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I was wondering what the space marine half helmet style head gear is called and what there functions are. You normally see them on space marines equipped with flamers.

Can you post a pic?

I believe that he means the heads with the rebreathers on it such as shown on the flamer in this pic.
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod1060074

I believe its a marine wearing a rebreather and not a helmet, which has an inbuilt rebreather.

Ah ok thanks. Not sure of what the benefits are of having half you head bear when shooting what is essentially napalm but hey

There are no benifits, and the only good excuse is if your helmet is trashed(not unreasonable)

All my marines wear their damn helmets.

burnaboy wrote:
Ah ok thanks. Not sure of what the benefits are of having half you head bear when shooting what is essentially napalm but hey

The Imperium is not great at maintenance, there might be a shortage of working helmets even for marines.

It's also possible that some marines have better senses with their own eyes, ears and nose than they would with a helmet on.

Plus having skin exposed lets you feel wind, temperature changes etc you can't pick up in a full suit of armor.

And it's not like a marine will care about a few drops of napalm on his forehead. They add character.

And we need to have some reason marine armor fails 1/3 of the time!

...Well, if there were no benefit to having half your face exposed, squad leaders would hardly walk around bareheaded, now would they?

In all seriousness, it's probably a matter of personal preference, Space Marine Chapters function at least as much as a religious order as a military unit, so if a brother decides he doesn't like the lenses getting in the way of his ability to see the battlefield it's not like anyone's going to pull uniform regulations on him.

Space Marines can survive in vacuum and breathe under water without helmets.. on top of that they have a black carapace, plus radios and stuff like that (I think) I'm pretty sure that a helmet is just personal prefereance unless fighting something that could steal their DNA. Plus I remember hearing in some fluff that half of a space marine's head was blasted off and he didn't even notice until he realized he couldn't see from his other eye (Correct me if i'm wrong as I don't know if its true or if this guy was wearing something or not).. But the point is that space marines pretty much already got a ''helmet''.

I always figured the older a Marine gets the less he needs to rely on a helmets enhancements. This probably results from getting it damaged or knocked off so many times they learn to adapt to helmetless fighting and excel at it. This means having better peripheral vison, sounds, smells, not relying on tactical data to load, and more or lezs relying on ones own intuition and senses rather than mechanical means. You can eyeball that xeno who is about to blow your head off faster than the helmet can register it as a threat and light it up on your viewscreen.

Rule of cool, lads. The miniatures and some illustrations have them with bare heads because it looks cool, that's all.

In the novels, even SW with their accute senses wear teir helmets more often than not.