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 JustALittleOrkish wrote:

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
Important to consider is their sheer demand. Every single Chapter wants more Terminator armour, all the time. The lion's share of that is probably going to go to the First and Second Foundings.

So the "value" of Terminator armour in an economic sense is very, very high. Demand is extremely high while supply is extremely low. A Chapter might get a resupply of ten fresh Terminator suits every 1000 years, for a made up example. Even just receiving shipments of parts is extremely valuable. This means that Terminator suits have to be regarded as precious relics, treated with the best possible maintenance and care because they can't just requisition new ones whenever they feel like it (unless they're the Grey Knights).
/quote]
I always wondered with Space Hulk if it was the best use of termies. Ooh a pile of space junk, better send out elites in expensive armour. In a universe where planets will be virus bombed for the risk of a chaos taint it seems much more likely just to blow it up. Or use a tractor beam to pull it into a star. Genestealer risk over.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I messed up the quote there and the stupid iphone won't let me edit my post. It was supposed to look like this. Sorry for repeat :

Frozen Ocean wrote:
Important to consider is their sheer demand. Every single Chapter wants more Terminator armour, all the time. The lion's share of that is probably going to go to the First and Second Foundings.

So the "value" of Terminator armour in an economic sense is very, very high. Demand is extremely high while supply is extremely low. A Chapter might get a resupply of ten fresh Terminator suits every 1000 years, for a made up example. Even just receiving shipments of parts is extremely valuable. This means that Terminator suits have to be regarded as precious relics, treated with the best possible maintenance and care because they can't just requisition new ones whenever they feel like it (unless they're the Grey Knights).

I always wondered with Space Hulk if it was the best use of termies. Ooh a pile of space junk, better send out elites in expensive armour. In a universe where planets will be virus bombed for the risk of a chaos taint it seems much more likely just to blow it up. Or use a tractor beam to pull it into a star. Genestealer risk over.

Space Hulks often have valuable stuff inside or take way too long to blow up. So they send people in to blow it up from the inside and grab the valuable stuff.

Martel732 wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I'm talking before that stuff. None of that used to exist.

ohh you mean like 3025?

Yeah. The original original game. It was in a box. The fluff even stated that their technology had gone backwards. Which is the opposite of what actually happens during a war.

in fairness we've never experianced a generations long total war employing WMDs.

also keep in mind that Comstar was sabotoging any attempts to advance the tech level

But with multiple planets, it wouldn't matter.

Comstar was a stupid plot device. Someone would have invented a new communication system or just said feth it and nuked the gak out of Earth.

If you can't tell, I really dislike retro-future stories. Because they are pretty much impossible. Even Dune acknowledged this with the Ixians.

If you hate the setting so much, why do you play? Not trying to be rude, I'm genuinely curious.

I like to think that production of new terminator armour suits is limited by the acquisition of fragments of The Emperor's armour.

I like to imagine the Cult Mechanicus scouring battle fields across thousands of planets that ten thousand years ago saw The Emperor fighting, in the unlikely hope of discovering a discarded fragment of The Emperor's own armour, allowing the creation of another TDA suit.

Martel732 wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"So what if essential components are vanishingly rare"

You'd make something else.

And if something else isn't as good, you don't have terminator armor. You get power armor. Or some 2+ armor that reduces your WS and I to 1 because it's clumsy. Or whatever.

It's looking like the strongest materials are made from humble carbon anyway. 40K needs the unobtanium trope to make their story remotely workable. I understand what they're going for. I just was never into that much and I'm probably burned out on grimdark at this point.

The sad part is that terminator armor isn't even that good. There's so many weapons that go right through it in the game. I wouldn't bother fielding it as a marine chapter.

That's because fluff wouldn't make for much of a game. Even basic POWER ARMOUR makes marine basically impervious to small arms(autoguns, lasguns, even bolter struggles). How interesting game would be where say basic marine is T5 with 2+ rerollable save?

(also would make for lousy way for selling miniatures when pair of terminators would be aplenty. Basic marine army would be like handful of models)

Cataphractii and Tartaros terminator armor as far as I know is not produced any more, although with Bac being released and everybody grabbing it for their marine armies, apparently a forge world somewhere is mass producing Cata armor again.

Indomitus armor is still slowly churned out on several forge worlds. the chapters most closely aligned with those worlds likely get first dibs. It wouldn't surprise me if the more handy chapters like Iron Hands, Salamanders and their successors build their own.

tneva82 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"So what if essential components are vanishingly rare"

You'd make something else.

And if something else isn't as good, you don't have terminator armor. You get power armor. Or some 2+ armor that reduces your WS and I to 1 because it's clumsy. Or whatever.

It's looking like the strongest materials are made from humble carbon anyway. 40K needs the unobtanium trope to make their story remotely workable. I understand what they're going for. I just was never into that much and I'm probably burned out on grimdark at this point.

The sad part is that terminator armor isn't even that good. There's so many weapons that go right through it in the game. I wouldn't bother fielding it as a marine chapter.

That's because fluff wouldn't make for much of a game. Even basic POWER ARMOUR makes marine basically impervious to small arms(autoguns, lasguns, even bolter struggles). How interesting game would be where say basic marine is T5 with 2+ rerollable save?

(also would make for lousy way for selling miniatures when pair of terminators would be aplenty. Basic marine army would be like handful of models)

That basically negates the fluff, then. Terminators die to shotguns and stubbers at a non-trivial rate. Thoroughly unimpressive. You can say they shouldn't, but they DO. The fluff doesn't save my BA from being stomped all over by every Xeno list in the game, either. Where's THAT in the fluff?

Martel732 wrote:
That basically negates the fluff, then. Terminators die to shotguns and stubbers at a non-trivial rate. Thoroughly unimpressive. You can say they shouldn't, but they DO. The fluff doesn't save my BA from being stomped all over by every Xeno list in the game, either. Where's THAT in the fluff?

You are making major screwup in assuming gameplay equals fluff.

They don't, they won't. GW isn't interested in selling handful space marine model max per marine player army.

Fluff!=game play.

If marines in gameplay would equal fluff there THREE models would be marine army. That without factoring in terminators.

more to the point who the hell would want to play guard if they where basicly told "your infantry weapons are useless vs this army, which BTW is the most common army in 40k"

tneva82 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That basically negates the fluff, then. Terminators die to shotguns and stubbers at a non-trivial rate. Thoroughly unimpressive. You can say they shouldn't, but they DO. The fluff doesn't save my BA from being stomped all over by every Xeno list in the game, either. Where's THAT in the fluff?

You are making major screwup in assuming gameplay equals fluff.

They don't, they won't. GW isn't interested in selling handful space marine model max per marine player army.

Fluff!=game play.

If marines in gameplay would equal fluff there THREE models would be marine army. That without factoring in terminators.

It's not a major screwup. It's disavowing the fluff as having any meaning. If marines die to shotguns in the game, they die to shotguns. Period. It doesn't matter what some fanfiction says about it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BrianDavion wrote:
more to the point who the hell would want to play guard if they where basicly told "your infantry weapons are useless vs this army, which BTW is the most common army in 40k"

Good thing they aren't.

Power armour plate is impervious to lasguns, autoguns and shotguns.
Power armour seals arent- the rubberised joints that allow a marine to flex at the knees, waist, elbows, underarms and neck. If you were a guardsman who had fought astartes for any length of time you would concentrate fire at a marines belly, which is not covered by his bolter when he raises it to fire at your comrades.

This is abstracted ingame to a 66% chance for any small arms damage to simply bounce off into the ether. That 33% of failure is not some lasbolt or handful of shot boring straight through an undamaged chestplate- it's weight of fire eventually battering through a pauldron (which lorewise, explode outwards to deflect energy- like tank armour) or finding the neck/abdomen seal.

It also allows some sharpshooter to take out a marine through his eye.

Terminator armour covers most of these weak areas with overlapping plate, leading to reduced mobility but increased durability. A 2+ save is literally as good as it gets in a D6 system without rerolls or autopass.
Terminator armour is thus ideal for situations where durability is key and mobility/agility is less important- walking down a long corridor with little to no cover for example.

As to why marines board spacehulks at all- they are not just space borne refuse- they are amalgamations of human and alien ships going back millennia.
They are treasure troves of lost technology, artifacts and weapons- literally the scifi equivalent of dungeons filled with loot.
They are also filled with monsters and often materialise on crash courses with imperial worlds and need to be diverted.

" That 33% of failure is not some lasbolt or handful of shot boring straight through an undamaged chestplate- it's weight of fire eventually battering through a pauldron (which lorewise, explode outwards to deflect energy- like tank armour) or finding the neck/abdomen seal.
"

Except it can happen on the first shot of the first turn. It's clearly not impervious.

Martel732 wrote:
" That 33% of failure is not some lasbolt or handful of shot boring straight through an undamaged chestplate- it's weight of fire eventually battering through a pauldron (which lorewise, explode outwards to deflect energy- like tank armour) or finding the neck/abdomen seal.
"

Except it can happen on the first shot of the first turn. It's clearly not impervious.

That would the game which does not accurately depict fluff.

 =Angel= wrote:

As to why marines board spacehulks at all- they are not just space borne refuse- they are amalgamations of human and alien ships going back millennia.
They are treasure troves of lost technology, artifacts and weapons- literally the scifi equivalent of dungeons filled with loot.
They are also filled with monsters and often materialise on crash courses with imperial worlds and need to be diverted.

More importantly, loot that can be replicated. I mean it probably won't but it can be if it's good enough.

pm713 wrote:That would the game which does not accurately depict fluff.

Martel732 wrote:It's not a major screwup. It's disavowing the fluff as having any meaning. If marines die to shotguns in the game, they die to shotguns. Period. It doesn't matter what some fanfiction says about it.

I wouldn't start trying to argue this point. I think he views the TT above the rest in terms of background.

Martel732 wrote:
" That 33% of failure is not some lasbolt or handful of shot boring straight through an undamaged chestplate- it's weight of fire eventually battering through a pauldron (which lorewise, explode outwards to deflect energy- like tank armour) or finding the neck/abdomen seal.
"

Except it can happen on the first shot of the first turn. It's clearly not impervious.

You are making mistake of equaling game effect to fluff. Fluff which is GW written official and ergo is not fanfic. You have serious misunderstanding of basic concepts if you claim GW's official fluff is fanfic.

Besides Martell, as I said, how fun would it be for say a IG player if they literally with their infantry weapons could not kill basic infantry? yes Terminator armor can be overcome by mass firepower but that's more at this point a flaw with the basic D6 system.

nareik wrote:
I like to think that production of new terminator armour suits is limited by the acquisition of fragments of The Emperor's armour.

I like to imagine the Cult Mechanicus scouring battle fields across thousands of planets that ten thousand years ago saw The Emperor fighting, in the unlikely hope of discovering a discarded fragment of The Emperor's own armour, allowing the creation of another TDA suit.

The bit about a fragment of the Emperor's armour in every Terminator suit is not actually true. You do realise this, yes?

There was terminator armour before there were shards of the Emperor's armour to put in them.

 Furyou Miko wrote:

nareik wrote:
I like to think that production of new terminator armour suits is limited by the acquisition of fragments of The Emperor's armour.

I like to imagine the Cult Mechanicus scouring battle fields across thousands of planets that ten thousand years ago saw The Emperor fighting, in the unlikely hope of discovering a discarded fragment of The Emperor's own armour, allowing the creation of another TDA suit.

The bit about a fragment of the Emperor's armour in every Terminator suit is not actually true. You do realise this, yes?

There was terminator armour before there were shards of the Emperor's armour to put in them.

But you gotta admire a fictional propaganda machine that's so good it makes real people believe it!

True.

Besides, everyone who knows anything knows that the true shards of the Emperor's armour are enshrined in the Praesidium Protectiva, a group of special Storm Shields entrusted to the Adepta Sororitas for safekeeping.

As far as I'm aware terminator suits can still be made but it is very long and expensive and so most chapters have less than 30 suits available.

tneva82 wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
"So what if essential components are vanishingly rare"

You'd make something else.

And if something else isn't as good, you don't have terminator armor. You get power armor. Or some 2+ armor that reduces your WS and I to 1 because it's clumsy. Or whatever.

It's looking like the strongest materials are made from humble carbon anyway. 40K needs the unobtanium trope to make their story remotely workable. I understand what they're going for. I just was never into that much and I'm probably burned out on grimdark at this point.

The sad part is that terminator armor isn't even that good. There's so many weapons that go right through it in the game. I wouldn't bother fielding it as a marine chapter.

That's because fluff wouldn't make for much of a game. Even basic POWER ARMOUR makes marine basically impervious to small arms(autoguns, lasguns, even bolter struggles). How interesting game would be where say basic marine is T5 with 2+ rerollable save?

(also would make for lousy way for selling miniatures when pair of terminators would be aplenty. Basic marine army would be like handful of models)

It would be fine if marines costed 80 points and had a rapid fire RPG w str 6 ap4 assault 6 profile.

 Furyou Miko wrote:

nareik wrote:
I like to think that production of new terminator armour suits is limited by the acquisition of fragments of The Emperor's armour.

I like to imagine the Cult Mechanicus scouring battle fields across thousands of planets that ten thousand years ago saw The Emperor fighting, in the unlikely hope of discovering a discarded fragment of The Emperor's own armour, allowing the creation of another TDA suit.

The bit about a fragment of the Emperor's armour in every Terminator suit is not actually true. You do realise this, yes?

There was terminator armour before there were shards of the Emperor's armour to put in them.

You do realise all of wh40k is made up and not actually true, yes?

40K is a crazy place and if one person hears they should be putting shards of the Emperor's armour into terminator suits I can 100% believe that they might actually try to make it happen.

BrianDavion wrote:
Besides Martell, as I said, how fun would it be for say a IG player if they literally with their infantry weapons could not kill basic infantry? yes Terminator armor can be overcome by mass firepower but that's more at this point a flaw with the basic D6 system.

How is this different than what currently takes place?

40k as a game would not function (nevermind how badly it might function already) if it had to be true to fluff. The game Inquisitor made the best version of marines vs. regular people. Go see how broken that was, remember that that brokenness was only basic power armor and not even Terminator plate, and report back.

My personal games of 40k are very much of the casual nature, and I am fine with how TDA functions there. Sure, it's not a game winner that I will base an army around but is still entertaining - especially if used in smaller skirmish engagements like the various versions of Kill Team. There, a suit or two among a force otherwise containing 5-6 normal marines can really be a beast- especially in my skirmish games that use 2nd edition and it's drastically different armor rules, where skirmish games have a severe lack of the "big guns".

In my personal fluff, TDA armor is still produceable, but is a drastic resource drain, which is why whole scenarios (especially in Kill Team sized skirmishes) based around rescuing downed suits as objectives can fun. Losing half a squad of marines to secure two or three repairable suits of TDA is an acceptable loss.

I'd always assumed it was the religious cult side of the AM that made the production of things like Terminators and Dreadnoughts so slow. Each suit would be virtually hand made from scratch by a select group of tech priests and there acolytes(no dirty mass production for such sacred machines) and I mean really hand made down to the smallest component. Then you add on all the rituals that the AM believe are absolutely necessary to make the parts and assemble them.. A single Terminator suit could take years to build.

GoatboyBeta wrote:
I'd always assumed it was the religious cult side of the AM that made the production of things like Terminators and Dreadnoughts so slow. Each suit would be virtually hand made from scratch by a select group of tech priests and there acolytes(no dirty mass production for such sacred machines) and I mean really hand made down to the smallest component. Then you add on all the rituals that the AM believe are absolutely necessary to make the parts and assemble them.. A single Terminator suit could take years to build.

It is described as effectively taking years to a build of master armorers in order to build just one suit, so yeah you're in the right.

Skimming over this a few things i wanted to cover.

Its not from reverse engineering as such an idea is heretical and not allowed. Machines are viewed as living things and to take it apart is to destroy it and is evil.

From what i remember in lore, mind you this is a bit rusty. Like many have said, TDA was adapted from a maintenance suit, as an aside i heard it was originally created by the squats and adapted from their mining suits but thats neither here nor there.

I dont think there is any issue with creating more, as people have said it can be done BUT what i do not understand is how they continue to make the crux terminous

The crux termonus is said to contain a shard of the emperor armor in it, which is where they get their invul save from, so unless terra just has a big freaking pile of shards from his armor, im not sure how those keep getting manufactured.

Some one already covered that the shards of armour thing is only supposed to be a myth, but I like to think some Forgeworlds/AdMech/Chapters treat that myth as the truth and go on crusades to find fragments of big E armour.

"40k as a game would not function (nevermind how badly it might function already) if it had to be true to fluff."

Which makes the fluff meaningless.

Space marines find more terminator armor the same way they found a surplus of grav guns from 30k. They miraculously found a large cache in a long forgotten vault. All this stuff that Chaos Space Marines are supposed to bring from 30k is readily available thanks to plot holes.

Oh look, I wonder what this mysterious vault on this mechanicum planet has. Its full of jet bikes, volkite, kai guns and so much more ultra powerful stuff from 30k!

Martel732 wrote:
"40k as a game would not function (nevermind how badly it might function already) if it had to be true to fluff."

Which makes the fluff meaningless.

How does that make the fluff meaningless?