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endlesswaltz123 wrote:
WW1 troops were horrendously under trained, that is not comparable to the modern US forces.

Yes they were undertrained, but those professional forces obliterated each other in short order and attrition became paramount over quality. The army that can be in the field when its opponent cannot will triumph.

The amount of specialist positions and equipment loss would take decades to replace to get it back up to standard.

It didn't take the European forces that long. Arguably the British army came out far ahead of the first world war in terms of the capabilities of its military despite having essentially its entire pre-war botique elite army destroyed.

Scions take years to train though, it's arguably easier to train a marine due to the geneseed effects boosting their capabilities

The geneseed takes years to set and drains tons of worthy recruits through genetic rejection, the geneseed component most definitely adds many years to the recruitment time. To say nothing of the vastly more intensive logistic and equipment needs of a Space Marine.

and in some respects it is possibly harder to train a regular human up to the standards of the scion, as all you need to find marine wise is someone who can survive the procedures.

Um...no innate mental toughness and capability are required as well, and that genetic component tosses out huge numbers of aspirants. It's a huge drag on recruitment.

It doesn't matter how many more humans there are in the imperium, you would never get marines in a position to make the numerical numbers really count

I mean, if we just want to wave the magic plot armor wand, sure. From any realistic perspective, the numbers gaps are so astronomical (literally) as to be beyond any point to the SM's. The SM's can't be everywhere, while untold trillions of human troops can be. The Imperial Navy is far vaster than the Astartes fleets combined (there are ~75 IN ships per galactic sector...there are millions of such 100LYx100LYx100LY sectors...while an SM fleet is considered quite large at 12 vessels with a total of 1000 chapters) and quite frankly far better at ship to ship engagements (by design, SM's aren't allowed to have certain types of vessels and are limited in certain types of weaponry on starships). Most wars of the Imperium never see a single Space Marine boot and are won just fine, for the simple fact that there just aren't enough SM's to be in every war and yet they make it through.

and good luck catching them out. The time and resources it would take for the imperium to get the marines in a position that they could wipe them out Abbadon would be sitting on the throne by the end of it. It's a really really really really stupid argument that comes up on here time and again.

Only if you wave the plot armor stick. The Marines are outnumbered by orders of magnitude never beyond realistic comprehension, have nothing like the intelligence or logistical capabilities of the rest of the Imperium, and quite frankly.

To put it in a modern perspective, how would a single modern Navy Seal do against the Red Army of the Second World War at its peak...multiplied 200 times? That's about the numbers discrepancy we're talking about, and we have gobs of fluff showing SM's killed by relatively mundane weaponry and attacks.

EDIT: the big problem is that 40k isn't really a SciFi universe, it's a Fantasy universe with a SciFi skin. Once you start applying relatively real world logic to it that might be expected of a scifi setting, 40k's ability to suspend disbelief drops away quickly. Space Marines as described would work great for a solar system conflict. A million marines could be rare and special and powerful, but over the ~300,000,000 star systems in the Milky Way galaxy in an empire that claims literally billions of regiments of normal human troops and tens of millions of starships? The numbers just don't make sense anymore. If there were ten billion Space Marines, they'd make a whole lot more sense on a galactic scale. But when it takes *years* to make a Space Marine, and they have to fight all over a *galaxy*, and are supposedly in *constant* combat? The realities quickly just kick the concept in the teeth.

thing is 55 years isn't, as 40kl considers it that long, sure it means the chapter will be on "light duty" during that time period, but it's not that big a deal.

 General Kroll wrote:
How big are epic scale drop pods? Could they be used for "ammo drop pods"?

In Epic Marines have access to thunderhawks. They can also drop pod supplies down. As you are concerned about using a pod as an objective, just make it a smaller pod and not worry about it. Alternatively make it a parachute/glide pod dropped from said thunderhawk.