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It seems to me that there is not only an issue with the basic premise of space marines, but also an issue with the portrayal of space marines across the lore (especially between different authors).

This is my headcanon:

-Their armor is as thick as a light tank (of 40k) and would be the equivalent to Abrams armor today.
-Due to the aforementioned armor and the fact that their bodies are enhanced to be resistant to injury, it is extremely difficult to actually kill a marine.
-They can run upwards of 40mph (roughly 65 km/h for non-americans) at full sprint.
-They are strong enough to rip the turrets off of light vehicles with their (armored) hands, and they could probably deadlift the front of a main battle tank.
-They have reflexes that are roughly 10 times faster than a normal humans due to genetic enhancements, and they have upgrades to their nerve fibers and muscles so that they can respond not only far faster than a normal human to a stimulus, but also with more precision.
-A single marine is roughly equivalent to an entire platoon (~50 men) of well-trained imperial guardsmen just by himself, and that takes into account a platoon being armed with crew-served heavy weapons.

It is easy to me to see why they would be so devastating and why they are such a big deal where they actually fight when you consider the above as true. To all the people saying that there are not enough of them to actually make a difference... there is one marine for every planet in the Imperium (roughly). The vast majority of the Imperium is actually peaceful and not under attack, and space marines don't sit around twiddling their thumbs, they go to the places with the fighting. Consider that only 1% of the worlds of the Imperium are under siege at any given time. That means that there would be 100 marines for every active planetary warzone. Then also consider that most warzones do not even see a marine presence because they are not serious enough to warrant it and the numbers get even better. A few hundred marines isn't going to conquer a planet by itself, nor can they hold a planet (even a small one) for obvious reasons. But a few hundred marines CAN change the course of a planetary conflict, and if you don't see how that is possible when you consider the list above as true, well I don't know what to tell you.

As I said before, my biggest gripe about marines is the fact they take guardsmen levels of casualties almost every time they are portrayed fighting in the lore. Which I think makes them seem weaker to a lot of readers then they are actually meant to be.

that honestly sounds about right. another thing to consider, well the table top allows guardsmen to have a shot of taking space marines down with a lasgun (basicly 50 50 chance to pen the armor) chances are in universe Lasguns and other such small arms are just utterly useless against marines. meanwhile heavy weapons are bulky, a lascanon, just for example, needs to be set up and crewed by guardsmen. magine trying to aim a weapon that big and bulky at a man sized object, weaving and dodging at the speed of a car. (65 KPH is about the size of a car moving down a major city street) meanwhile their bullets when they hit your guys, and they're better shots then you are! are blowing massive holes in the chest cavity of the buddy beside you.

BrianDavion wrote:
...meanwhile their bullets when they hit your guys, and they're better shots then you are! are blowing massive holes in the chest cavity of the buddy beside you.

Exactly, forgot to mention that even the worst marine shooters are significantly more accurate than the average imperial guard sniper. Along with the fact that marine bolters are one-hitter-quitters when hitting anything less than a tyranid warrior.

w1zard wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
...meanwhile their bullets when they hit your guys, and they're better shots then you are! are blowing massive holes in the chest cavity of the buddy beside you.

Exactly, forgot to mention that even the worst marine shooters are significantly more accurate than the average imperial guard sniper. Along with the fact that marine bolters are one-hitter-quitters when hitting anything less than a tyranid warrior.

heck, realisticly the minute a squad of guardsmen comes under fire from bolt guns you'd think they'd break. it;d be a horrific way to go.

Read through bits of this thread, not the whole thing. feel like I only have one thing to contribute to it. There's a scene in the eldar novel path of the seer where the Imperium invades a craftworld. After succesfully holding the bridge from Imperial forces boarding torpedoes of space marines arrive and absolutely wreck the eldar defenders. After this the imperial forces establishes a beachhead and uses the bridge to unload more troops and coordinate their attacks. Later in the same novel there's a battle scene on a huge plain where space marines are killed in great numbers by titanic weaponry. I feel like this quite clearly illustrates the value of the space marines. You can save multittude of resources by having them break a position so the imperial guard (/AM) can establish a forward command. On large scale engagements though their value is not represented. Hence the smaller the engagement the more valuable the space marine becomes.

BrianDavion wrote:
heck, realisticly the minute a squad of guardsmen comes under fire from bolt guns you'd think they'd break. it;d be a horrific way to go.

Eh, for all the ways you can die in 40k a boltgun shot to the head/torso is actually not a bad way to go.

cody.d. wrote:
If I recall usually they do these sort of raids to get "pure" or unmutated genetic matter to create hellfire or anti nid rounds. At least that's what I vaugley remember from the Ventris omnibus.

I think in the Ventris novel they had to get unmutated dna to make a virus that would affect all the Tyranids on the planet.

w1zard wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
heck, realisticly the minute a squad of guardsmen comes under fire from bolt guns you'd think they'd break. it;d be a horrific way to go.

Eh, for all the ways you can die in 40k a boltgun shot to the head/torso is actually not a bad way to go.

I think the issue is less for the dead and more for the people now wearing them.

w1zard wrote:
-They can run upwards of 40mph (roughly 65 km/h for non-americans) at full sprint.

Funny enough I finished the night lords omnibus last night and they actually cite a figure, Talos clocked himself at 84 to 87 kph at a dead sprint.

-A single marine is roughly equivalent to an entire platoon (~50 men) of well-trained imperial guardsmen just by himself, and that takes into account a platoon being armed with crew-served heavy weapons.

That said, this always kills me. They don't have to be worth that to be worth while. They just have to be able to effectively close the distance between themselves and the enemy and then take advantage of the fact most other races in the universe aren't huge on hand to hand combat. They're beat sticks who specialize in getting into the enemy's face faster than the enemy accounts for, there's no cover save against chainswords after all. They're the distilled barbarian that the emperor used to pummel the rest of the galaxy into submission. But that took legions of them.

The comparison is even difficult because a marine functions best in the kind of environment that 50 men wouldn't function in. Trying to find one eight foot tall walking tank on an entire planet who just so happens to be spending his time blowing your gak up is actually quite difficult. Particularly when he's likely to face guards in ones and twos who he can easily get on top of and squish if they don't see him coming(things we don't even have rules for on the table top). The kind of things one veteran marine can pull off with sufficient knowledge of the enemy definitely throws the supposed power curve, but that would never scale up properly when the large units are far more easy to detect.

It's the rule of Ninjas; the more of them there are the weaker they become.

It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

Like, 10 marines land in a pod and storm a command center in minutes. Compared to 1000 guardsmen laying siege to the complex over a number of hours. Both missions are successful, but one mission took a tiny, elite force, vs. a more cumbersome deployment of many, many troops.

That's how I see it.

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

Like, 10 marines land in a pod and storm a command center in minutes. Compared to 1000 guardsmen laying siege to the complex over a number of hours. Both missions are successful, but one mission took a tiny, elite force, vs. a more cumbersome deployment of many, many troops.

That's how I see it.

But there's the numbers issue. If it takes 10 Marines to accomplish what 1,000 Guardsmen can do, that's a 1:100 ratio. Sounds good, until you realize that Guard outnumber Marines by WAY MORE than that.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

Like, 10 marines land in a pod and storm a command center in minutes. Compared to 1000 guardsmen laying siege to the complex over a number of hours. Both missions are successful, but one mission took a tiny, elite force, vs. a more cumbersome deployment of many, many troops.

That's how I see it.

But there's the numbers issue. If it takes 10 Marines to accomplish what 1,000 Guardsmen can do, that's a 1:100 ratio. Sounds good, until you realize that Guard outnumber Marines by WAY MORE than that.

It's still not a linear comparison in terms of value, however. If marines can do the job faster, and with fewer casualties, and return to battle-readiness as a unit quicker, then the ratio becomes greater.

For example, if the 10 marines take the post with two casualties, and those casualties can be battle ready again in a few days, then the cost in manpower is low compared to a siege using guardsmen that costs several hundred guardsmen lives or wounded troops that wont be back in service for months, if at all. So the marines can turn around and then accomplish another similar mission quickly with no replacements, but the guardsmen have to dig into their pool of reserves.

Those may not be the numbers but I hope it illustrates the point. One of the major benefits of marines not on the tabletop is their capacity to recover from injury as well as fight for days without rest. So not only can a few of them achieve an objective that it would take many more regular soldiers to accomplish, but they can quickly turn around and do the same thing again and again for days on end.

YeOldSaltPotato wrote:
Just to pound this out, in 40k "I don't like super soldiers" is so far from possibly giving a single gak about this universe

Guard vs Orks or Guard vs Tyranids are to many people more iconic than anything involving Marines.

Acting like someone who prefers those matchups "doesn't give a gak" about 40k is, frankly, just plain trolling on your part. I'd argue that someone like that cares more about the setting than you do, if you only care about marines.

Another point I don't get with Space Marines is geneseed reproduction. Technically each Space Marines has two progenoid glands that can be harvested, each one containing enough genetic material to create two new Space Marines. Here's my problem with this. First, what if the Marine dies before the progenoid glands reach maturity. It takes five years for one to become haverstable and 10 for the second. That means no dead Scout can be harvested. Each time a Scout dies, it's simply lost geneseed and Scout are less heavily armored, thus easier to kill, do one of the most dangerous job on the battlefield and are the least experimented Space Marine. Attrition rates amongst Scout must be higher than in most other function.

What if the body is seriously damaged. Killing a Space Marine isn't easy and the weapons that can kill one easily usually reduce a Space Marine body to ash or very small chunks, they are more akin to light cannons then rifles afterall. Furthermore, those glands are situated in the chest and in the neck respectively, two places that the enemy is going to target to kill a Space Marine; the neck because it's a weak point of their armor and the chest because that's where vital organs are (and it's a big target). So even if they get killed by small arm fire like a hot-shot lasgun, there are good chances the one or both glands will have been damaged or destroyed. The lower back or the calf would have been better ideas in my opinion.

Finally, even if you are lucky enough to have a dead Space Marine with intact progenoid glands to harvest, there is only one Space Marine in a hundred who has the equipment and the skills to harvest it. if he get's killed early on, you are in trouble. How about one per squad? That would be smarter. There is also the problem of geneseed compatibility. It's said that many aspirant die due to genetic incompatibility thus resulting in more lost geneseed. If you compound all those potential losses, a maximum reproduction rate of 2 per Space Marine is very small. Even if you accept the fact that Chapters can produce new Space Marine in a few years time, from what genetic material are they building them?

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

I said 500 guardsmen, but this right here exactly. But for what it is worth, I do think a single marine going up against 50 guardsmen (with accompanying heavy weapons) has about a 50/50 chance of going either way.

 JNAProductions wrote:
But there's the numbers issue. If it takes 10 Marines to accomplish what 1,000 Guardsmen can do, that's a 1:100 ratio. Sounds good, until you realize that Guard outnumber Marines by WAY MORE than that.

If you remove the imperial guard there is no way that the marines can do all of the fighting in the Imperium, but that is fine, they aren't designed or intended to do that. In the same way the U.S. military isn't just a bunch of navy SEALS for a reason, nor would the U.S military ever shift itself to try to do that.

epronovost wrote:
Another point I don't get with Space Marines is geneseed reproduction. Technically each Space Marines has two progenoid glands that can be harvested, each one containing enough genetic material to create two new Space Marines. Here's my problem with this. First, what if the Marine dies before the progenoid glands reach maturity. It takes five years for one to become haverstable and 10 for the second. That means no dead Scout can be harvested. Each time a Scout dies, it's simply lost geneseed and Scout are less heavily armored, thus easier to kill, do one of the most dangerous job on the battlefield and are the least experimented Space Marine. Attrition rates amongst Scout must be higher than in most other function.

What if the body is seriously damaged. Killing a Space Marine isn't easy and the weapons that can kill one easily usually reduce a Space Marine body to ash or very small chunks, they are more akin to light cannons then rifles afterall. Furthermore, those glands are situated in the chest and in the neck respectively, two places that the enemy is going to target to kill a Space Marine; the neck because it's a weak point of their armor and the chest because that's where vital organs are (and it's a big target). So even if they get killed by small arm fire like a hot-shot lasgun, there are good chances the one or both glands will have been damaged or destroyed. The lower back or the calf would have been better ideas in my opinion.

Finally, even if you are lucky enough to have a dead Space Marine with intact progenoid glands to harvest, there is only one Space Marine in a hundred who has the equipment and the skills to harvest it. if he get's killed early on, you are in trouble. How about one per squad? That would be smarter. There is also the problem of geneseed compatibility. It's said that many aspirant die due to genetic incompatibility thus resulting in more lost geneseed. If you compound all those potential losses, a maximum reproduction rate of 2 per Space Marine is very small. Even if you accept the fact that Chapters can produce new Space Marine in a few years time, from what genetic material are they building them?

One of the numerous issues behind why the portrayal of marine casualties is utterly nonsense.

w1zard wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

I said 500 guardsmen, but this right here exactly.

 JNAProductions wrote:
But there's the numbers issue. If it takes 10 Marines to accomplish what 1,000 Guardsmen can do, that's a 1:100 ratio. Sounds good, until you realize that Guard outnumber Marines by WAY MORE than that.

If you remove the imperial guard there is no way that the marines can do all of the fighting in the Imperium, but that is fine, they aren't designed or intended to do that. In the same way the U.S. military isn't just a bunch of navy seals for a reason.

To harken back to some examples, there are 2,450 Navy SEALS, according to Google.
Also according to Google, there's about 1.3 million, or 1,300,000 US military personnel.

That's a small number, about .2% of US military people are SEALS.

There are trillions of Guardsmen, meaning that for Marines to have even one-tenth the proportion SEALS have to the US they'd need 400,000,000+ Marines.

 JNAProductions wrote:

w1zard wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

I said 500 guardsmen, but this right here exactly.

 JNAProductions wrote:
But there's the numbers issue. If it takes 10 Marines to accomplish what 1,000 Guardsmen can do, that's a 1:100 ratio. Sounds good, until you realize that Guard outnumber Marines by WAY MORE than that.

If you remove the imperial guard there is no way that the marines can do all of the fighting in the Imperium, but that is fine, they aren't designed or intended to do that. In the same way the U.S. military isn't just a bunch of navy seals for a reason.

To harken back to some examples, there are 2,450 Navy SEALS, according to Google.
Also according to Google, there's about 1.3 million, or 1,300,000 US military personnel.

That's a small number, about .2% of US military people are SEALS.

There are trillions of Guardsmen, meaning that for Marines to have even one-tenth the proportion SEALS have to the US they'd need 400,000,000+ Marines.

And the SEALS are also not the only special forces, so that number of Space Marines will be even higher.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
And the SEALS are also not the only special forces, so that number of Space Marines will be even higher.

Do you have a general number of US Special Forces?

But yeah. Bearing in mind that the 400,000,000 number is for there to be one Marine for every 5,000 Guardsmen, and a low estimate (2 Trillion) on the number of Guardsmen.

Given the canon number of one million, that's one Marine for every 2 Million Guard.

Seals primary job is recon. Space marines can do recon but their specialty is massing power in 1 area and striking critical damage to an enemy. They are more akin to f-22s with tactical nuclear weapons than seals.

 JNAProductions wrote:

There are trillions of Guardsmen, meaning that for Marines to have even one-tenth the proportion SEALS have to the US they'd need 400,000,000+ Marines.

A: Why do they have to be the same ratio?

B: Seals don't have their own Air Force, Navy and Tanks?

w1zard wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not that 10 marines can fight 1000 guardsmen all at once ( or whatever). It's that from a strategic standpoint, 10 marines can achieve a misssion that it would otherwise take 1000 guardsmen to do.

I said 500 guardsmen, but this right here exactly. But for what it is worth, I do think a single marine going up against 50 guardsmen (with accompanying heavy weapons) has about a 50/50 chance of going either way.

Yeah. . . I don't like to subscribe to that idea. Maybe in very dense terrain over a long period of time or part of a starship boarding operation. Conflicts are so dependent on context I think statements like that are inherently non-useful. In any more open environment 500 Guard ought to just pulverize the Marine.

They don't have to have the same ratio. In fact, the 400,000,000 number is one-tenth the ratio of Marines:Guardsmen as US Military:Navy SEALS.

But they DO have to be some reasonable number. One million is just plain too small to have any reasonable galactic impact with their power.

 Xenomancers wrote:
Seals primary job is recon. Space marines can do recon but their specialty is massing power in 1 area and striking critical damage to an enemy. They are more akin to f-22s with tactical nuclear weapons than seals.

Agree. Space Marine Scouts are basically super human Seals. Everything not a Scout is a post-human hammer.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:
They don't have to have the same ratio. In fact, the 400,000,000 number is one-tenth the ratio of Marines:Guardsmen as US Military:Navy SEALS.

But they DO have to be some reasonable number. One million is just plain too small to have any reasonable galactic impact with their power.

That depends on how they are used.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Conflicts are so dependent on context I think statements like that are inherently non-useful. In any more open environment 500 Guard ought to just pulverize the Marine.

50 guardsman per 1 marine, not 500.

The first thing that would happen would be the marine unloading his bolter full-auto and every bolt scoring a kill. So 20-30 guardsmen are pretty much instantly dead. That and lasguns are about as effective against power armor as an AK is against tank armor (in my headcanon). Does that sound too ridiculous to you? Not to me... A space marine is literally orders of magnitude faster and more accurate with a weapon than a regular human could ever hope to be.

 JNAProductions wrote:
But they DO have to be some reasonable number. One million is just plain too small to have any reasonable galactic impact with their power.

Why? A single imperial guard general in the right spot in the right battle could turn a planetary conflict and thus has an effect on the galactic stage. Why is it so hard to imagine 100 space marines doing the same for a battle? They cannot be everywhere, they cannot even be most places, but at the places where they do show up they have an enormous impact. I just don't understand why you are drawing a magical line somewhere between "scarce special forces" and "irrelevant military force" that seems to be completely arbitrary.

They don't need to be the same ratio as navy SEALS to regular U.S military personnel to still be effective.

Assassins are even fewer in number than space marines and yet still have a massive impact on the landscape of galactic power.

w1zard wrote:
Assassins are even fewer in number than space marines and yet still have a massive impact on the landscape of galactic power.

The existence of Imperial Assassins makes the Space Marine even more pointless in my opinion. If their main quality is their capacity to launch drop pod assault on enemy command center that aren't protected by a protected by a efficient anti-air defense, then assassins can do the same job, more efficiently without taxing as much assets and can actually reach and eliminate target protected by defenses that would prevent Space Marine from doing so (or that would make it very costly). Plus, there is a variety of assassins, all perfectly adapted for a specific scenario.

Dandelion wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
a small kill team sent onto a hive ship would proably be delivering a payload and likely would be expecting it to be a one way mission. it's really a job only Marines COULD do

The issue I take with that is the assumption that a small kill team should be able to fight it's way into a hive ship. A hive ship of any importance will have millions of bugs waiting to kill you. How much ammo did they bring? Could the passage ways get blocked by the firefights? How deep are they going? Couldn't the ship also try to kill the marines or at least stop them? At a certain point, expecting 5 marines to make any progress into a hive ship is just ridiculous, and the fact that the stories show it to be possible just ruins my suspension of disbelief.
GW didn't have to write marines that way. I'd be more than happy to acknowledge that a single marine is worth say 10-20 guardsmen (100 would be pushing it imo), but the lore seems to indicate that a single marine could take on a whole regiment by itself, which is just stupid and unnecessary.

Hive ships don't have their entire army awake and ready to fight, or else they'd have to feed them all the time. From what we know of the nids, most of the bugs are either made short order when planetary invasion is intended, or in hibernation during travel. And fictionwise, there are several examples of this exact technique working. There's still a lot we don't know about Tyranids. But the lore is quite clear that small kill teams have been able to effectively insert into tyranid ships, and do critical damage.

The old Warrior King story.
The Warrior King leads from the front and is like an elemental force.
Just seeing him ploughing into the enemy gives hope to allies and makes them fight all the harder to win his notice and become part of his legend.



It is worth pointing out the opposite effect on morale when he dies though.

epronovost wrote:
The existence of Imperial Assassins makes the Space Marine even more pointless in my opinion. If their main quality is their capacity to launch drop pod assault on enemy command center that aren't protected by a protected by a efficient anti-air defense, then assassins can do the same job, more efficiently without taxing as much assets and can actually reach and eliminate target protected by defenses that would prevent Space Marine from doing so (or that would make it very costly). Plus, there is a variety of assassins, all perfectly adapted for a specific scenario.

Again, we run into the issue of why does it have to be one or the other? Does the existence of the army rangers invalidate the navy SEAL's existence? What about delta force? What about green berets? All of these groups have overlapping areas of proficiency, and yet we don't just say "hey SEALS are pointless because we already have delta force" etc.

For most conflicts, the guard are sufficient. For the missions that guard are not sufficient, the storm troopers are called in. For the missions that storm troopers are not sufficient the space marines are called in. For the missions the space marines are not sufficient for an assassin or multiple assassins are called in. All of these groups have somewhat different and yet overlapping areas of expertise, and all of them serve a purpose.

 Dakka Wolf wrote:
The old Warrior King story.
The Warrior King leads from the front and is like an elemental force.
Just seeing him ploughing into the enemy gives hope to allies and makes them fight all the harder to win his notice and become part of his legend.



It is worth pointing out the opposite effect on morale when he dies though.

which is why the IoM likely rarely reports on their losses

w1zard wrote:

Again, we run into the issue of why does it have to be one or the other? Does the existence of the army rangers invalidate the navy SEAL's existence? What about delta force? What about green berets? All of these groups have overlapping areas of proficiency, and yet we don't just say "hey SEALS are pointless because we already have delta force" etc.

Navy SEALS, Rangers and various other elite forces within the US army all have different roles and specialisations. Rangers can't do what SEALS are best at for the simple reason they aren't trained as divers for example. The Space Marines have no real unique field of expertise that no other military institution in the Imperium can display. If they were the only one to use the tactic of dropping into the mist of enemy line from the sky to destroy a key asset, it would make some sense, but they aren't. Plus, their ridiculously low numbers would mean that whatever specialty they could have, the Imperium would be in serious trouble since Space Marines are too rare to be used on all major battlefield in high enough numbers. Space Marine Chapters don't even all have the same specialty.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:
The old Warrior King story.
The Warrior King leads from the front and is like an elemental force.
Just seeing him ploughing into the enemy gives hope to allies and makes them fight all the harder to win his notice and become part of his legend.



It is worth pointing out the opposite effect on morale when he dies though.

which is why the IoM likely rarely reports on their losses

You sure that’s not just because they don't care?