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Okay I just wanted to start by saying i just bought myself 2000 points of Grey Knights and i just wanted to ask if i have My primary detatchment as GK's and i wanted SM's as an ally would i still have to take a Space Marine HQ? or do i have to because they are battle brothers? and if i do will my Army become unbound?, Thanks in advance for your responses.

Unless you are playing unbound, you will have to use either the Allied Detachment or take another Detachment of Space Marines. And all Vanilla marine detachments require an HQ as I recall.

So at minimum, if you use an Allied Detachment, you'll be needing 1 HQ and 1 Troop choice from the vanilla codex.

If you use Detachments of any kind you are playing bound. So you can't have half bound and half unbound.

Vilefang wrote:
Okay I just wanted to start by saying i just bought myself 2000 points of Grey Knights and i just wanted to ask if i have My primary detatchment as GK's and i wanted SM's as an ally would i still have to take a Space Marine HQ? or do i have to because they are battle brothers? and if i do will my Army become unbound?, Thanks in advance for your responses.

Alright, start at the beginning.

Here is a brief visual on how you build your army for 7th edition 40k:



If you're looking for a BOUND army, all the units in your army need to be a part of either:
- A detachment
- A formation

So let's break down your question.

You want an army that consists of two detachments: one of Grey Knights, the other of Space Marines.

Let's assume your first detachment (Grey Knights) is a Combined Arms Detachment, from the core rulebook (this could be any detachment, of course, like the Nemesis Strike Force from the GK book). This means that you need at least 1 HQ choice and 2 Troops choices from the Grey Knights codex. You then have a further 4 Troops choices, 3 Elites Choices, 3 Fast Attack choices, 3 Heavy Support choices, 1 Lord of War choice, and 1 Fortifications choice to add to the detachment, again from the Grey Knights codex (or Stronghold Assault for the fortifications choice, naturally). All of the units that were chosen as a part of this detachment receive the benefits of the detachment, and ONLY this detachment, like Objective Secured for Troops choices in this example.

Your second detachment in this case (Space Marines) is an Allied Detachment, from the core rulebook (once again, this could be any detachment, even another Combined Arms Detachment if you wanted). This means you need at least 1 HQ choice and 1 Troops choices from the Space Marines codex. You then have a further 1 Troops choice, 1 Fast Attack choice, 1 Elites choice, and 1 Heavy Support choice to add to the allied detachment. All of the units that were chosen as a part of this detachment receive the benefits of the detachment, and ONLY this detachment, like Objective Secured for Troops choices in this example. Additionally, allied detachments have restrictions: it cannot be your primary detachment, which means you must choose your warlord from units in another detachment, and it cannot be the same faction as your primary detachment, which means you can't have an allied detachment and another detachment both with units chosen from the same codex.

So, in short, you have to fulfill the requirements of a detachment in order to field it. Therefore, you must have at least 1 Space Marine HQ unit in your allied detachment to fulfill the requirements of that detachment. To be bound, you must have every unit in your army in a detachment or formation. As long as you're meeting that requirement, your army will not become unbound.

Hope this cleared things up.

Ok, the best way to look at it is if you want to include a unit in your army you either need to play unbound or you need to find it a home inside a detachment or formation. This is the part where things get interesting. There are many different kinds of detachments and formations but only a handful of them can be a home to a space marine unit. Of those detachments and formations, I know of no detachment that won't also require an HQ choice to go along with another unit. So no, there is no way to include a space marine detachment with out including a space marine HQ unit, however there might be a formation that does what you want.

http://bloodofkittens.com/detachment-compendium/ <- This is a good resource for finding what detachments are available to a faction.
http://bloodofkittens.com/formation-compendium/ ,- Same thing, but for formations.

Don't rely on those lists, but feel free to use them to find the books you need when making 'the perfect list'

Now a formation technically is a detachment. A very restrictive detachment. And 90% of the time a model cannot belong to two different detachments. The only time the game breaks this is when it uses a detachment that is actually a collection of formations but there are none of those for space marines or grey knights yet.