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Just need to hope it's one of the nicer ones and not y'know, the Charcharadons (take all the people and usable equipment then leave) or the Angels Vermillion (have a ritual every 50 years where they take a bunch of people, drain their blood and bathe in it before sacrificing a Sanguinary Priest).

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well, we’d have a Planetary Governor of some kind imposed upon us. Could be a Space Marine, could be a Noble House long since allied to the Chapter.

Either way, or existing governments would be swept away entirely. No more borders as we understand them. Likely the cultural re-education when it comes to world faiths.

Given our natural resources are still there to be exploited? Strip mining agogo, because a Chapter Planet needs resources to sustain itself.

And we’d need to consider whether or not our planet would put up resistance.

My experience in two operational theatres tells that, yes, there would be resistance. And 1000 Space Marines are going to get chewed up real quick. Real people in conflict are much more inventively killy and bloody-minded than fantasy writers.

Curvaceous wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:
The areas that are the most accustomed to individual liberties, whose populations survived mutation-causing evolutionary pinches in the past, and who currently enjoy the highest standard of living would be the most likely to be purged.

The Imperium knows a garrison population when it sees one. It’s SOP for a the Imperium to make a guard regiment and their descendants the privileged class on a planet, and the people on earth who are “most accustomed to individual liberties” are the same. They currently provide soldiers and middle managers for the occupation of the rest of the world, and in exchange they get a small portion of the loot, enough for the strange alienating comforts/burdens like mortgages.

The Imperium makes Rhodesias and Ulster Plantations all over the galaxy. There’s a good chance the chance that the current version of rhodesians would realize we’d get to keep our place if we agreed to be occupiers for the imperium.

Absolutely. But what's standard practice in those kind of colonial setups is generally to take whoever's on the bottom and set them up on top. That way, you've got a puppet who's used to being subservient to a higher power, but who also really enjoys grinding the previous higher-classes into the dirt with the new tools they get from their new patrons.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well, we’d have a Planetary Governor of some kind imposed upon us. Could be a Space Marine, could be a Noble House long since allied to the Chapter.

Either way, or existing governments would be swept away entirely. No more borders as we understand them. Likely the cultural re-education when it comes to world faiths.

Given our natural resources are still there to be exploited? Strip mining agogo, because a Chapter Planet needs resources to sustain itself.

And we’d need to consider whether or not our planet would put up resistance.

My experience in two operational theatres tells that, yes, there would be resistance. And 1000 Space Marines are going to get chewed up real quick. Real people in conflict are much more inventively killy and bloody-minded than fantasy writers.

Except Marines wouldn’t be meeting anyone on the field of battle. They’d be in our various Parliaments, tearing out the existing power structure root and stem. Or just pounding us to dust from orbit, because what the heck are going to do about that?

I think it's very much a case of "in the 40k game armies fight on a battlefield" vs "in lore a pitched battle is pretty rare".
You aren't going to play a game in 40k of "Space Marines vs the Planetary Governer and his household guard" because that would be rubbish but that's what it would be in-universe. You would maybe get "Space Marine drop assault on an airbase or barracks" but even then most of your soldiers are hardly going to be ready to immediately repel an attack from enemies they probably won't even be able to harm.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well, we’d have a Planetary Governor of some kind imposed upon us. Could be a Space Marine, could be a Noble House long since allied to the Chapter.

Either way, or existing governments would be swept away entirely. No more borders as we understand them. Likely the cultural re-education when it comes to world faiths.

Given our natural resources are still there to be exploited? Strip mining agogo, because a Chapter Planet needs resources to sustain itself.

And we’d need to consider whether or not our planet would put up resistance.

My experience in two operational theatres tells that, yes, there would be resistance. And 1000 Space Marines are going to get chewed up real quick. Real people in conflict are much more inventively killy and bloody-minded than fantasy writers.

Except Marines wouldn’t be meeting anyone on the field of battle. They’d be in our various Parliaments, tearing out the existing power structure root and stem. Or just pounding us to dust from orbit, because what the heck are going to do about that?

My experience in actual warfare is counter-insurgency. The people of earth wouldn't have to meet the Chapter in open warfare to win. Twenty years after making planet-fall the replacement Chapter Master would be declaring that his Chapter had achieved it's aims (and having had to replace its strength several times over due to all the losses) and was leaving the planet in the hands of "local forces" who would quickly be removed. Yes, the space fantasy protagonists could space-magic the planet into oblivion with cyclonic torpedoes. But then then don't have a planet to integrate into the IoM.

That seems a very prideful attitude, there is nothing special about modern day earth or our ability to fight in this context.

We're told that the Imperium has integrated millions of worlds and put down countless rebellions in its 10,000 year history.
I see no reason to assume we would be any different!

I also doubt any Space Marines would even be required to pacify Earth, given how tiny the combined forces of Earth would be against the might of the Imperial Guard.

 Kroem wrote:
That seems a very prideful attitude, there is nothing special about modern day earth or our ability to fight in this context.

We're told that the Imperium has integrated millions of worlds and put down countless rebellions in its 10,000 year history.
I see no reason to assume we would be any different!

I also doubt any Space Marines would even be required to pacify Earth, given how tiny the combined forces of Earth would be against the might of the Imperial Guard.

...with its tanks that can't move and only have enough space in the hull to store 2-3 shots given the size of their guns, military tactics from our WW2/WW1 era, and old-timey radios for communication.

 Kroem wrote:
That seems a very prideful attitude, there is nothing special about modern day earth or our ability to fight in this context.

We're told that the Imperium has integrated millions of worlds and put down countless rebellions in its 10,000 year history.
I see no reason to assume we would be any different!

I also doubt any Space Marines would even be required to pacify Earth, given how tiny the combined forces of Earth would be against the might of the Imperial Guard.

On the contrary, I have been humbled by my experience in counter-insurgency warfare. At the risk of getting a little dark, I have stood in the craters and collected the remains. I have seen the incredible resilience, stubbornness, inventiveness and ruthless bloody-mindedness of actual people in the face of incredible technological overmatch.

But I suppose this a forum about space fantasy, which I do enjoy, so my bad.

Yea I take your point, but the Guard have their own advantages such as psykers and support from space.

I think the track record of the Imperium is the key thing though, they have beaten everyone for 10,000 years. That is an insane amount of time!

It would also break the habit of a lifetime for us to unite against the Imperium, I would imagine at around half the nations on Earth would see some benefit from joining the Imperium

The planet is being integrated as an Astartes homeworld, the Marines aren't leaving any time soon. If the population won't comply when given the choice, that choice will be removed. If the population were to continue their defiance then they would likely be eradicated then replaced with loyal Imperial subjects, with maybe a scant few groups that aligned with the Imperium being left of the original population. The Marines might not even set up shop on Earth itself but instead, have an orbital Fortress Monastery or one on the Moon with the threat of orbital annihilation as a threat to keep the population in line.

 Kroem wrote:
Yea I take your point, but the Guard have their own advantages such as psykers and support from space.

I think the track record of the Imperium is the key thing though, they have beaten everyone for 10,000 years. That is an insane amount of time!

It would also break the habit of a lifetime for us to unite against the Imperium, I would imagine at around half the nations on Earth would see some benefit from joining the Imperium

Yeah, its almost like that's one of the most 'must suspend your disbelief' part of the whole setting - that the system of governance that historically has most resulted in rapid collapse of even the most powerful and advanced nations actually managed to create a '10,000 year reign'.

In reality, ultra-militarist ultra-expansionist ultra-centralized government does not retain control - it expands, then fractures into more stable more localized nation-states, or it expands and then shatters when the personality at its head dies or is defeated.

Everything we're shown in 40k is basically just 'every crazy, desperate historical event from humanity's past we can come up with, hyperbolized as much as we can imagine, and set in space' and then we're told 'and this is the status quo, the empire has managed to sustain itself with this going on for longer than recorded human history, just cus we say so!'


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kroem wrote:
Yea I take your point, but the Guard have their own advantages such as psykers and support from space.

I think the track record of the Imperium is the key thing though, they have beaten everyone for 10,000 years. That is an insane amount of time!

It would also break the habit of a lifetime for us to unite against the Imperium, I would imagine at around half the nations on Earth would see some benefit from joining the Imperium

The problem is that every piece of imperial tech in order to fit into a miniatures board the size of a coffee napkin and because it's all written by people who have no idea how military technology actually worse, is described in a lot of ways as way worse than modern military tech.

Unless it's just 'impossible.'

"THIS WEAPON CREATES A TINY BLACK HOLE"

"oh, so it instantly destroys the planet then?"

"no it just..it just kills the thing you point it at really good and sucks everything near it away like 'fwoosh' then it stops. For reasons."

"THIS WEAPON BURNS WITH THE HEAT OF A SUN"

"oh, so it instantly destroys the planet then?"

"no it just melts what you point it at really good. Unless its made of magic shields, then it SOMETIMES melts it really good."

I feel we are ignoring the societal aspects of this.

The arrival of the imperium would mean:

All our religions are wrong
Aliens exist and are trying to kill/eat/ us.
Humans exist outside of Earth and have a history spanning far further than our own.

Pretty much every conspiracy theory would say ‘See? We were right because (insert gibberish).

Rather than us launching gorilla warfare against the invaders, I’d put money on half the population siding with the Imperium against their own governments. Or at least turning on each other with accusations of working with the aliens/nonbelievers.

I hope the marines take out our nukes, because I bet we would deploy them against ourselves

 the_scotsman wrote:

 Kroem wrote:
Yea I take your point, but the Guard have their own advantages such as psykers and support from space.

I think the track record of the Imperium is the key thing though, they have beaten everyone for 10,000 years. That is an insane amount of time!

It would also break the habit of a lifetime for us to unite against the Imperium, I would imagine at around half the nations on Earth would see some benefit from joining the Imperium

Yeah, its almost like that's one of the most 'must suspend your disbelief' part of the whole setting - that the system of governance that historically has most resulted in rapid collapse of even the most powerful and advanced nations actually managed to create a '10,000 year reign'.

In reality, ultra-militarist ultra-expansionist ultra-centralized government does not retain control - it expands, then fractures into more stable more localized nation-states, or it expands and then shatters when the personality at its head dies or is defeated.

Everything we're shown in 40k is basically just 'every crazy, desperate historical event from humanity's past we can come up with, hyperbolized as much as we can imagine, and set in space' and then we're told 'and this is the status quo, the empire has managed to sustain itself with this going on for longer than recorded human history, just cus we say so!'

While the IoM’s system of government is pretty terrible, tbf it’s not actually all that centralised.

It’s basically space feudalism, with planets in place of manors and enough levels of bureaucracy in pan-Imperial organisations that they basically do their own thing at the sector level.

It effectively has broken into localised nation states, despite being nominally a single empire.

Except that the IoM won't do any of that. They don't need to.

They operate on a timescale of centuries, and they've integrated a hell of a lot of "Civilised" level worlds which are roughly similar to Earth.

The IoM has a few priorities:

1) Tithes
2) Keep down the psykers
3) Worship the Emperor

In roughly that order of importance. Who runs the planet is a matter of total indifference to them, but they do prefer to have some form of dynasty in place so they know which family to talk to about item 1.

So they'll approach an existing power structure and offer them governorship. Were I the IoM, I wouldn't bother with any of that government malalarky. You're looking for someone like our billionaire class. Give them the means to cement their powerbase, in return for shipping the Tithe off world. How they manage that is their problem - the IoM just wants their cut.

Psykers? Well, we've never been too shy about witch hunting down here, which leads us to 3)

The missionaries of the Ecclesiarchy. We have a number of pretty big religions on this planet already. All it takes, as they've done many times before, is some gradual changes to doctrine until 500 years later everyone is worshiping some variant of The Emperor and burning witches. The exact details are, again, totally irrelevant to the IoM.

Admech does roughly the same for technology.

After a few hundred years, you've got a world as integrated as any in the Imperium.

No mess, no fuss, no massive invasion. No rush.

Couple of thousand years later, it'll be utterly indistinguishable from any other Imperial world.

Put your chapter fortress on the Moon, and recruit whoever you feel like. Hell, start doing that now. Get your to-be-planetary-governor pals to start shipping potential recruits up to you and you don't even need to show your face on the planet.

With genuine and utmost respect to actual real life veterans, on account they’ve done a job I would never and probably could never do?

I think you’re greatly underestimating the sheer horror of Astartes taking something they want.

First and foremost? They have zero reason to negotiate over anything. Yes we have Nuclear arsenals sufficient to wipe ourselves out several times over (apparently, because reasons). But we’ve nothing which could target and hit their invasion craft in any meaningful way.

Second. They fight pretty dirty. Drop Pods where and when they want them. Thunder hawks to follow. And if they really, really can’t be arsed, orbital bombardment. Depending upon how much they can’t be arsed, could range from “nice city, shame if we were to aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s gone”, to wiping out every major population centre.

If their main goal was conquest and not “just wreck everything in sight because WTF are they going to do about it”? Kiss goodbye to any and all sources of manufacturing of weapons and ammo. Sure, anyone desperate enough can pick up a gun. But they still need ammo, coordinating and logistics and that to make them count.

As for land based actions by the Astartes? I don’t care how skilled or hard you are or think you are. Every Astartes is pretty much a walking tank unto themselves. For every shot that pings off their (by our standards) unfathomable armour, one your mates just detonated and become a fine, red mist. There’s a good couple of hundred of you, and you’ve got all ten of them in a cross fire. Oh look! One was just driven to his knees. Never mind, he’s back up again.

We would not stand a chance. At all. No matter how well disciplined or fanatical you are, you’ll hit brown trouser o’clock before you’ve inflicted meaningful damage upon them.

After all, what good are guerilla tactics, when your foe can literally teleport invincible soldiers Willynilly.

You can pop out a hole in the ground, they can pop out of thing air.

Just your very basic, common of garden variety Astartes is stronger, faster, more reactive and has such vastly superior stamina it’s not even funny.

Maybe you get lucky, and blat a squad with heavy munitions. You better be surer than sure none of them survived. You better know beyond knowledge they are all a fine red mist now. Because if you left one alive? That. Is. All. It. Takes.

IEDs? Astartes don’t care. Hiding in caves? Enjoy fighting MKIII armour, because they won’t even need a gun.

At our level of technology, there is no resistance. At all. Our weapons are laughable by their standard. Marines excel in skirmish situations precisely because they’re Marines.

If a Chapter wants our planet? There’s not a damned thing we can do about it. At all. Any resistance would be akin to opening the window and pumping the night levels of futility.

Shaped charge. EFP. Or enough HME. Or a quad-stack AT mine. Or a truck-bomb with HME. Oh, we can do horror.

Wolverines!

I don't think that we can't cause damage. I think we can't deal with the repercussions. There would be no hiding across borders; no hiding among civilians or even using them as human shields; no Geneva convention. If the can't find the "trouble makers" the would just kill everyone in the area.

Think WW2; resistance cells did not last long. Weather hiding amongst civilians or hiding in the wild. The imperium has greater manpower; greater logistics; and far fewer morales than our worst ever had.

Consider the gangs on Necromunda. On a plantary scale they are just a nuisance, contained and ignored.

Even a "peaceful" transition, which would probably amount to gunboat diplomacy, would have disastrous affects to our civilization as we know it.

- Religion: They would be told that their deities always was and has been the Emperor. Anyone who resists would have to go into hiding or be purged.
- Economy: This is a double-edged sword. One saving grace of Earth becoming a Chapter planet means it might not have to pay the tithe, instead we'd have to focus on catering to the Chapter based here. So we're spared the tithe, but we still have to sacrifice hundreds or thousands of people for the potential to make more Space Marines.

Then there's the introduction of servitors. This would be a huge boon to many of our global corporations. Where they can save money on wages and increase productivity on nearly all levels of production. This would then force millions of workers out of a job and put millions of people into poverty.
- Science: We'd be ordered to stop working on any kind of AI. Anyone who continues will be forced into hiding or purged.

It's not looking good. Any insurrection would be dealt with severely. The other thing about insurrection is that they could be corrupted by the whispers of chaos and slowly form a cult.

Whilst I disagree with people suggesting we can't hurt Space Marines, we certainly could. That's not what we should be saying defeats us. It's one the navy threat, that we literally have no answer to. Nuclear weapons are useless in space and a single lance or macro strike could level an entire city.

It's literally gunboat diplomacy.

I was reading up on the Necromunda lore the other day and how it came to be known as "Necromunda", a dead world. Seems like a pretty good model for how they would take the earth, identify the local elites (whether that's our elected leaders or our billionaires) offer them an ultimatum, if that ultimatum is rejected they start destroying our cities from orbit, the more tenacious our resistance the more population we lose. There's no winning a war of attrition against the Imperium, no sapping the political will to fight, there aren't imperial citizens back home protesting about the Space Marines carrying out atrocities, insurgent tactics can't win because the Imperium would just keep on wiping us out until whoever is left submits. If that takes a hundred years and means killing all but a few thousand people then that's what they'll do.

Honestly after the first billion or so casualties I think we'd see a coup by opportunistic leaders willing to submit. They get to become the founders of dynasties that will govern the planet and in return they'd do all the oppressing on behalf of the Imperium. If these collaborators fail to maintain control and insurgents become too much of a nuisance the process of population reduction begins anew and other leaders are found to replace them. Within a century or two Earth is indistinguishable from any other imperial world.

If it would be a recruitment world for the Astartes. I doubt theyd even need to do much. Just drop a virus. Last year or so has proved that.
They would only want to recruit from those tribes of lost amazonians or those island sentinalese anyway. If your civilized and live in a city, youd prolly be considered soft and not worth the time.

Considering Astartes recruits are always children location doesn't exactly matter. While substantially smaller than a 40k Hive, modern Earth cities would be the ideal place to source thousands of initiates to keep a Chapter stocked. Places like Tokyo, Shanghai, and Delhi would be prime choices for mass "recruiting".

Always children, yes. Tip rats, no. Your forgetting theyre not hersey recruiting.
lets throw a 10yr old from somewhere that chucks spears at helicopters or eats strangers when they turn up against a 10 yr old tip rat, or protected school kid, In the ring.
Whos your money on?

The ones who won't die from a cold because they have no immunity to viruses that most urban populations have grown accustomed to or been immunised against.
"Look how that initiate throws a spear brother, truly a warrior at heart."
"Oh it just fell over dead because another initiate has sneezed near them."

bat702 wrote:
I feel Earth would not put up a fight even if we could, our leadership is basically a freaking joke on our planet, we would cave instantly, the space-marines would laugh at our social justice warriors

...what do SJWs have to do with anything?
The thread as a whole doesn’t make a bunch of sense- as has been stated, Earth doesn’t map onto 40 nicely, or even at all, but the inclusion of this just seems odd.

If Earth became a home world, being selected to become an Astartes would be seen as honoured.

So it would seem likely it might become an attractive prospect for families. Consider how revered athletes and military service can be as we are right now

I think we’d see programmes put in place to aid the selection process, much as Baal does just without the manky mutations. Academies aimed at getting the absolute most out of a prospect.

Even those who didn’t make the cut would be prime recruits for a PDF type force.

As for that silly SJW post? The Imperium isn’t sexist or racist etc. We’re all grist for the mill, nobody is turned away because of race colour or creed.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
If Earth became a home world, being selected to become an Astartes would be seen as honoured.

So it would seem likely it might become an attractive prospect for families. Consider how revered athletes and military service can be as we are right now

I think we’d see programmes put in place to aid the selection process, much as Baal does just without the manky mutations. Academies aimed at getting the absolute most out of a prospect.

Even those who didn’t make the cut would be prime recruits for a PDF type force.

As for that silly SJW post? The Imperium isn’t sexist or racist etc. We’re all grist for the mill, nobody is turned away because of race colour or creed.

That sounds like the process the Ultramarines use on Macragge.

You gotta hope and prey you get a chapter that isn't insane/cruel/doesn't care about human life and boy is that rarer than a unicorns horn.