Many people have pointed out that the numbers don’t really add up if each chapter is 1k astartes but they are also active across countless battle zones across the whole galaxy. Although some people do make it work in their head.
I also know that many chapters have more than 1k marines but often they keep that a secret.
So would it be better if GW wrote (for example) that Guilliman decided to expand the Ultramarines to even beyond HH levels, making them the poster boys of the imperium, making them visible on many imperium worlds to bolster the faith and morale of its citizens, whilst leaving the smaller chapter last to specialist activities and war zones that require a very specific skill set.
Well first up most of the numbers don't make sense. They also won't make sense even if you try to do them scientifically because you're dealing with such a vast setting in an alternate reality and in the future. So depending on how you evaluate and weight things the "sensible" numbers can be all over the place.
Another element is perception. A galaxy is beyond most peoples comprehension/relatability. They just don't deal with such vast scales and numbers on a regular basis to easily put things into context. So if you suddenly go having millions of marines they no longer feel like the elite because most people equate a million to a very very big number. Even if 1million is a pitifully tiny number when you spread it out over a whole galaxy.
That said I was under the impression GW was doing this, just through Primaris instead of regular Marines. Indeed the lore seems to be stuck on a sticky spot between the two, esp as they are both in the game same army roster and structure. It's an area where some marketing and product choices are impacting the lore in strange ways.
I think they should expand the number. They mention the Emperor being the master of a million worlds in the opening text, so everyone who reads the lore immediately thinks, “one marine per world?”
Warhammer should just lean into the scale porn with marines the same way they do with hive worlds, Imperial navy ships, titans, ministratum and administratum size, etc..
mrFickle wrote: Many people have pointed out that the numbers don’t really add up if each chapter is 1k astartes but they are also active across countless battle zones across the whole galaxy. Although some people do make it work in their head.
Doing maths of any kind when it comes to big settings always hurts the brain. It's better to not bother.
I also know that many chapters have more than 1k marines but often they keep that a secret.
Nah, most Chapters have more than 1k Space Marines and have done for some time, it's just limited to a couple hundred over the "limit". The standing battle companies will hit 1k Astartes but then there are the various offices such as the Librarius or Chaplaincy and the various pilots or vehicle commanders.
So would it be better if GW wrote (for example) that Guilliman decided to expand the Ultramarines to even beyond HH levels, making them the poster boys of the imperium, making them visible on many imperium worlds to bolster the faith and morale of its citizens, whilst leaving the smaller chapter last to specialist activities and war zones that require a very specific skill set.
Guilliman doesn't have absolute authority. He managed to convince the wider Imperial power structure to allow for the Primaris because collectively they knew how desperate the galactic situation was. There are probably about enough Astartes (assuming 1000 Chapters with about 1200 Astartes each) to make just over 6 Legions that would already be considered large (i.e. the Ultramarines, Iron Warriors, or Dark Angels). So just over a quarter of the total number of Legions but barely.
To bring the Astartes back to the numbers seen during the opening stages of the Heresy, Guilliman would have to find all his brothers, somehow convince the High Lords that this move wasn't an attempt to install the Primarchs as the leaders of the Imperium, and not get murdered by the Custodes who already don't trust him and would prefer he was still in stasis (if not dead). If Guilliman managed that, he'd then have to get the Imperium stable enough to be able to actually produce the new Astartes in such large numbers. It's easy to build Legions when you're conquering outwards and creating/discovering new tech but the modern Imperium is the total opposite. The Legiones Astartes are very much a dead concept in the modern Imperium.
I love how Gilliman being a thing has the Imperium on the knife edge of tearing itself apart if he tries too hard to improve the situation!
A grim and dark setting where you're basically sitting there with the solution to most of the immediate problems and he just can't do it because to do so would likely cause multiple powerful subfactions to rise up in opposition. Either purists claiming its Heretical or those concerned that he's going to steal their power and influence etc...
Heck with the way the Mechanicus work now the Imperiums technological level has gone backward in 10K years. Instead of advancing or at least maintaining they've wound up with machines they use now that they don't fully understand and huge gaps in what they know and use and comprehend.
Guilliman has to walk this fine line in a sea of madness, religion, superstition, power grabs and more.
One of my favourite things to come out of the Guilliman resurrection was the people saying 40k was going to lose it's backward feel, then the first book post-Rift came out, and literally nothing changes and the Imperium is still as awful as ever.
I can still see the horizon where GW decides to split the Imperium in half in the lore and plunge one half into total confusion and fragmentation. I still think such a move would be great in terms of opening up the setting to allowing afew more forces to establish themselves within the setting as Xenos forces and such without having to bend over backward to plot armour them (Tau) or the whole "Oh them, they've always been there, we just never really mentioned them*"
*which is at least a step up from Exoidtes and the "yep we mention them every chance we get - no no we don't make ANY models for them"
"Marines are a small fraction of actual bodies in the Imperium's service, but have outsize influence due to their elite training, equipment, and transhuman nature."
I'd add three Zeros to Marine Numbers.
So there's 1 Billion in the Galaxy, a Chapter is 1 Mio. Marines. The Black Legion is 200 Mio. Marines - with a size like that I'd believe that they can pose a serious thread when attacking a Star system.
If there were 1 Million Space Wolves I can believe them appearing randomly at different spots in the galaxy.
The 1000 Marines number per chapter is ridiculously small in my view, immersion breaking even.
GW likes to portray Marines like normal soldiers - in trenches, getting gunned down by artillery or superheavy tanks, or getting worfed by some Genestealers. All these things are possible if Marines aren't the smallest and most unimportant army in the game that's supposed to get stuff done.
Lord Damocles wrote: The problem isn't really the numbers of Marines; it's that those same Marines are written in to every conflict all at once.
Yeah, it's this.
Also a couple other things:
1: The nature of the conflicts isn't really well spelled out. A lot of what Marines actually do is a highly concentrated overwhelming strike to opposition leadership, and then use a high operational tempo to take advantage of confusion.
2: Asymmetrical warfare is a b****, especially when it's existential in nature and you can deploy things like nukes and other WMTs.
3: Canonically, they also are often working alongside millions of Guardsmen or other branches of the Imperial forces. They don't do big conflicts on their own.
But also stuff like this. They take over the orbital defense platforms and then use them to pound the surface armies into dust.
Increasing by 10 or even by 100 times the cannonical number of marines wouldnt hurt anyone except those that believe that astartes are like film ninjas... Weak if encountered in big numbers but strong taken one by one.
On one hand, Only A Million is a silly small number for the setting.
But on the other? It’s so in-keeping with the setting. There’s precious little Astartes can’t handily achieve. And the fact there are so pitifully few of them adds to the overall doom and gloom. Sure if a squad or two arrives, the enemy is in for a tough time, but the actual chances of His Angels turning up are laughable small, bordering on non-existent.
The flaw I think is in the background overly focussing on their exploits. Whilst of course it’s still the merest snapshot of a given war zone, when Marines crop up nine times out of ten and butter the opposition? We lose sight of their objective rarity.
I think I'd like the size of chapters to remain essentially the same but to have characters in a novel somewhere hang a lantern on the estimated number of marines in the galaxy.
"Amazing. And to think there are only a million of them."
"Come now. You don't really believe those old propoganda vids do you?"
Leave the old numbers questionably canon for the people who like them, but make it fuzzy enough that you can headcanon it as inaccurate. Especially post-Guilliman rebuilding a bunch of chapters with primaris.
Lord Damocles wrote: The problem isn't really the numbers of Marines; it's that those same Marines are written in to every conflict all at once.
Agreed, it makes the galaxy seem very small when this occurs, and a bit improbable if there's only a 1000 or so Marines and yet somehow the chapter is involved in several warzones simultaneously.
Wyldhunt wrote: I think I'd like the size of chapters to remain essentially the same but to have characters in a novel somewhere hang a lantern on the estimated number of marines in the galaxy.
"Amazing. And to think there are only a million of them."
"Come now. You don't really believe those old propoganda vids do you?"
Leave the old numbers questionably canon for the people who like them, but make it fuzzy enough that you can headcanon it as inaccurate. Especially post-Guilliman rebuilding a bunch of chapters with primaris.
It's worth remembering it's 1,000 men-at-arms, which is to say the dudes in the regular companies 1-10, not including fleet, household, reclusiam, apothecarium, and librariam and not a limit during action when they're allowed to hot-box as many as are needed (excess being one of the reasons new Chapters are founded). Presumably it all goes swimmingly until someone goes Badab. BTs get around it by never being all in the same place, and Wolf Wolfs get around it by murdering any efforts at censoring them.
Overread wrote: I can still see the horizon where GW decides to split the Imperium in half in the lore and plunge one half into total confusion and fragmentation.
Eh, I don't think ~1 million marines is that bad, so long as you accept the basic premise that 100 or 50 or 10 marines matter to a war on the scale of a planet or system. GW consistently says that number of marines does matter, so lets go with it.
The following is based on pre-Rift lore, it is a lot looser and messier after the galaxy is split and primaris are deployed.
Firstly, I am operating on the assumption of ~1 million marines and ~1 million Imperial worlds, so about 1 marine per planet.
Most marine strike forces are a demi-company (~50 marines) or company (~100 marines) in a single vessel (usually a strike cruiser, sometimes a battle barge or frigate or occasionally a rarer vessel), although forces as low as a single squad or as large as several chapters exist. That means there is a marine strike force for about every 100 worlds.
Now, not every Imperial world is engaged in warfare at once- we know wars stop and start on a given planet. Armageddon has, apparently, only had 3 noteworthy wars in about 8000 years
Spoiler:
and 5 noteworthy wars in total...
, so most of that time has been relative peace.
I would be surprised if the percentage of Imperial worlds at war was as high as 20%, but if it was, that would mean roughly one in twenty warzones would have a marine strikeforce in attendance. However, the actual percentage of embattled worlds was probably much lower prior to the Great Rift.
That doesn't seem super rare, but rare enough to not be expected support. Now, there will also be marines on offensive campaigns against non-Imperial worlds, and concentrations of marines in particularly important warzones (30000 marines were estimated to be operating in the Armageddon sector during the Third War for Armageddon) which would draw marines away from other duties, but it will be in the same ballpark I think.
I think the best compromise on this would be for GW to write something along the lines of,
"Officially, there are roughly 1 thousand chapters, each having officially 1 thousand marines each. However, the Administratum knows that such precise numbers are impossible. New chapters are added each galactic year, along with chapters lost to the unending tide of humanities foes, and chapters that appear without prior records of their existence. Many chapters do not strictly adhere to the Codex, a document whose inflexible doctrine is, wisely, considered by many to be more of a guideline than a strict ruleset. Combat losses and the unpredictable nature of recruitment means that no chapter could possibly ever be at full strength. The recent spat of foundings of Primarus Space Marines has also led to an increase in chapters.
Therefore, unofficially, there may be many more chapters than the approximate number given, and many chapters may be above strength. This is technically a violation of the decrees of the Imperium. However, as hard pressed as the Imperium is, one must turn a blind eye to such minor offenses no matter the screeching of the Adepts and the Law Masters."
On one hand, Only A Million is a silly small number for the setting.
But on the other? It’s so in-keeping with the setting. There’s precious little Astartes can’t handily achieve. And the fact there are so pitifully few of them adds to the overall doom and gloom. Sure if a squad or two arrives, the enemy is in for a tough time, but the actual chances of His Angels turning up are laughable small, bordering on non-existent.
.
The original idea of the SM being small numbers of super elite soldiers that could take on anything was great when GW wasn’t pumping out lots of content and it was left to your imagination, but now I think they’ve made to much inconsistency in their own setting that I just don’t think it works. In the blood angles series on WH+ a squad of BA terminators gets wiped out pretty quick smart by a bunch of GSC but back in 2nd Ed that single squad of terminators would have cleared the whole planet of the GSC.
I do like the idea that the imperium has lost all control of how many chapters there are and just looks for any that are available at any given war zone. But then I also think that the first founding chapters like DA, BA and SW would fade into the background and not be seen as something special amongst the galaxy’s elite
They absolutely should have just quietly stuck an extra zero on with Primaris yes.
Just say that chapters were routinely doing that in practice and lying to the adminstratum anyway before.
There's just no way marine chapters (especially the Ultramarines) remain operational in the number of operations they're supposed to do with a thousand marines. Chapters would routinely lose a quarter of their operational strength in a warp storm and it's supposed to take a few hundred years to recover from that.
I go with the idea that a Chapter is closer to 1,300-1,400 Astartes.
As in Chapters operate on the technicality of 1,000 "Battle Brothers" with the 1,000 Astartes composing the 10 Companies of 10 Squads each. Since every bit of lore suggests there's the Company Command squads, several Chaplains, a bunch of Apothecaries and what amounts to 1-2 companies of Techmarines for pilotting the various space ships, Thunderhawks and ground vehicles. That has to be a few hundred Astartes, yet every Chapter breakdown seems to not actually include their numbers in the tally of a Chapter.
Finally, it's not like a Chapter is just gonna cryo freeze, kill off or waitlist the 1,001th Neophyte till an active Battle Brother goes to visit the Emperor and a spot opens up. I imagine even the active roster of "Battle Brothers" usually hovers around 1,100 to reasonably handle recruitment and losses.
Grey Templar wrote: I think the best compromise on this would be for GW to write something along the lines of,
"Officially, there are roughly 1 thousand chapters, each having officially 1 thousand marines each. However, the Administratum knows that such precise numbers are impossible. New chapters are added each galactic year, along with chapters lost to the unending tide of humanities foes, and chapters that appear without prior records of their existence. Many chapters do not strictly adhere to the Codex, a document whose inflexible doctrine is, wisely, considered by many to be more of a guideline than a strict ruleset. Combat losses and the unpredictable nature of recruitment means that no chapter could possibly ever be at full strength. The recent spat of foundings of Primarus Space Marines has also led to an increase in chapters.
Therefore, unofficially, there may be many more chapters than the approximate number given, and many chapters may be above strength. This is technically a violation of the decrees of the Imperium. However, as hard pressed as the Imperium is, one must turn a blind eye to such minor offenses no matter the screeching of the Adepts and the Law Masters."
Excellent writting, but even 10 million adeptus astartes is a drop in the ocean of a Galaxy at war... Perhaps a Billion would be the lowest number at which Space Marines could be somewhat meaningfull... Otherwise they are just boutique/propaganda units (like Tigers in WWII ETO).
10 or 50 marines in a war zone with 10s of millions of soldiers/xenos involved (which is not crazy, thats less than WW2 level mobilization and many IOM worlds have Bigger populations than current day earth) is an anecdote.
When you think that the Necromunda Underhive alone could absorb 10 chapters without being conquered (not counting here the "magic bullet" of the chapters navy on orbit which even doe they account for 90% of a chapters firepower arent really astartes but rather support personel), the whole Astartes Hubris starts to feel likeva joke.
The previous numbers are ment to be a sensible educated guess. But if you are a toxic bolt porn addict that believes that a single tac marine alone can handle alone a whole IG regiment, you might feel offended.
In fairness, marines are not meant to be frontline troops. They're not supposed to sit in a trench and hold a planet, that is what guardsmen are for.
They are supposed to conduct special operations, taking/defending specific objectives.
Most marine engagements are going to be a single squad, or even fewer, marines doing a very specific task. Aiding an Imperial commander by taking out a few vital targets that are preventing a planetary invasion from proceeding. Defending an evacuation point while a VIP or some long lost relic is removed from the planet. Drop podding on top of a rebel general while he is inspecting a point, or lounging in his spacious manor.
In that sense, even a few space marines can turn the tide of an entire warzone. They're not going to hold off entire legions, but they will do work equivalent to entire legions.
A single marine may not be able to take a whole IG regiment frontally, but he can certainly sneak into the headquarters, kill the command staff, and sow enough chaos while he escapes to make the regiment completely useless. Or he can lead your own regiment into battle and inspire them to greater deeds.
Grey Templar wrote: A single marine may not be able to take a whole IG regiment frontally, but he can certainly sneak into the headquarters, kill the command staff, and sow enough chaos while he escapes to make the regiment completely useless. Or he can lead your own regiment into battle and inspire them to greater deeds.
But why bother? If you know the location of the enemy HQ then a barrage of Basilisk shells or a lance strike from orbit is way cheaper and easier to arrange than a single marine. There just isn't any meaningful task that can be done by small-numbers marines that can't be done better by other, much more widely available, assets. IMOGW needs to do one of two retcons:
1) Add an order of magnitude or three to the number of marines. There are billions of marines, and they're still elite compared to the trillions of guardsmen and uncountably many PDF soldiers.
or
2) Acknowledge that marines have minimal practical value and exist purely for religious and/or propaganda value. A squad of marines may be a completely worthless asset in practical terms but the possible existence of that squad gives something of immense value: hope that victory is possible. And so when the guardsmen are dying in the trenches, desperately holding on for just one more minute, they can have the hope that if they hold on a little longer their sacrifice will mean something and the marines will arrive to save them. Repeat this all over the Imperium, add in some religious preaching on the marines as symbols of the might of sacred humanity, and now you see some real value. This also neatly explains all of the in-universe claims about how powerful marines are and how a single squad can win a war despite the obvious absurdity of the claim. It's absurd and that's fine because it's all Imperial propaganda hyping up the few contributions of marines into something way more than they really are.
Grey Templar wrote: In fairness, marines are not meant to be frontline troops. They're not supposed to sit in a trench and hold a planet, that is what guardsmen are for.
They are supposed to conduct special operations, taking/defending specific objectives.
Most marine engagements are going to be a single squad, or even fewer, marines doing a very specific task. Aiding an Imperial commander by taking out a few vital targets that are preventing a planetary invasion from proceeding. Defending an evacuation point while a VIP or some long lost relic is removed from the planet. Drop podding on top of a rebel general while he is inspecting a point, or lounging in his spacious manor.
In that sense, even a few space marines can turn the tide of an entire warzone. They're not going to hold off entire legions, but they will do work equivalent to entire legions.
A single marine may not be able to take a whole IG regiment frontally, but he can certainly sneak into the headquarters, kill the command staff, and sow enough chaos while he escapes to make the regiment completely useless. Or he can lead your own regiment into battle and inspire them to greater deeds.
Marines are not imperial assasins (but in a huge and clunky power armor) ... Stop the Ninja Marine BS, its juvenile and almost bad taste.
If marines are special forces they are not seal/delta types (those are deathwatch or other dedicated kill teams) ... They are like a ranger company, ie yes they also hold ground in a pitch.
While I agree that Marines could hold a trench and that they are closer to US Rangers or Royal Marine Commandos than Seal/SAS types, but using them as general infantry is a waste of resources.
Personally I would stop referring to Chapters as 1000 Marines strong, as that is blatantly not true. I would refer to a Chapter as a regiment in numbers.
You could add 000 to Chapter numbers and it would still not make sense. It would explain how Ultramarines are at all these battles. But not why they are all at full Chapter strength led by Marneus Calgar in most of them.
Grey Templar wrote: A single marine may not be able to take a whole IG regiment frontally, but he can certainly sneak into the headquarters, kill the command staff, and sow enough chaos while he escapes to make the regiment completely useless. Or he can lead your own regiment into battle and inspire them to greater deeds.
But why bother? If you know the location of the enemy HQ then a barrage of Basilisk shells or a lance strike from orbit is way cheaper and easier to arrange than a single marine. There just isn't any meaningful task that can be done by small-numbers marines that can't be done better by other, much more widely available, assets. IMOGW needs to do one of two retcons:
1) Add an order of magnitude or three to the number of marines. There are billions of marines, and they're still elite compared to the trillions of guardsmen and uncountably many PDF soldiers.
or
2) Acknowledge that marines have minimal practical value and exist purely for religious and/or propaganda value. A squad of marines may be a completely worthless asset in practical terms but the possible existence of that squad gives something of immense value: hope that victory is possible. And so when the guardsmen are dying in the trenches, desperately holding on for just one more minute, they can have the hope that if they hold on a little longer their sacrifice will mean something and the marines will arrive to save them. Repeat this all over the Imperium, add in some religious preaching on the marines as symbols of the might of sacred humanity, and now you see some real value. This also neatly explains all of the in-universe claims about how powerful marines are and how a single squad can win a war despite the obvious absurdity of the claim. It's absurd and that's fine because it's all Imperial propaganda hyping up the few contributions of marines into something way more than they really are.
Why bother? Not every location is in range of your basilisks, not every warzone will have Imperial naval superiority, not every ground target can be struck from orbit thanks to shields, etc... But there is almost no target you can't quickly fire a half dozen drop pods at and expect them to arrive.
The best option of course is making there be many more marines than officially acknowledged.
Marines are not imperial assasins (but in a huge and clunky power armor) ... Stop the Ninja Marine BS, its juvenile and almost bad taste.
If marines are special forces they are not seal/delta types (those are deathwatch or other dedicated kill teams) ... They are like a ranger company, ie yes they also hold ground in a pitch.
Its really easy to grasp.
Space Marine power armor is not clunky, its big but not clunky and awkward. Marines are described as moving faster and more quietly than something that big should, that is due to their power armor. It is quiet, they can move quickly and with a lot more stealth than you would think from their size alone.
They're definitely not ninjas, but a single marine could conduct a clandestine infiltration.
I'm not talking about some ninja sneaking in and out undetected. I'm talking a dude sneaking in under cover of darkness to lay a bunch of timed explosive charges and once discovered shoot his way out as the base explodes around him. Or 6 marines in a drop pod that land right in the command post, murder the command staff, and then escape to rendezvous with a thunderhawk.
Grey Templar wrote: Why bother? Not every location is in range of your basilisks, not every warzone will have Imperial naval superiority, not every ground target can be struck from orbit thanks to shields, etc... But there is almost no target you can't quickly fire a half dozen drop pods at and expect them to arrive.
If you can fire half a dozen drop pods at a target then you have a ship in position to destroy the target from orbit. And anything with the level of shields required to shrug off starship weapons is going to laugh at a mere squad or two of marines.
And most targets can make quick work of drop pods. Drop pods only work against Imperial 1950s-era manually aimed AA guns (and the other factions that use them), against a proper air defense network they'd be shot down at horrifying loss rates. We've been able to get direct contact hits on incoming ICBM warheads for decades and a drop pod is a much larger and slower target. Drop pod assaults are a great terror weapon against planetary governors with thoughts of treason, try them against a Tau or Eldar target and they're a great way to lose an entire chapter within seconds.
I'm not talking about some ninja sneaking in and out undetected. I'm talking a dude sneaking in under cover of darkness to lay a bunch of timed explosive charges and once discovered shoot his way out as the base explodes around him. Or 6 marines in a drop pod that land right in the command post, murder the command staff, and then escape to rendezvous with a thunderhawk.
Like the drop pod scenario this only works against very primitive opponents. I'm sure marines are very sneaky against orks where the only defenses are a bunch of low-ranking boyz who are too incompetent and useless to deserve a place in the real fight, and who have nothing but their eyes and an alarm button to guard the target. Try it against a Tau facility with automated drone defenses, motion detectors, IR cameras, audio sensors, etc, and a marine is going to trip the alarm immediately. And yeah, that marine might be able to blow away the patrolling gun drone and the fire warrior squad that arrives as immediate reinforcements but stealth is gone, the doors are all locked down, and the big guns are on their way to finish off the marine.
Grey Templar wrote: By your logic, all special forces are useless and pointless since we have aircraft, missiles, and artillery. Which is obviously not true.
Not at all. Those forces are incredibly useful in the real world because we care about collateral damage, we have political factors where excessive force could escalate a conflict, etc. The Imperium has none of that. They don't care if some "civilians" are within the blast radius of an orbital lance strike, there are no civilians in 40k and collateral damage means fewer traitors to have to kill once the planet is taken. They don't have to worry about the media showing pictures of mangled child corpses, their media is under strict government control and even if they did show such images their citizens would cheer the death of the filthy xenos/traitors. They don't have to worry about violating the sovereignty of another country to assassinate a target, no non-Imperial entity has any legitimacy whatsoever and the only reason they temporarily have independent sovereignty is that the Imperial invasion and genocide fleet hasn't arrived yet.
If we didn't have political and moral concerns with excessive force in the real world we would have very little need for special forces. Identify a target, destroy it with an ICBM, done.
I feel like the Space Marines are kinda undersold here. For example, I'm fairly sure that the entire point of the Drop Pod is that it passes through defenses undetected and the only way to spot a Drop Pod coming is by seeing it coming down from the sky - and even then it still cannot be targeted via sensors and good luck hitting it with manual fire controls. Similarly, I can't really understand all this fuss over Space Marine special operations - these guys don't exactly compare to IRL infantry standards (that'd be the Imperial Guard), they are more like an IRL tank squadron in terms of capabilities. A tank squadron you can semi-freely air-drop anywhere, anytime, and it can act as fully-fledged infantry (while not losing any of the tankyness) as the situation desires.
AtoMaki wrote: For example, I'm fairly sure that the entire point of the Drop Pod is that it passes through defenses undetected and the only way to spot a Drop Pod coming is by seeing it coming down from the sky - and even then it still cannot be targeted via sensors and good luck hitting it with manual fire controls.
That's not plausible at all. Aside from the radar signature of a giant angular block of metal the sheer heat of a drop pod reentering at high velocity would set off every IR sensor in a thousand mile radius. IR guidance would be more than sufficient to hit them and there's nothing you can do to hide when the air itself is compressed and heated to extremely high temperatures. The only reason drop pods are considered hard to hit is that most of the time the other side is trying to shoot them down with 1950s-era manually aimed autocannons. But Tau/Eldar/Necrons aren't going to have living gunners staring through the gun sights as they spray shells in the general direction of the incoming pods, they'll have networked air defense systems firing guided missiles under automated fire control. All the operator has to do is, at most, approve the launch order.
Similarly, I can't really understand all this fuss over Space Marine special operations - these guys don't exactly compare to IRL infantry standards (that'd be the Imperial Guard), they are more like an IRL tank squadron in terms of capabilities. A tank squadron you can semi-freely air-drop anywhere, anytime, and it can act as fully-fledged infantry (while not losing any of the tankyness) as the situation desires.
But, again, what's the target? If you can drop pod in marines you can obliterate the target with a lance strike from orbit. And if you're deploying them conventionally you could get thousands of LRBTs for the price of a single squad of marines. There are just very few missions where super-elite special forces make sense in a world where collateral damage is treated as a happy bonus.
"In the interest of realism and proper immersion, we're going to ask the space marine players to only play two encounters during this campaign. We don't want anyone to get the wrong idea about your troops being in several different places at once." -- No one, no where.
@Aecus Decimus - I would assume the value of drop pods probably increases when/if the enemy has substantial anti-orbital capabilities that could threaten a ship based bombardment of that nature. Likewise, we know that marines aren't always drop-poding around everywhere. it may well be that drop pods are used with a touch of discretion... But the, this is GW we're talking about, so we can safely acknowledge that in the written lore drop pods are used when they make 0 sense to use them.
Even so, if they were "real" one could imagine them being used for rapid ground insertion beyond the range of enemy AA defenses, or, amusingly, essentially launched as more ammo during a bombardment with the hope that no one pays enough attention/ there's enough other stuff to distract enemy AA elements.
Now why someone would want to deploy Astartes under such circumstances is suspect, but -sadly- we can look at the current war in Ukraine to understand the continuous artillery bombardment does not win wars alone.
I don't think that's a concern considering that 90% of the setting is in the same boat. If I have to explain it, I would say that Drop Pods use Sci-Fi ECM (active and passive) and unlike what people imagine they are not dropped into the atmosphere all on their own but with 1000s of decoys and independent Sci-Fi ECM emitters.
Same as with your average tank squadron: breakthrough operations and mobile reserves. After all the lancing and artillery (maybe even done by the Space Marines themselves) the Drop Pods come in and the Space Marines boltgun down the reeling survivors so that the Imperial Guard attack can roll over without stopping and take the clay. OR if the Imperial Guard defenses are getting overrun the Drop Pods come in and the Space Marines boltgun down the attackers to save the day - then they can Thunderhawk away for a breakthrough in the counterattack. They can also just mingle with the Guard and act as walking-talking MBTs that can fit into trenches and buildings because you can never have enough MBTs ESPECIALLY if they can fight literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the infantry.
100,000 for elevated chapters, some sort of fancy Latin title that a chapter can receive that means it's trusted.
This would kind of account in play why we see so many DA, BA, SpW, UltM, etc.
10,000 for basic Chapters, 1000 or less isn't uncommon though among less renowned Chapters.
Techmarines aren't driving most of the tanks, a marine in PA in a tank is turning two assets into one expensive target.
Tech-serfs, machine-spirits, basic grunts, and cored marine minds, pilot the vehicles/turrets most of the time.
The Neophytes + Initiates basically are run as an 11th company. With say; 50 overseers, 100-300 Initiates, 400-800 Neophytes, 600-1000 Aspirants (boy soldiers), 100-600 "training" servitors & death-row prisoners. The Initiates are passed into other companies
Each 1000 strong company might have around 4000 staff (some of which will be Aspirants in-waiting (younglings)).
The increase in numbers has meant each chapter must maintain an autonomous military police unit.
The Custodies kind of have no fixed number, its in the millions, but they kind of wonder around in 10s of digits collecting tithes and distributing boons.
The grey-knights operate at a 100,000, other chapters are obligated to send a fraction of their psy-capable Aspirants to the greyknights. Blackships also do a pitstop at Titan.
Deathwatch are 4 chapters of 100,000 roaming the outer segmentums, they get their fraction of everything and collaborate around Segmentum Solar
...
That's me just gaking out what would feel right, but I don't think there's a real answer.
Regarding special forces, it's often speculated that the value of a lot of the infrastructure/labor can stop a bombardment being cost-effective. There'll also be some plot reason a missile or railgun shot can't get through but a team of men can.
Drop pod assaults have been used successfully against Tau, Eldar and Necrons. Obviously, they have more to them than just a ceramic-coated box with retrojets that allows them to evade enemy fire. We have, erm... the entiriety of Marine lore and rules to support that they are nearly or just as hard to shoot down as attack craft from the more advanced species.
Also, Imperial AA tech is clearly way above manually aimed WWII guns Hydras, quad guns, Icarus lascannons, skyfire missiles etc have targeting systems, which is why they have a chance of hitting aircraft broadly equivalent to the AA of other species. This might not fit your headcannon, and it may not look the case from the Hydra model, but clearly a Hydra and an Eldar Firestorm are not dissimilar at shooting down a Razorwing or something.
The Imperium is an incredibly advanced civilization, far beyond our capabilities in the 21st century. It technology is mostly regressing, but from a very high place.
Anyway, it is difficult to work out how a small number of Marines matters, but the lore says it does. They are basically a specialised homing munition that can canonically be deployed in a way that circumvents void shields and other technology that reduces the effectiveness of artillery (including void artillery), at an extremely high combat intensity (human troops can't continuously fight in combat for weeks without dying from exhaustion). That is a cornerstone of 40k lore.
40K works on the tightest and widest zoom settings. The squad of Marines fighting their battle against the backdrop of a galaxy at war. We focus on the Sergeant and the Supreme Commander whether on the tabletop or in Black Library books.
The lore/numbers/scale gets wonky at the middle "operational" level, but that's OK. It is, after all, a sci-fi/fantasy setting for a tabletop wargame. The only thing sillier than the setting is the folks that try to poke holes in it because it is not realistic. Of course it isn't.
So leave the Chapters at 1,000 members and move on. It's been this way since the start so why change it now.
And regarding Drop Pods, one Codex tells us that they move at impossible speed. So that is how they get through air defence.
TangoTwoBravo wrote: 40K works on the tightest and widest zoom settings. The squad of Marines fighting their battle against the backdrop of a galaxy at war. We focus on the Sergeant and the Supreme Commander whether on the tabletop or in Black Library books.
The lore/numbers/scale gets wonky at the middle "operational" level, but that's OK. It is, after all, a sci-fi/fantasy setting for a tabletop wargame. The only thing sillier than the setting is the folks that try to poke holes in it because it is not realistic. Of course it isn't.
So leave the Chapters at 1,000 members and move on. It's been this way since the start so why change it now.
And regarding Drop Pods, one Codex tells us that they move at impossible speed. So that is how they get through air defence.
Ah, yes, Impossible Speed. That rarely seen point right in between "Ridiculous Speed" and "Ludicrous Speed". Just, whatever you do, make sure you don't go into PLAID!!!
As seen in the Scion 'dex, there is such a thing as enough AA to deter a drop pod assault, the pods can be tracked and shots (but not the Scions who are shoved out of the airlock and given a shroud of sorts to protect against the atmospheric entry)
AtoMaki wrote: For example, I'm fairly sure that the entire point of the Drop Pod is that it passes through defenses undetected and the only way to spot a Drop Pod coming is by seeing it coming down from the sky - and even then it still cannot be targeted via sensors and good luck hitting it with manual fire controls.
That's not plausible at all. Aside from the radar signature of a giant angular block of metal the sheer heat of a drop pod reentering at high velocity would set off every IR sensor in a thousand mile radius. IR guidance would be more than sufficient to hit them and there's nothing you can do to hide when the air itself is compressed and heated to extremely high temperatures. The only reason drop pods are considered hard to hit is that most of the time the other side is trying to shoot them down with 1950s-era manually aimed autocannons.
Tracking and intercepting ICBMs with modern tech is considered so difficult that we're still essentially relying on the Mutually Assured Destruction paradigm.
I mean, I'd love it if we had good anti ICBM tech. . . But we don't (that we know of).
There's also stealth pods for infiltration work as well as supply pods. Those are mentioned in one of the Imperial Armor books.
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Bobthehero wrote: As seen in the Scion 'dex, there is such a thing as enough AA to deter a drop pod assault, the pods can be tracked and shots (but not the Scions who are shoved out of the airlock and given a shroud of sorts to protect against the atmospheric entry)
I think in those (pretty rare) cases, the move on the SM part is to just drop over the horizon and approach at low altitude or just drop the Marine force off and have it move in on it's own accord, and then start to make a mess of things and draw the opposing force out.
Or they infil a defence site and turn off the defence laser/shields or point the big guns at the enemy. Stuff like that.
OR just bombard the AA from space, and then drop when that's complete.
Insectum7 wrote: Tracking and intercepting ICBMs with modern tech is considered so difficult that we're still essentially relying on the Mutually Assured Destruction paradigm.
Nah, we had working anti-missile defenses decades ago. There are two reasons we don't see it, neither of which apply in 40k:
1) It's a huge political issue. Effective anti-missile defenses have the potential to spark an arms race to overwhelm them with sheer numbers of ICBMs, and/or to attempt to launch a preemptive strike before your ICBMs are no longer useful as a deterrent and your enemy can launch their own preemptive strike at will. All of the major nuclear powers agreed to limit anti-missile defenses as a result and so each country has a few to stop, say, North Korea from doing something stupid but very obviously not enough to be a destabilizing threat. And as a result of being unable to spam thousands of terminal-phase interceptors all over the country the only option to counter MIRVs is huge and expensive interceptors that hit the incoming missile before MIRV separation but cost as much as the ICBM they're supposed to intercept. Obviously none of that applies in 40k, a setting where everyone wants to genocide everyone else and will gladly sacrifice billions to kill billions of the enemy.
2) Anti-missile defense requires way more reliability than killing drop pods. A 90% effectiveness on an anti-missile system means 10% of the warheads get through, and each one that gets through might kill millions of people. So now not only are you having to use the most expensive interceptor option you have to send several of them against each incoming target to get closer to a 100% stop. If I have to build five interceptors, each of which costs as much as an ICBM, to counter each of your missiles that's an arms race I can't win. But the 40k situation is completely different. A 90% stop rate against drop pods means horrifying losses for the marines, far more than the value of any possible mission they could accomplish. If 90 out of 100 marines are shot down drop podding into the enemy HQ then that's a clear win for the enemy. Those 90 marines were worth way more than the minor disruption that happens before the next person down the chain of command takes over, and that's assuming the 10 survivors can even accomplish anything before they are finished off by ground forces.
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AtoMaki wrote: I don't think that's a concern considering that 90% of the setting is in the same boat. If I have to explain it, I would say that Drop Pods use Sci-Fi ECM (active and passive) and unlike what people imagine they are not dropped into the atmosphere all on their own but with 1000s of decoys and independent Sci-Fi ECM emitters.
The problem is that GW tells us how drop pods survive: speed, and speed alone. And it's hard to imagine a decoy system that would be able to mimic the ballistic flight path of a drop pod and the IR emissions from reentry heating without being as large and heavy as a drop pod and, more importantly, taking up as much space in the launching ship as another pod full of marines.
The better answer, the one which is already required for other reasons, is for there to be orders of magnitude more marines and for drop pod assaults against well-defended targets to be a saturation attack that overwhelms the enemy's AA capacity. If a full company of Ultramarines launches a drop pod assault with 10,000 marines, loses all but 500 of them to AA fire, and the 500 survivors are able to finish the mission then that's fine because the chapter has a million marines and the Imperium as a whole has billions. It's only a problem with the ridiculously tiny number of marines in canon, where a single Sky Ray launching a SAM salvo can kill enough marines to annihilate a drop pod assault and cause catastrophic losses for the Imperium.
Same as with your average tank squadron: breakthrough operations and mobile reserves. After all the lancing and artillery (maybe even done by the Space Marines themselves) the Drop Pods come in and the Space Marines boltgun down the reeling survivors so that the Imperial Guard attack can roll over without stopping and take the clay. OR if the Imperial Guard defenses are getting overrun the Drop Pods come in and the Space Marines boltgun down the attackers to save the day - then they can Thunderhawk away for a breakthrough in the counterattack. They can also just mingle with the Guard and act as walking-talking MBTs that can fit into trenches and buildings because you can never have enough MBTs ESPECIALLY if they can fight literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the infantry.
Sure, a squad of infantry-size LRBTs is great and can do all kinds of things. But so can the 10,000 normal LRBTs you can get for the same cost as those precious few marines. All of these explanations require orders of magnitude more marines in the Imperium.
Grey Templar wrote: A single marine may not be able to take a whole IG regiment frontally, but he can certainly sneak into the headquarters, kill the command staff, and sow enough chaos while he escapes to make the regiment completely useless. Or he can lead your own regiment into battle and inspire them to greater deeds.
But why bother? If you know the location of the enemy HQ then a barrage of Basilisk shells or a lance strike from orbit is way cheaper and easier to arrange than a single marine. There just isn't any meaningful task that can be done by small-numbers marines that can't be done better by other, much more widely available, assets. IMOGW needs to do one of two retcons:
1) Add an order of magnitude or three to the number of marines. There are billions of marines, and they're still elite compared to the trillions of guardsmen and uncountably many PDF soldiers.
or
2) Acknowledge that marines have minimal practical value and exist purely for religious and/or propaganda value. A squad of marines may be a completely worthless asset in practical terms but the possible existence of that squad gives something of immense value: hope that victory is possible. And so when the guardsmen are dying in the trenches, desperately holding on for just one more minute, they can have the hope that if they hold on a little longer their sacrifice will mean something and the marines will arrive to save them. Repeat this all over the Imperium, add in some religious preaching on the marines as symbols of the might of sacred humanity, and now you see some real value. This also neatly explains all of the in-universe claims about how powerful marines are and how a single squad can win a war despite the obvious absurdity of the claim. It's absurd and that's fine because it's all Imperial propaganda hyping up the few contributions of marines into something way more than they really are.
Why bother? Not every location is in range of your basilisks, not every warzone will have Imperial naval superiority, not every ground target can be struck from orbit thanks to shields, etc... But there is almost no target you can't quickly fire a half dozen drop pods at and expect them to arrive.
The best option of course is making there be many more marines than officially acknowledged.
Marines are not imperial assasins (but in a huge and clunky power armor) ... Stop the Ninja Marine BS, its juvenile and almost bad taste.
If marines are special forces they are not seal/delta types (those are deathwatch or other dedicated kill teams) ... They are like a ranger company, ie yes they also hold ground in a pitch.
Its really easy to grasp.
Space Marine power armor is not clunky, its big but not clunky and awkward. Marines are described as moving faster and more quietly than something that big should, that is due to their power armor. It is quiet, they can move quickly and with a lot more stealth than you would think from their size alone.
They're definitely not ninjas, but a single marine could conduct a clandestine infiltration.
I'm not talking about some ninja sneaking in and out undetected. I'm talking a dude sneaking in under cover of darkness to lay a bunch of timed explosive charges and once discovered shoot his way out as the base explodes around him. Or 6 marines in a drop pod that land right in the command post, murder the command staff, and then escape to rendezvous with a thunderhawk.
So exactly the type of operation that a similar number of tempestus will handle similarly but with out toxic levels of fanboysm??????
And if you want to send a single operative you send an assassin, not a tac marine.
The more you thing about it, the more you realise that Astartes are nothing special... They are simply another toll in the arsenal of the IOM.
They are also Poster Boys and Propaganda Troops just like the Russian Paratroopers.
There are far fewer assassins than Space Marines. An Imperial commander is far more likely to have a small number of marines at his disposable than an assassin.
Grey Templar wrote: By your logic, all special forces are useless and pointless since we have aircraft, missiles, and artillery. Which is obviously not true.
Not at all. Those forces are incredibly useful in the real world because we care about collateral damage, we have political factors where excessive force could escalate a conflict, etc. The Imperium has none of that. They don't care if some "civilians" are within the blast radius of an orbital lance strike, there are no civilians in 40k and collateral damage means fewer traitors to have to kill once the planet is taken. They don't have to worry about the media showing pictures of mangled child corpses, their media is under strict government control and even if they did show such images their citizens would cheer the death of the filthy xenos/traitors. They don't have to worry about violating the sovereignty of another country to assassinate a target, no non-Imperial entity has any legitimacy whatsoever and the only reason they temporarily have independent sovereignty is that the Imperial invasion and genocide fleet hasn't arrived yet.
If we didn't have political and moral concerns with excessive force in the real world we would have very little need for special forces. Identify a target, destroy it with an ICBM, done.
Collateral damage is still a concern for the Imperium.
We in the real world care about collateral damage for humanitarian reasons, because excessive killing is "evil" and "wrong". The Imperium still cares about collateral damage, but only in the sense that collateral damage damages valuable stuff. Valuable stuff can include local infrastructure, the population at large, the morale/loyalty of the local population, etc...
They don't care about little Timmy getting blown up by an artillery shell, but they will care about massacring the local population unnecessarily which might cause resentment in the years to come. So they'll pull their punches when possible. Reckless commanders who wantonly destroy valuable Imperial assets will be replaced quickly.
There are many brutally practical reasons to keep special forces even if you abandon morality and only deal with tangible benefits.
Grey Templar wrote: There are far fewer assassins than Space Marines. An Imperial commander is far more likely to have a small number of marines at his disposable than an assassin.
.
Any Source for this apart from headcannon?
If we have 1000x1000 adeptus astartes... Subtract the training, support, logistics combat attrition, etc... We Might have perhaps 500 marines aveilable per chapter for front line combat, from those perhaps 2/3 can be send alone as a Not Ninja to do assasination missions... So we have like 300k Astartes Assasins Stand offs in the IOM.
We have like 6 assasin cults... Do you really think we have less than 50.000 vindicares, and if the number of those are in fact just 500 how is that they are worst than the mass produced bolter porn acolites?
Also Astartes dont follow the IOM chain of command, the are ******Cowboys Warmongers, Assasins do.
Aecus Decimus wrote: And it's hard to imagine a decoy system that would be able to mimic the ballistic flight path of a drop pod and the IR emissions from reentry heating without being as large and heavy as a drop pod
I would say the decoy is probably larger and heavier than the drop pod. We are not talking about an IRL army where material expenditure is a concern: the Imperium (and especially the Space Marines) can easily afford to have multiple times the disposable support material per combat force. When the Space Marines drop their entire Chapter in ~100 Drop Pods I would imagine millions (if not billions) of Drop Pod sized decoys deploying alongside covering half the target planet (if not half the solar system) in an impenetrable ECM shroud.
There’s also the issue of the number of Chapters being a matter of Administratum Records.
Which we know, in-universe, aren’t exactly reliable. And those records would likely assume Codex Compliance. I wouldn’t put it past the Administratum, at some point, to have lost a 0 from the Chapter count.
This is somewhat offset by the number of Foundings being broadly reliable. Except….those records aren’t believed to be complete, either. Especially with stuff like the Cursed Founding.
Who is actually checking a given Chapter only has 10 Companies of 100 Marines (well, 9 of 100, and a Scout Company of variable size)?
Even if the Chapter is required to assemble in one place for a census, how is there a way to know they’re not just presenting What Is Expected?
Space Wolves of course aren’t at all Codex Compliant. Black Templars are spread out so far in intentionally self sustaining Crusade Fleets there’s no way to tell just how many there actually are.
Grey Templar wrote: There are many brutally practical reasons to keep special forces even if you abandon morality and only deal with tangible benefits.
Which all goes back to the numbers problem. Space marines make sense if they cost 5-10x more than a guardsman with roughly proportional effectiveness. But when they cost orders of magnitude more than that it doesn't make sense. Yeah, a lance strike that takes out the traitor governor and the entire surrounding city costs some resources but that entire city is worth less than a single space marine. It would be better in the long run to obliterate the city if it means not having a space marine die.
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AtoMaki wrote: I would say the decoy is probably larger and heavier than the drop pod. We are not talking about an IRL army where material expenditure is a concern: the Imperium (and especially the Space Marines) can easily afford to have multiple times the disposable support material per combat force. When the Space Marines drop their entire Chapter in ~100 Drop Pods I would imagine millions (if not billions) of Drop Pod sized decoys deploying alongside covering half the target planet (if not half the solar system) in an impenetrable ECM shroud.
ECM does nothing against passive IR homing targeting the extreme heat of reentry friction and air compression. The drop pod is a very bright target for an IR seeker to lock onto and once it does that's the end of it. Plus there's ECCM, home-on-jam weapons, etc. And if the decoy is larger and heavier than the drop pod it won't have the same aerodynamic performance and the pods will quickly separate themselves from the decoys.
And then there's the question of how anyone is hauling millions or billions of drop pod sized ECM decoys to a planet when a space marine warship is only capable of launching a far lower number of pods. You'd have to have giant freighters full of decoys, at which point those freighters become a perfect target for naval forces. Then once you've expended all this effort on decoys, most of which you probably won't be able to recover, you really have to wonder why you bothered with space marines instead of conventional forces.
I always imagined the "1000 marines" thing in one of two ways.
1. It's an Administratum error, being that it was 1000 marines per chapter when they were reformed post-Heresy, and no-one has updated them since. Or theyve dropped a couple of zeroes.
2. It's 1000 "immediately deployable" marines. Not including those already deployed, on their way back from a deployment, in med-bays, etc. So they always make sure that they can have 1000 marines to deploy at the drop of a hat. So if they deploy 200 marines to a warzone, they immediately pick another 200 marines to be ready to go for the next deployment.
Aecus Decimus wrote: Space marines make sense if they cost 5-10x more than a guardsman with roughly proportional effectiveness.
I would say this is close, except there is an exponential effectiveness increase per cost. So a Space Marine needs roughly 10x the resources of a Guardsman (most of it being its implants) but has 100x the Guardsman's capabilities (because it is more like an MBT rather than an infantryman). The real catch is not the cost but the availability - if the Imperium could turn every 10 Guardsmen into 1 Space Marine by simply paying the extra cost up front then they would do that in a blink of an eye, but they can't do that because only 1 Guardsman in a million could be turned into a Space Marine.
Aecus Decimus wrote: ECM does nothing against passive IR homing targeting the extreme heat of reentry friction and air compression. The drop pod is a very bright target for an IR seeker to lock onto and once it does that's the end of it. Plus there's ECCM, home-on-jam weapons, etc. And if the decoy is larger and heavier than the drop pod it won't have the same aerodynamic performance and the pods will quickly separate themselves from the decoys.
Active ECM blind anything, any they are not your crappy IRL ECM but awesome Sci-Fi ECM. For all we know, they use an emission control field, trap all the infra-red coming from the Drop Pod, and redirect it back into space or even compress it into a needle-thin beam and refract it across the atmosphere. Maybe they use strange particle emitters to fry enemy sensors on the sub-quantum level. I don't think the Imperium is limited to our understanding of electronic warfare.
Aecus Decimus wrote: And then there's the question of how anyone is hauling millions or billions of drop pod sized ECM decoys to a planet when a space marine warship is only capable of launching a far lower number of pods. You'd have to have giant freighters full of decoys, at which point those freighters become a perfect target for naval forces. Then once you've expended all this effort on decoys, most of which you probably won't be able to recover, you really have to wonder why you bothered with space marines instead of conventional forces.
Space Marine voidships are pretty friggin' big and a Chapter-sized deployment would bring an entire fleet of them. They should comfortably have enough space for those decoys OR they might not even carry them around but build them on-demand with in-situ resource harvesting and onboard fabricators/autofoundries. The possibilities are really endless here.
Goodluck with IR targeting during daylight. When a big ball of plasma is emitting IR and visible radiation is the backdrop. And you only have seconds to detect the drop pod; get a firing solution; bring the weapon to target; and then shoot.
Our atmosphere is 12km thick. The speed of sound is 1225km/h. So roughly 34 seconds at the speed of sound. How fast is a drop pod? If it is bullet fast you have 15 seconds.
Bobthehero wrote: As seen in the Scion 'dex, there is such a thing as enough AA to deter a drop pod assault, the pods can be tracked and shots (but not the Scions who are shoved out of the airlock and given a shroud of sorts to protect against the atmospheric entry)
I think in those (pretty rare) cases, the move on the SM part is to just drop over the horizon and approach at low altitude or just drop the Marine force off and have it move in on it's own accord, and then start to make a mess of things and draw the opposing force out.
Or they infil a defence site and turn off the defence laser/shields or point the big guns at the enemy. Stuff like that.
OR just bombard the AA from space, and then drop when that's complete.
Not always possible, between void shields and heavy defences on the outer perimeter, dropping somewhere else or lancing the target may have been impossible. Or whatever, attempts from jumping from Thundwerhawks with jump packs also failed, I assume the Marine size actually proved to be a detriment.
Imo, it's good for setting, there's always this tendency for people to think things will just automatically go the Marine's way when they arrive, and it's nice to see that, yes, drop pod assaults aren't just ''Marine show up, and win, the end''
Grey Templar wrote: There are far fewer assassins than Space Marines. An Imperial commander is far more likely to have a small number of marines at his disposable than an assassin.
.
Any Source for this apart from headcannon?
If we have 1000x1000 adeptus astartes... Subtract the training, support, logistics combat attrition, etc... We Might have perhaps 500 marines aveilable per chapter for front line combat, from those perhaps 2/3 can be send alone as a Not Ninja to do assasination missions... So we have like 300k Astartes Assasins Stand offs in the IOM.
We have like 6 assasin cults... Do you really think we have less than 50.000 vindicares, and if the number of those are in fact just 500 how is that they are worst than the mass produced bolter porn acolites?
Also Astartes dont follow the IOM chain of command, the are ******Cowboys Warmongers, Assasins do.
Assassins are only trained on a single planet, Terra. They are under the direct command of the High Lords.
While direct numbers are never given, the implication is that they are extremely few in number.
Bobthehero wrote: As seen in the Scion 'dex, there is such a thing as enough AA to deter a drop pod assault, the pods can be tracked and shots (but not the Scions who are shoved out of the airlock and given a shroud of sorts to protect against the atmospheric entry)
I think in those (pretty rare) cases, the move on the SM part is to just drop over the horizon and approach at low altitude or just drop the Marine force off and have it move in on it's own accord, and then start to make a mess of things and draw the opposing force out.
Or they infil a defence site and turn off the defence laser/shields or point the big guns at the enemy. Stuff like that.
OR just bombard the AA from space, and then drop when that's complete.
Not always possible, between void shields and heavy defences on the outer perimeter, dropping somewhere else or lancing the target may have been impossible. Or whatever, attempts from jumping from Thundwerhawks with jump packs also failed, I assume the Marine size actually proved to be a detriment.
Naturally "not always possible" doesn't mean "never possible". There are passages somewhere about Space Marines juat moving on from a world that's too big a task for the strike force, and earmarking it for a combined action of Guard/Navy/Marines later. But what I like about this sort of thing is that it can play to the Marine strength of being able to go on loooong deployments and take advantage of their various extra abilities that aren't generally noted, like long, continuous marches without sleep, being able to digest all sorts of not-traditionally-food, and eating brains to gather intelligence.
Imo, it's good for setting, there's always this tendency for people to think things will just automatically go the Marine's way when they arrive, and it's nice to see that, yes, drop pod assaults aren't just ''Marine show up, and win, the end''
The point is more that there's more than one way to crack planetary defenses, and that the Marines are prepared for a number of insertion missions and types of conflict. Having the variety of scenarios keeps it interesting, yes.
Insectum7 wrote: Tracking and intercepting ICBMs with modern tech is considered so difficult that we're still essentially relying on the Mutually Assured Destruction paradigm.
Nah, we had working anti-missile defenses decades ago. There are two reasons we don't see it, neither of which apply in 40k:
1) It's a huge political issue. Effective anti-missile defenses have the potential to spark an arms race to overwhelm them with sheer numbers of ICBMs, and/or to attempt to launch a preemptive strike before your ICBMs are no longer useful as a deterrent and your enemy can launch their own preemptive strike at will. All of the major nuclear powers agreed to limit anti-missile defenses as a result and so each country has a few to stop, say, North Korea from doing something stupid but very obviously not enough to be a destabilizing threat. And as a result of being unable to spam thousands of terminal-phase interceptors all over the country the only option to counter MIRVs is huge and expensive interceptors that hit the incoming missile before MIRV separation but cost as much as the ICBM they're supposed to intercept. Obviously none of that applies in 40k, a setting where everyone wants to genocide everyone else and will gladly sacrifice billions to kill billions of the enemy.
2) Anti-missile defense requires way more reliability than killing drop pods. A 90% effectiveness on an anti-missile system means 10% of the warheads get through, and each one that gets through might kill millions of people. So now not only are you having to use the most expensive interceptor option you have to send several of them against each incoming target to get closer to a 100% stop. If I have to build five interceptors, each of which costs as much as an ICBM, to counter each of your missiles that's an arms race I can't win.
Well it looks to me like you just described some major problems with it. You need a ton of them, they're expensive, they need to be everywhere, and they're still not reliable.
But the 40k situation is completely different. A 90% stop rate against drop pods means horrifying losses for the marines, far more than the value of any possible mission they could accomplish. If 90 out of 100 marines are shot down drop podding into the enemy HQ then that's a clear win for the enemy. Those 90 marines were worth way more than the minor disruption that happens before the next person down the chain of command takes over, and that's assuming the 10 survivors can even accomplish anything before they are finished off by ground forces.
So then the answer is something different. Such as launch decoys, find where the effective counter-launch systems are, and then bombard the from orbit, or drop somewhere else.
AtoMaki wrote: I don't think that's a concern considering that 90% of the setting is in the same boat. If I have to explain it, I would say that Drop Pods use Sci-Fi ECM (active and passive) and unlike what people imagine they are not dropped into the atmosphere all on their own but with 1000s of decoys and independent Sci-Fi ECM emitters.
The problem is that GW tells us how drop pods survive: speed, and speed alone. And it's hard to imagine a decoy system that would be able to mimic the ballistic flight path of a drop pod and the IR emissions from reentry heating without being as large and heavy as a drop pod and, more importantly, taking up as much space in the launching ship as another pod full of marines.
No it's really easy; more Drop Pods. As already mentioned the Marine vessels are enormous. And we already have examples of Pods that don't carry Marines.
The better answer, the one which is already required for other reasons, is for there to be orders of magnitude more marines and for drop pod assaults against well-defended targets to be a saturation attack that overwhelms the enemy's AA capacity. If a full company of Ultramarines launches a drop pod assault with 10,000 marines, loses all but 500 of them to AA fire, and the 500 survivors are able to finish the mission then that's fine because the chapter has a million marines and the Imperium as a whole has billions. It's only a problem with the ridiculously tiny number of marines in canon, where a single Sky Ray launching a SAM salvo can kill enough marines to annihilate a drop pod assault and cause catastrophic losses for the Imperium.
No no no, that's proposing that the "fix" is a 90% loss scenario is a TERRIBLE solution. Not to mention the weird logic of discounting the idea of decoy pods, but then proposing more actual pods just filled with sacraficial bodies.
The solution lies elsewhere. Pods remain difficult to intercept effectively, through decoys, ECM, or other techniques, and the Marines aren't habitually suicide-dropping.
Sure, a squad of infantry-size LRBTs is great and can do all kinds of things. But so can the 10,000 normal LRBTs you can get for the same cost as those precious few marines. All of these explanations require orders of magnitude more marines in the Imperium.
The marines do fun stuff, like boarding orbital defence platforms and then nuking the planet below. The 10,000 LRBTs can't do that.
Grey Templar wrote: There are far fewer assassins than Space Marines. An Imperial commander is far more likely to have a small number of marines at his disposable than an assassin.
.
Any Source for this apart from headcannon?
If we have 1000x1000 adeptus astartes... Subtract the training, support, logistics combat attrition, etc... We Might have perhaps 500 marines aveilable per chapter for front line combat, from those perhaps 2/3 can be send alone as a Not Ninja to do assasination missions... So we have like 300k Astartes Assasins Stand offs in the IOM.
We have like 6 assasin cults... Do you really think we have less than 50.000 vindicares, and if the number of those are in fact just 500 how is that they are worst than the mass produced bolter porn acolites?
Also Astartes dont follow the IOM chain of command, the are ******Cowboys Warmongers, Assasins do.
Assassins are only trained on a single planet, Terra. They are under the direct command of the High Lords.
While direct numbers are never given, the implication is that they are extremely few in number.
300k on terra is a extremely low number, thats less than a a city block of a hive city. Nobody will even notice then among the trilion inhabitans of terra.
Some one make my lough when they say that Astartes cost the resources of 10 guardsmen but were 100 times more effective... If so, why not have a trillion marines
A single boot of a Marine power armour has more OC for the IOM than a IG squad.
IoM Astartes are just boutique troops for parades and propaganda, every know and then they scare some hopeless traitors to keep them fit.
Bolt Porn is just to sell books, the moment you try to make some logistical sense out of the setting SM become party clowns (curiously enough they share the colour palette).
Some one make my lough when they say that Astartes cost the resources of 10 guardsmen but were 100 times more effective... If so, why not have a trillion marines
You should re-read that post because it is explained in it why .
They tried that. Then half went rogue and nearly destroyed the entire Imperium
That’s why.
To most in The Imperium, Astartes are mythical beings. Something often included in Ecclesiarchy art and sermons as His Angels. But your actual chances of seeing them is tiny, even if you’re in The Imperial Guard.
On deeper thought? The actual number of war zones which would require (no, not desire) Astartes intervention is going to be pretty small. The Imperium already has truly vast armies. The Guard alone number in the untold billions. And most planets will have a large number of PDF Troops.
Opportunistic Raids can be handled by those. Not necessarily efficiently, but handled all the same.
And franky, a good chunk of Imperial Worlds aren’t even lynchpins. Worthy of defending sure, but not critical, such as Armageddon or Necromunda etc. And so in terms of Astartes, lower down on the priority list.
It’s all about the brutal calculus of war, and reserving your Best Stuff for the Most Serious Warzones.
As such, there’s simply not the need many might think for oodles and oodles of Astartes. Their numbers are few by design.
At the scale of the Imperium I'd wager the Guard are well into the Trillions. Especially when you consider their general method of conducting war is basically WW1 "flood the machine guns with bodies" style of control, complete with commissars executing guard as examples and all.
The guard is a mass produced system of defence. Vast numbers shipped around the Galaxy to defend and take worlds.
And yep whilst the game and lore heavily focus on the Marines, the actual reality of the setting is Marines are super rare. Heck the same is also true of Chaos Marines as well. Most Imperial Guard fighting against Chaos will encounter legions of cultists and warped machines, but actual marines in full armour is rare even then. Sure when a major campaign is underway when Horus is marshalling his forces, then you see vast legions of Marines pitted against Marines. However such events are rare, they are the moments of vast history being told and of worlds burned and lost and reconquered.
Someone help me with fluff logic: By my understanding, any writer can "POOF" a new chapter (1k Astartes) into existence any time they wish. Just say they are the great great great sub faction of the purple nurples of Zion 5, of the Tau Seti Cluster or something.
What cannot be done is "new" original founding chapters right? There are no "missing" chapters from the 1st founding?
Or is the OP asking to break the 1k limit and go back to legion strength? Which is a bad decision for very obvious reasons.
In M41 it is assumed that there are about a thousand Chapters. 9 of those are the modern incarnations of the Loyalist Legions from the Heresy.
That being said, prior to the opening of the Rift there were more Chapters dying than almost any other time in Imperial history and then the Rift consumed numerous Chapter homeworlds and fleets. Guillimans Ultima Founding did something to alleviate this damage but I don't think the number of Chapters has exceeded its pre-Rift levels.
Gert wrote: In M41 it is assumed that there are about a thousand Chapters. 9 of those are the modern incarnations of the Loyalist Legions from the Heresy.
That being said, prior to the opening of the Rift there were more Chapters dying than almost any other time in Imperial history and then the Rift consumed numerous Chapter homeworlds and fleets. Guillimans Ultima Founding did something to alleviate this damage but I don't think the number of Chapters has exceeded its pre-Rift levels.
That likely depends on just how many Primaris Cawl had made in his 10,000 years. Which of course would require some idea of how much of that was spent in perfecting the process.
Folk also need to keep in mind the overall Primaris Project (Bods, Guns, Tanks) wasn’t just 10,000 years in the making, but a process barely exposed to attrition, barring any part of the process where things went a bit wrong.
And that does matter a lot. Even if Cawl only spent the last 500 years of that only churning out the Perfected Products? We know turning a human into a Primaris is a more stable process than Firstborn, thanks to ideal equipment and purer, even purified, Geneseed. And when done, off into cryosleep until Guilliman returns and Cawl can reveal all without being instantly murdered to death for being a naughty little Heretek.
We can also reasonably infer the Impulsor, Repulsor etc, being STC (albeit more complex in design than Rhinos etc) were likely made throughout those 10,000 years - and all without any being wrecked or damaged. Certainly any impression just pulled them out of Physical Exhaust Sphincter Kappa Goon Beta is entirely erroneous. And now they exists in those numbers, maintaining is somewhat easier, especially if we can assume Cawl would’ve stockpiled spares and repairs as well.
You know that would be grim bit of fun to have the Primaris suddenly hit with supply issues. Perfected warriors who can't get replacement parts because the project was so secret and so under wraps that there isn't the infrastructure for long term wide spread support
Overread wrote: At the scale of the Imperium I'd wager the Guard are well into the Trillions. Especially when you consider their general method of conducting war is basically WW1 "flood the machine guns with bodies" style of control, complete with commissars executing guard as examples and all.
The guard is a mass produced system of defence. Vast numbers shipped around the Galaxy to defend and take worlds.
And yep whilst the game and lore heavily focus on the Marines, the actual reality of the setting is Marines are super rare. Heck the same is also true of Chaos Marines as well. Most Imperial Guard fighting against Chaos will encounter legions of cultists and warped machines, but actual marines in full armour is rare even then. Sure when a major campaign is underway when Horus is marshalling his forces, then you see vast legions of Marines pitted against Marines. However such events are rare, they are the moments of vast history being told and of worlds burned and lost and reconquered.
CSM might be even rarer than Adeptus Astartes.
BUT, and is a big BUT, Csm are in an "Astartes supremacy" society (what Horus wanted) ... AA Believe they are independent, but they are just tools of the High Lords and Inquisition, reduced to comically powerless "chapters".
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TangoTwoBravo wrote: Anyone ever shot something that was moving at impossible speed?
You’d need more than impossibly-fast reflexes to pull that off. Which as we all know, is impossible.
So 1,000 Marines in a Chapter is good to go.
This is dumb, seriously.
Are you the sort of person that would enlist the VDV just for the cool ads and Myth??
Some one make my lough when they say that Astartes cost the resources of 10 guardsmen but were 100 times more effective... If so, why not have a trillion marines
You should re-read that post because it is explained in it why .
Tried to re read and couldnt find it, sorry.
Could you pass the link so I can make self criticsm, comrade?
Vatsetis wrote:the moment you try to make some logistical sense out of the setting
Well, there's your problem and solution rolled into one! The setting doesn't make sense, and doesn't have to. So long as the general "idea" of Astartes being rare, but valuable, elite troops is met, then that's all you need to know. Numbers are just window dressing.
Perhaps you are right, Im pretty obtuse... I believe fiction is not an independent bubble outside of reality... But rather a derivation from it (and therefore both must follow the same basic rules). .. You know, like most of humanity understood life before the xviii century (or George Miller today).
Surely nowdays smart WASPs with "Scientific Method" know better, after all they have conquered the world (both geographically and culturally) and their reign will surely last forever (or until the antropic collapse, whatever comes earlier).
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: That likely depends on just how many Primaris Cawl had made in his 10,000 years. Which of course would require some idea of how much of that was spent in perfecting the process.
Folk also need to keep in mind the overall Primaris Project (Bods, Guns, Tanks) wasn’t just 10,000 years in the making, but a process barely exposed to attrition, barring any part of the process where things went a bit wrong.
And that does matter a lot. Even if Cawl only spent the last 500 years of that only churning out the Perfected Products? We know turning a human into a Primaris is a more stable process than Firstborn, thanks to ideal equipment and purer, even purified, Geneseed. And when done, off into cryosleep until Guilliman returns and Cawl can reveal all without being instantly murdered to death for being a naughty little Heretek.
We can also reasonably infer the Impulsor, Repulsor etc, being STC (albeit more complex in design than Rhinos etc) were likely made throughout those 10,000 years - and all without any being wrecked or damaged. Certainly any impression just pulled them out of Physical Exhaust Sphincter Kappa Goon Beta is entirely erroneous. And now they exists in those numbers, maintaining is somewhat easier, especially if we can assume Cawl would’ve stockpiled spares and repairs as well.
Cawl definitely made loads of Primaris but not all went into building entirely new Chapters, most went to rebuilding or reinforcing old ones. The vast majority of Ultima Founding Chapters were made from those Primaris who were part of the Unnumbered Sons that followed Guilliman during the Indomitus Crusade and were said to be Legion strength (in that people were getting worried Guilliman had a personal Legion of Space Marines).
It's probably safe to say that the Chapters that didn't die but were significantly battered by the big events of M41 and then the opening of the Rift are at least back to half strength by now, with a good portion of those reaching full or even greater than their pre-Rift numbers. As it stands (per Lexicanum) there are 39 confirmed Ultima Founding Chapters from GW sources be they Codexes, stories, or White Dwarf with 3 of these being re-foundings and I think by my last count there was close to 300 (possibly 400) official Chapters from GW sources over the years.
To the post above, it's largely estimated there's about 1000 chapters, so that's simple 1000 lots of 1000 marines + primaris I guess
I'm just going to post my 2 cents again having given it some more thought, sorry if I've gotten math wrong, I'm also not going to bother thinking through attrition.
Basically there's say 10 million inhabited worlds, which I'll assume will average a pop of 5 billion.
00,000,010,000,000 worlds
30,000,000,000,000 (30 trillion) troops (maybe 1-2/3rds PDF), 3,000,000 per world (based on Earth)
00,000,002,500,000 Marines (Full status)(+/-500,000), 4 marines per 10 worlds, 1 per 2.5
(now honestly this is based on... Nothing, but you get the impression only 1-10 recruits per planet make the cut in the Marneus Calgar comic, of which "soft-worlds" (agri) produce next to none)
So what would exist based on those numbers?;
00,000,000,002,500 1k Chapters
|OR|
00,000,000,000,250 10k Chapters
Proposal: 50*10k Chapters + 2000*1k Chapters Galaxy-wide, splits the difference and allows flagship chapters (Ultramarines that seem to be everywhere for instance) to be a little more prolific.
Proposal: 10k is permitted for crusading armies for the duration of crusade (Black-Templar "abuse" this)
Proposal: 10k is permitted to 1st generation loyalists & can be granted as boons to Chapters that perform above and beyond.
A 1k Chapter is permitted up to 250 initiates & neophytes, and 300 aspirants, in addition to the cap (in the Marneus Calgar comic they chew through 300 kids and end up with 1 neophyte)
A 10k Chapter is permitted up to 1250 initiates & neophytes, and 1500 aspirants, in addition to the cap (Black-Templar "abuse" this)
This way you have guys sworn in as official full members, and an allowance of people who aren't officially part of your Chapter but are able to fill slots in a pinch in various stages of development from neophyte to full marine.
I get that people are saying about the drop pod causality rate being higher than we might expect, but I wouldn't expect marines to have to bypass fortifications capable of shooting them that often, they're shock & awe troops most of the time, but they'll have infiltrators disable or find holes in defenses. There's also probably a few sci-fi things they'll be doing on top of chucking chaff and flares around them (in the animation Astartes you see the boarding ship is followed down by missile interception drones), I don't think we have to assume they're automatically resorting to carrying hundreds of empty drop-pods.
I don't think there's much point speculating about the assassins, they're maybe more effective, but not well rounded and very expensive for whatever sci-fi reasons, something like an evasor is an expensive heat-seeking missile, the others are artisans or genetic freaks, space-marines are simpler grunts that are meant to stick-around a warzone.
IMO The marines aren't made on-mass because of material constraints and post-heresy blues. Marines are going through extra screening but are also being used up quickly, a fraction of aspirants are not genetically viable, and a larger fraction are not good enough to be "elite" soldiers, and added to all of this a chapter can only recruit from the pubescent boys, whereas the guard can have you from the point you can hold a rifle onwards to the point you can't.
There's probably also diminishing returns on Space-Marines, where they're much more effective than base humans in shock&awe/black-ops/hostile-environments/etc, but don't trade as effectively in straight forward defensive engagements and the like, the admin may decide there's a sweetspot between the risk marines present, the value they provide, and the resources they'll consume.
(On top of this, as others have said; Marines are propaganda tools, and there's value to citizens and soldiers having these symbols around)
CaffeineIsGood wrote: . . .There's also probably a few sci-fi things they'll be doing on top of chucking chaff and flares around them (in the animation Astartes you see the boarding ship is followed down by missile interception drones), I don't think we have to assume they're automatically resorting to carrying hundreds of empty drop-pods.
One obvious (and given) workaround is that they can just friggin teleport.
Teleport Terminators into any anti-Pod silo or C&C center first, and then the pods are away and the war is on.
Bobthehero wrote: How do you locate those C&C centers? Get a teleport lock on? This is what I mean, people just assume things will just *work* for Space Marines
Monitor communications and suss it out. Perhaps powerful scanning tech. Drop a dummy and see what fires. Or a Librarian just divines it. . . Space magic.
Insectum7 wrote: Because Terminators can eat brains and gather more intel.
Is this even canon? It's certainly dumb enough that it shouldn't be. But now we've gone from "take out the AA defenses to clear the way for a drop pod assault" to some kind of spy mission where a random AA gun controller is a valuable intel source and a primary target instead of a means to an end.
And of course that's assuming there even is a control center. Against a Tau force, for example, AA defense is provided by squadrons of networked Sky Rays and Devilfish hubs. There's no fixed control bunker to teleport into, only mobile gunships flying around the battlefield. And because it's all networked together the loss of any one unit just means shifting it's responsibilities to the remaining units.
Drop Pods because Terminator armor is better protection during teleportation, and Drop Pods will do the job for Power Armor with less risk.
Less risk, assuming the enemy has no AA defenses, and only if you risk those terminators anyway by teleporting them into random bunkers to kill some poor sergeant monitoring the missile battery. It's all a needlessly convoluted plan when you're starting from a premise of total orbital control and precision teleport technology. Just teleport in a bomb and be done with it.
Insectum7 wrote: One obvious (and given) workaround is that they can just friggin teleport.
Teleport Terminators into any anti-Pod silo or C&C center first, and then the pods are away and the war is on.
Why teleport terminators in when you can teleport a bomb instead? And why use drop pods if you can teleport?
Because Termis can leave a survivor to spread fear? . SM are just propaganda and fear troops, thats their role (like nowdays Russian Paratroopers) as actual combat troopa they arent just not very efficient (just like Russian Paratroopers).
Bunkers can be well made. Teleport a bomb in, and you’ve no way of truly knowing the job is done.
Teleport in 5 Terminators? That job is about to get as done as it’s possible to be.
Hell. Why not also broadcast the slaughter. If seeing their leadership utterly massacred by seemingly invincible behemoths of war doesn’t shatter the enemy’s nerve, nothing will.
Thing is a bomb would destroy all the internals of a bunker. So yes you've taken the bunker, you also now cannot use the bunker yourself. Considering how many warzones are push and shove with the Imperium, retaking and holding defensive positions is very important. That bunker you assault today is your defensive point tomorrow.
Terminators let you take the bunker and hold it. Sure they do a lot of collateral damage, but no way near as much as a massive bomb would.
Plus a Bunker might well have multi-layered defences. So a bomb would either have to be insanely powerful or you'd have to do it more than once to punch through each layer.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Bunkers can be well made. Teleport a bomb in, and you’ve no way of truly knowing the job is done.
Teleport in 5 Terminators? That job is about to get as done as it’s possible to be.
Hell. Why not also broadcast the slaughter. If seeing their leadership utterly massacred by seemingly invincible behemoths of war doesn’t shatter the enemy’s nerve, nothing will.
Hey! I thought this thread was about Loyalist Astartes. Don't be bringing 8th Legion tactics into this.
Insectum7 wrote: Because Terminators can eat brains and gather more intel.
Is this even canon? It's certainly dumb enough that it shouldn't be.
Bruh, do you even 40k? It's canon, yes.
But now we've gone from "take out the AA defenses to clear the way for a drop pod assault" to some kind of spy mission where a random AA gun controller is a valuable intel source and a primary target instead of a means to an end.
And of course that's assuming there even is a control center. Against a Tau force, for example, AA defense is provided by squadrons of networked Sky Rays and Devilfish hubs. There's no fixed control bunker to teleport into, only mobile gunships flying around the battlefield. And because it's all networked together the loss of any one unit just means shifting it's responsibilities to the remaining units.
It's just an option that's available, that's all. A possible reason you might use a squad insertion rather than bombardment. They can always use bombardment too.
Drop Pods because Terminator armor is better protection during teleportation, and Drop Pods will do the job for Power Armor with less risk.
Less risk, assuming the enemy has no AA defenses, and only if you risk those terminators anyway by teleporting them into random bunkers to kill some poor sergeant monitoring the missile battery. It's all a needlessly convoluted plan when you're starting from a premise of total orbital control and precision teleport technology. Just teleport in a bomb and be done with it.
Marines are basically written as wartime geniuses at planetary assault. It's literally their primary role and the thing they are perhaps best known for. The scenario I describe is just one of many options available, and it's safe to assume that the Marines are going to use whatever means they feel is optimal for a given scenario. "There's more than one way to skin a cat" is the aphorism at play.
Drop Pods are described as coming in at velocities AA weapons simply can’t track. This is why they’re the sole reserve of Astartes. Any lesser being would be killed by the speed of the descent and exceptionally rapid deceleration immediately prior to hitting the ground.
Those things do not land gently or softly. Rather, they decelerate only to the point they don’t break apart upon impact.
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The ultimate weapon of terror and surprise, when a Drop Pod lands directly in the midst of an enemy line or formation and its occupants disembark and start wreaking havoc, there is little escape for the foe. Drop Pods are fired with colossal acceleration from an orbiting Strike Cruiser or Battle Barge, after which it screams through a planet's atmosphere with oversized rocket thrusters boosting it even further beyond terminal velocity; even the most advanced air defence systems have difficulty locking on to a Drop Pod travelling at up to 12,000 kilometres per hour.
The ultimate weapon of terror and surprise, when a Drop Pod lands directly in the midst of an enemy line or formation and its occupants disembark and start wreaking havoc, there is little escape for the foe. Drop Pods are fired with colossal acceleration from an orbiting Strike Cruiser or Battle Barge, after which it screams through a planet's atmosphere with oversized rocket thrusters boosting it even further beyond terminal velocity; even the most advanced air defence systems have difficulty locking on to a Drop Pod travelling at up to 12,000 kilometres per hour.
Oh they actually put a number on it? I'm surprised. I was just poking at numbers yesterday but using 3,000 kph as a starting point.
Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.
Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.
Overread wrote: Thing is a bomb would destroy all the internals of a bunker. So yes you've taken the bunker, you also now cannot use the bunker yourself. Considering how many warzones are push and shove with the Imperium, retaking and holding defensive positions is very important. That bunker you assault today is your defensive point tomorrow.
Terminators let you take the bunker and hold it. Sure they do a lot of collateral damage, but no way near as much as a massive bomb would.
Plus a Bunker might well have multi-layered defences. So a bomb would either have to be insanely powerful or you'd have to do it more than once to punch through each layer.
Insanly powerful like a Lance Salvo from Orbit you mean???
Astra Militarum is Cheap.
Navy has the firepower.
Assasins, Inquisition, Sorotitas, etc are Specialists.
Adeptus Astartes... look good in the posters I guess.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.
Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.
Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.
When they also have capacity to redirect their plummet? Yes, especially in the background.
Also keep in mind that the most common places Drop Pods might deploy against are (former) Imperial Worlds, and Ork worlds, because those are simply the most numerous inhabitants of the Galaxy.
Orks of course favour sheer volume of firepower and rarely, if ever, really bother to aim AA guns properly. Imperial Worlds? No real need for Astartes proof defences as such. So whilst it’s perfectly possible to create AA stuff which could reliably track Drop Pods? Few places would really need them.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: Is that fast enough to not be shot down by realistic AA/Anti Missile defenses? I see that there are missiles to take out other missiles that move at twice that speed.
Genuinely curious. I'm very much a layman on this subject.
Well "realism" is a little funky for 40k because huge defense lasers are also on the menu for defenses. But my quick math gives 12,000÷60÷60=3.33 kilometers per second. If a ship launches Pods from 120km up, that's about 40 seconds of time to react. So IRL something has to aquire the target, launch and intercept in less 40 seconds. And the time-to-intercept depend heavily on the distance required to travel, obviously. If there's 100 km between the launch site and the point of intercept, that missile has got to be faaaast.
In 40k, defense lasers that can shoot at orbiting spacecraft are totally a thing. So then that's more of a tracking thing to get a Pod. It's unclear to me how good infrared tracking is during the daytime when theres this big ball of burning plasma in the sky, the sun. I also don't know how high up a Pod starts to heat up from the atmosphere (which can change from planet to planet). Like it could be that the first third of the distance travelled the pod is invisible to detection, in which case the opposition has 25 seconfs to react, rather than 40.
And this is all without potential countermrasures from the assaulting side, such as decoys, bombardment etc, that could make things more tricky for the ground forces. One idea would be to just airbusrt a bunch of nukes in the sky ahead of the pods to temporarily blind any IR sensors and have the pods pop in just afterwards under cover of blinding light and radiation. Another thing to do is to launch pods from waaaaay out so any initial acceleration is to even harder to detect, and there's no Pod IR signature possible until it hits the atmosphere.
Historically, ICBMs were "tossed" from around the globe. The missile would only fire for a short while, and then the warhead would drift in from a huge parabolic but predictable arc. Defensive silos would get calculations based on the lauch direction and acceleration, and then know roughly where the nuke was aiming, and then counter-launch accordingly. But the whole trip from Russia to the US for example would take 20-30 minutes, iirc.
Then missiles started carrying up to 10 independently targetable warheads, which complicated things. And now modern Hypersonics are potentially further disrupting that, but I'm not really up to snuff on it.
#notanexpert. Happy to be wrong and get more info.
Vatsetis wrote: Could some one please give a short version of the drop pod debate? ... It seems interesting but convoluted.
Thanks.
Canonically Drop Pods are said to be too fast to intercept/shoot down in most cases, and Pods play a critical role in making Marines effective even at low numbers.
Some people think the idea that they can't be intercepted is silly, and question why pods are a useful asset in the first place. "Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.
Bobthehero wrote: When it comes to taking terrain, yes. If we're talking about destroying something, that is different.
Well, sorta. For 40k sometimes a target is behind a shield, and the best way might be to stealth infiltrate on the ground and do a commando raid to blow it up.
Insectum7 wrote: "Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.
And that argument is primarily collateral damage. In the real world we don't fight wars of genocide (unless you're Russian), and we have to at least pretend to care about civilian casualties. If an enemy HQ is next to a school full of children then we don't just carpet-bomb the entire area to guarantee a kill, we send in infantry to kill the enemy soldiers without hurting the kids. But in 40k a school full of children within the blast radius is a bonus because now you don't have to use a second bomb to kill the filthy xenos/heretics and destroy their indoctrination center, you can score a two-for-one. If we fought real wars like the Imperium does we'd have a lot less infantry, special forces would be virtually nonexistent, and we'd have a lot more nukes.
Also, remember that 40k has infantry even without space marines. The question is not whether infantry have a role, it's whether the Imperium needs super-elite infantry that each cost at least as much as an entire regiment of normal humans.
Sometimes to land enough troops and supplies for the Guard you need to capture the Space Port. You can't bomb the defenders of the Space Port from space because you need the Space Port. You can't bring enough Guard to bear because you need the Space Port to do so. But with Marines you can secure the Space Port by either dropping on the Space Port, or landing them near it and then taking it.
Insectum7 wrote: "Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.
And that argument is primarily collateral damage.
Which remains a valid argument in 40K, where factories/spacecraft/bunkers or other infrastructure might be preserved. Also the brain eating intel, or artifact nabbing assault team.
Insectum7 wrote: Which remains a valid argument in 40K, where factories/spacecraft/bunkers or other infrastructure might be preserved.
Except that marines are brutal shock troops that use grenade launchers as basic rifles and are best countered by anti-tank weapons. Expecting anything to remain intact after a marine fight is highly optimistic. And also, remember that a single space marine is worth way more than an entire factory. If the attacking marine force suffers a single casualty then the Imperium has lost value compared to just blowing it all up from orbit.
Also the brain eating intel
Which is not canon.
or artifact nabbing assault team.
This might be one of the few scenarios where marines can be useful, but at what cost? Is a recovered artifact worth more than the loss of an entire planet as a result of creating a squad of space marines to recover it instead of a thousand full regiments of guardsmen to win the war around that artifact?
This all goes back to the fundamental problem of numbers. Increase the number of marines by several orders of magnitude, to be elite units but so few in number that there are more Imperial worlds than space marines, and your scenarios make sense.
We can also look to more modern military issues, and see where Astartes would help.
Let’s look to Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare, hide and seek in cave systems. Yep. Astartes would be ideal. Tight environs reduces the enemy’s capacity to bring to bear enough firepower to drop a Marine. And labyrinthine caves are less of a problem, because Astartes don’t need sleep, so 24 hours a day they’re a-hunting’ you down.
Bobthehero wrote: How do you locate those C&C centers? Get a teleport lock on? This is what I mean, people just assume things will just *work* for Space Marines
I think Astartes are very powerful within their niche, but I don't think that means they are invulnerable or unstoppable or that there are no countermeasures. Clearly they can be defeated, as the large list of defeats in the lore shows.
What we are pushing back against is the idea marines are useless... which they clearly are not, as the large list of victories also shows. There is a wide space between useless and unstoppable.
Having said that, it is definitely difficult to counter marines at their chosen specialty of orbital assaults, with the example you shared being one of the rarer examples of marines being completely shut down unless they want to take horrific casualties.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: We can also look to more modern military issues, and see where Astartes would help.
Let’s look to Afghanistan. Asymmetric warfare, hide and seek in cave systems. Yep. Astartes would be ideal. Tight environs reduces the enemy’s capacity to bring to bear enough firepower to drop a Marine. And labyrinthine caves are less of a problem, because Astartes don’t need sleep, so 24 hours a day they’re a-hunting’ you down.
Except it's all a bunch of worthless caves. Nuke it from orbit and move on, if there are some civilians mixed in with the enemy then that just means fewer civilians to have to round up for the extermination camps.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.
Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.
Insectum7 wrote: "Just bomb the target, why use Marines?" Which is more or less an argument the air force said in the 50's iirc, but for some reason infantry still play a key role in modern warfare.
And that argument is primarily collateral damage. In the real world we don't fight wars of genocide (unless you're Russian), and we have to at least pretend to care about civilian casualties. If an enemy HQ is next to a school full of children then we don't just carpet-bomb the entire area to guarantee a kill, we send in infantry to kill the enemy soldiers without hurting the kids. But in 40k a school full of children within the blast radius is a bonus because now you don't have to use a second bomb to kill the filthy xenos/heretics and destroy their indoctrination center, you can score a two-for-one. If we fought real wars like the Imperium does we'd have a lot less infantry, special forces would be virtually nonexistent, and we'd have a lot more nukes.
Also, remember that 40k has infantry even without space marines. The question is not whether infantry have a role, it's whether the Imperium needs super-elite infantry that each cost at least as much as an entire regiment of normal humans.
The Imperium cannot, or really struggles to replace a lot of its tech, including the production lines that produce it, so they do generally avoid flattening them as much as possible. Imperial architecture seems to be very tough, but that just makes it better cover from the perspective of using orbital artillery against it.
Having said that, artillery does not guarantee a kill against fortifications or even just tough civilian infrastructure. WWI showed that, with defences surviving intact against enormous conventional firepower, WWII showed it again, with even civilian buildings forming reasonable cover against heavy artillery. A stone bank survived being near the centre of the blast at Hiroshima, IIRC, and protected its occupants. Wars since have reinforced this- I don't think the US forces in Vietnam were particularly caring about collateral damage when they were carpet-bombing a neighbouring neutral country (people still die from lingering munitions). Modern nuclear bunkers would require a direct nuclear hit to take out, and even then, I doubt it would be guaranteed.
Now add shielding of a kind we know to be able to resist the scale of artillery found on warships (void shields), and artillery alone is not a reliable way to remove an entrenched opponent, but also destroys the valuable infrastructure the Imperium would like to reoccupy. Exterminatus grade weaponry can be used to totally destroy the planet, but this also means a total loss of the planet as a useful territory (and we know virus bombs alone are not sufficient to dig out prepared defenders, as Istvaan 3 and Tallarn demonstrate).
I am not sure why you think marines using small arms is going to destroy a structure as thoroughly as the guns on a 5km warship..? Boltguns fire explosive rounds, but they don't have a massive blast radius and function more like powerful bullets. There will be damage, but the structural integrity and function of an installation will be unlikely to be harmed unless the marines or defenders are trying to harm it.
Also, the gaining intel from eating brains thing is absolutely canon, and has been for >30 years. One of the marine implants is explicitly for this purpose, and the initiation rites for many chapters involve eating corpses after this stage of implantation to celebrate and test the new skill.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.
Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.
That would require an absurd level of firepower, to destroy an entire cave system. Modern day nukes would likely struggle to, er, blow up mountains. Rock is pretty hard to blow up. 40k easily has the tech for some rebels to hermetically seal off deep portions of the cave to prevent them dying from the overpressure or the O2 beimg sucked out.
It's totally canon. Read about the Omophagea implant https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Creation_of_a_Space_Marine In the novel Space Marine (later republished as soemthing else, though I forget) Marines learn how to pilot a titan by eating the fresh brains of the former occupants.
Haighus wrote: Modern nuclear bunkers would require a direct nuclear hit to take out, and even then, I doubt it would be guaranteed.
Fortunately a mere nuke is trivial compared to 40k weapons. There are direct canon quotes that starship weapons are capable of destroying entire continents with a single salvo. The only possible issue is collateral damage, not a shortage of firepower. https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/frggzr/naval_combat_range_and_firepower/
Now add shielding of a kind we know to be able to resist the scale of artillery found on warships (void shields)
If the fortification has so much shielding over such a wide area that it can survive a continent-destroying broadside from an orbiting warship then what exactly are marines going to do against it? Even titan weapons can't breach that level of shielding.
There will be damage, but the structural integrity and function of an installation will be unlikely to be harmed unless the marines or defenders are trying to harm it.
The concrete structure of a bunker may still be intact, the delicate computer systems are unlikely to survive marines firing automatic RPG launchers everywhere (on top of their heavy weapons). And nobody cares if you capture the concrete shell of a building when everything of value inside it is lost.
Also, the gaining intel from eating brains thing is absolutely canon, and has been for >30 years. One of the marine implants is explicitly for this purpose, and the initiation rites for many chapters involve eating corpses after this stage of implantation to celebrate and test the new skill.
It's stupid as hell and relies on GW having no idea how brains actually work. The only sensible thing to do is to reject it as non-canon nonsense.
That would require an absurd level of firepower, to destroy an entire cave system. Modern day nukes would likely struggle to, er, blow up mountains. Rock is pretty hard to blow up. 40k easily has the tech for some rebels to hermetically seal off deep portions of the cave to prevent them dying from the overpressure or the O2 beimg sucked out.
Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface; torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.
-Nemesis
or
A mighty Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser with powerful reactors and heavy armour in sloping facets of adamantine and ceramite scores of metres thick, the vessel carried a weight of armament and ordnance that could reduce a continent to ruins with a single salvo.
-Black Crusade
It's stupid as hell and relies on GW having no idea how brains actually work. The only sensible thing to do is to reject it as non-canon nonsense.
Pretty sure other settings have done brain eating for knowledge long before. I bet there's more than one Dr Who foe who does it; Starship Troopers has it as a massive major plot point (which is probably what influenced GW getting the idea).
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: You’re not taking the caves. You’re clearing out enemy leaders and soldiers.
Which can be done with an orbital bombardment that turns the whole region of worthless desert, caves included, to lava and kills everyone inside. If you're a ruthless genocidal dictatorship and don't care about civilian casualties then the solution to enemies hiding in caves in the desert is WMDs, not absurdly rare special forces.
If you can win the fight without irradiating your agri-world that feeds 100 billion souls on the nearby forge world, and win it quickly without disrupting farming production, then do that.
If you can board and disable rebel-held defense platforms so they can be returned to loyal service befote the next Ork Waagh shows up, then do that.
If you can board and disable an otherwise invulnerable-to-the-forces-at-hand Tyranid vessel while it's still dormant, then do that.
Insectum7 wrote: If you can win the fight without irradiating your agri-world that feeds 100 billion souls on the nearby forge world, and win it quickly without disrupting farming production, then do that.
But how exactly is this scenario happening? If the enemy is concentrated in a single place than a lance strike from orbit can kill them all with minimal disruption, as even annihilating everything in a hundred mile radius would be a very minimal impact on an agri-world as a whole. Spending the resources required to create and support the marines on more farming capacity would do more to feed the forge world than would be lost in the orbital bombardment. And if the enemy is so numerous and spread out that destroying them from orbit would have a meaningful impact on production then space marines are irrelevant, they can't kill enough enemies to matter before they run out of ammunition.
If you can board and disable rebel-held defense platforms so they can be returned to loyal service befote the next Ork Waagh shows up, then do that.
Assuming you can do it without the rebels setting off the dead man's switch nukes as the marines take the platforms, and assuming the marines don't cause sufficient damage to destroy the platforms while firing RPGs/plasma guns/etc inside them. And again, there's the question of resources. A single marine is worth more than all of the platforms, so instead of making and supporting the marine just build more gun platforms to replace the ones you have to destroy.
If you can board and disable an otherwise invulnerable-to-the-forces-at-hand Tyranid vessel while it's still dormant, then do that.
What scenario is there where marines armed with man-portable weapons can destroy a Tyranid ship but the warship carrying them can't? Now there isn't even the collateral damage argument to worry about.
Scions are also a thing, likely far cheaper and much more numerous than Marines, if the need for special forces-type guys is present, without spending so much on them, resources wise.
I think one stumbling block people have is the divide between the Imperium as a whole and the Imperium at the local level.
As a whole the Imperium likely does not "care" about most worlds. Sure Forge Worlds and key systems etc.. are important, but many worlds are just unimportant to the greater whole. They can be lost or gained and its an administration blip - that heck might get lost in the sea of paperwork.
Even defensive fleets brought in from outside might have little regard or connection to the worlds they are fighting on.
However this doesn't mean that, at the local level, no one cares. Nor does it mean that the Imperium will always just throw away worlds at a whim. Heck the one time they have done that to try and starve a hive fleet the guy in charge of the operation was ex-communicated and declared a traitor (I think) and certainly the policy has never been tried again.
The Imperium can be and is wasteful and insane; but it is not those things with impunity.
So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.
Overread wrote: So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.
But that still doesn't make sense. A bunker is trivially easy for a slave labor gang to build in a day or two max, using only the most common of resources. There's no way it makes practical sense for the Imperium to invest vast resources in creating space marines to save a few hours of common slave labor and some bags of concrete. And if even a single space marine is killed in the attack that loss will be millions of times more than the value of the bunker that was saved by not just obliterating it from orbit.
Overread wrote: So yes you can obliterate that bunker from orbit. Or you can send in Marines who will take that installation and leave it standing enough that it can be used again. The answer to everything isn't just complete obliteration. It's not an RTS game on the computer where winning it all that counts and you don't care about what collateral damage is done on the way.
But that still doesn't make sense. A bunker is trivially easy for a slave labor gang to build in a day or two max, using only the most common of resources. There's no way it makes practical sense for the Imperium to invest vast resources in creating space marines to save a few hours of common slave labor and some bags of concrete. And if even a single space marine is killed in the attack that loss will be millions of times more than the value of the bunker that was saved by not just obliterating it from orbit.
I mean if its a day or two bit of concrete and slave labour, hitting it with orbital bombardment is also an insane waste of resources. That kind of bunker doesn't NEED the entire mountain side turned to slag by orbital weapons.
It doesn't need marines either, that bunker is being taken by guardsmen.
The kind of bunker you teleport Terminators into is a fortified bunker. Probably multiple layers and designed to withstand major artillery fire and bombardment. The kind of thing that's built with metal and to a higher standard. Something that's possibly closer to what some might consider a fortress (though fortress tends to imply something above ground whilst a bunker kind of suggests something more below or at ground level etc... at least in casual use of the terms).
Overread wrote: The kind of bunker you teleport Terminators into is a fortified bunker. Probably multiple layers and designed to withstand major artillery fire and bombardment. The kind of thing that's built with metal and to a higher standard. Something that's possibly closer to what some might consider a fortress (though fortress tends to imply something above ground whilst a bunker kind of suggests something more below or at ground level etc... at least in casual use of the terms).
But the point is still the same: the marines are more valuable than the bunker, and any losses will more than outweigh the gain from not having to replace the bunker.
This, again, goes back to the root of the problem: there are too few marines. If marines were 2-3x as good as storm troopers at 4-5x the cost and 10-20% of the total numbers all of these scenarios would make sense. But when there is less than one marine per world in the Imperium, half their gear is sacred and irreplaceable relics of a forgotten age, and vast amounts of resources go into making and supporting them it stops making sense. With canon numbers "blow it up from orbit" is the answer in virtually every scenario and in the few edge cases where marines would be the best tool for the job and justify their cost they're probably off crusading on the other side of the galaxy and unavailable anyway.
The marines are more valuable than the bunker. However the Marines are also likely go in, win and not die. So you get the bunker and the marines.
Also if the Imperium adopted a policy of just obliterating everything from orbit the Chaos and Xenos forces would adapt to just letting the Imperium destroy itself. They'd always keep themselves active in populated areas and such. Ergo if the Imperium's policy was total orbital obliteration the enemy would just use that against them every time. Chaos would have no problem sacrificing a few cultists to see the Imperium destroy its own defensive installations, bunkers, factories, civilian populations and more.
Not to mention the moral impact of such tactics would likely see local system and regional power bodies openly deny any kind of incursion or invasion until it was way too late so that their worlds weren't pepper potted with huge orbital holes by the Imperial Navy. Heck some might even turn their own guns on the Navy ships to try and protect what they've got.
Marines are a valuable resource, but the Imperium isn't playing an RPG game where they can afford to keep all their one time consumable items until the end-game boss. They are more prepared to use the Marines in combat even if it puts them at risk.
Heck I suspect some chapters might even go insane or rebel if they were refused combat.
Overread wrote: The marines are more valuable than the bunker. However the Marines are also likely go in, win and not die. So you get the bunker and the marines.
But if even one marine dies the Imperium suffers a net loss. Marines have to have a 0% casualty rate in battle after battle after battle to break even and we see clearly in canon that they don't. Hell, depending on how much credit you give the assorted "sacred and priceless relic" lines it's arguable that the precious hand-made bolter rounds fired in the attack are worth more than the bunker.
Also if the Imperium adopted a policy of just obliterating everything from orbit the Chaos and Xenos forces would adapt to just letting the Imperium destroy itself. They'd always keep themselves active in populated areas and such. Ergo if the Imperium's policy was total orbital obliteration the enemy would just use that against them every time. Chaos would have no problem sacrificing a few cultists to see the Imperium destroy its own defensive installations, bunkers, factories, civilian populations and more.
And it's better for the Imperium to spend vastly disproportionate resources to preserve those targets? A factory destroyed by orbital bombardment is a factory lost but so is a factory that makes a single space marine instead of entire regiments of LRBTs.
Also, let's once again not forget about the guard. Orbital bombardment is not the only tool, it's just the tool that solves most marine tasks better than marines can. If the problem is a few cultists you send in a regiment of guardsmen that costs 0.000000000000001% as much as the marine force.
They are more prepared to use the Marines in combat even if it puts them at risk.
But they shouldn't have marines. Marines at 2-3x the effectiveness of storm troopers and 10-20% of the numbers make sense. Marines at their canon numbers are an idiotic waste of resources that are a net loss for the Imperium simply by existing.
You also realise this is the same Imperium where technology and science is heavily regulated and unsanctioned scientific work is illegal and punishable by death or worse. Where machines are considered religious; where innovation and change is bad.
Where they can lose entire planets and systems in administration; where they refuse to use even basic AI systems and instead use human brains turned into calculators?
It's not a sane setting. Any sane setting would see the Imperium expand the marines a millionfold to win. The Imperium is insane.
It's broken and twisted and crippled. It survives through sheer momentum, but at its core its got something rotten. It's insanely fearful of things. It's technophobic, xenophobic and more. Heck even the use of the guard itself makes little sense when you consider what they go up against. Their equipment is way below what the Imperium can produce at their best even without using marine level tech.
Ideology is far more important than logic to the Imperium but in the case of just mass producing Astartes there are legitimate reasons for not doing so and they all stem from the Horus Heresy.
Astartes are the Emperor's Angels, the saviours of humanity. The Imperial populace reveres them almost as gods and when Astartes are deployed to a warzone the locals often experience a wave of religious zeal.
There are numerous instances of Renegade Astartes leading popular uprisings against Imperial rulers because, as with the Heresy, many Astartes see themselves as the better choice to rule the Imperium. These instances are still the rarity but the respect and awe that Astartes command is exactly why they are not massed to their Crusade-era levels. With a particularly charismatic Chapter Master, the Astartes could start another Heresy level event.
I always get annoyed at the idea that, because 40k is absurd, nothing needs to make sense. 40k is absurd, but Marines make sense within the universe. They are a previously mass produced troop that is now the elite of the elite within the Imperium. They're used because the are fast, durable, and strong, while not being too bulky to enter most buildings, even the 10 feet tall Primaris. They're a slightly bigger target than most people, sure, but it is slightly. Due to being superhuman, they can be dropped anywhere from giant canisters, and tend to drop behind enemy lines to take them out. In lore, they're supposed to travel so fast that they can't be targeted, but let's just assume that they'll use different strategies, like causing massive heat waves, or dropping many drop pods, depending on the enemy counter. They're also not the worst to produce, as long as geneseed is not lost. Sure, you can only really use the best of the best, and they usually die before becoming a Marine, but there's not such a shortage that if ten marines were to die on a mission, they couldn't be replaced.
40k is cool first and foremost, but it is good to make sense, or else the cool factor just fails.
The thing is, it's important to remember that killing an Astartes is pretty damn difficult. You can wound or seriously injure them but an Astartes can also go into a form of suspended animation to help with the healing process. Even then the various implants often mean that even with a serious injury, such as the loss of a limb, the Astartes can continue fighting until the battle ends for more advanced medical treatment.
Sure you might get a spot of bad luck where a Rhino gets obliterated by a Titan and its occupants are very much toasted but that's going to be pretty rare. Add on things like bionics and the ability of some Apothecarions to grow replacement limbs and Marines can be back in fighting shape in a very short span.
That is true. And while it is one Marine per world, if we assume one million and one million, not every world is in constant need of Marines. I view them as good shock troops, morale boosts, and even force multipliers for the right jobs. They're versatile, which is needed. The issue is when they become unkillable monsters in books. It just stops being fun. But that's true of most factions.
Indeed, there are many worlds in the Imperium that will never know conflict. My favourite part of the Wolftime novel is a Navy officer having their entire life turned upside down because it shockingly turned out that Orks were real.
Space Marines don't need to be so numerous as to defend every world, that's what the PDF and to a degree the Guard are for. There aren't enough Chapters to defend the Imperium but to make hundreds more would bring that same Imperium to ruin.
Might be a controversial take, but I don't think marines are that irreplaceable, outside the wealth of experience contained in the older members of a chapter.
It appears to be possible to crank out Astartes at a huge rate, and the basic gear is high-end but not irreplaceable.
Chapters also have no limit on the size of the scout company, and can maintain as many scouts as they wish. Some chapters are known to have extra scout companies. Assuming intact geneseed stores, some chapters appear to be able to recover from horrific combat losses in a pretty short space of time, varying presumably due to differences in recruitment capacity and ongoing attrition post-catastrophe. The implication, in combination with the relatively high attrition rates of some chapters, is that there are an awful lot of initiates feeding into the main body of a chapter at any one time, rapidly replacing combat losses. Chapter fortress monasteries are probably full of hundreds or thousands of initiates working through the process to enter the scout company proper. That would suggest the Imperium could easily make far larger numbers of marines if it wished, but chooses not to (spectre of the Heresy etc.), as raised by others in this thread.
It is probably a bit like fighter pilots, where a small proportion do the majority of the killing, and the rest provide support and suffer the majority of the casualties. Veterans are survivors who likely take lower casualties, and newer marines probably die at disproportionately high rates and are rapidly replaced by elevated scouts.
Overread wrote: Any sane setting would see the Imperium expand the marines a millionfold to win. The Imperium is insane.
The problem is that marines are over and over again presented as not being insane. GW tells us they're a genuinely effective weapon that matters to the Imperium. For the insanity defense to work GW would need to admit that marines are too few in number to matter and portray them as being, at best, a futile attempt that will never matter in the long run. Marines can kill stuff 1v1 but there will never be enough of them and for every battle they win a thousand other battles will be lost because the Imperium was stupid enough to invest in marines instead of normal forces. But unfortunately GW refuses to do this.
Overread wrote: Any sane setting would see the Imperium expand the marines a millionfold to win. The Imperium is insane.
The problem is that marines are over and over again presented as not being insane. GW tells us they're a genuinely effective weapon that matters to the Imperium. For the insanity defense to work GW would need to admit that marines are too few in number to matter and portray them as being, at best, a futile attempt that will never matter in the long run. Marines can kill stuff 1v1 but there will never be enough of them and for every battle they win a thousand other battles will be lost because the Imperium was stupid enough to invest in marines instead of normal forces. But unfortunately GW refuses to do this.
I mean GW doesn't have too?
A nation a war for 10 Thousand years that has lost territories; lost technologies; that has "corpse starch" as a food source.
GW doesn't "have" to spell it out. The setting is full of evidence that things are not working.
The fact that the Imperium is always best with war; always struggling to find more troops; always fighting tooth and nail to hold onto every bit they can and often lose huge chunks. All these things surely show that for all the awesome of the Marines; they are not enough. Heck Primaris are 100% a display of exactly what you mean. That the Imperium sat on the Marine tech and dogma for 10K years and didn't expand them to make them as effective a force as they could be. The fact that Primaris are not just a display of what could have been, but that major players argue against their use in the setting and more is surely doing exactly what you're asking GW to do.
I think there's way too much Bolter Porn, and Games Workshop isn't very good at actually using the Unreliable Narrator trope, but rely on it pretty heavily. It almost feels like the despair of the galaxy, more than anything, is an aesthetic in 40k, rather than a true backdrop. I want more stories to be normal dudes in the Imperium interacting with the Imperium. I want to feel that the populace suffering has a true impact, rather than a set-piece for Marines to kill aliens. it's one of the reasons why I prefer 40k as a setting, rather than using 40k for stories. It's really hard to advance the 40k universe, and do it well. I'd rather small stories happen throughout the timeline, and the timeline rare ever advance. In addition, the mystery is being bled from the universe. I can't even say slowly. It often feels like I could ask who Horus' second in command's dad is, and I'd get a proper answer. It's weird when the whole point used to be filling in the holes yourself for your dudes, your headcanon.
40k, for me at least, has become rather disappointing. I love the universe. I love a lot about it. But it really does work better as a setting for RPGs, Wargames, and Video Games, than a proper story. Stories within it work well, but stories progressing it have to deal with so much baggage that it's got to be insanely hard to do well. I hate how the Horus Heresy turned out, for example. How big the primarchs is laughable to me. The trailer for the Horus Heresy tabletop game made me laugh at Horus lifting the marine like a toy.
So, as I never gave my answer to the thread, no. We shouldn't expand the volume of Astartes. I feel we should go back to the older lore feel. The old art has such a good look to it, the way the lines are drawn, the way the lore is written. I want a return to the classic 40k. Maybe not Rogue Trader, but 2nd or 3rd would be my sweet spot. Sorry for rambling.
Overread wrote: The setting is full of evidence that things are not working.
But it's also full of evidence that the marines aren't to blame. GW keeps telling us that space marines are the Imperium's only hope, that without them the Imperium would collapse completely, that when things are bad the only chance of victory is the miraculous intervention of a marine force to save an entire sector, etc. For the insanity defense to work GW needs to stop doing that and portray marines as doomed tragic heroes. They can win a battle here and there but none of their deeds will ever matter and the rest of the Imperium barely bothers to acknowledge their irrelevant existence.
Do you realise in this thread we are comparing a single Terminator Squad with the firepower of the Biggest Nukes!!!
This is Bonkers!!!
What will be the next step in this escalatio n of insanity:
Comparing an Intercessor with the Beatles.
A versus scenario between a Tactical Marine and Zeus??
Leman Russ killing Khorne inside the EOT and becomming the new lord of Skulls??
A Drop Pod making a detour and destroying by accident the Tau homeworld.
A Bunch of Black Templars getting a bit too zelous and killing hand to hand the whole population of 40K Terra.
Mephiston having a bad dream and erradicating the Leagueas of Vottan out of reality??
Is there ANY limit to bolter Porn?
As this toxic loop gains traction and retrofedback... I can see that in 10 years time the average BPA (bolterpornaddict) will by default assume that each time an adeptus astartes blinks a whole tyranid fleet goes into oblivion (just because some BL "novella" hinted so and it became a meme).
The degeneration of this akward and niche sector of the 40k community is becomming both comical and saddening. :(
Overread wrote: The setting is full of evidence that things are not working.
But it's also full of evidence that the marines aren't to blame. GW keeps telling us that space marines are the Imperium's only hope, that without them the Imperium would collapse completely, that when things are bad the only chance of victory is the miraculous intervention of a marine force to save an entire sector, etc. For the insanity defense to work GW needs to stop doing that and portray marines as doomed tragic heroes. They can win a battle here and there but none of their deeds will ever matter and the rest of the Imperium barely bothers to acknowledge their irrelevant existence.
Which Perfectly fits their role as PROPAGANDA and FEAR troops, not ment for proper front line combat.
If you assume this paradigm suddenly the whole setting makes much more sense without the need for titanic ammounts "plotanium".
In the future, when I explain to my pupils how military propaganda brainwashes the public... I will use Dakka Astartes Fanboys as a case study.
Insectum7 wrote: If you can win the fight without irradiating your agri-world that feeds 100 billion souls on the nearby forge world, and win it quickly without disrupting farming production, then do that.
But how exactly is this scenario happening? If the enemy is concentrated in a single place than a lance strike from orbit can kill them all with minimal disruption, as even annihilating everything in a hundred mile radius would be a very minimal impact on an agri-world as a whole. Spending the resources required to create and support the marines on more farming capacity would do more to feed the forge world than would be lost in the orbital bombardment. And if the enemy is so numerous and spread out that destroying them from orbit would have a meaningful impact on production then space marines are irrelevant, they can't kill enough enemies to matter before they run out of ammunition.
Marine Strike Cruisers can blast them from orbit if they need to, sure. But if the enemy are spread out and it takes a campaign to do it, than that's what they do. They can resupply via pods or gunships.
If you can board and disable rebel-held defense platforms so they can be returned to loyal service befote the next Ork Waagh shows up, then do that.
Assuming you can do it without the rebels setting off the dead man's switch nukes as the marines take the platforms, and assuming the marines don't cause sufficient damage to destroy the platforms while firing RPGs/plasma guns/etc inside them. And again, there's the question of resources. A single marine is worth more than all of the platforms, so instead of making and supporting the marine just build more gun platforms to replace the ones you have to destroy.
Dead-mans switches might happen, but how many rebel commanders are willing to sacrifice themselves and possibly 1,000s of their troops if they believe that they can hold out against the Marines? It's also quite possible that bringing a Techmarine along could disable any potential dead-mans switch.
If you can board and disable an otherwise invulnerable-to-the-forces-at-hand Tyranid vessel while it's still dormant, then do that.
What scenario is there where marines armed with man-portable weapons can destroy a Tyranid ship but the warship carrying them can't? Now there isn't even the collateral damage argument to worry about.
Being able to quietly disable a dormant ship after approaching it looking like an insignificant threat is a thing. Just opening up on a whole fleet of vessels, potentially waking them all up prematurely might do more harm than good. There's an entire game about it called Tyranid Attack, look it up
As for "a marine is worth more than a factory, orbital station, etc.", no he's not. They come and go and die all the time. The value is in the institution of the chapter and the capabilities it provides. How many normal soldiers lives would be spent taking it otherwise? How long would it take? Does delay prolong the war, requiring a million more men and a billion more tons of materiel? The chief strategic capability of Marines is to strike so fast and so hard, that the enemy doesn't have time to react or adequately countermaneuver. And these things specifically can get a thorough capitulation, shortening the time of conflict and saving potentially millions or even billions of lives, not to mention all the factories, cities, agri-farms, etc.
The Imperium does not NEED Marines. The Guard/Navy/Sisterhood/Mechanicum could totally fight all the wars instead, but it would take more time, more lives would be lost and more damage would be incurred. Marines have their niche and perform it well. Which, btw, is a great argument in favor of NOT expanding the number of Marines. They are a niche and specialized force that sits alongside a whole host of other "branches" of the Imperial military. There doesn't need to be more of them because they're not expected to do everything, they're probably barely expected to do 5% of the fighting or even less. They're just often at the forefront and providing much of the initiative in major joint operations.
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Vatsetis wrote: Do you realise in this thread we are comparing a single Terminator Squad with the firepower of the Biggest Nukes!!!
This is Bonkers!!!
What will be the next step in this escalatio n of insanity:
Comparing an Intercessor with the Beatles.
A versus scenario between a Tactical Marine and Zeus??
Leman Russ killing Khorne inside the EOT and becomming the new lord of Skulls??
A Drop Pod making a detour and destroying by accident the Tau homeworld.
A Bunch of Black Templars getting a bit too zelous and killing hand to hand the whole population of 40K Terra.
Mephiston having a bad dream and erradicating the Leagueas of Vottan out of reality??
Is there ANY limit to bolter Porn?
As this toxic loop gains traction and retrofedback... I can see that in 10 years time the average BPA (bolterpornaddict) will by default assume that each time an adeptus astartes blinks a whole tyranid fleet goes into oblivion (just because some BL "novella" hinted so and it became a meme).
The degeneration of this akward and niche sector of the 40k community is becomming both comical and saddening. :(
Overread wrote: The setting is full of evidence that things are not working.
But it's also full of evidence that the marines aren't to blame. GW keeps telling us that space marines are the Imperium's only hope, that without them the Imperium would collapse completely, that when things are bad the only chance of victory is the miraculous intervention of a marine force to save an entire sector, etc. For the insanity defense to work GW needs to stop doing that and portray marines as doomed tragic heroes. They can win a battle here and there but none of their deeds will ever matter and the rest of the Imperium barely bothers to acknowledge their irrelevant existence.
Which Perfectly fits their role as PROPAGANDA and FEAR troops, not ment for proper front line combat.
If you assume this paradigm suddenly the whole setting makes much more sense without the need for titanic ammounts "plotanium".
In the future, when I explain to my pupils how military propaganda brainwashes the public... I will use Dakka Astartes Fanboys as a case study.
By “Astartes fan boy” I assume he means “folk with an interest in the background, and really enjoy extrapolating from there, but always keeping speculation tied to established in-universe fact”?
For instance, they claimed every Astartes action is a loss because they’ll always lose Astartes.
Well. No. Not at all. Because as well as being tough to put down? Astartes are really, really hard to kill.
Blow a limb off a baseline human, and our chances of survival are slim without immediate medical care (even it’s just tying off the limb to prevent or reduced blood loss). Not only blood loss but shock can see us turning up our toes, pushing up the daisies and joining the choir heavenly.
On an Astartes? Blowing that limb off is an effort in itself, thanks to their power armour. But even if you manage that? Their armour and enhancements both massively reduce the chance of them entering shock. Synthetic internal and external pain killers kick in, and the Larraman’s Organ deals with the blood loss.
Sure, the loss of a limb or even an old fashioned nuggeting* can take the Marine out the fight, but it will by absolutely no means kill them.
Organ trauma similarly is heavily mitigated. Two hears, only one needed to survive in the short to mid term (though the other will need replacing with bionics for continued peak efficiency). Knacker their kidneys? Their armour can, again in the short term, step in with some form of blood cleansing.
And if it’s really, really bad? Like….think of the Sir Robin song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and all the horrible fates mentioned by his Minstrels happened to the same Marine in the same engagement? Sus-an Membrane kicks in. Now that won’t necessarily heal the Marine, but entering organic bio-stasis again greatly increases the chances of overall survival and patching up, by massively extending the window of opportunity for medical aid to arrive.
So sure, they’re likely to take casualties. But the survival rate would be astonishing, because that’s what they’re designed for. And it all adds to their threat.
Consider movie scenes, where a character is crippled and is all “I’ll hold them off as long as I can”. Astartes can do that, even with both legs blown off - and not be slipping in and out of consciousness. Leave them a pair of Bolt Pistols, and they’re gonna make a helluva mess before anyone gets past them.
*Nuggeting is a LARP term where, during battle**, you lose all armour and hit points on your four limbs. The 25% less painful version, where you’re left with one intact limb but still can’t exactly go anywhere, is of course known as a Drumsticking. The victims are naturally referred to as Nuggets and Drumsticks accordingly. A movie example of a Drumsticking is Anakin at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
**Well, I say during battle. It can also happen on the path as a result of a half arsed mugging***, or, if I’m feeling fruity and want to practice surgery skills, anytime I think I can reasonably get away with it without anyone returning the favour.
***A proper mugging leaves you dead, and your soul already interrogated, preventing anyone finding out exactly which Cheeky Chappy hacked you into tiny bits then made off with whatever was in your pockets and bags and that****
****it’s a game, but nobody ever said you have to play nice.
I’ll revert to my earlier opinion that self same nonsensical minimalism only benefits the background, as your chances of a miracle rescue by His Angels are ludicrously small.
Yes The Imperium would benefit from a ten or even hundredfold increase in Astartes head count, and no that wouldn’t necessarily mean any Chapter being bigger than Codex Compliance.
But…it’s The Imperium imposing that on itself, because it’s hide bound, backwards and utterly obsessed with ancient rules, whether or not the once’s enforcing said rules actually understand why a given rule was first introduced.
Another example of this is the Ad Mech. All fear the Abominable Intellect. Thou Shall Not Create The Abominable Intellect.
But….does anyone, in-universe, truly know at what point a Machine Spirit becomes Abominable Intellect? I’d say….probably not, no.
They know it’s Bad. They understand Abominable Intellect buggered things up and ended the Golden Age. But they don’t know the why, or the how.
Yet it’s the reason why they test and test and test newly recovered/rediscovered/dusted off STC fragments. Because at some point, what they call a Machine Spirit was developed into AI, but have no way of knowing when that happened. Was a freak occurence, or the result of natural improvements?
Haighus wrote: Modern nuclear bunkers would require a direct nuclear hit to take out, and even then, I doubt it would be guaranteed.
Fortunately a mere nuke is trivial compared to 40k weapons. There are direct canon quotes that starship weapons are capable of destroying entire continents with a single salvo. The only possible issue is collateral damage, not a shortage of firepower. https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/frggzr/naval_combat_range_and_firepower/
Now add shielding of a kind we know to be able to resist the scale of artillery found on warships (void shields)
If the fortification has so much shielding over such a wide area that it can survive a continent-destroying broadside from an orbiting warship then what exactly are marines going to do against it? Even titan weapons can't breach that level of shielding.
There will be damage, but the structural integrity and function of an installation will be unlikely to be harmed unless the marines or defenders are trying to harm it.
The concrete structure of a bunker may still be intact, the delicate computer systems are unlikely to survive marines firing automatic RPG launchers everywhere (on top of their heavy weapons). And nobody cares if you capture the concrete shell of a building when everything of value inside it is lost.
Also, the gaining intel from eating brains thing is absolutely canon, and has been for >30 years. One of the marine implants is explicitly for this purpose, and the initiation rites for many chapters involve eating corpses after this stage of implantation to celebrate and test the new skill.
It's stupid as hell and relies on GW having no idea how brains actually work. The only sensible thing to do is to reject it as non-canon nonsense.
That would require an absurd level of firepower, to destroy an entire cave system. Modern day nukes would likely struggle to, er, blow up mountains. Rock is pretty hard to blow up. 40k easily has the tech for some rebels to hermetically seal off deep portions of the cave to prevent them dying from the overpressure or the O2 beimg sucked out.
Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface; torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.
-Nemesis
or
A mighty Repulsive-class Grand Cruiser with powerful reactors and heavy armour in sloping facets of adamantine and ceramite scores of metres thick, the vessel carried a weight of armament and ordnance that could reduce a continent to ruins with a single salvo.
-Black Crusade
A mere cave is no issue at all.
I am pretty confident that the above BL quotes are hyberbole. The same Repulsive-class grand cruiser, with a single broadside, struggles to destroy a stationary, unshielded Imperial cruiser hull at point-blank range. An Imperial cruiser is 5km long, and only about 500m thick along much of it's length. Yet, we are supposed to believe that the same firepower is capable of devastating a continent? Australia is the smallest continent on Earth, and the majority of it (Australia proper) is 4000km wide. Nearly a thousand times longer than an Imperial cruiser, which can survive the firepower of a Repulsive cruiser without shields (although likely heavily crippled).
It really doesn't add up.
Also, void shields don't block everything- attack craft attacks somehow circumvent them, for example. A person can walk through a void shield, but couldn't shoot a laspistol through one. It isn't clear at what velocity the shield kicks in and blocks a given attack.
That cruiser is a much smaller target, and unlike many sci-fi settings, 40K naval battles are conducted at really quite long range. So we can probably assume a lot of the Repulsive’s firepower would miss the Cruiser. Whereas when launched at a planetside target, especially if you’ve established a matching orbit? It’s all gonna hit there or thereabouts.
I also watched a fairly interesting video on YouTube, explaining how and why atomic are less useful outside of an atmosphere, due to how they actually work. Note however I didn’t say ineffective, just less effective.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: That cruiser is a much smaller target, and unlike many sci-fi settings, 40K naval battles are conducted at really quite long range. So we can probably assume a lot of the Repulsive’s firepower would miss the Cruiser. Whereas when launched at a planetside target, especially if you’ve established a matching orbit? It’s all gonna hit there or thereabouts.
I also watched a fairly interesting video on YouTube, explaining how and why atomic are less useful outside of an atmosphere, due to how they actually work. Note however I didn’t say ineffective, just less effective.
Sure, but BFG has rules for a stationary target at point blank range- full firepower is used essentially. Even with the lances included, a Repulsive leaves an unshielded cruiser on 1 or 2 hitpoints out of 8 on average. That is basically in ideal conditions where you would expect every shot to hit.
Also, one of the authors of BFG has stated an approx. range of 1000km per game CM, so combat is typically fought at 60000km or less. It is long, but not enormous.
I mean thats roughly 12 times the distance from New York to London. I'd say thats pretty enormous.
Relative to the distance between Earth and the moon, sure its not as big but still.
Gert wrote: I mean thats roughly 12 times the distance from New York to London. I'd say thats pretty enormous.
Relative to the distance between Earth and the moon, sure its not as big but still.
Apologies, I wasn't very clear- not enormous for void combat distances in scifi (in reference to what MDG said), or in comparison to distances in space in general. It is big compared to planetary distances.
The BFG ruleset strongly implies that anything less than 15000km is point-blank range for voidships, and is basically a guaranteed hit at that range for stationary targets like defenses. This makes sense, any weapon system that has the precision to fairly reliably hit a moving target 1.2km long at 30000-60000km range is going to be incredibly accurate at shorter ranges.
Hmm, I need to find the supplementary rules for fighting in orbits above planets.
Even so, it’s a helluva distance over which to aim at something comparatively tiny. If you’re off by a degree of aim, or the target is moving and your calculation is off? Not a lot of your firepower is going to hit - especially compared to unleashing the same firepower against a planetside target, which may very well not be 600,000km away.
And for further thought, here’s that video i mentioned,
BFG established torpedoes to have hundreds of gigaton yields. Further sources continued using high-end weapon yields fitting in the era of the Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections “Biggatons” firepower calculations. These numbers are consistent among many sources from the time, back when Warhammer 40k lore was consistent and more thought-out.
You don’t have to take my word for it. People have already gathered and collated all the references, and they show their math:
Responding to OP; I use a headcannon of x10 to maintain suspension of disbelief; Marine numbers are ten times larger going all the way back to the Great Crusade.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: BFG established torpedoes to have hundreds of gigaton yields. Further sources continued using high-end weapon yields fitting in the era of the Star Wars Incredible Cross Sections “Biggatons” firepower calculations. These numbers are consistent among many sources from the time, back when Warhammer 40k lore was consistent and more thought-out.
You don’t have to take my word for it. People have already gathered and collated all the references, and they show their math:
The only change that'd make sense is increasing the total nr of chapter, not the size limits.
Yes a single unsupported Space Marine chapter on its own could not take down a world in anything but a temporary fashion. That's literally the core function of the chapter size. If they're in a conflict where they need to recruit more people the Codex already has a provision for this: declare a Crusade.
Thus the easiest would be to change the nr of chapters out there from a thousand to a million or a billion or some such number. Say that the Empire itself isn't even sure how many there are exactly, with most lesser chapters being the successor chapter of a successor chapter of a successor chapter in a loooong line all the way back to one of the original legions/chapters.
mrFickle wrote: Many people have pointed out that the numbers don’t really add up if each chapter is 1k astartes but they are also active across countless battle zones across the whole galaxy. Although some people do make it work in their head.
I also know that many chapters have more than 1k marines but often they keep that a secret.
So would it be better if GW wrote (for example) that Guilliman decided to expand the Ultramarines to even beyond HH levels, making them the poster boys of the imperium, making them visible on many imperium worlds to bolster the faith and morale of its citizens, whilst leaving the smaller chapter last to specialist activities and war zones that require a very specific skill set.
I don't think it's completely unreasonable. The entire Imperium isn't at war. Otherwise the setting just breaks. There's likely hundreds of thousands of worlds just going by day-to-day, providing their tithes to the Imperium. Growing the food, mining the resources, manufacturing the goods and weapons of war, mustering the manpower, etc.
Say for example 10% of the Imperium is at war at any one time. That's 100,000 worlds across the galaxy. Say 10% of those only require a marine response. The rest is handled by the PDF, the Guard and Navy, etc. That's now only 10,000 planets. That's actually somewhat achievable, there's 10 companies per chapter and 1,000 chapters, for a total of 10,000 possible deployments.
Now obviously not every company could be combat ready 100% of the time. They have to rearm, have to wait for new marines to replace losses, heal the injured , etc. But even in the lore that makes sense, marines can't always go to where they're requested and that's thematic to the setting.
* * * * *
What I don't like is how much focus is given on the 1st founding chapters. GW make it seem they're everywhere at once, fighting all over the galaxy, sometimes even after they supposedly lose half a company or sometimes nearly their entire chapter. They should really use more of their other named chapters more often.
Even if war is a near constant, very few theatres will the scale of Armageddon, Cadia et al.
Indeed I argue this is the true problem for The Imperium. Vast as it’s resources are, they have to be spread thin. To leave any world or system undermanned or worse entirely undefended is to invite piratical raids.
Sure small scale incursions are typically repulsed, but it’s still a distraction, something they need to counter, but in doing so prevents their full might be deployed to crush more serious aggressors quickly.
Consider Charadon, which I think is the largest known Orky Empire. Yes it’s vast. Yes it’s dangerous. But. If The Imperium had the opportunity, it absolutely has the means to eradicate it. It would be quick. The butchers bill would be truly staggering - but it could be done, in ideal circumstances of build up and deployment.
But…they don’t have that sort of opportunity. Too many fires in too many places. Even the smallest ones can’t be ignored, lest they spread and get larger.
Suffice to say had it not been for the great rift opening, the Primaris Project’s unveiling and unleashing could’ve change the Galaxy’s balance of power forever. Imagine forces of that scale, power and competence, lead by Guilliman, plunging into The Maelstrom and cleansing it. Definitely has the numbers to wallop The Red Corsairs straight out of existence. Or to plunge into Charadon and wipe out the Orks therein. Take out one or both of those particular threats, and a significant amount of pressure is relieved.
From there, fully garrison The Cadian Gate.
Of course that never happened and now never will happen, short a Pri-Primaris project being revealed in similar scale. But given how screwed things were looking, it still allowed Guilliman to go on the offensive, which is remarkable in itself.
Hydras, quad guns, Icarus lascannons, skyfire missiles etc have targeting systems, which is why they have a chance of hitting aircraft broadly equivalent to the 
.
