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Despite a general default to "Rule of Cool" and "Because Grimdark" it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider it.

The argument of melee vs range has gone back and forth since the bronze age. It's a rock-paper-scissors game between armored infantry, cavalry, and archers. The archers reign supreme until armor lets melee fighters get in range to do damage.

In the late medieval period, the english were the best at this, taking large numbers of archers who could cause complete havoc against french cavalry, allowing english cavalry and infantry and infantry to mop up afterward. This lasts until plate becomes sophisticated enough to withstand storms of arrows again. Once the French get a hold of Milanese plate, archers become significantly less effective and the pendulum swings back in the other direction.

Of course the answer to this comes in the form of gunpowder. guns were cheaper than arrows and easier to train than skilled longbowmen. This is a small issue at first, but armor has to respond and become heavier and heavier (The phrase "Bullet proof" comes from the mark in a breastplate showing that it had been tested against a gunshot).

Of course, this being 6th edition renaissance rules the focus becomes less on highly mobile and elite expensive troops and more on massed, footslogging infantry. Cavalry becomes less important than huge pike blocks and muskets.

As guns get better, pikes disappear and become bayonets and the weight of armor required to stop musket fire becomes slowly not worth the weight, inconvenience, and point cost of armor. It gradually disappears.

Civil war is men shooting off at long distance. Cannons and rifles rule the day.

WWI sees melee come back because of trench fighting. Close quarters.

WWII sees machine guns becoming everyone's best friend and war gets more mobile - back to guns.

modern warfare is now mostly close quarters urban fighting, but you also see the return of body armor.

Now plug in the tech from 40k. IG stick to the WWI/II doctrine - armor is practically irrelevant, but range is the order of the day. They are practically modern.

Space Marines and others though are a step in the other direction. Armor is now powerful enough to withstand almost any weapon. Weight isn't even an issue at this point, and social structure is now back to the point where it is worthwhile to train soldiers from birth/specifically engineer them. Space Marines engaging in melee makes perfect sense for the same reason that both Bronze-clad Hoplites and Steel-plated French made sense. You stand a good chance of charging through their fire and an overwhelming advantage once you do. This is doubly applicable when you realize that the reach of ranged weapons in 40k is laughable compared to their real-world equivalents.

Add to that the ability to carry melee weapons that can rip through tanks and sheer through the heaviest armor, and the close engagement distances most 40k scenarios take place in? Melee combat in an age of power-armor and personal force fields is one of the few things in 40k that strike me as totally plausible.

TLR Version
Melee combat works in 40k because armor is effective enough to allow you to get in melee combat.

Except armor isn't effective enough, as we can see from power armored troops dying just fine against proper shooting. Melee combat in 40k exists for three reasons:

1) The scale of the tabletop game is completely broken. Distances and movement speeds are not at the same 28mm scale as the models, and the alternating turn structure prevents proper reactions. So you get guns that struggle from one end of a tank to the other and assault troops that can cover an entire city block of movement while the defenders sit there doing nothing while waiting for their turn. If you remove the constraints of trying to play a company-scale 28mm game on a 6x4 table those assault units get shot to death long before they can cover the distance to their target.

2) GW constantly ignores how deadly heavy weapons are and removes WMDs entirely. In a "real" war you aren't going to have millions of guardsmen defending their trenches with bayonets and frag grenades against millions of orks, you're going to have an artillery unit hundreds of miles away launch a single nuke and kill all of the orks. Assault units aren't going to gain cover from magic indestructible ruins, a demolisher shell is going to bring the whole building down and kill everyone inside. Etc. This allows the horde of idiots with swords to be a viable strategy instead of just an efficient way of getting your own troops killed.

3) Because GW wants it to happen. This is why you have things like Tau, an army that wants nothing to do with melee combat fluff-wise, getting "bonuses" to staying in combat and continuing to fight instead of stepping back and shooting the idiot with a sword. Or, in the case of jetpack units, hovering out of sword reach and shooting. Over and over again you have GW making rules that encourage or even force melee combat to happen no matter how little sense it makes fluff-wise.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kazian wrote:
Armor is now powerful enough to withstand almost any weapon.

Except even if the armor is strong enough to stop an impact the person inside it isn't. The only benefit to a suit of power armor stopping a direct hit from a tank shell is that maybe you can hose out the remains of the wearer and give it to the next guy. Impact force alone is going to kill whatever is inside the armor, just like people figured out that the easiest way to deal with plate armor is to just hit it with a hammer until the guy inside is dead.

Weight isn't even an issue at this point

Only because GW doesn't understand thermodynamics and declares that everyone has magic infinite power sources to keep that power armor moving and not overheating.

and social structure is now back to the point where it is worthwhile to train soldiers from birth/specifically engineer them.

Only because GW doesn't understand the scale of a real war and thinks that a dozen marine can win a battle involving millions of troops instead of just dying anonymously in an artillery barrage. But even GW admits that there are nowhere near enough space marines to win the Imperium's wars, and the only real advantage they offer is propaganda stories about the Imperium's greatest heroes.

This is doubly applicable when you realize that the reach of ranged weapons in 40k is laughable compared to their real-world equivalents.

Fluff =/= game mechanics. 40k weapons have laughable range because if you give them realistic range every weapon has infinite range on a 6x4 table. For range to matter for gameplay purposes you have to scale it down a lot. Arguing fluff based on this makes about as much sense as arguing about how big space marines are based on the fact that you can't fit ten of them in a Rhino model.

Because Tau are the only race without close combat capability that hasn't been wiped out by Space Marines, Orks or Tyranids.

This is actually a somewhat complex question. To get a complete answer to this question you have to consider a lot of factors.

1) The game represents a microcosm of the total battlefield that is laughably small compared to the whole thing. I like to think this is the "pivotal" moment in that battle but that is pure egotism.

2) Most of the battles in the 40K universe are probably settle as Peregrine and a number of other posters have pointed out. If you ever played the rebelion of krieg it would be over in ~10 sec as you just hit a button and nuke/virus bomb the entire planet into a wasteland. There is actually not a lot of melee in the lists of major battles if you actually read between the lines.

3) The battles are played on the wrong size board for the sake of convenience. If you played IG the battles should all be played with >240" between the deployment zones.

4) We have trouble envisioning the 40K universe but really look at some of the art. Hive cities are huge with massive underground areas which are filled with mutants and gangs. Forge worlds are literally entire worlds where most of the surface is covered in factories and tunnels for the workers. This means that many of the fights may take place in complex environments with important assets that you cannot destroy. This means you have to shoot your weapons only in their most accurate ranges (why basilisks are limited to such small ranges). Some of these worlds also have extremely bizarre ecosystems so there may be very limited methods to spot enemies. This could allow enemy forces many more opportunities for stealth than we could imagine.

What all of these points mean is the battles we play are those select few where the armies have managed to come within a very close range of each other. This can be for a variety of reasons;
-Tunneling; this could be a variety of things such as coming up from a sewer system where the orks/nids are spawning from, tunneling into an enemy fortification or city, or an invasion of a hive city. Their are a lot of underground regions in 40K which are poorly defended, monitored, and often going to ruin.
-"Drop in" this could be orks "landing" (ie crashing) their ships right into a hive city or factory world and going to town. SM like the rain of death and in general shock and awe tactics using drop vessels (falcons, waveserpents, vendettas, drop pods, mycetic spore are all examples of vehicles that by fluff can enter through an atmosphere). We don't play the drop the planetary defenses battles very often but this has to be done at some point either through guile or battle fleet. This could even be daemons summoned from the warp by cultists.
-Sacrifice: if you can't win by finesse just ram a million gaunts down the throat and then a million more into the breach. There are actually aliens capable of spawning fast enough to manage such tactics (ie orks, tyranids, and necrons to a degree)
-Subterfuge: You sneak up on them or make them come to you. This is probably the eldar way as they either get the opponent to come near a webway portal or sneak up on them. That or they would drop from the sky. Just remember that we don't know all the prep that goes into these battles.

Now as for why people carry around swords...
-SM: These guys use boltguns and are part of the IoM. This means they have an infamously unreliable supply line but yet use a matter projectile weapon they have to continuously resupply. This is a famous premise in the fluff where they run out of bullets and have to use their swords. The fact is the IoM is just has bad supply lines due to their poor travel methods and bureaucracy.
-Chaos: These guys are off their rockers and don't seem to fight to "win" per se but rather to please their god. So they fight with the weapons that allow them to please their god best.
-CWE: This is partly ceremonial and partly due to the close quarters they prefer to fight in. CWE mostly fight in close to the enemy where less of the opponent's army will be able to shoot them. They also fight in space ships and ambushes more than most. CC in general is not a bad place to be for a race with the reflexes of the eldar as there is less chance of stray mortar round killing them with no recourse. It also explains why their weapons tend toward the short range fire support rather than the stand off fire fights.
-DE: similar to the CWE but they like pain. People that like to inflict pain usually like to do so in close gory detail. Probably similar to why chaos gods like CC.
-IG: Their weapons are mostly ceremonial or a mark of extreme egotism. They bring a power sword to a fight because the officer has more money, zealotry, or just idiocy than he does sense. IG uses whatever it can wherever it can as it is fighting more battles in more places than it can supply to a carapace/plasma gun standard. Heck some of them are little better than stone age "cavemen". They also fight in trenches so this is why they get their bayonets and knifes. Not to mention like all IoM troops they may not get resupplied.

Hopefully this gives some sort of relevant thoughts and info to people who read.

As a recap there are situations even in advanced high tech war where you just have to get out a knife and slug it out.

 Peregrine wrote:
Except armor isn't effective enough, as we can see from power armored troops dying just fine against proper shooting.

Define "proper shooting".

Except even if the armor is strong enough to stop an impact the person inside it isn't. The only benefit to a suit of power armor stopping a direct hit from a tank shell is that maybe you can hose out the remains of the wearer and give it to the next guy. Impact force alone is going to kill whatever is inside the armor, just like people figured out that the easiest way to deal with plate armor is to just hit it with a hammer until the guy inside is dead.

Yet for some reason in the actual fluff that isn't the case. Hmm.

 Void__Dragon wrote:

Except even if the armor is strong enough to stop an impact the person inside it isn't. The only benefit to a suit of power armor stopping a direct hit from a tank shell is that maybe you can hose out the remains of the wearer and give it to the next guy. Impact force alone is going to kill whatever is inside the armor, just like people figured out that the easiest way to deal with plate armor is to just hit it with a hammer until the guy inside is dead.

Yet for some reason in the actual fluff that isn't the case. Hmm.

This makes me laugh. There is big money going into developing methods of circumventing this. There are already results being shown but the basic concept is to redirect the energy away from the wearer, waste the kinetic energy or disperse it, or have a counter energy to cancel the incoming energy. You can already see that the dragon skin armour already does a pretty good job of dispersing energy and the modern tanks and APC show some decent ability to protect the occupants from attacks which should shake them to death.

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Define "proper shooting".

Better than "a few barely-trained conscripts with lasguns/autoguns". Power armor is great at stopping small arms fire as long as you aren't stupid and stand around out in the open waiting for everyone to shoot you. That doesn't mean it's going to stop plasma/krak missiles/etc.

Yet for some reason in the actual fluff that isn't the case. Hmm.

Unfortunately the fluff is stupid about a lot of things. But there's no getting around this one, as long as you have biology that is even remotely close to human (and marines do) a sufficiently powerful impact will kill you even if your armor isn't breached.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ansacs wrote:
This makes me laugh. There is big money going into developing methods of circumventing this. There are already results being shown but the basic concept is to redirect the energy away from the wearer, waste the kinetic energy or disperse it, or have a counter energy to cancel the incoming energy. You can already see that the dragon skin armour already does a pretty good job of dispersing energy and the modern tanks and APC show some decent ability to protect the occupants from attacks which should shake them to death.

Except that armor is still dealing with small arms fire, which means energy levels low enough that it won't kill you with impact shock. The important part is stopping the impact without injuring the person wearing the armor, not preventing them from being turned into a red puddle.

I think melee is more prominent because its not necessarily correct to simply 'scale up' the efficiency of firearms against human targets and expect it to apply with bigger firearms against bigger targets.

We use guns in war because guns are designed with the weaknesses of human physiology in mind. We are slow, vulnerable to punctures that can rupture vital organs etc, and have a very low 'resiliancy' to injury. Ergo, a gun that can do enough 'damage' to incapacitate a human at 300 yards is much better than say, a chainsaw that can do enough damage to kill a human ten times over at melee distance.

But if your opponent is a resiliant Ork, or a supernaturally agile Eldar, or a Daemonic entity... who says that these weapons are ideally suited for killing such opponents?

Also, rule of cool, applying equally to both melee and shooting - because the vast tides of men you see in 40k artwork are simply not viable, no matter what the hell they're equipped with, when the other guy has a space fleet filled with space lasers.

Let's do some math, because math is fun:

120mm anti-tank sabot round = ~9kg, 1500m/s = 13500 kg*m/s of momentum. Using this estimate of ~500 kg for a power armored marine that means the marine hit by the tank shot will be flung backwards at 27m/s (about 60mph).

Now here's the fun part: the marine has to stop the round almost instantaneously (if it doesn't the marine gets a 120mm depleted uranium spike through their chest and dies instantly). Let's generously assume the ~10' tall marine is also ~10' thick. The tank shell will cross that distance in 0.002 seconds. So let's very generously assume that this is sufficient. To accelerate to 27m/s within 0.002s the marine will experience over 1300 times the force of gravity. Compare that the the ~200g maximum that a human has ever been recorded surviving.

And then remember that this was the insanely generous version. In reality the impact forces would be many orders of magnitude higher, so it's safe to say the space marine is dead even if their armor somehow magically survives.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dakkamite wrote:
But if your opponent is a resiliant Ork, or a supernaturally agile Eldar, or a Daemonic entity... who says that these weapons are ideally suited for killing such opponents?

It doesn't matter. Who cares if a lasgun isn't the most effective weapon against an ork, that's what heavy weapons are for. It doesn't matter how "resilient" you are if a heavy bolter shell blows off your leg and leaves you unable to move, or an artillery barrage/nuclear weapon/etc turns you and your entire army into a bloody mist. Running a horde of orks at the enemy only "works" because the distances are not to scale and GW doesn't accurately portray how powerful heavy weapons are.

 Peregrine wrote:

Better than "a few barely-trained conscripts with lasguns/autoguns". Power armor is great at stopping small arms fire as long as you aren't stupid and stand around out in the open waiting for everyone to shoot you. That doesn't mean it's going to stop plasma/krak missiles/etc.

Yet in the fluff power armour can hold up pretty well to direct impacts from bolter or even assault cannon salvos, hmm.

Krak and plasma missiles aren't exactly the most common thing seen on the battlefield, and the former isn't an effective anti-infantry weapon.

Unfortunately the fluff is stupid about a lot of things. But there's no getting around this one, as long as you have biology that is even remotely close to human (and marines do) a sufficiently powerful impact will kill you even if your armor isn't breached.

I'm afraid not. Given the choice between going with how you think the setting should work, and how it actually does work within the fluff, the latter is obviously the more correct choice.

Space Marines can survive being hit by barrage bombs, big bombs shot from starships that can take out the shields of other starships or pulverise city-wide+ areas. Because their armour protects them.

40k does have Nukes, their called Orbital Barrage, Deathstrike Mkssiles and Exterminatus. But as already pointed out, in general the guys who can use these things usually want to planet afterwards so wasting it is bad.

As for the maths you have done, based on what we do know, that would be correct. But there is a lot we don't know. For example, just how resilient a Marine is, the density and resilence of adamantium and ceramite, the damage control systems of the armour, the impact compensators in the armour and who knows what else that isn't as commonly mentioned. Not only rhat, your talking about a 120mm AT round, which is not commonly ised against marines, and when they are, such as Lascannons, Meltaguns and Battlecannons, of course the marines go splat. But a common firearm like a Lasgun, or even a .75 Bolt round with explosive core, barely anything. Even heavy weapons like Heavy Bolters, which I think are like 105 calibre, arn't that effective.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Dakkamite wrote:
But if your opponent is a resiliant Ork, or a supernaturally agile Eldar, or a Daemonic entity... who says that these weapons are ideally suited for killing such opponents?

It doesn't matter. Who cares if a lasgun isn't the most effective weapon against an ork, that's what heavy weapons are for. It doesn't matter how "resilient" you are if a heavy bolter shell blows off your leg and leaves you unable to move, or an artillery barrage/nuclear weapon/etc turns you and your entire army into a bloody mist. Running a horde of orks at the enemy only "works" because the distances are not to scale and GW doesn't accurately portray how powerful heavy weapons are.

I know, and I mentioned that in my post. But it doesn't just apply to melee - a crapton of guardsmen also only works for and despite of the exact same reasons. An army of any kind as depicted in 40k (the 'endless tide of men') is ridiculous in the face of even WW1 level artillery, let alone what we have today or what there would be in 40,000 years.

GW doesn't depict *any* weapon in realistic accuracy. A Lasgun is described as being able to easily take off a mans arm - yet a guardsman can just tank those shots 50% of the time *without armour*. The entire 40k experience is based around a suspension of belief in the pursuit of a more cinematic experience. The same reason a Guardsman can tank such a shot or a horde of Orks is viable is the same reason that space lasers don't just erase an Imperial Guard Tank Battalion from existance - so its not just melee thats effected, its the entire shebang.

 Peregrine wrote:

Except that armor is still dealing with small arms fire, which means energy levels low enough that it won't kill you with impact shock. The important part is stopping the impact without injuring the person wearing the armor, not preventing them from being turned into a red puddle.

Actually from the initial tests of dragon skin light body armour they released to the public ~2010ish that would stop a grenade from point blank with relatively little damage to the person or a 50 caliber. The secret being the layered curved disordered alloys used in the armour. The energy of impact is absorbed into these plates and both dissipated through the surface and are partially reflected back along the line of the force vector.

Your math assumes no deflection, energy dispersion, or energy storage. Interestingly you could incorporate advanced piezoelectric devices into the armour to generate electricity. If the fluff is to be believed you could power a small house off the bullets hitting a spacemarine.

Because it sounds cool, which makes it nice in advertisements.

Im still with Kharn (such a swell guy). Offtopic:
"Compare that the the ~200g maximum that a human has ever been recorded surviving"
HOLY G-FORCE, BATMAN, what kind of person survives this? A rough estimation says that in that situation your EYEBALLS WEIGH ROUGHLY 5.6 KG / 12 POUNDS EACH! Not to speak of other organs.
Can you point me to where you got this from?
EDIT: EACH FETHING EYEBALL!!

Well this thread was inevitably going to turn ridiculous, and well, here we are.

I do have to love the people trying to figure out rationalizations for it.

The reality is, the 40K tabletop game is not an accurate representation of the universe, and never will be. It's just a way to sell plastic toy soldiers that you can then use with a predetermined set of unrealistic limitations of equal forces, equal terrain, and alternating turns, and resolve these battles within a short time frame.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
Well this thread was inevitably going to turn ridiculous, and well, here we are.

I do have to love the people trying to figure out rationalizations for it.

The reality is, the 40K tabletop game is not an accurate representation of the universe, and never will be. It's just a way to sell plastic toy soldiers that you can then use with a predetermined set of unrealistic limitations of equal forces, equal terrain, and alternating turns, and resolve these battles within a short time frame.

Just leave the Tabletop aside then, and concentrate on the fluff. Fluff orks and space marines are still CC heavy enough.

Orks aren't described as logical from our point of view to begin with.

 troa wrote:


In short, beyond the "it's the game", it can make sense, it's plausible. It's not fact, it's fiction. Science fiction makes best guesses, and 40k is a mix of science and fantasy fiction(aspects just don't have as much scientific backing as much of modern sci-fi does). Close combat is not something relegated to fantasy, however, as another person claimed. It shows in numerous sci-fi settings, including well researched ones.

So you don't know how 40K started, Warhammer in space, they didn't even bother creation a new rules set. Until 3rd, but they never left behind the fantasy, CC, magic(psy), demons from hell, epic heros wade across the feild killing 100s or 1000s single handed, orcs, elfs, do I need to go on. Even Tau came in to being becouse "gaint robot were cool at the time", not becouse GW realised you should be shooting in the future. Becouse it is dumb to walk up to a 10ft human tank and hit it with a sword. Hell in 40K trained soilder, just now figured out you should shot the guys charging you (6th ed), so maybe everybody in the 40K setting were just to dumb until now.

Its is foolish and outright stupid to think that there wont be an enemy that will overcome your biggest strength! Thus my question... when will there be close combat battlesuits for the tau? Massive shields and some form of powerweapons... anyways...

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

Well, that and artillery firing for effect.

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

..said bolter-armed combatant would reload. We would expect soldiers, especially ones with power armor, to be carrying quite a lot of ammunition. Logistical support would logically scale up to support to an army that depends heavily on cartridge-fed weapons, like space marines.

Cause without Melee combat, the assault phase would be boring!..duh!

 Vaerros wrote:

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

..said bolter-armed combatant would reload. We would expect soldiers, especially ones with power armor, to be carrying quite a lot of ammunition. Logistical support would logically scale up to support to an army that depends heavily on cartridge-fed weapons, like space marines.

What if your logistics lines stretched through the warp? You know that thing that can cause planets to disappear for a few centuries and seems to regularly cause ships to get lost.

We tend to think about travel in 40K as like today but rather it is closer to ~1700's shipping soldiers across to continents.

 ansacs wrote:

 Vaerros wrote:

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

..said bolter-armed combatant would reload. We would expect soldiers, especially ones with power armor, to be carrying quite a lot of ammunition. Logistical support would logically scale up to support to an army that depends heavily on cartridge-fed weapons, like space marines.

What if your logistics lines stretched through the warp? You know that thing that can cause planets to disappear for a few centuries and seems to regularly cause ships to get lost.

We tend to think about travel in 40K as like today but rather it is closer to ~1700's shipping soldiers across to continents.

Astartes, even deployed in the limited fashion they are(that is, not part of a prolonged conflict) would have to be sufficiently supported to be effective. Chapters are known to have access to their own fleets, so I think it's safe to assume crafts orbiting a planet during a conflict would be able to deploy both forces *and* supplies to the ground.

 Vaerros wrote:

 ansacs wrote:

 Vaerros wrote:

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

..said bolter-armed combatant would reload. We would expect soldiers, especially ones with power armor, to be carrying quite a lot of ammunition. Logistical support would logically scale up to support to an army that depends heavily on cartridge-fed weapons, like space marines.

What if your logistics lines stretched through the warp? You know that thing that can cause planets to disappear for a few centuries and seems to regularly cause ships to get lost.

We tend to think about travel in 40K as like today but rather it is closer to ~1700's shipping soldiers across to continents.

Astartes, even deployed in the limited fashion they are(that is, not part of a prolonged conflict) would have to be sufficiently supported to be effective. Chapters are known to have access to their own fleets, so I think it's safe to assume crafts orbiting a planet during a conflict would be able to deploy both forces *and* supplies to the ground.

I like to think the reason Astartes need multi-kilometer long ships to deploy 100 men or less is all the room for ammunition.

It's quite simple, because it is damn cool?

Why are there massive ground battles in 40k?

There is a prevelance that the imperium doesn't care about civilians, so why not fly in bombard the planet and then mop it up, colonize the planet again, problem solved.

I remember hearing somewhere (no proof at hand, although im sure it was from cbc coverage of that kid on the bus) that at 22 feet a man with a knife can stab a person before they could draw their gun, aim and fire.
In modern times that would be pretty much the high end of effective melee range.
Take into account the speed at which a space marine can run and you are somewhere around 40 feet
Look around you, I bet there is something within 40 feet that could hide a space marine.

 Vaerros wrote:

 Waaghboss Grobnub wrote:

You can always run out of ammo... what the f will you do then? Throw your bolter? And as stated... yes Orks... Orks will swarm you.. before the second wave hits you WILL have run out of ammo,,... orks waves are massive.. all you got then is your guts, sword and the brother beside you...

..said bolter-armed combatant would reload. We would expect soldiers, especially ones with power armor, to be carrying quite a lot of ammunition. Logistical support would logically scale up to support to an army that depends heavily on cartridge-fed weapons, like space marines.

Orks, Cultists, Guardsmen, and Tyranids tend to have more soldiers than a Marine force, Loyal or Heretical, will have shots to fire at them. By an order of magnitude or so.

So Marines deploy surgicially to take out key points because one hundred Space marines vs one hundred million Orks in a straight fight won't end well.

Not everyone is using a sword, bayonet, or axe. Some guys have pistols, and when I imagine close quarters combat I picture those pistols being used. Even in modern times fights happen at close quarters.... I always picture that one fight in Saving Private Ryan....