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I would have thought that the Imperium would have arrived when we discovered and used the atomic bomb and nuclear power.
But anyways, yeah i agree with jfrazell someone would probably be able to steal weapons from the marines.
And I don't think thunderhawk transports will work too well against anti air or fighters, unless marines have some type of airplane I haven't heard of, which is quite possible.

Reverse engineering plasma weapons or bolters might not be an option.

Consider an F-22 Raptor sent back in time to WWII, just 60 years ago.

Sure scientists could more or less figure out what it is and how it works but their material science is no where near up to the task of copying the engines and airframe.

And the electronics would be a complete mystery.

They might get some ideas from it but copying it is just out of the question.

Now for a plasma pistol...

"OK Mr Tech Priest talk or we turn it back on!"
"No! please! Emperor's mercy do not again subject me to the singing of the one you call Celene!"
"How do we make these plasma guns?"
"Well you'll need a supply of Monopole Duraluminum Dilithium alloy to make the gun itself."
"Mono what?"
"Oh it's a common alloy in any binary star system, you just have to harvest it from asteroids trapped between the two stars."
"Um... right."
"For the fuel you'll need hydrogen 4 isotopes, fortunately it's pretty common in the upper atmosphere of the world you call Neptune."
"Um..."
"Then you need to hook the weapon up to your plasma reactor to intitialize the reaction..."

You get the idea...

Hold on, that Tech Priest would surely reply with either.....

Option A ) First, thou shalt sacrifice to the Omnissiah three Jars of Sacred unguent etc....

or

Option B ) Buggered if I know mate.

And to be honest, Option B is the more likely!

Turn 1:
SM's land. Due to deepstrike rules, they cannot assault. Spend their turn shooting or preparing to shoot.
In retribution, we attack.

Turn 2:
SM's annihilate anyone in HtH with them. Consolidate d6" into terrain.
We shoot but launch no assaults.

Turn 3:
SM's give us the opportunity to surrender.
We ask them to wait while we "vote on it."

Turn 4:
We get our last warning; Surrender or die!
We send our "representatives" to "negotiate the world's surrender."

Turn 5:
Unbeknownst to the SM's, we sent Jehovah's Witnesses. They are all converted and spend their days trying to convert other Space Marine chapters.
We do not need to take our turn. They have been tabled.

Game over.

and what alot of you have forgot, a space marine chapter never gathers in one place. ussually they only send about 2 companies. no space marine chapter would bother with a back water world like earth.

Not all space marine chapters are like that. Some actually do gather in large numbers frequently, and besides, it is irrelevant. That's like saying "Well, Space Marines can't travel 38,000 years back in time, so it's moot!". In vs debates, we refer to such things as "by act of Q".

Determining our dependence on fossil fuels....

First is the offer of join the imperium of Man or suffer the consequences. Give them a few weeks to talk when they refuse...

1. Destroy or incapacitate every satellite in orbit. You just shut down all but land line traffic.
2. Detonate 4 or so nuclear warheads in upper atmosphere to generate EMP and shut down any non-hardened electronics.
3. Destroy any tankers currently en route around the globe stopping flow of fuel.
3. Pull back into outer solar system and maintain observations.
4. Send Thunderhawks to destroy any attempts to launch replacement comm satellites.

As world markets collapse, loss of communications and we go back to a turn of the century (19th to 20th) tech as we try to recover despite failed transportation network (no fuel), starvation (no delivery of goods), anarchy (no mass communications)....

Repeat the offer to all the world leaders still trying to maintain a grip... are you ready to see the Emporer's Light?

Most should concede at this point, some may resist but without any infrastructure or limited fuel... their military forces are going to be reduced to Imperial Guardsmen with nothing but their current supply of dragons and milans to deal with the marines. I should think a few examples would break this resistance.

The marines should be able to form an effective shield to any and all who follow them and provide basic assistance in restoring the norm.

Meanwhile a call goes to the Imperium to send an inquisitorial detail and a contingent of battle sisters to determine the extent of the heresy that is here and eliminate it.

50/50 that every clergyman and politician is imprisoned, killed, turned into arco-flagellants or penitent engines. Upon seeing this, Barack Obama delivers a world wide address calling for celebration declaring that the Imperium stands for the kind of change that he promised to bring us as his wife states in the background this is the first time she is proud to be a part of the human race. Bill Clinton quickly makes a background deal to become the first Governor of Earth but is assassinated for heresy by the Callidus assassin that sheds her Hillary Clinton disguise. Finally peace reigns as Kim Ill Sung is announced as the first Governor of Earth.

"50/50 that every clergyman and politician is imprisoned, killed, turned into arco-flagellants or penitent engines. Upon seeing this, Barack Obama delivers a world wide address calling for celebration declaring that the Imperium stands for the kind of change that he promised to bring us as his wife states in the background this is the first time she is proud to be a part of the human race. Bill Clinton quickly makes a background deal to become the first Governor of Earth but is assassinated for heresy by the Callidus assassin that sheds her Hillary Clinton disguise. Finally peace reigns as Kim Ill Sung is announced as the first Governor of Earth."

Now now, let's keep politics out of it.

Besides Kim Ill Sung is dead, you're thinking of his son Kim Jong Il (who may also be dead but that's another issue).

DAaddict wrote:50/50 that every clergyman and politician is imprisoned, killed, turned into arco-flagellants or penitent engines. Upon seeing this, Barack Obama delivers a world wide address calling for celebration declaring that the Imperium stands for the kind of change that he promised to bring us as his wife states in the background this is the first time she is proud to be a part of the human race. Bill Clinton quickly makes a background deal to become the first Governor of Earth but is assassinated for heresy by the Callidus assassin that sheds her Hillary Clinton disguise. Finally peace reigns as Kim Ill Sung is announced as the first Governor of Earth.

Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton are all politicians. The wouldn't be making worldwide addresses or making bids for governor, unless they were made into the most charismatic arcoflagellants ever.

DAaddict wrote:Determining our dependence on fossil fuels....

First is the offer of join the imperium of Man or suffer the consequences. Give them a few weeks to talk when they refuse...

1. Destroy or incapacitate every satellite in orbit. You just shut down all but land line traffic.
2. Detonate 4 or so nuclear warheads in upper atmosphere to generate EMP and shut down any non-hardened electronics.
3. Destroy any tankers currently en route around the globe stopping flow of fuel.
3. Pull back into outer solar system and maintain observations.
4. Send Thunderhawks to destroy any attempts to launch replacement comm satellites.

As world markets collapse, loss of communications and we go back to a turn of the century (19th to 20th) tech as we try to recover despite failed transportation network (no fuel), starvation (no delivery of goods), anarchy (no mass communications)....

Ah HA!
You forgot our HAM Radios!
We'll use those to coordinate a worldwide effort.

We'll commandeer one of their space ships and have a rap star and hack actor fly it up there and implant a virus into their system. It'll shut everything down, thus removing their Invulnerable save.
At that precise moment, all the armies of the world, coordinating their attacks via radio waves, will strike out at the SM battle cruisers, destroying them.
That's a no-brainer there.

Eric

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Much the same as I was going to point out Voron!

Take out all our Satellites, and we are deaf, dumb and pretty much blind. Also known as Lambs to the Slaughter. Add in that they Imperium would be able to 'White Noise' the airwaves, and not even hand radios would work.

This is why map reading should not be removed from the national curriculum.

Fun thread.

Here's my take:

When the marine battle barge arrives, they are announcing themselves as the envoy of a galaxy-spanning human empire.

We barely have missiles that can hit a satelite traveling along a fixed trajectory, there is no way we could use our Nukes against an orbital target that is able to reposition itself and that can theoretically shoot down incoming missiles and has shields that can theoretically withstand a nuclear blast anyway.

This ship has the ability to cause massive human casualties anywhere on the globe at will, and they have no problems doing just that as many times as needed in order to force capitulation.

This is a situation very similar to the end of WWII where the US had a destructive technology that no one else had and was willing to use it in order to dominate others.

There is no way any world leader can advocate 'fighting' when to do so means that *BLAM* another several thousand people are dead as the battlebarge lances NY city.

This is especially true because the 'invaders' are human and are asking us to join them (in servitude) and in response they promise us many wonderous things. Although in reality our fate will likely be worse, the promise of a brighter future would almost certainly be enough to get us to surrender especially since they have the ability to inflict massive damage to us and we have no way of preventing it.

I think the greatest impact of actual marines would be as a representative of what the Imperium can achieve (beyond the obvious sign of their spacecraft). Anyone witnessing a marine in person would clearly know that this is an Empire that surely has many more devestating weapons to bring to bear on us should we try to fight back.


I mean, sure if we knew that there was only a 1,000 of them and that they didn't understand their technology and stuff we could maybe think about fighting them. But in reality we would assume there was plenty more where they come from and we have nothing that can hurt them in space so we simply have to capitulate.


End of story, no fighting to be had.


The only fighting would probably occur once the true nature of Imperial reign started to sink in. Then we'd almost certainly have insurgent forces fighting for their freedom, but the government troops (now PDF) would now be tasked with keeping these insurrections down.

To be honest, i would willing go to the emperors light without question. and kill for there cause without a second thought. even if they were just to torture or kill me afterwards. I dont know why exactly but i would.

jfrazell wrote:If they haven't obliterated the earth in the 3 months then they've lost.

timeline
1. Within 3 months one of our skilled thieves has procured a plasma or melta pistol.

2. Within 3 months they are selling it in the Asian underground.

3. Within 6 months the Borg, er Microsoft will have a copy.

4. Massed armies of kids with mass produced plasmas will eliminate all marines with ease. Enter cool speeder races as captured landspeeders become the new must have.

5. Within 2 years, fleets of ships based on reverse engineered technology will be sent out. The Imperium doesn't stand a chance against the power of the Borg er Microsoft.

6. Above timetable would be put off forever by crashes, bugs, hackers, spammers and bandwidth being stolen by all manner of nefarious Earth cyber-criminals. We win!

Just for the record I am going to compare a challenger 2 and a Leman Russ, with the value for a Leman Russ on the left.

Length(m) - 7.08/8.3
Width(m) - 4.86/3.5
Height(m) - 4.42/2.5

Main Armament - 120mm smothbore battlecannon/120mm rifled L30A1
Secondary Armament - 2 side mounted Gryphonne IV heavy bolters; 1 hull mounted Lucius pattern lascannon/coaxial 7.62 mm L94A1 EX-34 (chain gun); 7.62 mm L37A2 Commander's cupola machine gun

Speed - 29kph/59kph

The Challenger also has advanced targeting equipment, greater angle of elevation for its main barrel and can carry 20 more rounds.

Plus, being shorter, it can hide more easily!

Challenger beats Leman Russ!

I think our tanks' main concerns would be enemy lascannons. Ours are built to withstand blasts - the only weapons we have that can penetrate tanks are blast weapons, so they're built to resist those. Energy weapons would do a number on them.

However someone brought up an interesting point about the technology they had. In classic Hollywood style, this would be their weak point. For example rather than try to kill each marine, we could aim to disable their weapons - a boltgun is half the size of a man. Hitting a bolter or lascannon with an RPG is bound to mess up some part of its inner workings. Even though they can perform maintenance and repairs on equipment, it requires a tech priest to do it. Imagine a 10-man tactical squad tasked with taking an objective somewhere. If they were resisted at all by people knowing this about them, they could see their weapons disabled very quickly, and would require extraction.

Constantly having their weapons in need of repair would dramatically slow down their war.

I'm pretty sure bolters aren't 3 feet long, Battle Sisters would have an awfully difficult time hefting the things. Even if they were, the accuracy required to hit something like that with an RPG (or equivalent) is beyond just about anyone alive, especially in a combat situation where said weapon may be pointing and firing at you. And if we had to use our heavier munitions simply to disable their standard issue weapons, we'd be pretty much screwed anyway.

Put a bolter up against a guardsman model.

And yes, without the strength boost from power armour, no sister of battle would be able to carry one. Look at what the 40k universe calls a "pistol"!

We are such dorks.

Somewhat OT -- please would someone who has a Leman Russ model measure it and post the dimensions?

I would like to work out the true scale of 40K.

The scale of 40k is meant to be 1inch = 5foot but this is nonsense as a battle cannon would be over a foot in diameter, not the 120mm listed in my above post (I got the data from th WD with the armoured companies so it is GW fluff).

A leman russ is 8cm wide(hull) so 8cm=7m or 8cm=700cm so 1.14cm=1m. IMHO though, scale is irrelevant since the ranges for weapons have to be reduced anyway, to fit a game on a tabletop.

I was about to say, don't even try to use "scale" to guess how big a true-life equivalent would be. Space Marines are no taller than Guardsmen on the tabletop. And even if the power-armor boost was required to heft a bolter, have you even tried fire a weapon 3 feet long, whose grips are on opposite ends of the weapon? It makes even less sense than 40k normally does.

And that bolter would have a range of maybe 50 feet, as compared to the model height.

And a transport with an interior space of 8x5 feet can hold ten marines.

George Spiggott wrote:

Kid_Kyoto wrote:...they can take hostages (the Pope, the President of the US, Bono...

With some sort of 'surrender or we'll give them back' deal, right?

Reminds me of a student Rag Week deal by the IIRC City of London Polytechnic back in the early 90's.

Some 'terrorists' with toy AK's stood on a street corner with Ken Livingston in handcuffs, demanding ransom payments or they threatened to release him.

Kid_Kyoto wrote:

"OK Mr Tech Priest talk or we turn it back on!"
"No! please! Emperor's mercy do not again subject me to the singing of the one you call Celene!"

You get the idea...

Love it.

WeeHessy wrote:Just for the record I am going to compare a challenger 2 and a Leman Russ, with the value for a Leman Russ on the left.

Length(m) - 7.08/8.3
Width(m) - 4.86/3.5
Height(m) - 4.42/2.5

Main Armament - 120mm smothbore battlecannon/120mm rifled L30A1
Secondary Armament - 2 side mounted Gryphonne IV heavy bolters; 1 hull mounted Lucius pattern lascannon/coaxial 7.62 mm L94A1 EX-34 (chain gun); 7.62 mm L37A2 Commander's cupola machine gun

Speed - 29kph/59kph

The Challenger also has advanced targeting equipment, greater angle of elevation for its main barrel and can carry 20 more rounds.

Plus, being shorter, it can hide more easily!

Challenger beats Leman Russ!

You completely fail to take into account a few pretty serious elements here.

1. The Leman Russ' speed is only 29kpm when it roll off the assembly line. Pretty much every crew in the Imperium quickly bypasses the excessive governing placed on the tank by paranoid Mechanicus craftsmen, bring the tank's speed up in leaps and bounds, up to 79 kpm. In addition, the 'signature move' of the Russ is a full speed 90 degree turn, which it can execute in under a second. Flanking the tank with modern vehicles is a laughable exercise.
2. The Leman Russ is made of plasteel, plasma steel. It's protective qualities are completely unheard of by modern standards, to the point where it'll turn a modern 80mm anti-tank shell at point blank range.
3. The Conquerer, the reduced recoil version of the Russ, produces over a million newtons of force when it fires. The gun's velocity is such that it'll go through a modern battle tank with little to no deflection.
4. The Leman Russ possesses computer uplinks, auto-loaders, laser targeters, and a limited degree of computer intelligence. In addition, inertial dampeners eliminate the possibility of concussion damage to crew or equipment.
5. The Russ is reliable, will run on anything that burns, and can be made on the cheap to a level we can't even comprehend.
6. The Lascannon is a multi-gigawatt weapon. It's going to slag a Challanger in one shot.
7. Heavy Bolter rounds are basically RPG-7 rockets, with more accuracy and explosive power. It'll reduce our light and medium vehicles to scrape in short order.

open_sketchbook wrote:
1. The Leman Russ' speed is only 29kpm when it roll off the assembly line. Pretty much every crew in the Imperium quickly bypasses the excessive governing placed on the tank by paranoid Mechanicus craftsmen, bring the tank's speed up in leaps and bounds, up to 79 kpm. In addition, the 'signature move' of the Russ is a full speed 90 degree turn, which it can execute in under a second. Flanking the tank with modern vehicles is a laughable exercise.

79kpm with a russ
Maybe if transported.Not on its own.
If you want to flip your russ,try your 90° turn.
There could be a reason,why we earthlings have dropped the variants of tracked vehicles looking like the russ.

2. The Leman Russ is made of plasteel, plasma steel. It's protective qualities are completely unheard of by modern standards, to the point where it'll turn a modern 80mm anti-tank shell at point blank range.

Modern ammo will just "meltagun" through plasteel.Old WWI tech in tank-builds won't hold against AT.

4. The Leman Russ possesses computer uplinks, auto-loaders, laser targeters, and a limited degree of computer intelligence. In addition, inertial dampeners eliminate the possibility of concussion damage to crew or equipment.

Human loaders are faster than auto-loaders.To call the commanders lasgun a laser-targeter

7. Heavy Bolter rounds are basically RPG-7 rockets, with more accuracy and explosive power. It'll reduce our light and medium vehicles to scrape in short order.

WS 3 for IG?

Actually, modern ammo will meltagun through steel plate. The Russ likely has armour comparable to that on our own tanks, which will shrug off anything less than an APDS round.
The Russ is armour 14 on the front. This is roughly a 30-40% chance of stopping a damn laser cannon capable of vapourising a man where he stands, or killing a heavily boosted super-soldier instantly.

lord_sutekh wrote:All that tech can't take out guys with AK-47s hiding in the hills of Afghanistan (or hasn't yet, if it can).

Actually if given free reign of the US military and the disbarring of all rules of war the US could feasibly wipe out the entire Middle eastern population to the point of insignificance. The only reason the US is having as many problems as they are is becuase they are restriced to following the rules of war as laid out in the Geneva convention. This has happened to them before. In Vietnam most battlefield wounded were simply shot by the NVA, where as we had to by rules give them the exact same medical treatment as our own wounded. (Total bs if you ask me.)

Though if you want something at a similar scale to a SM invasion I would suggest the Posleen War series by John Ringo, though he also says that once the gravity well is controlled it is game over for the planet side forces.

As to an actual space marine invasion, one chapter probably could destroy the worlds infrastructure. They would simply destroy or cut off all highlevel communication from say state governors, presidents etc. Then all they would really have to do is sitback and wait. Without a central government controlling things you would have a few weeks of rampant looting. Then the individual communities would band for mutual protection. So pretty much we would simply devolve into village sized factions. So all they would have to do is sitback and wait, they wouldn't even have to occupy. They plan on rebuilding the place from the ground up anyways, why not let us do the demolition for them?

Skorpion wrote:Actually, modern ammo will meltagun through steel plate. The Russ likely has armour comparable to that on our own tanks, which will shrug off anything less than an APDS round.
The Russ is armour 14 on the front. This is roughly a 30-40% chance of stopping a damn laser cannon capable of vapourising a man where he stands, or killing a heavily boosted super-soldier instantly.

And again, how many Tanks can we field, how many can the Imperium Field?

Add in the Super Heavies, including Leviathins etc, and we are truly stuffed. We don't have Orbital Bombardments to punch a hole in lines. They do. We don't have anywhere near the number of troops they do. Lasguns, crucially, have a high ammo capacity, and the reloads don't weigh anywhere near as much as convential FMJ ammo we use.

We'd be screwed! Utterly, utterly screwed.

Well, I say we. What would really happen is that Britain would seize it's chance to once again become the dominant World Power, and coerce the Imperium to strap really, really big engines on Britain, so we can sail her across the world, like a massive island of Pirates. Our shock Troops? Geordies. Our sabatoeurs? Scousers.

Well judging by a lot of the fluff actually not that many. Further, I believe we're talking marines here. Thats a minimal number of predators. Of course, the issue is blowing the thunderhawks out of the sky or dropping ordnace on the predators on the ground (as noted unless they drop nearby prepared positions or stay on the ground for some period of time we would not be able to deploy armor against them).