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So I have very little knowledge of the operating systems of power armor or the Adetpus Astartes so please bare with me. I play alot of Rogue Trader and find that this armor according to the description only remains operational from 1-5 hours and then is rendered useless till charged again. To me, this seems impossible to complete most missions for Marines as they are normally Herculine in scope and ability never being solved quickly. I can't rightly imagine this restraint is in effect for Space Marines but perhaps civilian sector? If people wouldn't mind giving me a break down of the fluff of Power armor and it's various limitations and incarnations I'd be most interested to learn as i foresee needing this knowledge eventually.

For example how precious is power armor to a space marine chapter?

How rare is Power Armor?

Is their a way around the power drain effects?

Non-astartes power armor relies on power cells, unless you get a generator like the astartes ones.

Power armor is crazy rare in the grand scheme of things, though it's possible for small numbers to be procured. You can't outfit a guard unit in armor unless your... um... lord of a segmentum? Even then, why bother, unless they are veterans. The high lord of a sector might be able to pull it off, but even then no more than 20 suits.

Astartes power armor is part of what makes a space marine as space marine. How precious do you think that makes it?

Plus it would be extremely difficult to use.

You play Rogue Trader? Don't those books specifically say that while civilian power armors have limited batteries, military PA lasts much longer, or forever?

I only play Dark Heresy but I know the books say that.

Asherian Command wrote:Plus it would be extremely difficult to use.

yea, its the kind of thing your trained in from the start of your training. If you took a 20 year guard veteran, put him in power armor, I bet he'd be less effective in combat, because all his experience relies on him being light and agile. Sisters of Battle and Space Marines never learn to fight WITHOUT power armor (or at least not for long, anyway).

ph34r wrote:You play Rogue Trader? Don't those books specifically say that while civilian power armors have limited batteries, military PA lasts much longer, or forever?

I only play Dark Heresy but I know the books say that.

It didn't mention it much simply that they were superior and focused on the underlined armor available, so simply put i had a hunch Space Marines had superior armor i just wanted to make sure just how superior and it looks like I got an answer to it. I assume all Power Armor regardless of Space Marine Equivalent or not is produced by the Adetpus Mechanicus and I assume is a marine was stripped of his power armor Presumably from death a chapter would reasonably send a small contingent to retrieve it from the enemy assuming they are not a hyper threat like Orks, tryanids chaos ect in which a situation of retrieval is tactically stupid for them to execute unless the threat has been adequately dealt with.

What about it's construction? What sectors would use this civilian power armor? Inquisition, SOB ? i've just never heard of anyone but space marines and SOB using power armor so the idea to me is strange that Rogue Traders who are arguably in the same tier of privilege as the Inquisition (low ranks i might add) who were these suits designed for?

In the second ultramarines book, I believe there's some reference to the power armour needing to recharge after a while. Not every couple hours for a couple hours though. More like during the space marines normal relaxing hours.

So in other words, it recharges proportionally to the space marine himself.

No clue about civilian armour.

Asherian Command wrote:Plus it would be extremely difficult to use.

Well Marine armor would be impossible for anyone but a Marine to use as you need the Black Carapace in order to use it. I don't know about other imperial power armor like the kind inquisitors and sororitas wear, but I would imagine they may have some lesser form of the carapace as it makes power armor much more responsive.

If you need more info about power armor as a whole, you should be looking at the dark heresy books, they go into detail regarding civilian power armor.

Certain lords of planets and militant minded individuals of the inquisition are the most common to find in power armor. The creation of power armor tends to take 1-5 years (I think) for a single person working on it, depending on the tools at hand.

A close friend of mine has a Rogue Trader book. I might pick it up and read up. There's plenty I'm missing out on

'Its limitations'

'It's limitations' means 'It is limitations'

Sorry this has been bugging me for 10 minutes.

Power armor is both precious and rare; it requires very uncommon artificer skills to create properly, and even if a skilled forger can be found the process takes a long time. That said, Astartes power armor is apparently extremely robust, so much so that a suit can be repaired to full function even after the wearer has been killed, and assigned to another Space Marine. There are suits of power armor still in service from the time of the Horus Heresy.

Astartes power armor lasts for a very, very long time without a recharge; I'm not aware of any fluff that states exactly how long, but I do recall that Marneus Calgar fought continuously against an Ork Waaagh for a day and a night, apparently without needing to recharge, so 48 hours of continuous combat operation might be considered a solid lower limit. Kayvan Shrike and a squad of Raven Guard were trapped behind Ork lines for three years; there is no information about how often they needed to recharge, sadly.

If I recall correctly, actually, Astartes power armor is run by a miniature fusion reactor; if that's true (it might not be, I'm not really up on my Space Marine fluff) then it shouldn't need to recharge for years, at least. And even then, it just needs more reaction mass added and it's good to go for another couple of decades. Cheaper civilian models would probably run off of batteries, in which case they'd need to recharge on a regular and fairly short schedule.

A Space Marine chapter will go to GREAT lengths to recover ruined power armor, up to and including sacrificing the lives of some of their battle-brothers. Given that, I would be tempted to conclude that a Space Marine is easier to replace than a suit of Astartes power armor, but it might just be a side-effect of the mysticism surrounding technology in general.

In terms of defensive qualities, power armor could be compared to wearing a modern main battle tank. The chest-plate, pauldrons, greaves and vambraces are probably impenetrable to small arms, while the helmet is necessarily thinner and so more vulnerable. The joints appear to be largely unarmored except for some cloth-like substance (presumably anti-ballistic and/or energy resistant) in some pictures, while other artwork has them with thinner interlocking plates or flared guards extending over them. The groin, armpits, and inner elbow and knee joints are the weakest parts.

First off, one needs to realize that there is not one true version of fluff. 40k encompasses a multitude of different but overlapping interpretations by thousands of authors and gamers. Which is why FFG's RPG deviates from GW fluff (which also states that Marine armour is very much penetrable by small arms, by the way) on more than one occasion. However, not in this case: As correctly pointed out, Astartes power armour functions indefinitely here, too. It is only the "civilian" models - a rather stupid concept that continues to irritate me whenever I read it (having stuff like "civilian plasma pistols" or "civilian Terminator suits" is just wrong) - which are subjected to these limitations.

Lynata wrote:First off, one needs to realize that there is not one true version of fluff. 40k encompasses a multitude of different but overlapping interpretations by thousands of authors and gamers. Which is why FFG's RPG deviates from GW fluff (which also states that Marine armour is very much penetrable by small arms, by the way) on more than one occasion. However, not in this case: As correctly pointed out, Astartes power armour functions indefinitely here, too. It is only the "civilian" models - a rather stupid concept that continues to irritate me whenever I read it (having stuff like "civilian plasma pistols" or "civilian Terminator suits" is just wrong) - which are subjected to these limitations.

Haven't seen Terminator armour actually, just a cruddy version of light and traditional power armors, out of curosity what are they made from plasteel is that correct? And I assume some form of power weave of energy? is Space Marine actually accurate where the system "recharges" in middle of combat sitautions or is that just a FPS aspect.

Big Mek Wurrzog wrote:

Haven't seen Terminator armour actually, just a cruddy version of light and traditional power armors, out of curosity what are they made from plasteel is that correct? And I assume some form of power weave of energy? is Space Marine actually accurate where the system "recharges" in middle of combat sitautions or is that just a FPS aspect.

That's just a game mechanic, or at least I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else.

Materials mentioned in the construction of Astartes power armor are plasteel, ceramite, and sometimes adamantine. I don't know anything about civilian versions, but they're probably similar, just with less or lower-quality everything.

Power armor doesn't include an energy field, no.

From my recollection, Astartes power armor is powered by a "sub-atomic stack". I take this to mean a sub-critical nuclear reactor, i.e. not fission or fusion but atomic decay giving off heat. Captured by super-efficient thermo-electric materials, you could collect up a lot of energy that way, but it would be over long periods of time. It wouldn't necessarily be suited for the intense amount of power required in short bursts for combat. So there would be batteries of some sort, like in a Chevy Volt, this is a "hybrid" suit of armor. These batteries would, in theory, require recharge time if the marine is highly active over a long enough period to drain them completely, but otherwise the batteries will compensate for high power requirements and the power plant will charge them continuously to keep them from every running out.

The flip side to this is that marines are strong enough to move fairly normally in their armor, just not as quickly or with as much force as when the armor is powered. So unless a marine IS in combat, the armor is likely not drawing much power anyway.

Long story short, if you never got a break from hard fighting, you could drain your armor's battery in days, but the power plant itself will keep making power for years, and it's likely that in normal use a marine would never notice the battery running down, ever.

/ my humble opinion

CalgarsPimpHand wrote:From my recollection, Astartes power armor is powered by a "sub-atomic stack". I take this to mean a sub-critical nuclear reactor, i.e. not fission or fusion but atomic decay giving off heat. Captured by super-efficient thermo-electric materials, you could collect up a lot of energy that way, but it would be over long periods of time. It wouldn't necessarily be suited for the intense amount of power required in short bursts for combat. So there would be batteries of some sort, like in a Chevy Volt, this is a "hybrid" suit of armor. These batteries would, in theory, require recharge time if the marine is highly active over a long enough period to drain them completely, but otherwise the batteries will compensate for high power requirements and the power plant will charge them continuously to keep them from every running out.

The flip side to this is that marines are strong enough to move fairly normally in their armor, just not as quickly or with as much force as when the armor is powered. So unless a marine IS in combat, the armor is likely not drawing much power anyway.

Long story short, if you never got a break from hard fighting, you could drain your armor's battery in days, but the power plant itself will keep making power for years, and it's likely that in normal use a marine would never notice the battery running down, ever.

/ my humble opinion

Huh, cool. ^_^

I wonder if Draigo's just a cover story then. Maybe he's really Chuc- :: bolt pistol shot is heard, and I collapse ::

:: an Ordo Hereticus Inquisitor steps up, his bolt pistol steaming from the barrel. He fires another shot into my head and says :: May your soul be consumed by your heathen gods, heretic.

:: the Inquisitor then has his henchmen drag my corpse away for disposal :: Nothing to see here, folks. Go back to your regular postings.