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 Hellebore wrote:

 Gert wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:

Either they were superior to marines and should have been used all the time, or worse and never produced at all.

Do you also believe that the Nokia should never have been invented because the IPhone now exists?

The Thunder Warriors and every other genetically-engineered soldier used by the nascent Imperium were all build up to the Primarch and Astares projects.

Can you point to a nokia that is superior to an iphone in all factors except battery life? Because that's what your analogy is doing.

There actually is an argument to be made that the nigh-indestructible Nokia is a superior phone to the iPhone despite all of the new tech, bells and whistles, and distractions not needed for the inherent phone usage that give you what mostly boils down to the modern iPhone being more a hand-held computer than a phone.

I’m not even sure the Nokia is fussed by 4g and 5g?

I don’t know if the underlying signal for mobiles is tied to 4g and 5g and that, hence the question mark.

If not? Then if you want a phone to Just Be A Phone? You can absolutely do worse than that old Nokia.

In terms of Thunder Warriors, as I understand it the short lifespan was only part of the issue. They were just unstable, mentally and physically.

I guess one could compare them to overclocking a CPU. Yes, you’ll get a superior performance, but at risk of burning it right out. And potentially slagging the motherboard.

As short term shock troops, they of course clearly and demonstrably got the job done. But, much as they were a bodge job in the end? The Astartes appear to have swapped some of the potential raw power for greater stability.

And there are benefits to that. They’re more reliable, and because they aren’t going to die outside of violence? You again stand to gain from much greater combat experience.

I can’t overstate the importance of that experience. Communication has been key to humanity’s ongoing advancement. From cave painting and oral traditions to the written word, the more you can preserve collective learning, the further the next generation can go. Because they don’t have to fart around trying to rediscover relative basics.

With Astartes having ludicrous lifespans outside of going splat in combat, you just end up with a more efficient fighting force, especially on a Legion scale. New recruits benefitting not from a couple of decades of hard won experience, but potentially centuries.

If like Thunder Warriors the lifespan is reduced? You lose that entirely, and risk doing the old two steps forward, one step back.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m not even sure the Nokia is fussed by 4g and 5g?

I don’t know if the underlying signal for mobiles is tied to 4g and 5g and that, hence the question mark.

If not? Then if you want a phone to Just Be A Phone? You can absolutely do worse than that old Nokia.

4/5G has to do with data transfer speeds and so is tied to phone internet, not the actual phone calling.

Hellebore wrote:That's all I'm pointing at. Their prowess is irrelevant, it was the speed of production that was the reason they were made.

My argument has been against the notion that their prowess is a factor in the discussion. If it was then it introduces a whole host of issues as I've described.

They were churn and burn fire and forget tools and thus only useful on earth.

i've generally figured that the reason why surviving Thunder warriors could fight multiple astartes and win in the heresy novels wasn't because the thunder warriors were substantially* stronger or tougher than astartes.. but more that the ones that didn't get killed when the custodes purged them were just some of the more experienced and skilled thunderwarriors around. which gave them an edge in terms of skills against astartes, which let them leverage even small differences in strength and toughness into big force multipliers. i have no doubt that the thunder warriors had some advantage physically over astartes, if only because their mods get baked into the genetics rather than being biological implants applied over normal biology.

Definitely depends how reliable their conversion process was.

We look to Astartes and see largely standardised results. But even there, we’ve the odd Much Bigger Marine, such as that 40K Space Wolf.

Thunder Warriors we’re told was a cruder process. Now, crude could mean a number of things. But I would rule out a greater variety of results. All considerably stronger than a baseline human, absolutely. But if the candidate’s genetics had already determined they were going to be really tall and really strong? Perhaps it was all amplified.

And as you say? We can fairly speculate any that survived the eventual purge were, most likely, the freaks of science.