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reds8n wrote:...They don't use cloning..as that's illegal. Of course it was also intended for it to be illegal for the Ecclesiarchy to have soldiers too of course...

Kreig uses "vitae wombs" to produce their regiments, but they never specify exactly how these work or what they are -- side note I have recollections of someone asking about this at one of the FW Open Days but cannot find a/the link .

Why do i have an image of the Tleilaxu Axlotl Tanks.....

It's decades since I read Brave New World.

From what I remember, though, the technique is to take a blastula and divide it at an early stage so that all the cells remain completely undifferentiated and retain the capability to develop fully.

This is merely an adaptation of how natural clones (identical twins) occur.

Only the lower castes were produced in this way, since there was commensurately more demand for mentally slowed midgets than upper-class administrators.

But the exact mechanics in Brave New World are irrelevant unless you consider why Huxley was attributing such a manner of reproduction to his dystopia: he was riffing on fears of Americanization and industrial mass production.

But 40k isn't a piece of literature trying to make a point, and the particulars of the background make as much difference to it as the paint-jobs make to the miniatures in the game.

The Iron Warriors use Clones for their Chaos Space Marines with no Major problems. Some get rejected. The Current champion of Warsmith Honsou is a clone of an Ultramarine Captain.

No, they don't use clones.

They use cloned genetic material.

Big difference.

Iur_tae_mont wrote:The Iron Warriors use Clones for their Chaos Space Marines with no Major problems. Some get rejected. The Current champion of Warsmith Honsou is a clone of an Ultramarine Captain.

Not really.
Edit that 'no' out and change 'some' to 'many' or 'most'. Otherwise its wishful thinking to call hundreds of mutants a success.
These poor creatures didn't have their own skin, and actually the installment was deactivated rather violently....


The only attempt at cloning was done in the heresy (RG, corax, weregeld ) and the remnants of that have been destroyed as it was not possible to create marines this way no matter how much old knowledge from DAoT was available to try it.

Grarg wrote:Why do i have an image of the Tleilaxu Axlotl Tanks.....

40k cribbed background from Dune? There's no way that's possible!

Nurglitch wrote:That's not exactly a huge reveal if you're read Fulgrim, or A Thousand Sons, or what have you.

It goes a lot further.



But lets tale any discussion of that elsewhere.

Last ight I started reading "Dead men Walking" as it happens, if anything pertinent crops up I'll add it in here.

Actually no, that's just reiterating what's spelled out in every book after Horus Rising.

1hadhq wrote:

The only attempt at cloning was done in the heresy (RG, corax, weregeld ) and the remnants of that have been destroyed as it was not possible to create marines this way no matter how much old knowledge from DAoT was available to try it.

Not quite true. One of Swallow's Blood Angels books had an apothecary trying to restore their losses due to a civil war via cloning.



Of course...this all depends on how much you want to ignore the series.

reds8n wrote:

Spoiler:

The very genesis of the Primarchs and the powers they were given are a combination of science and sorcerous/psychic pacts wrought with the Chaos Gods themselves. Prayers and sorcerous incantations were wrought upon their very gestation pods.

So no mention of genetic material from any source other than the Emperor then? Magic clones are still clones.

Not sure if this got mentioned already but didn't Corax (Primarch of the Raven Guard) try his hand at cloning space marines after his Legion was nearly wiped out at the Dropsite Massacre? I'm pretty sure it went pear-shaped really quickly and resulted in monsters made flesh that spooked the crap out of some Space Wolves and drove Corax insane. If a primarch couldn't manage to clone his own legion it would seem rather unlikely that any of the current chapters could pull it off.

edit: found it on Lexicanum http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Corax it is under the "Horus Heresy" heading.

This may have already been brought up but I think that the Imperium dosen't clone simply because they've lost the technology to do so. At one point they had it I mean Fabius Bile used the process to make a clone of Horus and the technology used was probably from the Great Crusade era.

And gene seed isn't cloned I believe it is self replicating in that it's placed inside slaves a grown withing them then harvested. It would be great if the Imperium had cloning though, Imagine taking Guilliman and cloning him. Or finding DNA in the bones of Dorns hand or heck even cloning the Emperor. Then we'll see how strong the enemies of the Imperium really are although I doubt the various factions of the Imperium would allows these clonings to happen for various reasons.

On an extremely good Imperial History site (some may recognise, it is green and black when you go on it) that my memory fails to remember, I read about an entire chapter of prefabbed, cloned marines. They were very good at what they did, but the inquisition found out, and exiled them on pain of death, so they travelled to the outer reaches, out of the reach of the astrinomican, and settled their own world. Cloning is apparently super unholy, and its true, all christians complain about it

Warboss Imbad Ironskull:

Except as the debacle involving cloning Horus Lupercal's body, as well as Ferrus Manus' death in Fulgrim, and Magnus' invasion of Terra in A Thousand Sons, the important part of the Primarchs is psychic and cloning mere flesh doesn't do anything to replicate the soul.

Jaon:

Sounds like fan-ficton (aka 'trash').

Worse than fanfic, it sounds like justification for FSMs!

Shoo with that trash! It has no place here!

Nurglitch wrote:Warboss Imbad Ironskull:

Except as the debacle involving cloning Horus Lupercal's body, as well as Ferrus Manus' death in Fulgrim, and Magnus' invasion of Terra in A Thousand Sons, the important part of the Primarchs is psychic and cloning mere flesh doesn't do anything to replicate the soul.

Regardless I think it can be argued that even if they didn't have the same soul as the subjects they where cloned from they would still be valuable assets to the Imperium. The Primarchs where created to be generals, to lead in war is in their very genetics. This would be inherant in the clones which in all probability would make them just as effective as their originals (what do you call the original subject that was cloned anyway?). Though I will admit they would lose the experience gained by their originals in that their lives won't be exactly the same but if brought up within their respective chapters I think they would take to it like a pig to mud.

If geneseed mutates the way it is, wouldn't clones too?

Perhaps they worry that they could corrupt their stock.

Or maybe clones just ain't grimdark... I mean, mass-produced Space Marines would mean victory for the Imperium surely?

What was it that Corax did to make a ton of new Marines? Was that an acceleration process?

The IoM probably couldn't mass produce Marines even with cloning, because they can't built the necessary equipment (power armour, bolters and ammo) in large enough quantities.

nobody wrote:

1hadhq wrote:

The only attempt at cloning was done in the heresy (RG, corax, weregeld ) and the remnants of that have been destroyed as it was not possible to create marines this way no matter how much old knowledge from DAoT was available to try it.

Not quite true. One of Swallow's Blood Angels books had an apothecary trying to restore their losses due to a civil war via cloning.
Of course...this all depends on how much you want to ignore the series.

Chaos scum like F.bile doesn't count.
It a shame they killed a clone of him, hoped we get rid of this selfaggrandizing apothecary right now.

andain841 wrote:Not sure if this got mentioned already but didn't Corax (Primarch of the Raven Guard) try his hand at cloning space marines after his Legion was nearly wiped out at the Dropsite Massacre? I'm pretty sure it went pear-shaped really quickly and resulted in monsters made flesh that spooked the crap out of some Space Wolves and drove Corax insane. If a primarch couldn't manage to clone his own legion it would seem rather unlikely that any of the current chapters could pull it off.

Henners91 wrote:
What was it that Corax did to make a ton of new Marines?

Seems this valid piece of fluff isn't welcome as it ends the clone marines debate..

Kilkrazy wrote:The IoM probably couldn't mass produce Marines even with cloning, because they can't built the necessary equipment (power armour, bolters and ammo) in large enough quantities.

You doubt the Mechanicum and the Munitorum?

Mass produced Marines are not neccessary, just read the 'right' novels and a single marine is always enough.
And we also prefer to keep the eternal war, don't we?`Endless numbers of marines would quickly grant ultimate victory to the IoM.

Kilkrazy wrote:The IoM probably couldn't mass produce Marines even with cloning, because they can't built the necessary equipment (power armour, bolters and ammo) in large enough quantities.

Indeed. A single full suit of military-grade power armor alone-- designed for humans, and thus requiring less materials-- costs enough to outfit an entire platoon of Guardsmen with weapons and armor for an entire campaign.

Warboss Imbad Ironskull:

A Primarch's body is just the tip of the iceberg. Same with that of a Space Marine. Reproducing the meat is simply making a simple process more complicated and expensive.

Again, what exactly do we mean by "soul" in 40k?

A "soul" in 40k is one's psychic presence in the warp.

Every living being has one. Yes, even Blanks have one, as do Tau. Even locations and animals have them.

One wonder, then, whether and how this "presence" survives the destruction of its material self. Maybe it doesn't (not sure if it's ever been claimed to, honestlty)--and that could explain the notable lack of a 40k afterlife.

I think, and this is just speculation, that for non-psykers all of the energy in the soul disperses in the form of pure emotions, eventually being absorbed by one of the Chaos Gods.

Psykers survive, for a short while, in the warp. But eventually theirs will as well, unless they have a suitably powerful ego/psyche with which to withstand the horrors of the Warp and continue on. The lesser psykers will likely be consumed by Daemons. The most powerful of these psykers probably eventually become Daemons, or make their way to the Emperor to join with him.

It's almost as if the 40K fluff is a bodged up collection of tropes, themes, memes and scenes, dredged from a thousand SF, fantasy and historical examples by lucky dip methods, as opposed to the finely crafted, internally logical setting that results from a rigorously tuned writing machine.

Good thing too, or else we wouldn't have any reason to dig into those memes to figure out what they're alluding to. And that would make for a duller background forum.

Nurglitch wrote:Warboss Imbad Ironskull:

A Primarch's body is just the tip of the iceberg. Same with that of a Space Marine. Reproducing the meat is simply making a simple process more complicated and expensive.

.......I'm not sure what your point is?

My point is that, as others have pointed out, cloning a Primarch's body is a waste of time unless you can reproduce the entity that was bound into the flesh. Ditto with the Space Marine. The essence of a Space Marine isn't simply the Astartes' physical body; the candidate's spiritual strength is more important and that's something you can't reproduce in a vat in a cost effective way. I mean suppose counter-evidentially that clones can have souls so that clones of sufficient strength of will and character could be reproduced from scratch, and that such clones could be safe-guarded from the issues of monocultures. Now consider the strenuous physical ordeals an ordinary Astartes candidate must go through to be certified from the procedure. Since we have no guarantee that the clones' souls will be mass-produced like their bodies, we can reasonably expected the same rate of attrition in candidacy. 99% of clones will be wasted meat. Meat that required not only vats, but being raised from newborn, requiring care, guidance, education, and so on above and beyond the usual Chapter budget for recruitment and training. On the other hand, Humanity is billions strong and groups of humans can produce greater numbers for considerably less cost and far less expertise.

Aside from all the risks of producing soulless Blanks, genetic degradation, monoculturing Astartes, and so on, cloning Astartes is simply making an expensive process and making it moreso.