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Well with the astartes project you have the whole package. Astartes, black carapace and power armour, all are part of the same system so there is really no comparison.

The thunder warriors did not have powered legs for their armours so I'd hesitate to actually call it power armour. The arms are powered. For some reason. It might carry its weight through the structure of the legs but it does not propel its own weight, its all on the wearer.

Power Armour doesn't have to be a full suit. Ignatus pattern armour for example looks like this:

And there will be many patterns of Imperial-made armour that fall into a similar design.

I can certainly see why astartes armour is much superior. actually supports itself and has fibre bundles to enhance movement. This looks like a liability to anyone who is lacking the genebulking to be able to carry it.
If that is their idea of armour its a good thing that they always had the old space suits to fall back on.

I'm sure there are STCs for some models of power armor, for normal humans. Astartes Power Armor however was developed long after the STCs had been built.

One should remember that STCs don't necessarily just represent a specific complex item. They can be components and recipes for materials as well that can then be combined with other things to make various objects and tools. The nuts, bolts, ceramic compounds, circuit boards, programming that runs on those circuit boards, the padded lining of the armor, etc... those will all be individual STCs in and of themselves. You can then customize how you assemble them, change dimensions to fit specific individuals and body sizes, etc...

So while Astartes Power armor doesn't have a specific STC associated with it, it will be made up of many components acquired from STCs. There will be an STC for the fasteners that are used to hold the armor together. Perhaps one for the exoskeleton that provides the main support, it just gets scaled up to Astartes size from normal human size. There will be an STC for the artificial muscles that give the armor it's strength. There will be an STC that gives the formula for the ceramite armor plates, and you just mix and mold it to the desired shapes.

All-together, it makes a non-STC item, but it is made with STC derived components.

It’s also entirely possible that Power Armour is now in fact an STC, albeit one created during The Great Crusade.

I’d argue it’s far more likely the case than not, as STC was the technological base of the Ad Mech, so you’d want to ensure they can access it and produce the designs as quickly as possible.

 Grey Templar wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
Well I was assuming some sort of fault caused the power to fail. I’d they are nuclear reactors why are they not causing small nuclear detonations when hit by weapons in combat

Because reactors don't do that. Malfunctioning reactors melt, they do not explode. Nuclear weapons work entirely different to nuclear bombs and require different fuel types.

A miniature reactor would also be heavily shielded to protect the wearer from the radiation, this would have the side effect of making it very resistant to damage from weapon fire. Anything capable of destroying the reactor is going to obliterate the whole suit.

If the reactor is a Thorium based reactor(which is likely would be), any type of meltdown would burn itself out before it broke containment of the suit.

They use micro fusion reactors, so no thorium.

Still not as good as cold fusion I hear. Micro fission won't keep your beers cold in any event.

Not an issue to anyone asside from maybe the spacewolves. But they would probably drink it warm.

I imagine it varies quite a lot between chapters, conditions, and armor marks. Some chapters are better with their tech and/or their supplies, some conditions will sap the armour far more quickly, and iirc some armor marks offer much greater long-term durability. I recall a brief story in... the Core RB or SM Codex? where a marine had been fighting for over a year and his was still working, though his chainsword's mechanism had broken down.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also entirely possible that Power Armour is now in fact an STC, albeit one created during The Great Crusade.

Could they still make them then?

Of course they could still make it if they still had the STC, I think the reason why we don't see new MK1-3 armours is that they have been largey superseded by later models and that the MK4 actually offers something different in the armour, it is less protective BUT more agile etc so it has some strengths that put it in favour even over later models and thus into the 41st Millenia the beaky still is popular in some chapters, I can see the MK4 still being in production, but the MK1-3 are probably more clunky and in areas less protective than the more modern MK7 and 8 armours, or the older armours might offer a level of protection that is not commonly needed and it compromises agility etc, to an unacceptable degree for it to be still in wide scale production.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I imagine it varies quite a lot between chapters, conditions, and armor marks. Some chapters are better with their tech and/or their supplies, some conditions will sap the armour far more quickly, and iirc some armor marks offer much greater long-term durability. I recall a brief story in... the Core RB or SM Codex? where a marine had been fighting for over a year and his was still working, though his chainsword's mechanism had broken down.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also entirely possible that Power Armour is now in fact an STC, albeit one created during The Great Crusade.

Could they still make them then?

Well, depends what you consider an STC to actually be.

Given the different ages of STC, some are just literal blueprints on design specification, others are searchable databases, others are more….I dunno, open ended “Oi, Steve TC, we need something that can get this job done” creative engines.

Given Power Armour is now largely standardised, we can reasonably say there must be a standardised set of construction plans, and indeed various copies thereof (Chapters need them, and I think Chapter Allied Forgeworlds will have them too). So it’s a Template Construction, Standardised. Which makes it an STC. And SoB will have their own variant STC for their Power Armour - though one could argue those plans could be much older, potentially the STC Astartes Power Armour was adapted from.

Power armour causes a bit of a problem with the STC concept that seems to be largely glossed over in the background. Bolters may also fall into the same category.

As far as I'm aware, power armour is a development of Terra, not Mars. There were various takes on power armour during the Unification Wars, with the Emperor more or less perfecting it over time starting with the Thunder Warriors. As such, it's not the product of an STC, at least as far as we know. The people of Terra were not so dogmatic as the Mechanicum and did innovate heavily, though they were quite badly restricted by the resources they had available thanks to constant warfare during the Age of Strife. The subsequent development of power armour throughout the Great Crusade seems to have been a case of the Emperor (ab)using his position as the Omnissiah to develop the necessary equipment for his armies without having to wait for the AdMech to approve it.

It's conceivable that the AdMech now view power armour as having come from an STC, given how far in the past it was originally created. We can probably ignore any Cawl-related updates since he seems to specifically be a rogue element in the AdMech faction.

We do know power armour existed outside of Old Terra though, suggesting it was at least based in STC concepts that were then adapted to Astartes by the Emperor.

For example, the Auretian Technocracy, a human world found during the tail end of the Great Crusade and destroyed by the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet under Horus directly, was noted to utilise power armour very similar to that used by the Astartes they were fighting. They also claimed to have some kind of functioning STC. This suggests that MkII-MkIV power armour (which would have been used by the Sons of Horus during the war) is likely to share a lot in common with older STC designs of power armour for human use.

Given MkII armour was not created until the nascent Imperium merged with the Mechanicus, it is likely that Mars held an STC fragment for an environmentally-sealed human power armour that MkII was based on. This is further corroborated by the Techpriest Engineseer model, which wears power armour reminiscent of MkII with the ringed plates. The Technocracy must have had either a similar design or copy of the same design.

Also, STCs pre-date the Martian Mechanicum, so power armour being common on Terra doesn't preclude it from being based in STC designs.

Power Armor almost certainly doesn't have a single origin in 40k. There would have been power armor in the Dark Age of Technology all the way up to the Great Crusade.

Power Armor is a generic term, it simply refers to a powered exoskeleton that has armor to protect the wearer. It is not unique to Space Marines, though they are certainly very much intertwined with power armor.

Well of course. When we are talking about power armour we should really specify what type we are talking about. Marine power armour is distinctly different as it is designed to work as part of a system being armour, black carapace, implants and astartes warrior.