Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Aren't power armor EMP protected?
And people already said that they would just ignore mortar fire.
Terminators also have personal teleporters, so those mortar positions would be dead if Termies just teleported in center of them.

Really now... I'd imagine a 120mm mortar would turn them into jelly in their own armor. And even if they were emp hardened, it's actually not a guarantee to work and definitely not going to be functioning at 100% capacity. So you still would be dealing with somewhat incapacitated space marines.

King Pariah wrote:Really now... I'd imagine a 120mm mortar would turn them into jelly in their own armor. And even if they were emp hardened, it's actually not a guarantee to work and definitely not going to be functioning at 100% capacity. So you still would be dealing with somewhat incapacitated space marines.

If you actually managed to hit a Space Marine, directly, with a 120mm mortar round then yes, he's probably dead or at least very badly injured.

But against a human-sized target (and an evading target, at that) you are practically never going to do so. And since even leaving aside the protective qualities of power armor Space Marines are physically much denser and more robust than humans, a near-miss isn't going to take one out; the shock wave is probably not going to kill them unless the shell actually hits them.

Honestly, I think using indirect artillery against Space Marines would be a mug's game. Fuel-air bombs might do it.

A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.

King Pariah wrote:A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.

Think about how those mortars kill people.

There's two ways; penetration and pressure. Either you are killed by the red-hot shrapnel that's being hurled everywhere, or you're killed by the massive kinetic impact of the atmosphere being pushed away from the blast. Right?

Shrapnel we can certainly argue about. I don't think hardly any would get through power armor; but yeah, with some luck you might hit a flexible joint and do some real damage.

The shockwave? Well, pressure (which is what a shockwave is) damages the human body by compressing and decompressing it rapidly. That causes all kinds of problems, biologically; but Space Marines are much denser than humans, and increased density means that they're much harder to compress and decompress like that, which means that pressure effects are going to be much less dangerous to them.

guys sorry if this sounds bad but im sure my rear end (FART) after a good curry could do the job lmao

So you're saying that something that is known to have effectively killed tanks can't kill space marines?

CalgarsPimpHand wrote:

tsz52 wrote:
But if we're talking modern weapons vs SMs well most of the squadies I've conversed with who've fought in our contemporary wars have told me that nearly all of the actual killing is accomplished by air strikes, mortars and shoulder launched missiles, then a bit by artillery and the heavy and medium MGs, with everything less (with the exception of grenades, now and then) doing not much more than suppress (to allow those 'proper' weapons to work).

So you're not having to wheel these weapons out specially just to fight the dread SMs - a modern military fights pretty much that way already. There're a few bits of doctrine that you'd have to tweak (eg most small arms won't suppress SMs) but not much.

Space Superiority: Whomever's got that wins: End of. Imperial Navy wins.

But that invalidates just about every 40k warfighting premise... so should be used sparingly in such a debate as this.

Gah... I'm going to have to read the thread aren't I?

I think you're spot on with this, but I echo the previous poster who said "if you have to bring anti-tank to fight infantry, you're in trouble", because Astartes, pretty much by definition, would not be lining up and waiting for you to call in support weapons. Nor would they be suppressed by any fire a modern infantry squad could put out, so good luck pinning them down long enough to get your air support lined up.

I think we can safely ignore tabletop 40k in discussions like this. Lining up and charging across open fields - t's just WHFB in space. If you want to talk about "real" space marines, it's 7.5' tall bipedal light tanks deploying directly from orbit into your backyard, killing your governor/president/whatever, then being airlifted back out before anyone really knows what's going on. Or, if you're crewing an enemy spacecraft, and you enjoy the sensation of being alive, you had better arm yourselves with HEAT RPGs and train to fire them down hallways at rapidly advancing walls of armor firing .70 cal RPGs back at you, or else you and your whole bridge crew will be piles of goo.

For the purposes of this thread we can discuss all the various ways in which a .50 cal or a 120mm artillery shell would kill a marine, but if a space marine finds himself squaring off against an enemy who is ready and able to bring heavy weapons to bear across open ground, he's already screwed the pooch. If the Adeptus Astartes did exist, they would outgun, outlast, and outmaneuver a modern military force the same way NATO forces outfight the Taliban in Afghanistan. Space Marines, like any soldier from any time, would do everything within their power to avoid a "fair" fight and bring all their advantages to bear as ruthlessly as possible.

Aye, if we're talking realistic SMs fighting realistically* (the very exemplar of SOF) then that presents a logistical problem since your 'safe' rear echelon is the front line where them pesky Astartes are concerned.

But if we lived in a universe where SMs existed and we were embarking upon a path where SM assault seemed likely at some point then we'd have solved this problem pre-emptively in the same way that all logistical problems are solved.

And if SMs aren't signatories of the Geneva Convention and Hague Protocols then even our tech can chuck some nasty stuff at them Astartes - if we've got enough time to ditch the 5.56 mm ARs and SAWs and replace with proper battle rifles and GPMGs with 'exotic' ammo for everyone (plus underslung GLs, beefed up grenades, more anti materiel rifles and Browning .50 Cal MGs everywhere), with more folks and more training.

Not saying that it'd be easy nor 100% reliable, but not impossible/'OMG We're Doomed!' either.

*Except for the what you'd actually do if you had complete space dominance part, this being 40k.

King Pariah wrote:So you're saying that something that is known to have effectively killed tanks can't kill space marines?

They can kill tanks BY HITTING THEM DIRECTLY, because a tank is much, much larger and much, much less maneuverable than a person. Faster, but less maneuverable.

I already said; if you managed to hit a SM directly, yes, you'd kill him. But doing that will be nearly impossible.

Not even the relatively cheap guided mortars?

BeRzErKeR wrote:

King Pariah wrote:A 120 mm mortar can have the explosive capacity of a 155 artillery shell and come in HEAT. I've been around 60mm and 80mm mortars and with 80mm about 5 mortars will pretty much guarantee the death of everything within a 50 meter radius. Yeah, I think the raw concussive blast of mortars is plenty enough to jellify a space marine.

Think about how those mortars kill people.

There's two ways; penetration and pressure. Either you are killed by the red-hot shrapnel that's being hurled everywhere, or you're killed by the massive kinetic impact of the atmosphere being pushed away from the blast. Right?

Shrapnel we can certainly argue about. I don't think hardly any would get through power armor; but yeah, with some luck you might hit a flexible joint and do some real damage.

The shockwave? Well, pressure (which is what a shockwave is) damages the human body by compressing and decompressing it rapidly. That causes all kinds of problems, biologically; but Space Marines are much denser than humans, and increased density means that they're much harder to compress and decompress like that, which means that pressure effects are going to be much less dangerous to them.

Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).

King Pariah wrote:Not even the relatively cheap guided mortars?

Yes. Guided mortar rounds are barely accurate enough to hit moving armored vehicles dead on, and a tank has a massively larger cross-section than a Space Marine. If you have a margin of error of even two meters each way, you've got only about a 30% chance or so to actually hit a man-sized target; and the accuracy of a guided mortar round is far coarser than that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

tsz52 wrote:

Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).

Not exactly. Flexibility is what lets you survive a shockwave, while a brittle substance will shatter.

Density matters for two reasons; first, denser materials absorb more energy per cubic inch, or whatever unit you want to use; and second, denser materials are commonly more brittle (relatively) and so shatter more easily. A Space Marine would absorb more kinetic energy from a shockwave than a human would, both because he's larger and because he's denser; but if the structural strength of his muscles/organs/bones has been increased more than the added density has reduced his flexibility, he'll still survive better the shockwave better than a human.

Also, a thick, hard, rigid material like power armor will protect against the blast. Not perfectly, certainly, but it will soak up a good deal of the force before it ever reaches flesh, particularly since power armor is described as being a layered composite rather than a solid, homogeneous mass.

Now here's the finale, direct fire mortars (yes, they exist and are considered to possibly be just about as good, if not better, at popping tanks as a 105mm direct fire cannon). How about that?

I assume you're using 'mortar' as a jargon term here, because a mortar is, by definition, an indirect-fire weapon.

Direct-fire artillery could well be effective; as I said, if a nice, big, explosive shell scores a direct hit on a Space Marine, that Space Marine is up gak creek without a paddle. That's actually how I interpret the AP3 of a krak missile, honestly; even if the missile doesn't blow clean through the armor the concussive force is still going to mess the Space Marine up, so in game terms there's exactly no chance that the armor will save him from a direct hit.

You'll still have accuracy problems; unless you've got a ballistic computer calculating trajectory, hitting a man-sized target with a weapon that big is always quite difficult for a human. If you DO have a ballistic computer, you could probably ace any Space Marines who popped up in the open pretty effectively, though.

BeRzErKeR wrote:

tsz52 wrote:

Sorry chief but it's that density which kills him: more dense, more easily compressible (molecules closer together and more tightly bound) with a higher velocity concussive wave going through him. Less dense and more elastic is the key to surviving blast-/shock-waves (with vacuum being the ideal, right?).

Not exactly. Flexibility is what lets you survive a shockwave, while a brittle substance will shatter.

Density matters for two reasons; first, denser materials absorb more energy per cubic inch, or whatever unit you want to use; and second, denser materials are commonly more brittle (relatively) and so shatter more easily. A Space Marine would absorb more kinetic energy from a shockwave than a human would, both because he's larger and because he's denser; but if the structural strength of his muscles/organs/bones has been increased more than the added density has reduced his flexibility, he'll still survive better the shockwave better than a human.

Also, a thick, hard, rigid material like power armor will protect against the blast. Not perfectly, certainly, but it will soak up a good deal of the force before it ever reaches flesh, particularly since power armor is described as being a layered composite rather than a solid, homogeneous mass.

This would only work if SMs were made up of radically different materials than regular organic stuff. I always took it that their organs were made of organic stuff but beefed up a bit with redundancy and so on, but I am by no means an expert on Astartes. If their organs and bones aren't held together by carbon nanoweave sheaths or whatever then you're looking at the same effects happening as happens to regular humies but moreso (assuming a wave strong enough to overcome the extra absorption afforded by the extra volume and density).

The extra density provides a more efficient medium for the wave to pass through, to more effectively reach the less elastic and/or more vulnerable bits that will fail under pressure from that wave (liver, brain, central nervous system, vessels that can burst, skeleton which can shatter or at least spall). Again, he'd be better off filling that increased volume with less dense and more elastic organs with a lot more ability to move as gross structures to absorb the momentum, with as empty as possible cavities insulating the major bits and bobs.

Likewise with his armour.

But yeah, as you say, there is a cross-over point where increased density ceases to be an advantage and becomes a liability with a given force hitting it, with given materials - we don't have any of those crunchy numbers and facts. All I'm saying is that you can't claim the increased density as a definite boon, since it might be the exact opposite sometimes.

Also don't forget that you don't need to kill him outright, since however tough he is, inside he is still a meatbag; hit him with enough force close up enough to drop him for a few seconds, his central nervous system and hearts momentarily stunned, and then you can hit him square on with your mortars or whatnot since he isn't going anywhere.

Rented Tritium wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Let me raise stakes here.

Let us replace Astartes with:

-an Terminator.

-an Grey Knight.

-an Custodes.

And in the end let us compare Primarchs to.

What now can kill those guys?

All armor still has soft spots for movement and they all still have dudes in them. The same basic weaknesses apply. Kinetic force from sufficiently large anti-tank rounds and explosive pressure waves close enough to the softer spots should be sufficient to damage the tissue inside the armor even without penetrating it.

Have you ever skinned your knee through your pants without tearing them? Think about that only much more upscaled and involving explosives.

Well custodes have even stronger armour than astartes, and terminators have even their joints hidden behind layers of armour, with grey knights having psychic shielding which I don't think we could penetrate. A primarch we likely would have immense trouble killing WITHOUT armour even.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

But we don't know what velocities Tau Railguns run at (?), so this might be academic but I wanted to just point that out to BeRsErKeR as a possibility (and it benefited your argument, by the way);

I remember hearing a figure in the vicinity of mach 8?

Just make a Space Marine get a wife.... Yoou'll soon see who wear the power armour pants then.... 9ft guys gibbering in the corner saying Yes Dear!

The wife is the ultimate weapon in any era for destroying a man =]


Just don't tell my wife that.

Milisim wrote:Just make a Space Marine get a wife.... Yoou'll soon see who wear the power armour pants then.... 9ft guys gibbering in the corner saying Yes Dear!

The wife is the ultimate weapon in any era for destroying a man =]


Just don't tell my wife that.

Please, haven't you realized? SM aren't interested in...women. HINT HINT HINT.

Sausagefest = Space Marines

Really, very few modern weapons could beat a space marine in power armour. Let's go over some of the theories, Shall we?

Nuke: Maybe
An Orbital bombardment is more powerful than a Nuke and marines have survived them before.
Copied weapons: Yes
There was a suggestion that the army would take the power armour and bolter form a marine and copy it to kill the others. this could work...if you could reproduce it. Ceramite it made form materials that humanity currently lacks the ability to forge. Bolter rounds require Diamond for basic rounds and Adamantium for Anti-Power Armour.
Sniper rifles: Maybe
Could work for blinding the marine, but the sniper would be weaker than a bolter and marines can take a bolt round to the face without a helmet and live. (example listed in chaos codex, and done by a scout no less)
Flamethrowers: no
Modern flamethrowers would be too cold to work, with the cooling systems in the Armour overwelming the heat form the fire
Tank shells: Maybe
Power armour is designed to be hit by modren tank shells and the marine would be more likely to be injured by the collision from the shell than the blast.
Mortars: No
Coupling inaccuracy with lower firepower while deminishing both makes this a horrible choice.

I thought a Direct fire mortar was called a Howitzer? I imagine Power armour has similar protective qualities to CHOBHAM armour on both the M1A1/2 Abrams and the Challenger II in which case if you could get close enough to get an acurate shot, an RPG-32 would probably do the job. It is the only weapon that has penetrated CHOBHAM, other than AFPDS/Sabot rounds because you're essentially firing a massive needle at the target at something close to mach 3

No, a howitzer is an artillery piece thus "indirect" fire

Direct fire mortars are simply mortars configured to fire straight at the target instead of a high angle. For all intents and purposes, the old definition of mortar is pretty much kaput as we do use direct fire mortars.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panhard_AML

A Tank fired 120mm APFSDS round traveling at 1 700 metres per second should do it. Add DU for extra damage and secondary detonations- ammo pouches, power cells
A 65cm grouping of hits is not difficult at 1000m.
Now the million dollar question is how fast that Space Marine can cover the 1000m?

Or you could try a HESH round if he was standing still.



APFSDS Armour Piercing Fin Sstabilised Discarding Sabot
HESH High Explosive Squash Head
DU Depleted Uranium (actually Staballoy)

tsz52 wrote:

This would only work if SMs were made up of radically different materials than regular organic stuff. I always took it that their organs were made of organic stuff but beefed up a bit with redundancy and so on, but I am by no means an expert on Astartes. If their organs and bones aren't held together by carbon nanoweave sheaths or whatever then you're looking at the same effects happening as happens to regular humies but moreso (assuming a wave strong enough to overcome the extra absorption afforded by the extra volume and density).

The extra density provides a more efficient medium for the wave to pass through, to more effectively reach the less elastic and/or more vulnerable bits that will fail under pressure from that wave (liver, brain, central nervous system, vessels that can burst, skeleton which can shatter or at least spall). Again, he'd be better off filling that increased volume with less dense and more elastic organs with a lot more ability to move as gross structures to absorb the momentum, with as empty as possible cavities insulating the major bits and bobs.

Likewise with his armour.

But yeah, as you say, there is a cross-over point where increased density ceases to be an advantage and becomes a liability with a given force hitting it, with given materials - we don't have any of those crunchy numbers and facts. All I'm saying is that you can't claim the increased density as a definite boon, since it might be the exact opposite sometimes.

Also don't forget that you don't need to kill him outright, since however tough he is, inside he is still a meatbag; hit him with enough force close up enough to drop him for a few seconds, his central nervous system and hearts momentarily stunned, and then you can hit him square on with your mortars or whatnot since he isn't going anywhere.

Mmm. . . see, here's the thing. There's a point at which extra density is more valuable than extra flexibility.

For instance; get a two-inch-thick sheet of rubber and drape it over yourself. Set off a grenade on the other side. Now you're dead or at least badly injured, right? Partially from the shrapnel, but even if none of the shrapnel takes you out, the overpressure is still going to hurt, maybe burst your eardrums and pop veins in your eyes, under your fingernails, etc.

Get a two-inch-thick molded steel dish (large enough to cover your whole body) and hide underneath it. Set off a grenade just outside it. Not only are you totally protected from the shrapnel, but the pressure isn't as great, either.

That's because rigid materials like steel transmit less of a shockwave. When the shockwave hits, a dense, rigid material like steel flexes less; there's simply a lot more material in a certain thickness of steel than there is in the same thickness of rubber, and as a consequence a lot more of the kinetic energy of the shockwave is expended in making it move. All that energy which goes into overcoming the mass of the steel is gone, and can't hurt whatever (or whoever) is behind it; the person wearing a suit of rigid steel plate armor only gets what's left over. Furthermore, this effect is greatly increased if you've got multiple layers attached to each other, since EVERY layer absorbs some of the energy, and forces it to transfer repeatedly between the steel and whatever you have between the layers. That bleeds even more energy away.

A Space Marine is wearing, conservatively, a couple inches of layered metal and ceramic over his vital organs, though the helmet is probably thinner. On top of that, his physical makeup is also significantly heavier than a human body is, with a higher proportion of thick but compressible muscle fiber and hardened, interlocking bone to vulnerable, squishy organ-meat. In order to hurt him the shockwave first must pass through the armor itself, expending a lot of energy in forcing the various layers of ceramite and adamantine to flex against each other in order to transmit the energy; it then has to move through several layers of muscle fiber, and finally pass through his bones, in order to reach the organs. It's got a longer distance to travel, with less-vulnerable material to move through, before it can ever reach the places where it might do serious damage.

With all that taken together, I'm quite confident that a Space Marine would be massively resistant to overpressure, much more so than any normal human is.

Steel transfers energy really well actually, the rigidity of it absorbs the energy, and instead of dissipating significantly as seen with flexible materials, it conducts a significant amount of energy through it to whatever happens to be on the other side. As seen with the Newton Cradle.

According to Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermy AKA The Gunny a Howitzer is capable of both direct and indirect fire or at least the super-duper-uber-complicated ones are

King Pariah wrote:Steel transfers energy really well actually, the rigidity of it absorbs the energy, and instead of dissipating significantly as seen with flexible materials, it conducts a significant amount of energy through it to whatever happens to be on the other side. As seen with the Newton Cradle.

So, are you saying that a 2-inch-thick sheet of rubber will protect you from a blast better than a 2-inch-thick sheet of steel? Because I was using steel merely as an example of a hard, dense substance vs. a softer, less-dense substance. Molecules packed closer together transmit energy more efficiently, yes, but denser materials also have a lot more molecules present, and every single one still causes a loss of energy. This is exactly why hard, rigid materials have been used as armor for millenia; they protect people from kinetic energy, on an equal-size basis, better than soft, flexible materials do.

Actually a combo of dense and flexible is best. You need the hard to prevent penetration, not shock absorption. The more flexible material absorbs and dissipates the shock. If it was just a concussive grenade with no shrapnel, I'd take the rubber, with shrapnel I'd take a steel exterior with rubber behind it. Millenia of armor has shown the combo is best, never just a steel shell, that's a terrible idea. You get a bell like affect that way which is extremely dangerous to the body.

This is an exercise in futility, a marine is a powerful super science enchaned solider with bionics, redundant implants and stupid super armor. They exist in space and are able to eat a bit of flesh and get a whole bunch of information about a person and his skills... all this equates into a simple "duh, you could kill a space marine with a over-the top super structure destroying weapon.... so why is the marine facing those odds? Why is it that this guy who is bigger, stronger, tougher, more technologically and tactically advanced than us (lets not even throw in wisdom of centuries of combat). that he would ever find himself in that position?

Personally I think if you start comparing this sort of thing then you need to think about what the marine would do as a counter-measure? You say a tank cannon? I say he dodges the first blast by swiftly dodging and absorbing the explosion with his armor before pulling a pin on a krak gernade killing everyone inside and using the wreckage as cover to track and kill it's spotters for him. You say motors for long range fighting? I say jammed radio signals and improved stealth and gorilla tactics all the while waiting out till a change of the guard just to move during that time due to his heightened sleep depredation methods.

You say chopper? I say bolter fire being superior to most anti-vehicle weapons. You say gernade launcher? I say he grabs your frag round and crushes it in his hand as it explodes for the lawls. To the people who say las fire kills marines... in theory you are correct because you play the board game, however in the fluff it is so amazingly rare for a marine to die in such a fashion normally in the fluff he would lob a flash bang into the unit and walk out killing everyone but the sergeant so he could account for his squads actions at chainsword point.

All and all i understand the point was "just to see" but some people here sound smuggly confident they could kill the marine easily when i am thinking "most countries in the world want the weapons we are talking about there to use against us or someone else... what makes you think they would readily endanger these things to fight 1 man? or for that matter who hear knows a marine dumb enough to charge a base alone when he could review all avenues to avoid damage."

It's a wash, the mighty predator was beaten by a humble log ... so could a marine if it was unlucky enough. In order to kill that marine you need to remember he will elude gunfire and damage if you want him to be a proper marine and not a dude standing there to die.

Actually it equates to "you could kill a marine with a stick if you stuck him in the right place".