abilities in others. Also, the one bit of fluff that isn't Wardian there is something you've not reported correctly, unless Grimaldus coming out of that ruin more dead than alive counts as "unharmed" to you.
As much as I hate it it is also part of official canon recognized by many 40k fans. If one guy can alone level down entire city then what weapon we have that can bring him down?
And as far as i know Grimdalus was fine, he just said: "I fell like not dying yet".
He wasn't. In the codex, it's described as him only just holding onto life, and that he would have succumbed had it taken any longer for him to escape.
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Brother Coa wrote:
Durza wrote:But the Cadians, Elysians and Krieg live a lifetime of war before joining the IG anyway. That's not exactly a fair comparison.
So? My nation alone had 8 wars in just last 100 years on our soil, Israel to had many wars since it is founded and has some of the best weapons and trained troops in the world.
We also had their counterparts, we only had to search. That doesn't mean that we can kill Astartes as easy as we can kill a pig with a sledgehammer like some peopel here are pointing out.
Sure, we can kill Astartes using just knife, the problem is actually doing that to 8 foot tall superhuman.
The point of the thread was "what can kill" not "How easy can you kill."
Admittedly, some of the claims have been hilarious, but the fact still stands that SM are not as invulnerable as is being made out.
Sure, Draigo could kick the arse of every singe Green Beret ever and still have time for a nice scone with jam, but he's a special character of a particularly feared band of arse-breakers.
How are his or Calgar's abilities as humanoid wrecking balls representative of the average marine?
Brother Coa wrote:
And I have golden medal for sharpshooting and license for a pistol and carbine. I also lived trough 3 wars in my lifetime, 1 revolution and second worst inflation in history ( after German one ). Sheltering eh? You are from US right? Just remember when was the last time Americans fell war and destruction in their homeland before asking Europeans that question.
No. I know the little flag shows US, and I did start out there, but I've been a hell of a lot more places then that (and, as a matter of fact, am not there right now). Your little flag looks like Serbia, but it's hard to tell, and they are nto that accurate anyway. Congrats on your marksmanship. Can you do it when your eyes and mouth (and gun and hair and clothes) are full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short? I know it messes me up. You've survived wars. Woopdy fething doo. So have a lot of people at this point I know when I stop to think about it, I'm amazed I'm still alive, myself.
I'll grant you're in worse shape economically, but not nearly as bad as some places. You want people who are really screwed, try Southeast Asia sometime. Or Africa.
Brother Coa wrote:
No, I am just thinking that we are normal Human beings who are totally inferior to 8 feet tall superhuman who can tear rough tank armor like knife trough butter. We can use weapons, traps etc... but against armored marines or Terminators that is useless.
Nobody is immortal. Some just take more killing then others. Saying 'We can't win' is a self fulfilling prophecy. A little det cord and a likely ruin and you have dead termies just like you have dead tanks. You'll probably lose a few guys drawing them in, but 'mere men' can do it. (BTW: this apparently happened in fluff, if you read the Killing Ground. A full squad of marines taken out by a building collapsing on them.)
Brother Coa wrote:
We dabated in several threads and conclusion was that Lasgun is better, not by stooping power ( it doesen't need stopping power when it creates mini-plasma explosion on impact that can blow up limbs in one shot at unarmored target ) but by it's all other characteristics. I never heard that Lasgun have strong recoil ( since it is light and light don't have mass ) nor that light depends on conditions like rain, dust etc...
No one must have had any idea how lasers work then. All those things diffuse the beam and increase bloom, which reduces it's effectiveness.
Brother Coa wrote:
So? Draigo raised entire city by himself in Warp. Beat countless Grater Daemons again and again. Grimdalus have entire building crash at him and he still get out unharmed, Calgar beat Avatar of Khaine with single blow from his fist. You clearly underestimate the Astartes skill and superiority.
No, I just point out that all of those have what's called contractual immortality because GW wants to sell minis of them. It's better to use the unnamed non-main character as your yardstick. Thy can actually die in the books.
Brother Coa wrote:
Great, and what will you do against Astartes Space Fleet? Point lasers at them?
No, I was thinking ball bearings, actually. Ball bearings moving at orbital velocities, but ball bearings none the less.
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Brother Coa wrote:
Sure, we can kill Astartes using just knife, the problem is actually doing that to 8 foot tall superhuman.
One would like to think that if a little kid can do it, it must not be that hard. And they're only seven foot if the chart at FW is to be believed. Meaning they got a foot on me.
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Brother Coa wrote:
So? My nation alone had 8 wars in just last 100 years on our soil,
And your nation started or caused at least 3 of them, so...
ifStatement wrote:IMo guardsmen training is more akin to WW1 level than modern day level. I don't see why they would waste so much time training the guardsmen when the combat life expectancy is minuscule.
That is wrong information. They are trained depending on a planet, some will never invest in it's Guard units then several weeks of training. Some will train it's solders their whole life.
And Guard use different strategy depending on situation and enemy at hand.
Modern day strategies are basically hit and run, air strike with artillery after that follows column of tanks and infantry. That strategy is good against today's millitaries and braking down enemy hard points. While it is great against say Eldar or Chaos Heretics it is next to useless against Orks or Tyranids who are horde army's. So the Guard by using WW1 strategies against Orks ( who are working ) and modern strategies against enemy like Tau.
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Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
The point of the thread was "what can kill" not "How easy can you kill."
Admittedly, some of the claims have been hilarious, but the fact still stands that SM are not as invulnerable as is being made out.
This is what I am referring to, some points made here were hilarious. It turns out that i can kill a Marine with spoon if I have a luck.
I agree the fact is that Marine can die easy sometimes, even Daemon princes and Grater Daemons are dying easy sometimes. Question is just how hard would it be to implement that wound. And that is what I am trying to prove, that as much as it easy to kill it it is hard to do so.
Space marines are definitely killable. There is no disputing that. But they are also head and shoulders above normal humans. In almost any balanced encounter, the space marines are going to come out on top, they are much tougher and deal more damage than a standard human.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No. I know the little flag shows US, and I did start out there, but I've been a hell of a lot more places then that (and, as a matter of fact, am not there right now). Your little flag looks like Serbia, but it's hard to tell, and they are nto that accurate anyway. Congrats on your marksmanship. Can you do it when your eyes and mouth (and gun and hair and clothes) are full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short? I know it messes me up. You've survived wars. Woopdy fething doo. So have a lot of people at this point I know when I stop to think about it, I'm amazed I'm still alive, myself.
You are talking like surviving wars is everyday's thing...and you talk cold about that. You must be a solder on a tour of duty or something like that right? Well you can't really compare me since I have been a kid when that happened, and I have just saw all that including the drooping of Fuel Air Bomb some 3km from my house. It shaken the entire city and the explosion was glorious... Thanks for congratulates, people said that guns really suit me. Haven't been to the war myself ( even if I wanted to ), I see that you clearly had and so what? Your eyes and mouth full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short are a lot batter then having your body part blow away or getting shot in the stomach and die slowly. But I don't think that kind of story is for this site for normal people to read...
I'll grant you're in worse shape economically, but not nearly as bad as some places. You want people who are really screwed, try Southeast Asia sometime. Or Africa.
Of course there are worst places then our country right now, thank God for that. But you should see early 1990's on Balkan, it was as worse as any today's active war zone. No wait - it was worse since it was civil war + ethnic cleansing from all sides.
BaronIveagh wrote:
Nobody is immortal. Some just take more killing then others. Saying 'We can't win' is a self fulfilling prophecy. A little det cord and a likely ruin and you have dead termies just like you have dead tanks. You'll probably lose a few guys drawing them in, but 'mere men' can do it. (BTW: this apparently happened in fluff, if you read the Killing Ground. A full squad of marines taken out by a building collapsing on them.)
I didn't say that mere men can't do it. I am saying that it is not as easy as you are describing it. And so what if building collapsed on Marines squad and killed them? One single Tau Fire Warrior killed a Lord of Change himself, but that doesen;t mean that single Guardsmen could kill it that easily to.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No one must have had any idea how lasers work then. All those things diffuse the beam and increase bloom, which reduces it's effectiveness.
So? Sand and mud in rifle reduce her effectiveness but it can still shoot.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No, I just point out that all of those have what's called contractual immortality because GW wants to sell minis of them. It's better to use the unnamed non-main character as your yardstick. Thy can actually die in the books.
That's right, GW said so. Adn GW said so that Space Marines are Mankind greatest warriors, steel and doom. That doesn't;t mean that they are immortal - but they are as hard to kill as hell.
They way you described for killing Marine could work only if marine stand still and let me have a shot witch is hilarious to even think about. The most realistic thing I saw in this thread was .50 caliber sniper, Abrams shot, A-10 Thunderbolt and RPG-7 direct hit. But taking a knife and slicing his throat is just hilarious for me to imagine.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No, I was thinking ball bearings, actually. Ball bearings moving at orbital velocities, but ball bearings none the less.
Either way - we lose.
BaronIveagh wrote:
One would like to think that if a little kid can do it, it must not be that hard. And they're only seven foot if the chart at FW is to be believed. Meaning they got a foot on me.
That was a special occasion, in one of our own movie a men grabs molotov cocktail and destroy a tank with it by simply throwing it to the front armor. That doesn't mean that tank coudl be destroyed that way. That marine trusted that child and as a result of drooping it's defense he was killed - I could kill Navy Seal that way to.
BaronIveagh wrote:
And your nation started or caused at least 3 of them, so...
Actually, we caused 6 of them - what to say we love to fight it is in our blood At least we are not stealing Oil from other countries by using democracy as cover story.
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BaronIveagh wrote:
No. I know the little flag shows US, and I did start out there, but I've been a hell of a lot more places then that (and, as a matter of fact, am not there right now). Your little flag looks like Serbia, but it's hard to tell, and they are nto that accurate anyway. Congrats on your marksmanship. Can you do it when your eyes and mouth (and gun and hair and clothes) are full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short? I know it messes me up. You've survived wars. Woopdy fething doo. So have a lot of people at this point I know when I stop to think about it, I'm amazed I'm still alive, myself.
You are talking like surviving wars is everyday's thing...and you talk cold about that. You must be a solder on a tour of duty or something like that right? Well you can't really compare me since I have been a kid when that happened, and I have just saw all that including the drooping of Fuel Air Bomb some 3km from my house. It shaken the entire city and the explosion was glorious... Thanks for congratulates, people said that guns really suit me. Haven't been to the war myself ( even if I wanted to ), I see that you clearly had and so what? Your eyes and mouth full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short are a lot batter then having your body part blow away or getting shot in the stomach and die slowly. But I don't think that kind of story is for this site for normal people to read...
I'll grant you're in worse shape economically, but not nearly as bad as some places. You want people who are really screwed, try Southeast Asia sometime. Or Africa.
Of course there are worst places then our country right now, thank God for that. But you should see early 1990's on Balkan, it was as worse as any today's active war zone. No wait - it was worse since it was civil war + ethnic cleansing from all sides.
BaronIveagh wrote:
Nobody is immortal. Some just take more killing then others. Saying 'We can't win' is a self fulfilling prophecy. A little det cord and a likely ruin and you have dead termies just like you have dead tanks. You'll probably lose a few guys drawing them in, but 'mere men' can do it. (BTW: this apparently happened in fluff, if you read the Killing Ground. A full squad of marines taken out by a building collapsing on them.)
I didn't say that mere men can't do it. I am saying that it is not as easy as you are describing it. And so what if building collapsed on Marines squad and killed them? One single Tau Fire Warrior killed a Lord of Change himself, but that doesen;t mean that single Guardsmen could kill it that easily to.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No one must have had any idea how lasers work then. All those things diffuse the beam and increase bloom, which reduces it's effectiveness.
So? Sand and mud in rifle reduce her effectiveness but it can still shoot.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No, I just point out that all of those have what's called contractual immortality because GW wants to sell minis of them. It's better to use the unnamed non-main character as your yardstick. Thy can actually die in the books.
That's right, GW said so. Adn GW said so that Space Marines are Mankind greatest warriors, steel and doom. That doesn't;t mean that they are immortal - but they are as hard to kill as hell.
They way you described for killing Marine could work only if marine stand still and let me have a shot witch is hilarious to even think about. The most realistic thing I saw in this thread was .50 caliber sniper, Abrams shot, A-10 Thunderbolt and RPG-7 direct hit. But taking a knife and slicing his throat is just hilarious for me to imagine.
BaronIveagh wrote:
No, I was thinking ball bearings, actually. Ball bearings moving at orbital velocities, but ball bearings none the less.
Either way - we lose.
BaronIveagh wrote:
One would like to think that if a little kid can do it, it must not be that hard. And they're only seven foot if the chart at FW is to be believed. Meaning they got a foot on me.
That was a special occasion, in one of our own movie a men grabs molotov cocktail and destroy a tank with it by simply throwing it to the front armor. That doesn't mean that tank coudl be destroyed that way. That marine trusted that child and as a result of drooping it's defense he was killed - I could kill Navy Seal that way to.
BaronIveagh wrote:
And your nation started or caused at least 3 of them, so...
Actually, we caused 6 of them - what to say we love to fight it is in our blood At least we are not stealing Oil from other countries by using democracy as cover story.
Coa old chap, I do believe you've missed the point there.
The point is not that SM heroes doing ridiculous things is somehow less valid than other fluff, but that they are not representative of the abilities of the average marine.
The average SM could no more punch an Avatar of Khaine to death in a single blow than he could fly like Superman. That is the kind of SM we would most likely be encountering here.
That;s the point Gorskar my lad.
Not every Marine can kill the strongest monsters and do incredible things, and not every Human being can kill a Space Marine.
Just because some solder with sniper could do doesn't mean that I could or you or any other non-military person.
Indeed so old fruit.
However, I was under the impression that we were discussing the abilities of our professional soldiers here, or have I missed something?
blazinpsycho&typhooni wrote:Still don't know why this thread is still going on...
ANYTHING can kill a space marine, it's the tactics, methods, and situations that determine whether or not they will actually succeed.
A pointy stick could slice the throat of a marine if they're helmetless, don't have errant armour (with the neck guard), and being swarmed by hundreds upon thousands of savages. (read First Heretic).
There armour is no doubt impressive but they all have their faults, pretty sure non marines are told to aim for the joints when facing sphez marines.
They aren't invincible, but they're pretty close.
Slit their throat and their larraman cells are going to stop the bleeding right away. Unless you penetrate deep, which would be quite difficult considering Know No Fear states that they are "As tall as a tall man on another tall man's shoulders".
IHateNids wrote:Im under the same impression as Gorska.
And what about a chainsaw? CSM kill SM with chain swords so why cant a basketball player (same height as a SM) kill one with a chain saw?
Because Basketball players are infinitely weaker (and average basketball player ~7 foot, marines 6" taller or more), chainswords are made from sturdier metal and have a monomolecular edge, chainswords would have considerably more potent engines, and because even chainswords struggle against PA.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Indeed so old fruit.
However, I was under the impression that we were discussing the abilities of our professional soldiers here, or have I missed something?
I am glad that we agreed on that If you see OP you could see that there is no mention of solder or civilian on description. Just a simple question: what our modern day weapon can kill an Astartes?
Answer is simple: many weapons can kill them. But them people started stating that even civilians could kill them easily and that just irritated me.
They wouldn't call them Angels of Death if they are that easy to kill, yeah they are Human - but superhuman at that. A living gods of war, instrument of his will, Mankind righteous fury...
And they deserve that praising very well with all the enemy they are fighting and deeds they are doing. Telling that ordinary men can kill them with a knife is kind insulting...
And I completely agree that professional solders could kill them, but not before losing a lot of troops to achieve that.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Indeed so old fruit.
However, I was under the impression that we were discussing the abilities of our professional soldiers here, or have I missed something?
I am glad that we agreed on that If you see OP you could see that there is no mention of solder or civilian on description. Just a simple question: what our modern day weapon can kill an Astartes?
Answer is simple: many weapons can kill them. But them people started stating that even civilians could kill them easily and that just irritated me.
They wouldn't call them Angels of Death if they are that easy to kill, yeah they are Human - but superhuman at that. A living gods of war, instrument of his will, Mankind righteous fury...
And they deserve that praising very well with all the enemy they are fighting and deeds they are doing. Telling that ordinary men can kill them with a knife is kind insulting...
And I completely agree that professional solders could kill them, but not before losing a lot of troops to achieve that.
"to take a town, send a legionary, to take a city, send a squad, to take a world, send a company, to take a culture, send a chapter"
Although that would be referring to the enemies of mankind during the crusade, so inflate that a bit to account for weaker modern weapons.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:Indeed so old fruit.
However, I was under the impression that we were discussing the abilities of our professional soldiers here, or have I missed something?
I am glad that we agreed on that If you see OP you could see that there is no mention of solder or civilian on description. Just a simple question: what our modern day weapon can kill an Astartes?
Answer is simple: many weapons can kill them. But them people started stating that even civilians could kill them easily and that just irritated me.
They wouldn't call them Angels of Death if they are that easy to kill, yeah they are Human - but superhuman at that. A living gods of war, instrument of his will, Mankind righteous fury...
And they deserve that praising very well with all the enemy they are fighting and deeds they are doing. Telling that ordinary men can kill them with a knife is kind insulting...
And I completely agree that professional solders could kill them, but not before losing a lot of troops to achieve that.
Well, it'd be a bit useless to spend years raising a single applicant to full SM status if he was easy to kill, it's gotta be said.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Slit their throat and their larraman cells are going to stop the bleeding right away. Unless you penetrate deep, which would be quite difficult considering Know No Fear states that they are "As tall as a tall man on another tall man's shoulders".
You do realize that makes them taller then a land raider, right? They'd be squeezing in like a clown car. I'll stick with FW's seven foot. It seems more likely and the scale matches up better.
And it doesn't matter if it stops the bleeding right away. That fast clotting would actually act against them in this situation because the blood that has gotten into their lungs would kill them by clotting, effectively choking them to death. Larraman cells are fast, not instantaneous, clotting.
Brother Coa wrote:
You are talking like surviving wars is everyday's thing...and you talk cold about that. You must be a solder on a tour of duty or something like that right? Well you can't really compare me since I have been a kid when that happened, and I have just saw all that including the drooping of Fuel Air Bomb some 3km from my house. It shaken the entire city and the explosion was glorious...
Thankfully not anymore. Though I miss the paychecks. (Or what occasionally passed for a paycheck.) And FAE can be quite a big boom, I agree. However, I grant, I would not want to be a kid in a warzone. Seen too many that found mines.
Brother Coa wrote:Your eyes and mouth full of that gritty concrete dust from the artillery falling short are a lot batter then having your body part blow away or getting shot in the stomach and die slowly. But I don't think that kind of story is for this site for normal people to read...
Agreed. Bleeding out is bad, but shrapnel and white phosphorus are worse, and now my shoulder hurts thinking about it so we'll let this whole subject drop.
Brother Coa wrote:But you should see early 1990's on Balkan, it was as worse as any today's active war zone. No wait - it was worse since it was civil war + ethnic cleansing from all sides.
Yes, sadly, I knew several individuals (and let me point out, they were not my friends) involved in an arms ring selling guns to all sides during that, to 'advance national interests'. Personally I think it was more to 'line personal pockets'.
Brother Coa wrote:
I didn't say that mere men can't do it. I am saying that it is not as easy as you are describing it. And so what if building collapsed on Marines squad and killed them? One single Tau Fire Warrior killed a Lord of Change himself, but that doesen;t mean that single Guardsmen could kill it that easily to.
The trick of any strategy is to force your opponent into the prepared killing ground. When fighting in built up areas it's easier, and attacks can come from more directions. It the open countryside you'd stand less of a chance, then it's mines, preferably something simple, since it's more likely that a SM preysight would detect a more complex mechanism, or in unexpected locations. Plain explosives would work well here too, used to trigger landslides and avalanches in deadly terrain like mountains. A pal of mine who was in Afghanistan told me a rather humorous story, and I'm not sure I believe him, about a trebuchet taking out a IFV by dropping a huge bolder on it from over a hill. No one inside was hurt, but the IFV was out of commission because it's transmission and treds were wrecked. If it's true, and again, I'm not sure I believe him, it's a good example of using lower tech to beat higher tech through creative application.
Brother Coa wrote:
So? Sand and mud in rifle reduce her effectiveness but it can still shoot.
Yes, but this would be more like firing that rifle underwater. It could still shoot, maybe, but the range and stopping power are heavily reduced.
Brother Coa wrote:
That's right, GW said so. Adn GW said so that Space Marines are Mankind greatest warriors, steel and doom. That doesn't;t mean that they are immortal - but they are as hard to kill as hell.
They way you described for killing Marine could work only if marine stand still and let me have a shot witch is hilarious to even think about. The most realistic thing I saw in this thread was .50 caliber sniper, Abrams shot, A-10 Thunderbolt and RPG-7 direct hit. But taking a knife and slicing his throat is just hilarious for me to imagine.
And how many times have we seen the Sargent unwisely not wearing his helmet? Throw enough men at them fast enough and you can pull it off (as was shown in First Heretic). It's easier in close terrain than in the open, but doable. Certain types of knives will probably do better. Ceramic and glass can have monomolecular edges even with current tech, and can actually be fairly hard, and the US Army has started handing out what is basically a small plasma cutter on a trial basis to some spec ops troops.
Brother Coa wrote:
Either way - we lose.
Not really, a ball bearing traveling at orbital velocities would have a similar impact to one of those Tau railguns they mount on their starships. Throw a big enough cloud of them at it, and...
Brother Coa wrote:
Actually, we caused 6 of them - what to say we love to fight it is in our blood At least we are not stealing Oil from other countries by using democracy as cover story.
LOL As being of Irish and Native American decent, I know something about fighting being in the blood.
And, agreed, but the last place I was it wasn't for oil. It wasn't really for democracy, either though.
You do realize that makes them taller then a land raider, right? They'd be squeezing in like a clown car. I'll stick with FW's seven foot. It seems more likely and the scale matches up better.
While Know No Fear does seem to put them at 9 feet or so which is a bit much (even tho heresy era marines are supposed to be slightly bigger) and my personal favourite height range is the most common 7'6" as average (though it could also depend on chapter, on primarch, on gravity of chapter homeworld etc.) because there are roughly 20,000 people in the world over 7 tall, and being taller than a space marine is heresy. 7'6" is a lot more rare than 7'
You do realize that makes them taller then a land raider, right? They'd be squeezing in like a clown car. I'll stick with FW's seven foot. It seems more likely and the scale matches up better.
While Know No Fear does seem to put them at 9 feet or so which is a bit much (even tho heresy era marines are supposed to be slightly bigger) and my personal favourite height range is the most common 7'6" as average (though it could also depend on chapter, on primarch, on gravity of chapter homeworld etc.) because there are roughly 20,000 people in the world over 7 tall, and being taller than a space marine is heresy. 7'6" is a lot more rare than 7'
As I recall, they're 7ft 6in without armour on, and 8ft with it.
Still, once again we've got the ol' 40K loose canon to contend with here.
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
As I recall, they're 7ft 6in without armour on, and 8ft with it.
Still, once again we've got the ol' 40K loose canon to contend with here.
Not the least of which is they start measuring at 2' instead of 1'
I mentioned the 'Tales of Heresy' Call of the Lion story at the start of the thread and got laughed off a bit.
However, nothing I've read here (and I've been reading a while) really suggests an alternate to what I thought from reading that short story.
The planet really did seem to be a stand in for modern day Earth, with a (broadly) similar makeup, including a UN expy.
Basically, if I remember right, marines do take casualties in it, either from anti tank weaponry or assorted dirty tricks (I think collapsing buildings was mentioned), and one or two from infantry fire but the main war ends up being much of a curb stomp and that it wasn't using a particularly large amount of legion resources.
I think the story ends with a squad of Terminators teleporting into the not-UN and slaughtering every major government leader after drop podded squads took out the main military bases on the planet.
I think that's a pretty fair / logical summary of what would happen, all things considered...
You do realize that makes them taller then a land raider, right? They'd be squeezing in like a clown car. I'll stick with FW's seven foot. It seems more likely and the scale matches up better.
While Know No Fear does seem to put them at 9 feet or so which is a bit much (even tho heresy era marines are supposed to be slightly bigger) and my personal favourite height range is the most common 7'6" as average (though it could also depend on chapter, on primarch, on gravity of chapter homeworld etc.) because there are roughly 20,000 people in the world over 7 tall, and being taller than a space marine is heresy. 7'6" is a lot more rare than 7'
As I recall, they're 7ft 6in without armour on, and 8ft with it.
Still, once again we've got the ol' 40K loose canon to contend with here.
That can be explained away with having taller or short initiates, taller or short primarchs (this trait would likely carry through the space marines) higher or lower gravity worlds etc.
You do realize that makes them taller then a land raider, right? They'd be squeezing in like a clown car. I'll stick with FW's seven foot. It seems more likely and the scale matches up better.
While Know No Fear does seem to put them at 9 feet or so which is a bit much (even tho heresy era marines are supposed to be slightly bigger) and my personal favourite height range is the most common 7'6" as average (though it could also depend on chapter, on primarch, on gravity of chapter homeworld etc.) because there are roughly 20,000 people in the world over 7 tall, and being taller than a space marine is heresy. 7'6" is a lot more rare than 7'
As I recall, they're 7ft 6in without armour on, and 8ft with it.
Still, once again we've got the ol' 40K loose canon to contend with here.
That can be explained away with having taller or short initiates, taller or short primarchs (this trait would likely carry through the space marines) higher or lower gravity worlds etc.
Probably the best way of looking at it, really.
Certainly we know that the Primarchs varied massively in height, if Alpharius/Omegon are anything to go by.
blazinpsycho&typhooni wrote:Still don't know why this thread is still going on...
ANYTHING can kill a space marine, it's the tactics, methods, and situations that determine whether or not they will actually succeed.
A pointy stick could slice the throat of a marine if they're helmetless, don't have errant armour (with the neck guard), and being swarmed by hundreds upon thousands of savages. (read First Heretic).
There armour is no doubt impressive but they all have their faults, pretty sure non marines are told to aim for the joints when facing sphez marines.
They aren't invincible, but they're pretty close.
Slit their throat and their larraman cells are going to stop the bleeding right away. Unless you penetrate deep, which would be quite difficult considering Know No Fear states that they are "As tall as a tall man on another tall man's shoulders".
Compel wrote:
I think that's a pretty fair / logical summary of what would happen, all things considered...
Except that it means that their entire military was run by morons and their leaders didn't have brain one among them. Did they also form neat lines to be shot down in long bursts on full auto?
Ok, here's what *I* would do in the event of SM invasion. ATM Nasa monitors near Earth space for objects that mass around wast a SM strike cruiser does, particularly on Earth intercept, so a sneak attack is probably out. Plus that fact that in fluff the engines have outputs across multiple frequencies when underway comparable to small stars.
On determining hostile intent, I would deploy THELs and other interception systems to counter drop pods and re-issue W48's to all artillery units. This would be followed up by taking up tactical positions both in major cities and at prepared positions away from urban areas.
All long range Nuclear weapons would be launched, along with the Brilliant Pebbles prototype, if it still exists. Based on current estimates, this should be enough firepower on it's own to wipe out several hundred strike cruisers and battle barges, but I like to make sure.
Should any Thunderhawks penetrate interceptors and ground fire from the THELs et al, in close terrain they would be engaged with maximum force. In open ground, use of W48s would be authorized, followed up with air cav recon and close air support.
Given the average chapter is one thousand space marines, each loss is a much larger chunk of their effective fighting force then a similar loss would be to ground forces. Snipers would be under orders to target officers and heavy weapons teams as priority targets.
Obviously, all important personnel would be removed to remote and undisclosed locations.
Note: I just did this with nothing but the US military. (reasoning being that the US, Russia, and China would most likely top the list of countries to recruit or disable, and all have comparable weapons systems)
In all honesty it seems like most firearms could kill a marine with a lucky or very well placed shot. after all you can kill a marine in melee with just a gun butt (before anyone whines needlessly, might i point out that guardsman do this all the time in 40k games). Having something along the lines of a GL or a 50 cal with AP rounds would help.
.
sennacherib wrote:In all honesty it seems like most firearms could kill a marine with a lucky or very well placed shot. after all you can kill a marine in melee with just a gun butt (before anyone whines needlessly, might i point out that guardsman do this all the time in 40k games).
Yeah, but now comes the whine that the rules don't represent real SM.
I guess this thread was abused so some users could flex their ego :/
Sadly, the inconsistency of the universe is showing and no one is really accepting anything but their own narrow views.
I go with the nigh-unstoppable Space Marines myself. Where most rounds would just bounce off completely or just scratch the armor itself. Unless hit in a weak spot.
That's just me though, I'll let the narrow-minded approach continue, sorry for any inconvenience.
Actually, 90% of stab wounds are superficial, causing nothing more than tissue damage. also, a slash wound to the neck would take your average 5"7 man aproximately 3 minutes and 40-45 seconds to bleed out and die. the best place would actually be beneath the ribs with something like a butchers knife as you then cut the Descending Aorta close to the heart causing death through bloodloss in 42-50 seconds.
By the Way, My source is "Contemporary Knife Tergeting"
If you can put a crack in his armor or helmet would mustard gas and such forms of weaponry prove effective? I ask as I was trying to think of ways to harm a SM or rather distract him from a distance to open him up to a lethal assault (close or far) and eliminate some of the threat when getting in close.
DeathRex wrote:If you can put a crack in his armor or helmet would mustard gas and such forms of weaponry prove effective? I ask as I was trying to think of was to harm a SM or rather distract him long from a distance to open him up to a lethal assualt and eliminate some of the threat when getting in close.
Gas wouldn't do a single thing to SM they have the ability to drink poison and spit it back at people lol. They don't gave an ish about poisons or gases I'm afraid.
After having read the grey knights omnibus if you have enough bodies arrows can do it XD
DeathRex wrote:If you can put a crack in his armor or helmet would mustard gas and such forms of weaponry prove effective? I ask as I was trying to think of was to harm a SM or rather distract him long from a distance to open him up to a lethal assualt and eliminate some of the threat when getting in close.
Gas wouldn't do a single thing to SM they have the ability to drink poison and spit it back at people lol. They don't gave an ish about poisons or gases I'm afraid
Not strictly true, they can be poisoned, but as the level of toxicity to do it doesn't currently exist on Earth, it's a waste of time to try.
Compel wrote:
I think that's a pretty fair / logical summary of what would happen, all things considered...
Except that it means that their entire military was run by morons and their leaders didn't have brain one among them. Did they also form neat lines to be shot down in long bursts on full auto?
Ok, here's what *I* would do in the event of SM invasion. ATM Nasa monitors near Earth space for objects that mass around wast a SM strike cruiser does, particularly on Earth intercept, so a sneak attack is probably out. Plus that fact that in fluff the engines have outputs across multiple frequencies when underway comparable to small stars.
On determining hostile intent, I would deploy THELs and other interception systems to counter drop pods and re-issue W48's to all artillery units. This would be followed up by taking up tactical positions both in major cities and at prepared positions away from urban areas.
All long range Nuclear weapons would be launched, along with the Brilliant Pebbles prototype, if it still exists. Based on current estimates, this should be enough firepower on it's own to wipe out several hundred strike cruisers and battle barges, but I like to make sure.
Should any Thunderhawks penetrate interceptors and ground fire from the THELs et al, in close terrain they would be engaged with maximum force. In open ground, use of W48s would be authorized, followed up with air cav recon and close air support.
Given the average chapter is one thousand space marines, each loss is a much larger chunk of their effective fighting force then a similar loss would be to ground forces. Snipers would be under orders to target officers and heavy weapons teams as priority targets.
Obviously, all important personnel would be removed to remote and undisclosed locations.
Note: I just did this with nothing but the US military. (reasoning being that the US, Russia, and China would most likely top the list of countries to recruit or disable, and all have comparable weapons systems)
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
I think what gets forgotten is, Guardsmen wear tshirts that give them saves from swords, and a few types of guns (look at all the wondrful junger fighters with the tank tops.)
Gangers, Heritics, ect kill off Marines, Tau and Ork with swords (not just chain swords) with flint lock pistols, and with "lasguns" which seem weak enough. A flamer is a flamer is a flame thrower, and it seems to work just well too.
So I am guessing knives, fire, and most small arms would still work.
BaronIveagh wrote:
Except that it means that their entire military was run by morons and their leaders didn't have brain one among them. Did they also form neat lines to be shot down in long bursts on full auto?
Ok, here's what *I* would do in the event of SM invasion. ATM Nasa monitors near Earth space for objects that mass around wast a SM strike cruiser does, particularly on Earth intercept, so a sneak attack is probably out. Plus that fact that in fluff the engines have outputs across multiple frequencies when underway comparable to small stars.
On determining hostile intent, I would deploy THELs and other interception systems to counter drop pods and re-issue W48's to all artillery units. This would be followed up by taking up tactical positions both in major cities and at prepared positions away from urban areas.
All long range Nuclear weapons would be launched, along with the Brilliant Pebbles prototype, if it still exists. Based on current estimates, this should be enough firepower on it's own to wipe out several hundred strike cruisers and battle barges, but I like to make sure.
Should any Thunderhawks penetrate interceptors and ground fire from the THELs et al, in close terrain they would be engaged with maximum force. In open ground, use of W48s would be authorized, followed up with air cav recon and close air support.
Given the average chapter is one thousand space marines, each loss is a much larger chunk of their effective fighting force then a similar loss would be to ground forces. Snipers would be under orders to target officers and heavy weapons teams as priority targets.
Obviously, all important personnel would be removed to remote and undisclosed locations.
Note: I just did this with nothing but the US military. (reasoning being that the US, Russia, and China would most likely top the list of countries to recruit or disable, and all have comparable weapons systems)
Several problems.
First off; you don't know what the hell a Space Marine, or indeed a Strike Cruiser, is. Politically, all that prep will be absolutely impossible, plus you'll have ten thousand different generals all with their own ideas about what to do shouting at you. But let's assume that you get past all that, and get your deployments just like you like them. Even the nuclear shells. SO now we reach the REAL problems.
First; 'Long range' for a nuclear weapon means one planetary radius or less. Imperial warships engage at many times that range, and are capable of accelerating and maneuvering rapidly enough to make combat at interplanetary distances possible. You cannot hit the Strike Cruiser with your nukes; as soon as the Space Marines detect the launches, they simply move a few thousand kilometers away. ICBMs do not have the homing ability or fuel capacity to engage a starship. So now you've wasted your nuclear arsenal.
Second; You're not thinking this through. Imperial starships make interplanetary voyages at extremely high speed all the time; Warp Drives don't work close to gravity wells, remember? Their energy shields are armor are demonstrably up to the task of dealing with meteorites, which is what Brilliant Pebbles is; and, furthermore, remember that speed we were talking about? The Strike Cruiser can OUTRUN Brilliant Pebbles, then circle around the cloud. So the (unharmed) Strike Cruiser comes right back and, just to make sure, kills all the nuclear silos you launched from with kinetic and lance strikes from orbit. It then also kills your carefully-deployed artillery units, because it can detect large military deployments from orbit at least as well as a GPS satellite can. And while it's at it, it clears out all the satellites we've put up there, so no more GPS, satellite phones or satellite recon.
Third; THELs will do exactly jack gak against drop pods. A drop pod is large enough to carry several tons of Space Marines and/or equipment, making it MUCH larger and more heavily armored than a Katyusha rocket or artillery shell, and it is fired at the target location at extremely high velocity. Furthermore, it is armored specifically against thermal transfer, such as a laser; we know this because it can survive atmospheric entry intact. In order to have a good shot at taking out a descending drop pod you will need a full-size ABM system, at least; of which there are exactly two in the world. There's no particular reason to think the Strike Cruiser wouldn't also be able to detect those and kill them; but even if it didn't, the GBMD has a 50% failure rate on intercept tests to date against targets both much larger and with a much longer flight time than a drop pod, while the A-135 currently has had its long-range launchers offline for the past five years, and so can only intercept something within about 100 km of Moscow. You will not be able to stop the Space Marines from reaching the ground.
At this point the war is over. The Space Marines can land exactly where they please (with a small exclusion zone around Moscow, if they haven't taken out A-135), in whatever force they please. They can bombard anything they feel like bombarding on the surface; which includes little things like Air Force bases, airfields, and even naval battlegroups, so you're going to lose any long-range radar and air intercept capability pretty damn fast. It's actually IRRELEVANT how hard it is to kill Space Marines; just control of the orbitals is such a massive advantage that Earth would rapidly surrender without having to land them at all.
Lucre wrote:How many autogun shots does it take to take down a tactical marine?
Or shotgun shells?
In the last UM book Cato Sicarius lets a bird kebab him with a sword so he can crush her swede when she gets close. She sticks it right through him and cuts his heart in half, but because he has two, he simply winces in pain and then crushes her head, before jogging off somewhere.
He does rest on one knee for a bit after the battles over though.
I just heard the Heart or Rage Audio drama too, a guy gets stabbed in the heart with the blade in up to the hilt. Ten minutes later, bloods clotted, no sickness, no slowdown, chops a blokes crust off.
If these hulking masses of muscle have multiple major organs, harder skeletons and solid rib-cages, I think a shotgun wouldn't do enough damage. I mean, you could probably kill one with small arms and knives if you had him chained up and you pumped like 20 shots into the bloke, but in real terms (A fight) You would injure him with your shotgun only if you surpised him (they are way faster and have better reactions and such) and then he would happily rip your face off.
And thats if he is fighting with his balls out cos you suprised him when he was getting out of the shower. Who knows if they are wearing power armour.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Run at the SM with C4 strapped on. If the SM shoots the Taliban with his close range .75 RPG, BOOM! One dead or unconcious SM to be opened by a tank.
If the Taliban gets to the SM, it's *click* then BOOM! One dead or unconcious SM to be opened by a tank.
Why's it close range? It's a high-powered rifle, with the added benefit that the round itself has a rocket motor to extend its range, speed up the shell, and flatten the trajectory. A bolter (assuming that the technology could actually be put into practice in the manner it's described) should actually be an excellent sniper weapon.
RicBlasko wrote:I think what gets forgotten is, Guardsmen wear tshirts that give them saves from swords, and a few types of guns (look at all the wondrful junger fighters with the tank tops.)
Gangers, Heritics, ect kill off Marines, Tau and Ork with swords (not just chain swords) with flint lock pistols, and with "lasguns" which seem weak enough. A flamer is a flamer is a flame thrower, and it seems to work just well too.
So I am guessing knives, fire, and most small arms would still work.
Since when do tau kill marines with swords or flintlock pistols? And orks tech works because of psychic power, not any kind of actual black powder. They could forget the powder and it'll still work.
Automatically Appended Next Post: The following are firepower estimates of the IOM Naval mounted weaponry, using information garnered from Battlefleet Gothic:
From what we can gather, a the offensive capacity of a ship is divided between light-heavy Batteries, Lancers (Laser cannons), Torpedoes and the Nova Cannon.
- – -
“the forty men pulled harder at the traversing chains, heaving the massive barrel of the macro-cannon into position amidst the clank-clank-clank of rusty gears.
When it was open, the others bent their backs to the loading winch, ,lowering the shell, which weighed several tons, into the heart of the cannon.”
- Battlefleet Gothic
Weapons batteries (Otherwise known as macro cannons), loaded with a shell that weighs “several tons.” Going with the standard established velocity of 20,000 km/s for direct fire Imperial weapons weapons. At that mass/velocity, the kinetic energy of the projectile would be 400,000 terajoules, or just under 10 gigatons.
Conservative figures point to the Battleship firing “two hundred foot” torpedoes, which would be sixty meters long. Assuming that the diameter is 1/4 to 1/5 of the length, the torpedo would yield a diameter of around fifteen meters. To be further conservative, assume a density equal to water (yeah, I’m being ultra conservative here.) The mass of the torpedo in question would be between 6,800 and 10,600 tons.
Thus the kinetic energy of a torpedo is about 12,400,000,000 petajoules (Staggering really) with a momentum (Measured by calculating the speed and weight of the torpedo) between 6.6e16 kg*m/s and 1.05e17 kg*m/s.
Giving a single Torpedo a staggering yield of 2963 teratons (Or 2.9 petatons – Wow).
“A Nova cannon is a huge weapon, normally mounted in the prow of a ship so that the recoil it generates can be compensated for by the vessel’s engines. It fires a proejctile at incredible velocity, using graviometric impellers to accelerate it to close to light speed. The projectile implodes at a preset distance after firing, unleashing a force more potent than a dozen plasma bombs.”
- Battlefleet Gothic
Take note of how the ship has to compensate engine thrust to counter recoil – in a vacuum!
I would generally assume “close to light-speed” to mean at least 80-90% of C. The size of a Nova cannon shell is never given precisely, but the diameter of the shell is given in other sources (Fifty meters in “Warriors of Ultramar”), though a 30 meter diameter nova cannon is mentioned. Mass can be derived by assuming the length is at least equal to the diameter, or (more probably) a multiple of the diameter (2-3x longer than the diameter, for example. A fifty meter diameter shell would be a hundred and fifty meters long).
Example: Going by a 50×150 meter shell made of Iron (assume 30% solid, its supposed to be packed with explosive of unknown type and density) fired at .9c yields a shell mass of around 770,000 tons and and a kinetic energy rating of 90,000,000,000 petajoules (Holy gak!).
Giving the blast of a Nova cannon (The most powerful ship mounted Imperial weapon) a staggering yield of 22 petatons. For those of you struggling to comprehend these figures, this is a yield one million times greater than the heaviest Turbolaser available to the Star Wars universe.
Or for those less fantastically inclined, two to three million times the combined explosive power of every nuclear weapon on Earth throughout history.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
As pointed out earlier in the thread, a 350 kiloton nuke is equivalent to an entire broadside from a Lunar class cruiser in fluff.
BeRzErKeR wrote:
First; 'Long range' for a nuclear weapon means one planetary radius or less. Imperial warships engage at many times that range, and are capable of accelerating and maneuvering rapidly enough to make combat at interplanetary distances possible. You cannot hit the Strike Cruiser with your nukes; as soon as the Space Marines detect the launches, they simply move a few thousand kilometers away. ICBMs do not have the homing ability or fuel capacity to engage a starship. So now you've wasted your nuclear arsenal.
One, you seem to think that a nuke has to keep burning fuel while traveling through space. Two, while granted, a strike cruiser's maximum range is two planetary diameters from Earth, it has to move to one diameter to accurately hit anything on the surface. Three, modern ICBMs have built in navigational systems capable of real time course alterations, and they do also have maneuvering jets they use in space...
BeRzErKeR wrote:
Second; You're not thinking this through. Imperial starships make interplanetary voyages at extremely high speed all the time; Warp Drives don't work close to gravity wells, remember? Their energy shields are armor are demonstrably up to the task of dealing with meteorites, which is what Brilliant Pebbles is; and, furthermore, remember that speed we were talking about? The Strike Cruiser can OUTRUN Brilliant Pebbles, then circle around the cloud. So the (unharmed) Strike Cruiser comes right back and, just to make sure, kills all the nuclear silos you launched from with kinetic and lance strikes from orbit. It then also kills your carefully-deployed artillery units, because it can detect large military deployments from orbit at least as well as a GPS satellite can. And while it's at it, it clears out all the satellites we've put up there, so no more GPS, satellite phones or satellite recon.
A strike cruiser moves at 10km per second. That's the low end of Meteor speeds. So, no, jumping out of the way is not possible. Assuming you're firing at it moving head on, the relative speed can be over 38km per second, or nearly four times as fast as a strike cruiser can move. It is not going to be able to evade. A battle-barge is extra screwed, not only is it not maneuverable, it's also not as fast. You seem to be forgetting that SM have gak ships because they're not supposed to be fighting space battles.
Second: The average SM strike cruiser has minimal shielding.
On it's supposed sensor ability, I call watch the language please Cloudcover has interfered with a strike cruisers sensors in fluff. Even in BFK, it's little better then a decent quality map on a dataslate with a compass. Remember that when firing, shots can scatter over 20km without a beacon to lock onto (and this gets brought up in fluff as well)
BeRzErKeR wrote:
Third; THELs will do exactly jack gak against drop pods. A drop pod is large enough to carry several tons of Space Marines and/or equipment, making it MUCH larger and more heavily armored than a Katyusha rocket or artillery shell, and it is fired at the target location at extremely high velocity. Furthermore, it is armored specifically against thermal transfer, such as a laser; we know this because it can survive atmospheric entry intact. In order to have a good shot at taking out a descending drop pod you will need a full-size ABM system, at least; of which there are exactly two in the world. There's no particular reason to think the Strike Cruiser wouldn't also be able to detect those and kill them; but even if it didn't, the GBMD has a 50% failure rate on intercept tests to date against targets both much larger and with a much longer flight time than a drop pod, while the A-135 currently has had its long-range launchers offline for the past five years, and so can only intercept something within about 100 km of Moscow. You will not be able to stop the Space Marines from reaching the ground.
Fluff conflicts on drop pods and reentry. Current codex says that they are slowed enough that they do not experience significant reentry heat, so I'm going with it. This means that it is dropping much slower then you think. Given that, you don't have to punch through to kill it, just cause an uncontrolled decent by damaging it's thrusters. I'll go out on a limb and call a THEL as powerful as a lascannon, which has no trouble punching through a drop pod.
BeRzErKeR wrote:
At this point the war is over. The Space Marines can land exactly where they please (with a small exclusion zone around Moscow, if they haven't taken out A-135), in whatever force they please. They can bombard anything they feel like bombarding on the surface; which includes little things like Air Force bases, airfields, and even naval battlegroups, so you're going to lose any long-range radar and air intercept capability pretty damn fast. It's actually IRRELEVANT how hard it is to kill Space Marines; just control of the orbitals is such a massive advantage that Earth would rapidly surrender without having to land them at all.
You might want to check just how much damage a hit from a bombardment cannon does. Using fluff, it takes 3 (iirc) hits to penetrate a single bunker in Nightbringer. Using the rules in BFK, it's a nasty hit to a smaller unit, but not as effective against a larger one, and generally ignored by anything Titan sized, like, say, an aircraft carrier or battleship. And a chapter has a max of 10 of them that can fire on average about once every 20 min or so. Oh, and, btw: you never did address what happens that the SM survive those W48 artillery shells landing on them in their deployment areas. Being thermonuclear weapons, they have a bit more kick then an earthshaker, which has little to no problem making even the best SM gear go boom.
Amusingly, I'll also point out that BFK, the difference between the modern US army and the Imperial Guard is the US gets a +2 bonus and they get a +3 bonus. Given the numbers being dealt in, that's a very, very slim difference.
BaronIveagh wrote:
As pointed out earlier in the thread, a 350 kiloton nuke is equivalent to an entire broadside from a Lunar class cruiser in fluff.
So? That still doesn't mean that we can penetrate it's Void Shields or destroy it with just one nuke. And it would be hilarious to even think about trying to shot down Impwerial ships in planetary orbit with our slow rockets.
I am still curious how you guys came to that conclusion, since I looked for Lunar class and only info I could find is "reasonable lance and weapon battery armament, and a fair torpedo capability" and " It also possesses enough shielding and armour to enable it to get to the range of its weapons relatively unscathed". I didn't see anything that tells me "this weapon has this much power output? or "Lunar class lance batteries have this kind of output" etc... Where does it say in fluff that entire broadside from a Lunar class cruiser is equal to 350 kiloton of energy?
And to that note we woudl still lose badly against Imperial Navy, we have nothing to scratch Emperor class Battleship. And they also have this:
We have nothing to counter Exterminatus bomb or the fleet of Imperial navy ships.And someone pointed out Tau Railguns, well let me tell you that Tau ships have great number of Railguns as their main weapons. And they are almost useless against medium to big Imperium ships. When a Battlecrueser destroyed Tau largest Battleship what can we say who lack those weapons?
im2randomghgh wrote:
Weapons batteries (Otherwise known as macro cannons), loaded with a shell that weighs “several tons.” Going with the standard established velocity of 20,000 km/s for direct fire Imperial weapons weapons. At that mass/velocity, the kinetic energy of the projectile would be 400,000 terajoules, or just under 10 gigatons.
Except that this has been retconned (twice) and now they only hit with a few kilotons spread out over a 10-20km area when used for surface bombardments.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Conservative figures point to the Battleship firing “two hundred foot” torpedoes, which would be sixty meters long. Assuming that the diameter is 1/4 to 1/5 of the length, the torpedo would yield a diameter of around fifteen meters. To be further conservative, assume a density equal to water (yeah, I’m being ultra conservative here.) The mass of the torpedo in question would be between 6,800 and 10,600 tons.
Thus the kinetic energy of a torpedo is about 12,400,000,000 petajoules (Staggering really) with a momentum (Measured by calculating the speed and weight of the torpedo) between 6.6e16 kg*m/s and 1.05e17 kg*m/s.
Giving a single Torpedo a staggering yield of 2963 teratons (Or 2.9 petatons – Wow).
Two problems here: Your ultra conservative numbers assume the entire object is made of a uniformly dense material, and not, say, empty space. Which, it is, since they are powered by an unstable plasma reactor, not, say, some sort of solid or liquid fuel they burn through. And, two, Like a lot of other things about 40k, they never really explain why it's 60 meters long, since it only contains two things, and both of them are fairly small. 1 two hundred kiloton warhead, and one unstable plasma reactor to move it, plus guidance system. All those things would fit in in a '72 Buick Skylark so why it takes 60 meters of torpedo to deliver it, I have no idea.
They also only travel something like 16km per sec, so you might want to check your math there.
im2randomghgh wrote:
“A Nova cannon is a huge weapon, normally mounted in the prow of a ship so that the recoil it generates can be compensated for by the vessel’s engines. It fires a proejctile at incredible velocity, using graviometric impellers to accelerate it to close to light speed. The projectile implodes at a preset distance after firing, unleashing a force more potent than a dozen plasma bombs.”
Again: retconned. A Nova Cannon is now a linear accelerator as of BFK, so the recoil thing is out, and the speed has been dropped to a small fraction of C. And, it all sounds very fancy, but a dozen plasma bombs has a blast radius around a km in fluff and crunch. The Nova cannon now has damage roughly that of a macrocannon broadside, it's simply much, much longer range. There are, however, vortex variants. As far as shell size, again, it's not mentioned, however, it's been all the way down to ten meters long, depending on who's writing.
BTW: by Imperial law, SM are forbidden specifically anti-ship weapons such as the Nova Cannon. (Don't ask me why, it makes no sense, but it came up again and again when we did FAQ 2010 and tried to give them lances)
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Brother Coa wrote:
So? That still doesn't mean that we can penetrate it's Void Shields or destroy it with just one nuke. And it would be hilarious to even think about trying to shot down Impwerial ships in planetary orbit with our slow rockets.
I am still curious how you guys came to that conclusion, since I looked for Lunar class and only info I could find is "reasonable lance and weapon battery armament, and a fair torpedo capability" and " It also possesses enough shielding and armour to enable it to get to the range of its weapons relatively unscathed". I didn't see anything that tells me "this weapon has this much power output? or "Lunar class lance batteries have this kind of output" etc... Where does it say in fluff that entire broadside from a Lunar class cruiser is equal to 350 kiloton of energy?
Pick up a copy of the Rogue Trader corebook and Battlefleet Koronus, available now at Drivethru RPG and other fine retailers. And now I feel like HBMC for some strange reason...
Brother Coa wrote:
And to that note we woudl still lose badly against Imperial Navy, we have nothing to scratch Emperor class Battleship. And they also have this:
*snip*
We have nothing to counter Exterminatus bomb or the fleet of Imperial navy ships. And someone pointed out Tau Railguns, well let me tell you that Tau ships have great number of Railguns as their main weapons. And they are almost useless against medium to big Imperium ships. When a Battlecrueser destroyed Tau largest Battleship what can we say who lack those weapons?
Ok, deep breath. No, we do not have protection from Exterminatus. The Imperium doesn't either. No one does. It's sort of the point.
Well, first, define 'fleet' since are we talking a small battlegroup or the entirety of the Segmentum Pacificus emptying out? Granted, IN would clean our clocks. SM however, have terrible ships. By law, in 40k fluff. This was deliberately done following the Horus Heresy, along with breaking up the Legions.
And, it died because the plot called for it, if you count how much of it's systems are immediately shot off in the first volley in, what in game would be, rolling nothing but crits by every single ship that fired. I've done the historic refights for that one. I have not lost it as the Tau yet.
A far as us killing an Emperor class, again, no idea, but they suck against ground targets, being basically carriers, so... unless it's ramming the planet or dropping an Exterminatus weapon...
BaronIveagh wrote:
Ok, deep breath. No, we do not have protection from Exterminatus. The Imperium doesn't either. No one does. It's sort of the point.
Well, first, define 'fleet' since are we talking a small battlegroup or the entirety of the Segmentum Pacificus emptying out? Granted, IN would clean our clocks. SM however, have terrible ships. By law, in 40k fluff. This was deliberately done following the Horus Heresy, along with breaking up the Legions.
This Ultramarines Battle Barge disagree with you:
If Space Marine Battle Barge can do that to a planet from that distance then Imperial Navy can get us kicked with a press of a button.
And, it died because the plot called for it, if you count how much of it's systems are immediately shot off in the first volley in, what in game would be, rolling nothing but crits by every single ship that fired. I've done the historic refights for that one. I have not lost it as the Tau yet.
TT rules =/= fluff.
In fluff Tau fleet suck against Imperial Navy.
A far as us killing an Emperor class, again, no idea, but they suck against ground targets, being basically carriers, so... unless it's ramming the planet or dropping an Exterminatus weapon...
Like Imperial Navy can't equip their ships with weapons that can be used to devastate entire cities in one blow.
Except that this has been retconned (twice) and now they only hit with a few kilotons spread out over a 10-20km area when used for surface bombardments.
No. GW never gave figures for the yield of these weapons, to get solid numbers we have to use math and the size of the shells. 10 Gigatons. And this is auto-weaponry too. The starship equivalent of an autocannon.
Two problems here: Your ultra conservative numbers assume the entire object is made of a uniformly dense material, and not, say, empty space. Which, it is, since they are powered by an unstable plasma reactor, not, say, some sort of solid or liquid fuel they burn through. And, two, Like a lot of other things about 40k, they never really explain why it's 60 meters long, since it only contains two things, and both of them are fairly small. 1 two hundred kiloton warhead, and one unstable plasma reactor to move it, plus guidance system. All those things would fit in in a '72 Buick Skylark so why it takes 60 meters of torpedo to deliver it, I have no idea.
LOL You actually think assuming the density of a warhead to be the same as water is liberal? YOU are also guessing that they're using hollow-point rounds in space? That's just silly. And it's huge because everything is bigger in 40k. My figures didn't even figure in the warhead, they were just direct impact.
They also only travel something like 16km per sec, so you might want to check your math there.
#number he pulled out of his ass.
Again: retconned. A Nova Cannon is now a linear accelerator as of BFK, so the recoil thing is out, and the speed has been dropped to a small fraction of C. And, it all sounds very fancy, but a dozen plasma bombs has a blast radius around a km in fluff and crunch. The Nova cannon now has damage roughly that of a macrocannon broadside, it's simply much, much longer range. There are, however, vortex variants. As far as shell size, again, it's not mentioned, however, it's been all the way down to ten meters long, depending on who's writing.
I acknowledge the linear accelerator part, but they have NOT been dropped to a small fraction of C. They are NOT 10m (Hell Forged used several dozen metre long nova cannon shells that critically damage a space hulk in one hit) it is only comparable to a broadside if you're using BFG rules.
BTW: by Imperial law, SM are forbidden specifically anti-ship weapons such as the Nova Cannon. (Don't ask me why, it makes no sense, but it came up again and again when we did FAQ 2010 and tried to give them lances)
It doesn't make sense to me either, but I am fairly sure that the Phalanx has nova cannons, so yes, Space Marines can still blast your face off with nova cannons.
Any modern weapon could kill an Astartes, I'd say. It would just take a lot of skill and/or luck.
Their armour has joints, which are a weak point. A high calibre round to the joint between their leg and pelvis would probably shatter the bone, then you just wait for them to bleed out or shoot them again when they're down.
Alternatively there's the gap between the helmet and chest armour. Get a shot into there and sever the spinal cord. One dead marine.
Brother Coa wrote:
If Space Marine Battle Barge can do that to a planet from that distance then Imperial Navy can get us kicked with a press of a button.
Yeah, and Ultramarines battle barge also has weapons forbidden to SM in the Codex Astartes on it, if that lance hit is from it. Serous issue with canon there, as it's an Ultramarines battlebarge. (And, for those of you who are getting ready to scream but, but SEDITIO OPPRIMERE I might point out that it has since been retconned with extreme prejudice as of page 58 of FAQ 2010)
Brother Coa wrote:
TT rules =/= fluff.
In fluff Tau fleet suck against Imperial Navy.
Until FAQ 2010 they did. Now they're expressly equal to it in fluff.
Brother Coa wrote:
Like Imperial Navy can't equip their ships with weapons that can be used to devastate entire cities in one blow.
Yes, but that blow usually also involves blowing up the entire planet. A lance strike is absolutely lethal for a half km or so, and deals minor structural damage for another km. A city takes extensive bombardment to kill, with even SM strike cruisers, which are specifically designed for planetary bombardment, only do middling damage. (both in TT rules and in fluff)
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im2randomghgh wrote:
No. GW never gave figures for the yield of these weapons, to get solid numbers we have to use math and the size of the shells. 10 Gigatons. And this is auto-weaponry too. The starship equivalent of an autocannon.
No, FFG wrote it, GW said it was canon, and if you don't like that, take it up with GW.
im2randomghgh wrote:
#number he pulled out of his ass.
Using BFG scale, an Imperial torp travels at 60,000 kmph. Divide it by 60 twice. 16.666 km per sec
im2randomghgh wrote:
I acknowledge the linear accelerator part, but they have NOT been dropped to a small fraction of C. They are NOT 10m (Hell Forged used several dozen metre long nova cannon shells that critically damage a space hulk in one hit) it is only comparable to a broadside if you're using BFG rules.
Or any other space ships game they've ever made. And, again, read the NC section in BFK. Wasn't aware that they had a meter long version, but makes sense with the Jovian pattern. Each one is a Vortex warhead.
im2randomghgh wrote:
It doesn't make sense to me either, but I am fairly sure that the Phalanx has nova cannons, so yes, Space Marines can still blast your face off with nova cannons.
Yes, but since fluff does not agree on what the Phalanx even looks like, and no place does it mention nova cannons, I'm calling BS on that as you have no evidence they do, and I have the statements in the Codex Astates that they're not supposed to. Hell, in the section on the Nova frigate in BFG:A they talk about how the navy and Inquisition don't like they have a single lance armed frigate.
I would like to point out its probably not a good idea to be chucking around '-tons' of anything without some serious context and analysis of how it does damage. Considering that the Imperium uses focused beams as well as omnidirectional explosives as its weapons, you're not going to get the same effects. Nevermind that thermal effects and 'blast' effects won't behave the same either (how 40K gets blast effects in space is a mystery, but they do, and they're *persistant* effects. Which ranks right up there with their weird plasma.)
Fun fact: you could theoretically kill all life on the planet if you dumped enough HE fragmentation shells on it (a couple trillion to be exact.) Yet that same explosive payload in nukes would not necceesarily do the same thing (I think it was 100 million tons of composition B, which is.. 100 megatons)
Also as a counterpoint: we know they drop megaton range bombardments simply as tactical/planetary bombardments not designed to screw over the planet (Planetstrike, 3rd/4th ed. 'Nid codex I forget which - it was describing the land battle when BEhemoth attacked MacRagge.) And the FFG Rogue trader stuff describes orbital bombardment lances vaporizing square kilometers of land and/or water (which is far more than 'kilotons', particulariyl for water.) You get tons of stuff like that in the novels too.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Sorry, missed this earlier.
Does the article take into account the effects of radiation on the environment?
Nuclear blasts aren't what will deliver the deathblow, fallout will.
Brother Coa wrote:
Like Imperial Navy can't equip their ships with weapons that can be used to devastate entire cities in one blow.
Yes, but that blow usually also involves blowing up the entire planet. A lance strike is absolutely lethal for a half km or so, and deals minor structural damage for another km. A city takes extensive bombardment to kill, with even SM strike cruisers, which are specifically designed for planetary bombardment, only do middling damage. (both in TT rules and in fluff)
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im2randomghgh wrote:
No. GW never gave figures for the yield of these weapons, to get solid numbers we have to use math and the size of the shells. 10 Gigatons. And this is auto-weaponry too. The starship equivalent of an autocannon.
No, FFG wrote it, GW said it was canon, and if you don't like that, take it up with GW.
im2randomghgh wrote:
#number he pulled out of his ass.
Using BFG scale, an Imperial torp travels at 60,000 kmph. Divide it by 60 twice. 16.666 km per sec
im2randomghgh wrote:
I acknowledge the linear accelerator part, but they have NOT been dropped to a small fraction of C. They are NOT 10m (Hell Forged used several dozen metre long nova cannon shells that critically damage a space hulk in one hit) it is only comparable to a broadside if you're using BFG rules.
Or any other space ships game they've ever made. And, again, read the NC section in BFK. Wasn't aware that they had a meter long version, but makes sense with the Jovian pattern. Each one is a Vortex warhead.
im2randomghgh wrote:
It doesn't make sense to me either, but I am fairly sure that the Phalanx has nova cannons, so yes, Space Marines can still blast your face off with nova cannons.
Yes, but since fluff does not agree on what the Phalanx even looks like, and no place does it mention nova cannons, I'm calling BS on that as you have no evidence they do, and I have the statements in the Codex Astates that they're not supposed to. Hell, in the section on the Nova frigate in BFG:A they talk about how the navy and Inquisition don't like they have a single lance armed frigate.
1. Imperial ships are consistently described as having continent-shattering weaponry.
2. If you don't like math, take it up with someone who is willing to not use math.
3. using TT scale, railguns have a range of about 300 feet when in reality, they have range closer to 30 nautical miles. That means it is about 1:630 in terms of range. 60,000Km/h x 630 = FTL. TT scale =/= in universe.
4. Again, you're using TT mechanics to argue against physics. And no, I did not say "several dozen, meter long" rounds, I said "several dozen meter long rounds" as in rounds that are several dozen meters long.
5.
Her foredeck is so large that it can dock a dozen large cruisers and has developed its own ecosystem, complete with unique species of animal life which have had their own evolutionary history aboard the ship
I can dock a dozen large cruisers, meaning grand cruisers, which can and do have Nova cannons. Therefore, nova cannons are a part of it's arsenal.
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Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
BlaxicanX wrote:
Gorskar.da.Lost wrote:
im2randomghgh wrote:
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Sorry, missed this earlier.
Does the article take into account the effects of radiation on the environment?
Nuclear blasts aren't what will deliver the deathblow, fallout will.
With a fraction of a percent of the necessary nukes, I highly doubt it would be sufficient.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Sorry, missed this earlier.
Does the article take into account the effects of radiation on the environment?
Nuclear blasts aren't what will deliver the deathblow, fallout will.
It doesn't. It also doesn't take into account the effects on the infrastructure of the countries hit. It's a pretty flawed estimate of how many nuclear weapons are required for destruction of our race.
Realistically? If the marine wasn't in armor, any modern weapon could kill a marine. He may have a greater chance of surviving wounds and whatnot, but a rifle round to the skull would likely do him in just as much as a lascannon would. Astartes have highly enhanced bone structures, and healing mechanisms, but a bullet that would turn a human head into spaghetti sauce spread over a room would likely still kill a Space Marine even if it didn't totally annihilate the skull in the same way. Anything heavier likely wouldn't have much more difficulty either. If it'll kill an elephant or a gorilla, it'll likely kill a Space Marine as well.
In armor? well, that's different, because that varies highly depending on author and protagonist/antogonist standing. In some fluff lasgun blasts can crack the ceramite plate of an SM's chestguard and work their way through, in other fluff, it might as well literally be a flashlight.
A 40mm grenade likely wouldn't leave a Space Marine the happiest of campers on a direct hit, there's a good possiblity that he may sustain internal injuries or even death through the armor from kinetic shock even if it doesn't penetrate the armor (same reason you can still break ribs and rupture organs if hit by a buller while wearing a bullet proof vest), though a near miss or mere shrapnel probably wouldn't bother him much.
Realistically autocannon fire would probably kill him inside the armor even assuming it didn't penetrate (I tend to see SM armor saves against autocannons in game as saving against near hits from explosive rounds, and the failures as sustaining direct hits from autocannon shells). Many modern autocannons can pulp an Elephant with a direct hit through half a meter of concrete, an SM surviving a direct hit would be unlikely, though they may have little or nothing to fear from blast/shrapnel from near misses that would otherwise annihilate normal infantry.
Dedicated anti-tank weaponry of any sort would likely leave *very* dead (read: likely non-existent) unless his ceramite armor really is providing the functional equivalent of more than 260mm of hardened steel in the case of a 50 year old soviet RPG-7 or over a full meter (1000mm+) of hardened steel in the case of many modern 120mm anti-tank rounds, which I doubt.
One must remember that SM's quite often are written with a large amount of plot armor or not depending on author and circumstance, and the game is really much more Fantasy in Space than Science Fiction.
Too many people underestimate just how ridiculously capable modern day weaponry really is, especially when compared with 40k units/weapons. A modern MBT could put a shell capable of penetrating a meter of armor-grade steel through a 2.5m tall space marine (in armor) at 2,000m downrange while moving at highway speeds with a ~90% success rate about 10 times a minute.
Vaktathi wrote:Realistically? If the marine wasn't in armor, any modern weapon could kill a marine. He may have a greater chance of surviving wounds and whatnot, but a rifle round to the skull would likely do him in just as much as a lascannon would. Astartes have highly enhanced bone structures, and healing mechanisms, but a bullet that would turn a human head into spaghetti sauce spread over a room would likely still kill a Space Marine even if it didn't totally annihilate the skull in the same way. Anything heavier likely wouldn't have much more difficulty either. If it'll kill an elephant or a gorilla, it'll likely kill a Space Marine as well.
In armor? well, that's different, because that varies highly depending on author and protagonist/antogonist standing. In some fluff lasgun blasts can crack the ceramite plate of an SM's chestguard and work their way through, in other fluff, it might as well literally be a flashlight.
A 40mm grenade likely wouldn't leave a Space Marine the happiest of campers on a direct hit, there's a good possiblity that he may sustain internal injuries or even death through the armor from kinetic shock even if it doesn't penetrate the armor (same reason you can still break ribs and rupture organs if hit by a buller while wearing a bullet proof vest), though a near miss or mere shrapnel probably wouldn't bother him much.
Realistically autocannon fire would probably kill him inside the armor even assuming it didn't penetrate (I tend to see SM armor saves against autocannons in game as saving against near hits from explosive rounds, and the failures as sustaining direct hits from autocannon shells). Many modern autocannons can pulp an Elephant with a direct hit through half a meter of concrete, an SM surviving a direct hit would be unlikely, though they may have little or nothing to fear from blast/shrapnel from near misses that would otherwise annihilate normal infantry.
Dedicated anti-tank weaponry of any sort would likely leave *very* dead (read: likely non-existent) unless his ceramite armor really is providing the functional equivalent of more than 260mm of hardened steel in the case of a 50 year old soviet RPG-7 or over a full meter (1000mm+) of hardened steel in the case of many modern 120mm anti-tank rounds, which I doubt.
One must remember that SM's quite often are written with a large amount of plot armor or not depending on author and circumstance, and the game is really much more Fantasy in Space than Science Fiction.
Too many people underestimate just how ridiculously capable modern day weaponry really is, especially when compared with 40k units/weapons. A modern MBT could put a shell capable of penetrating a meter of armor-grade steel through a 2.5m tall space marine (in armor) at 2,000m downrange while moving at highway speeds with a ~90% success rate about 10 times a minute.
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines. Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc. this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce. In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction, taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms) and armour that only sci-fi anti-tank can kill.
In a vacuum, a lot could kill a space marine. But in practise, assuming a scenario where there is no situational advantages to either side (IE. Chapter VS. Earth, with all the resources that either side would be dedicated, and assuming standard behavior of each side), the space marines would win. They simply aren't going to face us in a way that we are prepared to deal with. Hell, the mere fact that they will have orbital supremacy, discounting exterminatus, we are going to assume they don't want to use it for whatever reason, secures them the win. There is no frontline for this conflict, they can strike where they want, when they want. They won't land where we have anti tank guns that will pulp them, they are going to fight where the advantage is theirs, strike hard, strike fast, and leave before an effective counter can be launched. Of course assuming that the space marines are going to line up in a nice orderly fashion and wait to be hit is going to result in them all dying. If our armies did the same thing to them, we would also get pulped. These arguments always end up stacking the odds in one sides favor, and using that as proof that the side would win.
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
Not a problem for modern MBT's. Modern MBT's like Leopard 2's and Abrams tanks can hit moving 2Mx2M targets while themselves moving at highway speeds at very long ranges with very high success rates.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines.
Lasguns probably would do stuff to unarmored vehicles, just like modern rifles do. Civilan cars, transport trucks, etc don't like rifle fire and I imagine wouldn't like lasgun fire. To armored vehicles? Probably not, nothing in 40k lore suggests that they would be a threat to such vehicles.
Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc.
That's getting more than a wee bit silly here, there is absolutely nothing in any 40k lore, depiction or representation to support that. Especially not Bolters slaying battle tanks. Quite often mere walls and the like provide cover from bolter fire in fluff.
this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce.
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms)
Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Sorry, missed this earlier.
Does the article take into account the effects of radiation on the environment?
Nuclear blasts aren't what will deliver the deathblow, fallout will.
With a fraction of a percent of the necessary nukes, I highly doubt it would be sufficient.
Those are pictures of present day Hiroshima.
Hiroshima was hit by an atom bomb, though, and not a modern ICBM. Those are a hell of a lot more powerful.
I'm not sure we can count Hiroshima as a viable example in terms of recovery from an all-out nuclear strike, no matter how impressive and inspiring their recovery.
Long range nuclear weapons would be nowhere near powerful enough to destroy a strike cruiser, even the few hundred capable of leaving the atmosphere. I'll have to look for it, but I had found estimates putting macro cannon rounds at several tens of thousands of times more powerful than every nuke every made by humans, put together.
That seems highly unlikely, given that a single macro-cannon round would therefore be capable of wiping out all life on a planet, something all of those nukes could certainly do.
Sorry, missed this earlier.
Does the article take into account the effects of radiation on the environment?
Nuclear blasts aren't what will deliver the deathblow, fallout will.
With a fraction of a percent of the necessary nukes, I highly doubt it would be sufficient.
Those are pictures of present day Hiroshima.
Hiroshima was hit by an atom bomb, though, and not a modern ICBM. Those are a hell of a lot more powerful.
I'm not sure we can count Hiroshima as a viable example in terms of recovery from an all-out nuclear strike, no matter how impressive and inspiring their recovery.
Agreed. After total nuclear war there would be no economy or infrastructure left to facilitate recovery, so Hiroshima today is a null point. You'd rather have to look at Hiroshima immediately after it was hit and apply that to most major cities and places of tactical significance (military facilities, power stations etc.).
im2randomghgh wrote:Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
You may want to revise that velocity, because as it is that Space Marine is running one hundred times faster than the speed of sound
Connor MacLeod wrote: And the FFG Rogue trader stuff describes orbital bombardment lances vaporizing square kilometers of land and/or water (which is far more than 'kilotons', particulariyl for water.) You get tons of stuff like that in the novels too.
In FFG it's actually only a half km, with, oddly, no explosion, just the thermal effects from the bloom. Which is why the marines in planetstrike are not killed when three lance strike hits only 50 yards from them. vaporizing a greater daemon of nurgle and a hoard of Death Guard, because Space Marines can slaughter entire hoards of other space marines much more experienced then they are, who are also juicing on the power of the warp, because of their plot based powers.
im2randomghgh wrote:
1. Imperial ships are consistently described as having continent-shattering weaponry.
And juggernauts of Khorne are unstoppable daemon engines. You might want to look up 'hyperbola'.
im2randomghgh wrote:
2. If you don't like math, take it up with someone who is willing to not use math.
Your basis was that there was no fluff, when there was. You can't claim fluff and plot armor trump reality when talking about SM in combat and at the same time insistat that math and physics have to apply to 40k ships. Expect to get call out on such hypocrisy.
im2randomghgh wrote:
3. using TT scale, railguns have a range of about 300 feet when in reality, they have range closer to 30 nautical miles. That means it is about 1:630 in terms of range. 60,000Km/h x 630 = FTL. TT scale =/= in universe.
Um, no, on TT railguns can have a range of 45,000 km. Judging by your posts, you have never played BFG, and have little idea what you are talking about.
im2randomghgh wrote:
4. Again, you're using TT mechanics to argue against physics. And no, I did not say "several dozen, meter long" rounds, I said "several dozen meter long rounds" as in rounds that are several dozen meters long.
Because your argument is that fluff trumps reality for the SM, but reality trumps fluff for ships? Or we could use the 2,500 kmph number from BFK. Somehow though I find it hard to believe that they're that slow.
Her foredeck is so large that it can dock a dozen large cruisers and has developed its own ecosystem, complete with unique species of animal life which have had their own evolutionary history aboard the ship
Yes, but in Flight of the Eisenstein, they cannot take a frigate on board as it's too large. So, again, they cannot even agree on the most basic details of it between books.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines. Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc. this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce. In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction, taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms) and armour that only sci-fi anti-tank can kill.
So, in essence 'You can't kill SM with modern weapons because I say so!'
And, btw: your space marine would burn his armor off trying to run at 30km per sec inside an atmosphere, since he'd be running at Mach 87.
Vaktathi wrote:
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
Incidentally, in fluff Marines have been killed by hoards of plague zombies.
Vaktathi wrote:Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
I can't either, but I do remember one worrying about being shot without his armor, as even a handgun could kill him now. (The Killing Ground)
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
Not a problem for modern MBT's. Modern MBT's like Leopard 2's and Abrams tanks can hit moving 2Mx2M targets while themselves moving at highway speeds at very long ranges with very high success rates.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines.
Lasguns probably would do stuff to unarmored vehicles, just like modern rifles do. Civilan cars, transport trucks, etc don't like rifle fire and I imagine wouldn't like lasgun fire. To armored vehicles? Probably not, nothing in 40k lore suggests that they would be a threat to such vehicles.
Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc.
That's getting more than a wee bit silly here, there is absolutely nothing in any 40k lore, depiction or representation to support that. Especially not Bolters slaying battle tanks. Quite often mere walls and the like provide cover from bolter fire in fluff.
this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce.
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms)
Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
1. Again, you are imagining a target such as a vehicle. Marines are not going to run in a straight line. They can duck, weave, reverse on a dime, zigzag etc. do thing normal 2x2 targets (like motorcycles or ultra-compact vehicles) could never hope to do.
2. Well being able to blow off limbs suggest power similar to a .50cal on the standard setting, and .50cal are a serious threat to vehicles. Also, they can be cranked up powerful enough to make an exit hole too on most lightly-medium light armoured vehicles. When you overcharge you could damage a tank (since overcharge can crack dreadnoughts)
3. I admit bolts wouldn't do much to heavy armour, but really any vehicle <45tons would be boned. These are rapid firing, .75 cal armour piercing warheads, which would detonate inside the vehicle after having pierced the outside. Even the Space Marine game let's you demolish most greenskin cover with bolts.
4. Well the general standard seems to be that not much outside of heavy weapons can damage the main parts of the plate, but have very limited rubber armour they need to penetrate with a direct hit to the joints. Unless it happens to be a sword in which case it will someone do more damage than lasers and shotguns #40kproblems.
5. Not unstoppable unarmoured, but more than capable of taking out 1-4 armed and trained humans, unless they're sororitas/ST.
6. The Last Detail, a Dark Hunters short story, has a space marine sans armour get hit with a full fusillade of lasguns fire and then get angry and charge the humans who fired at him, and murder their asses.
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
Not a problem for modern MBT's. Modern MBT's like Leopard 2's and Abrams tanks can hit moving 2Mx2M targets while themselves moving at highway speeds at very long ranges with very high success rates.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines.
Lasguns probably would do stuff to unarmored vehicles, just like modern rifles do. Civilan cars, transport trucks, etc don't like rifle fire and I imagine wouldn't like lasgun fire. To armored vehicles? Probably not, nothing in 40k lore suggests that they would be a threat to such vehicles.
Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc.
That's getting more than a wee bit silly here, there is absolutely nothing in any 40k lore, depiction or representation to support that. Especially not Bolters slaying battle tanks. Quite often mere walls and the like provide cover from bolter fire in fluff.
this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce.
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms)
Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
1. Again, you are imagining a target such as a vehicle. Marines are not going to run in a straight line. They can duck, weave, reverse on a dime, zigzag etc. do thing normal 2x2 targets (like motorcycles or ultra-compact vehicles) could never hope to do.
A Space Marine is 2 to 2.4 metres tall and wearing very bulky armour. Modern Battle Tanks have auto tracking systems, laser range finding and computers to calculate the required trajectory of the shot. It doesn't matter how he moves, it will still be able to track him and fire a shot with enough accuracy to take him out. He couldn't "reverse on a dime" if he was running flat out. Try running full speed and then just stopping instantly and running the opposite way. You fall over. He'd have to decelerate first and when he does, boom.
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
Not a problem for modern MBT's. Modern MBT's like Leopard 2's and Abrams tanks can hit moving 2Mx2M targets while themselves moving at highway speeds at very long ranges with very high success rates.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines.
Lasguns probably would do stuff to unarmored vehicles, just like modern rifles do. Civilan cars, transport trucks, etc don't like rifle fire and I imagine wouldn't like lasgun fire. To armored vehicles? Probably not, nothing in 40k lore suggests that they would be a threat to such vehicles.
Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc.
That's getting more than a wee bit silly here, there is absolutely nothing in any 40k lore, depiction or representation to support that. Especially not Bolters slaying battle tanks. Quite often mere walls and the like provide cover from bolter fire in fluff.
this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce.
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms)
Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
1. Again, you are imagining a target such as a vehicle. Marines are not going to run in a straight line. They can duck, weave, reverse on a dime, zigzag etc. do thing normal 2x2 targets (like motorcycles or ultra-compact vehicles) could never hope to do.
A Space Marine is 2 to 2.4 metres tall and wearing very bulky armour. Modern Battle Tanks have auto tracking systems, laser range finding and computers to calculate the required trajectory of the shot. It doesn't matter how he moves, it will still be able to track him and fire a shot with enough accuracy to take him out. He couldn't "reverse on a dime" if he was running flat out. Try running full speed and then just stopping instantly and running the opposite way. You fall over. He'd have to decelerate first and when he does, boom.
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
Assuming he is standing still, and not running at 30 km/s.
Not a problem for modern MBT's. Modern MBT's like Leopard 2's and Abrams tanks can hit moving 2Mx2M targets while themselves moving at highway speeds at very long ranges with very high success rates.
And as I see it, plot armour is as inherent a part of marine as anything else, and needs to be taken into account as much as is possible. IRL lasguns would be a real threat to vehicles but in 40k they barely do anything to marines.
Lasguns probably would do stuff to unarmored vehicles, just like modern rifles do. Civilan cars, transport trucks, etc don't like rifle fire and I imagine wouldn't like lasgun fire. To armored vehicles? Probably not, nothing in 40k lore suggests that they would be a threat to such vehicles.
Boltguns would be tank-slayers, lascannons would work like bloodlances etc.
That's getting more than a wee bit silly here, there is absolutely nothing in any 40k lore, depiction or representation to support that. Especially not Bolters slaying battle tanks. Quite often mere walls and the like provide cover from bolter fire in fluff.
this means that their armour is stronger than we could logically deduce.
The bigger issue is consistency as I noted. In some fluff, their armor can be damaged and defeated by lasguns fairly easily, in other fluff it's basically invulnerable even to anything but lascannons.
In the fluff, non-armoured marines are harder to kill than zombies are in most fiction
Zombies are an entirely different thing and depends on entirely what kind of zombie we are talking about., that said, even the hardiest zombies are rendered relatively impotent, even if not "dead" relatively easily as their bodies can be dismembered/exploded/crushed/etc. I'm not recalling much on unarmored marines being unstoppable, merely very hardy.
taking entire clips to their gut and not slowing (clips from a lasgun, which blow off human arms)
Um, can you find an example of a marine taking entire magazines worth of fire to their unarmored gut? Because I certainly can't recall such an example.
1. Again, you are imagining a target such as a vehicle. Marines are not going to run in a straight line. They can duck, weave, reverse on a dime, zigzag etc. do thing normal 2x2 targets (like motorcycles or ultra-compact vehicles) could never hope to do.
A Space Marine is 2 to 2.4 metres tall and wearing very bulky armour. Modern Battle Tanks have auto tracking systems, laser range finding and computers to calculate the required trajectory of the shot. It doesn't matter how he moves, it will still be able to track him and fire a shot with enough accuracy to take him out. He couldn't "reverse on a dime" if he was running flat out. Try running full speed and then just stopping instantly and running the opposite way. You fall over. He'd have to decelerate first and when he does, boom.
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
The shot is fired in a trajectory which compensates for the motion of the target. So it will be fired to detonate in front of him and his motion will carry him into it. It's like a sniper leading the target but done by computer so it is much, much more accurate.
And we're not talking about a bullet. We're talking about a tank shell. There are laser guided shells and even bullets currently in development today. One prototype laser guided bullet hit a target a mile away from its original firing position https://share.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/bullet/ You are seriously underestimating how effective our current technology is today at hitting a moving target.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
Um... not always true in the case of a tank. The old Starship fired a Shillelagh guided AT missile instead of a conventional round. You also run into the issue of it firing sub-munitions or canister style munitions. That isn't even getting into more exotic stuff like tungsten fletchettes.
So, to build on what Mallus was saying, you don't even need the newest bleeding edge tech to pull these tricks off.
6. The Last Detail, a Dark Hunters short story, has a space marine sans armour get hit with a full fusillade of lasguns fire and then get angry and charge the humans who fired at him, and murder their asses.
Feel free to chew me out on this, but I cannot accept this as representative of how durable a SM is. There's so much fluff to contradict this, including incidents where lasguns kill armoured marines (too many times to count in Storm of Iron) that I cannot see this as anything but unrepresentative at best. I mean, that's just ridiculous.
6. The Last Detail, a Dark Hunters short story, has a space marine sans armour get hit with a full fusillade of lasguns fire and then get angry and charge the humans who fired at him, and murder their asses.
Feel free to chew me out on this, but I cannot accept this as representative of how durable a SM is. There's so much fluff to contradict this, including incidents where lasguns kill armoured marines (too many times to count in Storm of Iron) that I cannot see this as anything but unrepresentative at best. I mean, that's just ridiculous.
I have to agree. Uriel Ventris, a marine with enough plot armor to run for Draigo, was worried about getting shot without his armor on. If he was that immune to bullets, I don't think he would have been much concerned about it.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
Um... not always true in the case of a tank. The old Starship fired a Shillelagh guided AT missile instead of a conventional round. You also run into the issue of it firing sub-munitions or canister style munitions. That isn't even getting into more exotic stuff like tungsten fletchettes.
So, to build on what Mallus was saying, you don't even need the newest bleeding edge tech to pull these tricks off.
The example used was an M1 Abrams, which to my knowledge uses direct-fire shells which can compensate for a predictable course, but have no hope of hitting an erratic target, just as one has poor chances of hitting a mid-air fly with a spitball.
Sub-munition and canister would be useless. Multiple smaller bullet is not how you pierce armour.
If marine armour was as strong as logic and common sense would dictate, I agree marines would die. But given the ridiculous displays of durability the regularly perform in the fluff, you need to have a suspended disbelief. I have read sci-fi where individual ships could curb-stomp entire IN battle-fleets, where infantry weapons can damage starships, and where AIs taking over is actually beneficial, and none of those were as soft as wh40k.
6. The Last Detail, a Dark Hunters short story, has a space marine sans armour get hit with a full fusillade of lasguns fire and then get angry and charge the humans who fired at him, and murder their asses.
Feel free to chew me out on this, but I cannot accept this as representative of how durable a SM is. There's so much fluff to contradict this, including incidents where lasguns kill armoured marines (too many times to count in Storm of Iron) that I cannot see this as anything but unrepresentative at best. I mean, that's just ridiculous.
I have to agree. Uriel Ventris, a marine with enough plot armor to run for Draigo, was worried about getting shot without his armor on. If he was that immune to bullets, I don't think he would have been much concerned about it.
Don't get me wrong, the dark hunter was injured after, so I can see why Ventris would be cautious about taking his armour off, but not fatally, or enough to sideline him.
6. The Last Detail, a Dark Hunters short story, has a space marine sans armour get hit with a full fusillade of lasguns fire and then get angry and charge the humans who fired at him, and murder their asses.
Feel free to chew me out on this, but I cannot accept this as representative of how durable a SM is. There's so much fluff to contradict this, including incidents where lasguns kill armoured marines (too many times to count in Storm of Iron) that I cannot see this as anything but unrepresentative at best. I mean, that's just ridiculous.
I have to agree. Uriel Ventris, a marine with enough plot armor to run for Draigo, was worried about getting shot without his armor on. If he was that immune to bullets, I don't think he would have been much concerned about it.
Don't get me wrong, the dark hunter was injured after, so I can see why Ventris would be cautious about taking his armour off, but not fatally, or enough to sideline him.
But that's just it. Why even wear the armour at all if an unarmoured SM can survive a fusillade of lasgun fire, gunfire that can be modified to punch through even Power Armour?
It just doesn't add up. The marine not only should have been injured gravely, there should have been a good chance of him being dead.
im2randomghgh wrote:
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
Um... not always true in the case of a tank. The old Starship fired a Shillelagh guided AT missile instead of a conventional round. You also run into the issue of it firing sub-munitions or canister style munitions. That isn't even getting into more exotic stuff like tungsten fletchettes.
So, to build on what Mallus was saying, you don't even need the newest bleeding edge tech to pull these tricks off.
The example used was an M1 Abrams, which to my knowledge uses direct-fire shells which can compensate for a predictable course, but have no hope of hitting an erratic target, just as one has poor chances of hitting a mid-air fly with a spitball.
Sub-munition and canister would be useless. Multiple smaller bullet is not how you pierce armour.
If marine armour was as strong as logic and common sense would dictate, I agree marines would die. But given the ridiculous displays of durability the regularly perform in the fluff, you need to have a suspended disbelief. I have read sci-fi where individual ships could curb-stomp entire IN battle-fleets, where infantry weapons can damage starships, and where AIs taking over is actually beneficial, and none of those were as soft as wh40k.
And as we speak the USA is currently developing a guided shell for use in the Abrams, the XM1111. It has already been successfully tested in the prototype phase, hitting a moving T-72 at 8,700m (5.4 miles) to within an inch of the target point. I believe it is currently estimated to come into service in 2013.
Also the Russians have developed guided missiles which are fired from a tank barrel.
Connor MacLeod wrote: And the FFG Rogue trader stuff describes orbital bombardment lances vaporizing square kilometers of land and/or water (which is far more than 'kilotons', particulariyl for water.) You get tons of stuff like that in the novels too.
In FFG it's actually only a half km, with, oddly, no explosion, just the thermal effects from the bloom. Which is why the marines in planetstrike are not killed when three lance strike hits only 50 yards from them. vaporizing a greater daemon of nurgle and a hoard of Death
Guard, because Space Marines can slaughter entire hoards of other space marines much more experienced then they are, who are also juicing on the power of the warp, because of their plot based powers.
Depends on your source:
Spoiler:
Battlefleet Koronus, page 133
When used in a planetary bombardment, the initial impact area of a lance weapon is relatively
small, typically no more than a few hundred metres. Anything directly hit by a lance is completely annihilated,
with no chance of survival. However, the ensuing blast wave affects an area of roughly one square kilometre, setting
buildings afire, boiling away bodies of water, and leaving little behind but ashes and molten stone.
I take it you were referring to a 'lance strike' as per Deathwatch: Rites of Battle...
Spoiler:
Anything within 500 metres of the point of impact of a lance strike is utterly vaporised.
This is basically a half km radius, which is 1 km diameter, and in terms of area is 785,000 square metrs, only a bit smaller than 1 square km (1 million square metres.)
Automatically Appended Next Post: As far as getting hit by lasfire, that depends entirely on the model and function of lasweapons being used (as well as things like setting.) Some just drill narrow holes through the target whilst others will blow off limbs (or some or all of the head away. Including Ork and Tyranid heads.) Notable example is 'First and Only' where a lasgun on maximum takes the head off of a World Eater. Or there's 'Flesh and Iron' where a lasgun barrage (without changing clip and may not even have been a full clip) at point blank range drills through a Blood Gorgons helm to kill the Marine underneath.
We do know that Black Legion armour can stand up to ~30 hellgun shots from 'hunter, Prey' (short story from an anthology I forget) before failing (although it turns the chestplate molten as I recall.) Hellguns being 2-4x more powerful than a lasgun (at least by FFG standards.)
im2randomghgh wrote:
Unless the bullet can alter course in mid air (hint: it can't) it won't be able to account for a marine running a zig-zag or diving.
Um... not always true in the case of a tank. The old Starship fired a Shillelagh guided AT missile instead of a conventional round. You also run into the issue of it firing sub-munitions or canister style munitions. That isn't even getting into more exotic stuff like tungsten fletchettes.
So, to build on what Mallus was saying, you don't even need the newest bleeding edge tech to pull these tricks off.
The example used was an M1 Abrams, which to my knowledge uses direct-fire shells which can compensate for a predictable course, but have no hope of hitting an erratic target, just as one has poor chances of hitting a mid-air fly with a spitball.
Sub-munition and canister would be useless. Multiple smaller bullet is not how you pierce armour.
If marine armour was as strong as logic and common sense would dictate, I agree marines would die. But given the ridiculous displays of durability the regularly perform in the fluff, you need to have a suspended disbelief. I have read sci-fi where individual ships could curb-stomp entire IN battle-fleets, where infantry weapons can damage starships, and where AIs taking over is actually beneficial, and none of those were as soft as wh40k.
And as we speak the USA is currently developing a guided shell for use in the Abrams, the XM1111. It has already been successfully tested in the prototype phase, hitting a moving T-72 at 8,700m (5.4 miles) to within an inch of the target point. I believe it is currently estimated to come into service in 2013.
Also the Russians have developed guided missiles which are fired from a tank barrel.
Guided, but not smart shells. Smart shells don't just fire at the target and turn left right up down as needed, they will move to avoid obstacles, bend around a corner instead of hitting the corner etc.
The example used was an M1 Abrams, which to my knowledge uses direct-fire shells which can compensate for a predictable course, but have no hope of hitting an erratic target, just as one has poor chances of hitting a mid-air fly with a spitball.
Your knowledge is antiquated...
im2randomghgh wrote:
Sub-munition and canister would be useless. Multiple smaller bullet is not how you pierce armour.
...and you clearly have not see what sub-munitions can do even to hard targets.
Actually there are other systems that are also nearing the production stage, including a rather cute number that fires a shaped explosive, rocket driven armor piercer in 12 gauge (.74 cal) Hmm.... sounds familiar somehow...
im2randomghgh wrote:
Don't get me wrong, the dark hunter was injured after, so I can see why Ventris would be cautious about taking his armour off, but not fatally, or enough to sideline him.
From the book it was of the 'crap, they'll kill me' rather then the 'well this will sting a bit'. sort. Mind you, in the same book Ventris reaches his bare hand into boiling oil, so merely suggesting he's concerned about how much pain it would cause doesn't ring true.
I'd like to submit the Challenger II MBT to this arguement.
im2randomghg
During the gulf war, Challenger II's were destroying Iraqi T-72's through sand dunes, i.e. no visual contact. The Challenger II's turret can also complete a full rotation in 9 seconds. thats alot faster than:
A. the marine can run
B. the marine can dodge
especially with the gyroscopicly stabilised weapons
Granted the Challenger II is a magnificent weapon and the premier AFV of the modern era, it still holds the world record distance for a tank v tank engagement, about 5800m I believe it was.
No way is it going to be able to engage a target as small as a space marine on the move, sure if he stood still but if he was trying to not get shot you'd never hit it.
From the book it was of the 'crap, they'll kill me' rather then the 'well this will sting a bit'. sort. Mind you, in the same book Ventris reaches his bare hand into boiling oil, so merely suggesting he's concerned about how much pain it would cause doesn't ring true.
That was the impression I got. Ventris knew the oil wouldn't kill him, but it would burn like all hell - which it did, giving him 3rd degree burns.
However, bullets will kill an SM if he is unarmoured, lasbolts doubly so.
)
right).
