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There tends to be a great deal of talk on this board of space marines. No idea why...

In these discussion the topic that the creation of these space marines is extremely wasteful.

My questions are thus:
How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

Do they die from the failed process? If they do not die what happens to them?


I base these next questions off of a real world politically/socially charged situation. Please do not explore whether this morality is right or wrong here but perhaps with a friend over some wine. It is well known that in some locations throughout the world the bullet for an AK47 is used as money and the gun itself is worth more than the life of the person holding it. Considering this to be true in a real world situation could it not also be true in the grimdarkness of Warhammer 40K?

If the space marine candidates all die from the process could it be cost practical considering these individuals are usually hive gangers, deathworld savages, and in general people with little discipline who would commit violent crimes if not controlled? ie they are not useful for IG recruits and not useful members of IoM society.

If not cost practical as a replacement for prison then would these individuals be worth less than conscript training, flak armour, and lasgun? ie are they worth less than IG equipment?

 ansacs wrote:
How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

It mostly depends on the status of the chapter geneseed and apothecarion. At best near 80% of implantations are successful and those who failed to accept implants mostly survive and become chapter serfs, and there is no bottom plank for "at worse" - for the barbaric chapters with highly mutated gene-seed and ritualized implantation procedures things for the recruits can go REALLY bad.

 ansacs wrote:
There tends to be a great deal of talk on this board of space marines. No idea why...

In these discussion the topic that the creation of these space marines is extremely wasteful.

My questions are thus:
How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

Just one. Just one exceptional specimen who is generally from a feral world, has survived conditions that would kill lesser men (OMG, NO wifi! ) and has passed numerous tests (physical, mental AND Genetic). Then they have to survive the chemical, physical and psycho surgery on them to turn them into "scouts".
General odds, 1 or so from each thousand candidates.

Do they die from the failed process? If they do not die what happens to them?

Some get turned into servitors, some get made into chapter serfs. Some probably become soylent marine.

I base these next questions off of a real world politically/socially charged situation. Please do not explore whether this morality is right or wrong here but perhaps with a friend over some wine. It is well known that in some locations throughout the world the bullet for an AK47 is used as money and the gun itself is worth more than the life of the person holding it. Considering this to be true in a real world situation could it not also be true in the grimdarkness of Warhammer 40K?

If the space marine candidates all die from the process could it be cost practical considering these individuals are usually hive gangers, deathworld savages, and in general people with little discipline who would commit violent crimes if not controlled? ie they are not useful for IG recruits and not useful members of IoM society.

If not cost practical as a replacement for prison then would these individuals be worth less than conscript training, flak armour, and lasgun? ie are they worth less than IG equipment?

Not all candidates die from the processes involved in making them marines. It's said that there are no wolves on fenris - partially because the apex land predator on Fenris has about as much in common with the extinct terran Canis Lupus as my aunt Dot does (although she did have a body hair issue and a monobrow ... ) and probably because they are the remnants of failed initiates with the canis helix running mad in their bodies.

If there's one thing the Imperium has in abundance (apart from one-eyed superstitions), it's people. Their greatest resource. All humans are of value, even if it's only fertiliser.
No problem is so large that they can't just throw legions of meatbags against the foe and wear them down (or at least expend all their ammo).

The human cost of making space marines is irrelevant in how much of a waste they are. Life is cheap in 40k, and the Imperium has no moral problem with spending it.

The cost problem with space marines is a practical cost. Creating space marines and giving them their precious fortresses/religious rituals/etc and all the best equipment uses up resources that could be better spent on more guardsmen and nuclear missiles. After all, a space marine dies in an orbital bombardment just like a guardsman, so why spend the extra resources to create and arm a space marine? Their only purpose is to create propaganda heroes for the imperium. Their actual practical value in winning wars is nonexistent, but it's worth sending in a few marines and mopping up an enemy HQ or whatever so that the oppressed citizens of the Imperium can be united in their worship of the heroic defenders of humanity.

 ansacs wrote:
Do they die from the failed process? If they do not die what happens to them?

As for the Space Wolves, I'll give you a hint. "There are no wolves on Fenris."

As for the creation of a marine, you might have 100 kids ( who could very well be one in 10,000) who have been screened, deemed genetically and mentally compatible enter, and end up with one scout receiving his black carapace and becoming a marine.

The value of a space marine might be immeasurable though to the Imperium, as not only are they a supreme fighting organism but they also serve as a religious icon. Its kind of like how in the USA we hero worship people in the special forces. To your regular joe they are magical murder fairies that protect us at all times, even though they themselves are regular joes who have gone through immense amounts of training. I would assume your regular army grunts vastly outnumber them and probably, in the grand scheme of things, accomplish more, but since the magical murder fairies are so rare and mysterious, they get more attention. In this case it's a giant murder fairy who also has a direct genetic connection to your God.

The main thing I've always wondered for marines though, is the inherent organ loss attrition for scouts. A mature progenoid gland in a marine creates two gene seed sets, a gene seed set is used to grow/clone a complete set of space marine organs. Each time a scout dies having received some of the space marine organs, those are lost, and require a new set of organs to be grown from a gene seed. At some point, some chapter must have had basic implant organ shortages from this attrition, but it's never been touched upon.

 Peregrine wrote:
why spend the extra resources to create and arm a space marine?

Space Marines fight and win battles, that in turn give for everybody else in Imperium chance to continue waging war.

 piprinx wrote:
The main thing I've always wondered for marines though, is the inherent organ loss attrition for scouts. A mature progenoid gland in a marine creates two gene seed sets, a gene seed set is used to grow/clone a complete set of space marine organs. Each time a scout dies having received some of the space marine organs, those are lost, and require a new set of organs to be grown from a gene seed. At some point, some chapter must have had basic implant organ shortages from this attrition, but it's never been touched upon.

Because the implanted Astartes grow extra gene-seed in addition to the ones they already have*, I'd imagine they'd have reserves of organ implants.

*And when they run low they stick the progenoids in ordinary people, wait 10 years for them to grow them some more gene-seed then "harvest" them.

 PrinceRaven wrote:

 piprinx wrote:
The main thing I've always wondered for marines though, is the inherent organ loss attrition for scouts. A mature progenoid gland in a marine creates two gene seed sets, a gene seed set is used to grow/clone a complete set of space marine organs. Each time a scout dies having received some of the space marine organs, those are lost, and require a new set of organs to be grown from a gene seed. At some point, some chapter must have had basic implant organ shortages from this attrition, but it's never been touched upon.

Because the implanted Astartes grow extra gene-seed in addition to the ones they already have, I'd imagine they'd have reserves of organ implants.

True, and I imagine that growing up a huge reserve of the organs is what leads to the genetic deviancy in future generations. But if you are having batches of 100 or more guys all needing the organs, and you might have multiple sized groups like that in a short time span because of marine deaths there has to be some kind of strain on some of the early implantation organs. If I recall correctly it takes decades for the progenoids to mature in order to be harvested while the marine is alive, or you have to get it when the marine is dead and hope they are salvageable, if they aren't that's X amount of organs you will never see again.

The way I've always seen it though, is that one marine is only able to create the two sets of gene seed based organs from one progenoid. If they could culture more than two sets from one marine, there wouldn't be as much need to harvest the gene seed. They would have plentiful amounts of the later implant organs, but the first few implants are going to have severe shortages from early scout/novitiate deaths.

Edit: For the 10 years organ farming, isn't that from what the AdMech does to build up reserves from gene seed tithes to supply gene seed to form new chapters? I've never read that as a Space Marine practice unless it was added in a newer book.

 piprinx wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:

 piprinx wrote:
The main thing I've always wondered for marines though, is the inherent organ loss attrition for scouts. A mature progenoid gland in a marine creates two gene seed sets, a gene seed set is used to grow/clone a complete set of space marine organs. Each time a scout dies having received some of the space marine organs, those are lost, and require a new set of organs to be grown from a gene seed. At some point, some chapter must have had basic implant organ shortages from this attrition, but it's never been touched upon.

Because the implanted Astartes grow extra gene-seed in addition to the ones they already have, I'd imagine they'd have reserves of organ implants.

If I recall correctly it takes decades for the progenoids to mature in order to be harvested while the marine is alive, or you have to get it when the marine is dead and hope they are salvageable, if they aren't that's X amount of organs you will never see again.

Edit: For the 10 years organ farming, isn't that from what the AdMech does to build up reserves from gene seed tithes to supply gene seed to form new chapters? I've never read that as a Space Marine practice unless it was added in a newer book.

5 years for the neck progenoids to mature, 10 for the chest.

You might be right about that, I'm not entirely sure.

 PrinceRaven wrote:

 ansacs wrote:
Do they die from the failed process? If they do not die what happens to them?

As for the Space Wolves, I'll give you a hint. "There are no wolves on Fenris."

Apart from the ones that were already there obviously

The Wolves also use failed aspirants for serfs and servitors too.

Dark Angels seem to kill aspirants that failed the transformation so they are spared the dishonor of going home. The people at home then believe that their kids had passed the test.

ansacs wrote:How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

As has already been mentioned, this answer depends both on the population (genetic compatibility, susceptability to hypnotic suggestion) of the planet and on how well a Chapter managed to preserve its technological and medical knowledge.

For example, the extremely primitive people on the Fleshtearers' homeworld of Cretacia are said to possess an unusual degree of genetic compatibility to the creation process, and according to WD #251 "only a small percentage of them reject the genetic modifications that make a Space Marine superhuman, while their simple minds are easily adapted to the mental conditioning all Space Marines undergo", which means you could turn almost the entire world into Space Marines. However, as fans familiar with this Chapter know, the degenerated state of the native people and their cannibalistic traditions, in combination with the Chapter's defective geneseed means that the Fleshtearers are still doomed.

Likewise, as the entire Imperium suffers from a general decline in technological knowledge, the creation process itself has become increasingly mystified and debased, more tradition than actual science, which increases the likelihood of implant malfunction and/or the death of the subject. The degree of how much this has affected successful recruitment is different amongst all Chapters, reflecting the success (or failure) of their Apothecaries to preserve knowledge and expertise across the millennia.

For further reading, White Dwarf issue #247 had an Index Astartes article about the creation of Space Marines; an online backup is available here.

ansacs wrote:If the space marine candidates all die from the process could it be cost practical considering these individuals are usually hive gangers, deathworld savages, and in general people with little discipline who would commit violent crimes if not controlled? ie they are not useful for IG recruits and not useful members of IoM society.
If not cost practical as a replacement for prison then would these individuals be worth less than conscript training, flak armour, and lasgun? ie are they worth less than IG equipment?

It could certainly be argued that one of the basic requirements for Space Marine recruitment (mental condition) simultaneously makes an individual less valuable to the Imperial Guard. On the other hand, not all Guard regiments are built around discipline, and when you have the Munitorum recruit from a backwater world (Attilan Rough Riders) or from hive gangs (Necromundan Spiders), you will end up with a formation that reflects those qualities in some way anyways, and hopefully be able to use such qualities to their advantage by adapting their tactics - the Savlar Chem-Dogs, for example, are said to be undisciplined, yet excellent skirmishers and tunnel fighters. The Guard does not even attempt to select only the most disciplined and most skilled recruits from across the galaxy, it simply tithes from every single world not exempted from this obligation by Imperial decree.

Similarly, it should be pointed out that Space Marine recruitment schemes are highly erratic and heavily influenced by superstition and Chapter culture. Whilst a lot of Chapters seem to hold contests to select the strongest candidates from amongst the pool of potential recruits, you also have practices where the Space Marines take the most skilled artisan, such as the Salamanders with their blacksmithing tradition. Likewise, the Ultramarines recruit from eight seemingly very civilised worlds, which also raise regiments of capable and disciplined PDF occasionally seconded to the Imperial Guard. That the indoctrination works on people with such mental qualities is probably a testament to the Ultramarines' preservation of technology.

Either way, as chromedog mentioned, "life is cheap". When Imperial commanders can get away with clearing mine fields by throwing bodies at it, then the Space Marines occasionally taking a bunch of people won't be of interest to anyone in the entire galaxy. More critical might be that the average Space Marine Chapter tends to hog an entire planet that could be tithed, regardless of how many people they actually recruit.

piprinx wrote:The main thing I've always wondered for marines though, is the inherent organ loss attrition for scouts. A mature progenoid gland in a marine creates two gene seed sets, a gene seed set is used to grow/clone a complete set of space marine organs. Each time a scout dies having received some of the space marine organs, those are lost, and require a new set of organs to be grown from a gene seed. At some point, some chapter must have had basic implant organ shortages from this attrition, but it's never been touched upon.

A Chapter can grow as many implants as it may like - the only thing they can't just grow in a tube is the geneseed itself, which is required to clone the implants and which has to be cultured on the Marines themselves. When a Scout dies, his gene-seed should be harvested by an Apothecary in the same manner as it is usually harvested from fully-fledged Space Marines, thus preserving it for later use.

The only two reasons the Imperium "tithes" a percentage of a Chapter's geneseed is to monitor its purity as well as to enable the creation of entirely new Chapters - the confiscated geneseed does not act as a sort of bank that can be tapped, which is why a Chapter may well "become extinct" should it lose too much of its geneseed. A fate currently awaiting the Celestial Lions.

Check the Index Astartes link above for further details from GW's take on the subject, if you like.

 ansacs wrote:

Do they die from the failed process? If they do not die what happens to them?

For a non Wolf example, in the third edition SM codex there was a commentary on a few recruits who were going through the implant process. One stood out above the rest in terms of close combat prowess and in the early logs (It was done as an apothecary med report) it was noted he would go far in the chapter. In the later implants their were complications with several of the implants, the bone and muscle implant ones so they froze him in order to study what happened, not only to prevent it in future but to see if they could learn to correct what happened and use that knowledge to force aspirants to develop like he did since up to that point he was above average. (Paraphrased that quite a bit, been ages since I've had the third edition SM codex at hand)

Now failings can happen not just biologically but morally, in the first Crimson Fist Space Marine Battles book a scout did something or another to cause Kantor butthurt (He either didn't take a shot or took a shot too early, I only read the book up to the first 30 pages or so because those early SMB came out in the make everything kiddie friendly phase of 40k and it was painful to read) and he sentenced him to becoming a servitor, not a menial bathroom cleaning serf but a mindwiped servitor who might end up looking like a snail cleaning the floors of the fortress monastery with his tongue.

He took his shot too early, showing his training and hypno indoctrination had failed, alerting the orks to the danger by failing to kill the warboss. This directly led to the Orks attacking Rynn's World.

I think servitor is the best that scout could hope for.

piprinx wrote:For a non Wolf example, in the third edition SM codex there was a commentary on a few recruits who were going through the implant process. One stood out above the rest in terms of close combat prowess and in the early logs (It was done as an apothecary med report) it was noted he would go far in the chapter.

Ah! Indeed, this is an excellent bit of fluff - very interesting (and somewhat creepy) to read.
I wondered which source it was in as it's been years since I saw it. I remember it also mentioned the Marines testing their recruits by letting them operate a bolter. Considering we're talking about 10 year olds, this probably says a lot about their physical prowess (or Marine guns are lighter than is commonly believed, but it is probably a mixture of both).

 Lynata wrote:

piprinx wrote:
I wondered which source it was in as it's been years since I saw it. I remember it also mentioned the Marines testing their recruits by letting them operate a bolter. Considering we're talking about 10 year olds, this probably says a lot about their physical prowess (or Marine guns are lighter than is commonly believed, but it is probably a mixture of both).

I can't remember which book (I am heavily leaning towards the first Space Wolf novel) but the training sergeant gives a cocky recruit his bolt pistol and says he will go unarmed. Recruit can't even lift the pistol and the sergeant thrashes him.

Third edition to me was the best era, so many morally and thought provoking wtf fluff moments as opposed to "wtf was the writer thinking?" moments

That's why I prefer GW's own writing to the Black Library novels - the gap between Space Marine and normal people is still massive, but not as huge.
Same thing for the roleplaying games - in GW's Inquisitor, everyone uses the same bolters. In FFG's RPGs, Marines get +1 versions with a special rule that renders them pretty much unusable for everyone else (regardless of how strong the other person actually is). I find that a bit ridiculous (are Space Marines not cool enough already?), but of course that is a matter of preferences..

Some of the GW writing can be just as over the top though (Primarch heart carving anyone?), they just come out with it at such a slow pace and in small blurbs it doesn't seem as bad.

For the older GW direct materials and BL it wasn't as bad though, since a lot of times it was people working in the studio writing them as opposed to outsiders (who may or may not know the universe outside of a quick rundown) only doing the novels so it was more coherent.

 ansacs wrote:
How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

Is that the only worth you see in humans in 40k?

I was hoping for a broader question...

 Melissia wrote:

 ansacs wrote:
How many humans does it take to get to the center of a...er, make a space marine?

Is that the only worth you see in humans in 40k?

I was hoping for a broader question...

Unfortunately in 40k humans are considered a commodity and are usually just quantified unless they are in power armor.

Before the Chapters were the legions. And the legions recruited en masse. Its not that the mortality rate of creating an Astartes is high, its just that since the Age of the Imperium, recruiting standards have become much higher. The trials before the initiation into the chapter is the thing killing most of the recruits. Even then, there's always a constant flow of initiates and neophytes into the chapter, for without it, the Chapter will not be able to constantly fight and sustain casualties. Generally, the ones successfully recruited into the Chapter are stronger, faster, smarter, tougher, and more viscious than those that have been successfully recruited into a Legion. But the numbers chosen to undergo the trials, I would think are similar to the numbers under the legion.

There's no value to a life in the Imperium if that life is not used in Imperial productivity. How many humans for a space marine? I'm guessing tens of thousands. Those that don't die from the trials become chapter serfs. Faithfully serving the enterprise they have given their lives to when deciding to undergo the trials until that life comes to and end.

When people are worth about tree fitty, you can waste a lot of them to make a Space Marine.

Space Marines aren't very good on the tabletop because Games Workshop wants to sell you more toys. In fact, Space Marines went from fairly overpowered back in 2nd Edition, to 6th Edition's running joke. So it's obvious the tabletop rules are not 40K the fluff, they are 40K the product that needs to make a profit.

On the other hand, a Space Marine in the fluff is capable of all kinds of cool things we never even see in the tabletop game. Void combat. Ship to ship boarding actions. Surgical strikes. Surviving horrific injuries. Stuff that either wouldn't be practical to try to use regular humans for, or stuff that they'd never be able to do even if you tried.

Now, I'd imagine it doesn't take nearly as many humans to make a Space Marine as some people are suggesting. It seems fairly plausible that the vast majority of aspirants would fail before the "training" even started. Geneseed is a pretty precious resource, and it's finite. They can't just go get more from the geneseed bank like the Legions did during the Crusade. So a candidate isn't even going to get implanted until long after they've been considered a worthy candidate for it. Some kids might die in the trials, but remember, Space Marines aren't selected, or born. They're made.

It's mostly irrelevant whether or not a Chapter selects the fat kid, or the skinny kid, or the tall kid or the short kid. They're going to make him into a seven and a half foot tall superhuman using genetic manipulation, growth enhancement, and biological modification surgeries. All they want is a kid whose boddy isn't going to reject that process. So yeah, the chubby kid probably has less of a chance of getting picked, but in the end, maybe he has the kind of mental aptitude that would be ideal for Space Marines, and his genetic profile matches the target. He'll lose weight eating Optimized Space Gruel™.

And because geneseed is finite, the process is going to be designed to succeed, not to fail. Candidates may die, but probably not in droves. This is grimdark, but it's not that grimdark. There's a vast galaxy of things out there for Space Marines to get killed facing. But you need to actually have Space Marines in order to kill them.

Eh, how much it's worth it depends. Space Marines are worth about ten guardsmen, as per the opinion of the Primarchs, but ten guardsmen are far easier to equip and tarin-- so in the overwhelming majority of situations, the guardsmen are better than the marine. Which is why they're used far more often than marines as well.

Human life itself is of paramount importance to the Imperium; infinitely less so any given human life.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Melissia wrote:
Space Marines are worth about ten guardsmen, as per the opinion of the Primarchs

I don't doubt you read this somewhere (I personally thought the ratio was attributed to the Emperor) but if you think about it ... it does not at all represent what's going on in the fluff.

 Manchu wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
Space Marines are worth about ten guardsmen, as per the opinion of the Primarchs

I don't doubt you read this somewhere (I personally thought the ratio was attributed to the Emperor) but if you think about it ... it does not at all represent what's going on in the fluff.

"Give me a hundred Space Marines. Or failing that give me a thousand other troops".

Rogal Dorn, Space Marines fourth edition.

Like I said, I don't doubt it's published fluff. It just makes no sense.

Melissia wrote:Eh, how much it's worth it depends. Space Marines are worth about ten guardsmen, as per the opinion of the Primarchs

Well, one* Primarch. But the 10:1 ratio is also stated in the rulebook's general description.

[edit]*: And I'm fairly sure that was Rogal Dorn, not Guilliman.

Manchu wrote:I don't doubt you read this somewhere (I personally thought the ratio was attributed to the Emperor) but if you think about it ... it does not at all represent what's going on in the fluff.

That depends on the fluff you read - which in turn of course depends on one's personal preferences. Just like I'm sure that there is some novel that has 7.5 feet Marines as VS suggested, even though GW's own descriptions make them clock out at around 7 feet.

That's just the woes and benefits of a "pick what you like canon" where individual incidents are classified as legend and propaganda rather than fact. There are also a number of incidents where Space Marines or CSMs got pwned badly, and considering that the damage of a projectile does not care for who fired it, technology ends up being a huge equaliser. That's why - from what I have read - Space Marines generally focus on surgical strikes and blitzkrieg tactics - to overwhelm their opposition with as much force as possible, because if they get pinned down by a numerically superior enemy with this ratio, they're going to have a bad time.

Makes perfect sense to me. Space Marines are special forces troops, not line troops.

They're best deployed in quick surgical strikes. When deployed on the front line as line troops, their advantages are lowered to near nothing. It matters little how tough you are if you're being bombarded by earthshakers.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lynata wrote:
[edit]*: And I'm fairly sure that was Rogal Dorn, not Guilliman.

Whoops, you'reright.

It's Rogal Dorn, from the fourth edition Space Marines codex.

It depends on the chapter. Some have more rigorous selection processes than others. Many aspirants die even before they get the first implantation.

Then some die in the implantation process, although I think this is fairly low relative to how many die before the implantation begins. Geneseed is too valuable to waste after all.

I read somewhere once that its only roughly one in a thousand are actually compatible with the Geneseed.


For some chapters its even less. For the GKs, its roughly one in a million.