Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I did some searching and I can't find the answer to my question. First off, I have a decent sized marine army and just started khorne. I'm always looking to expand my hobby techniques and was looking to make some allies but can't decide whether or not to add chaos allies or marine allies. I'm looking to add some allies that look like they've nearly spent their entire careers in the fight.

If a marine, either imperium or chaos, is in a battle and/or a war, what is the duration that marine is expected to fight? If the duration is high, it would seem that their armor would be way more worn than normal art work depicts. Even the painted minis in the codexes are near perfectly clean with a scratch here and there. I understand they're trying to make the model look presentable but they're also showing a future soldier with polished armor. In our day and time a vehicle can be in a war zone for a year and it looks nearly destroyed. The battles/wars fought in the 41st millinium are fought in environments that can't even be imagined. Could it be expected for a marine fighting in a battle to nearly have all of the paint removed from his armor? Or am I missing some fluff aspect? Like do they go back into orbit on one of the ships where their armor is re-tooled and polished up? My question applies to vehicles as well. I just acquired 6 tanks and absolutely do not want some polished up pretty tanks. I can't find this answer anywhere and am seeking the answer of the fluff gods. Thanks in advance for any help.

The people who write/do art for GW usually completely miss anything logical to do with warfare or scale. I doubt they have even thought about it.

What that guy said. Also, it depends. Some chapters/legions aren't opposed to drawn out fights. Others treat missions like they're holding them up on their way to an important business meeting. Nova Marines and Ravenguard favor one-sided ambushes where possible, so their armor shouldn't have a chance to get dinged up all that badly assuming things go well.

Then you have to consider the enemy you're fighting. Necron gauss weapons don't just strip paint; they strip molecules. Some tyranid weaponry doesn't really bother hurting armor, instead preferring to crawl inside said armor and start chewing on the armor's occupant. Melee-obsessed armies might never get close enough to a marine army's gunlie (again; assuming things are going well) to leave a lot of battle damage.

There's also the matter of ceramite shattering in places after it takes enough punishment. It's possible that all the paint would get removed, but you're more likely to have armor start shattering (or wearers start dying) before you get to that point. Even space marines tend not to come out of an all-over lasgun tanning salon without suffering some appreciable injuries.

I remember reading that before every battle (or after every battle?) the marines go through various rituals and prayers/chants while repairing/painting/polishing their armor.

I'm sure that their armor gets highly damaged during battle, but they spend a lot of time repairing and maintaining it.

It's entirely possible that every time a marine steps onto a battlefield, his armor actually is shiny and looks new.

Also depends on the chapter and the mission. If it is going to be a long term guerilla fight then they will use camo and the armor will get weathered over time.

If it is just a quick in and out mission which probably comprise 75% or more of their regular missions, then the armor is probably cleaned and well painted by the serfs.

I remember reading that before every battle (or after every battle?) the marines go through various rituals and prayers/chants while repairing/painting/polishing their armor.

I'm sure that their armor gets highly damaged during battle, but they spend a lot of time repairing and maintaining it.

Yes theres several accounts in the HH series of characters repairing/maintaining their armor. Its basically sacred to them and having it in a poor state leads to a reduction in battle effectiveness.

I think SM would have the best kept armor/equipment of all the factions. Given that it's the IG who hold down the trenches and the monotony of frontline warfare, their gear and vehicles would be always dirty after day 1. Unless you say your SM are part of a long siege/long campaign, they probably pull back to relative safety between battles to restore their damaged equipment. As mentioned above, GW likely has little/no idea how long their guys are in the fight. If you take a look at modern soldiers, they're kitted out with ammo galore, grenades, med kits, water, snacks, NVGs, etc. for a single raid or patrol. Take a look at a SM. He has his bolter and that's it. Rarely, one guy will have a knife or a couple grenades and, even rarer, an extra magazine.
If you'd like to make some battle-conditioned men and machines, go for IG. Look up pictures of how soldiers and vehicles looked after the push to Baghdad in 2003. Everybody and everything is dirty. Vehicles are dirty, soldiers' kits on the rear/sides of their vehicles, patched repairs, and some fun graffiti here and there.

There used to be (back in the halcyon days of yore) an article on GW's website on how to model Marines with battle damage, showing the expected outcome of Tyranid acid weapons, bolt shell impacts, overloaded powerpacks, missing limbs, etc. Go crazy, dude. Model your guys however you want.

I have been reading Damocles in my lunch breaks. There are Raven Guard going from one battle to the next with very little time in between and they basically just replace damaged armor plates with new plates from storage and actually mention that there isn't enough time to paint it so its it's natural color.

Seems to me someone would have done something wrong at some point and had to paint all the replacement parts to match armor in use. I mean they know what the plates are going to be used for, might as well go ahead and prep them. They do not make it seem like this is an unusual occurrence.

 Flanker wrote:
I As mentioned above, GW likely has little/no idea how long their guys are in the fight. If you take a look at modern soldiers, they're kitted out with ammo galore, grenades, med kits, water, snacks, NVGs, etc. for a single raid or patrol. Take a look at a SM. He has his bolter and that's it. Rarely, one guy will have a knife or a couple grenades and, even rarer, an extra magazine.

That's more a function of GW making display models and art that promotes the product, not "realistic" 40k combat. What SM is going to walk into combat against a horde of Orks or Nids with one magazine...30 bolter rounds? 30 rounds. Against an entire horde, where you know off the bat you're going to be outnumbered 10 or more to one? Errr, no. Every SM would have ammo packs on each hip, frag and krak grenades right in front, a combat knife in easy reach. They don't run out of ammo 2 minutes after contact and die gloriously or get bailed out by the IG. GW must have a few guys on staff who've served in the Brit military and know how fast one goes through ammo even in a quick engagement. The heroic scale of the bolter against the SM model itself doesn't help matters, either, so a "realistic" ammo load looks busy, fast. I'm fighting that with my army-in-progress now. Plus, I haven't read a lot of the BL, but what I have read never went into SMs swapping magazines. More like a 40k spaghetti western where the bolters never run out of ammo so nobody reloads. So, in terms of artwork, modeling and fiction, GW glossed over the whole "ammo basic load" thing. Which, in a game of minis and dice, isn't really that important.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Col. Dash wrote:
I have been reading Damocles in my lunch breaks. There are Raven Guard going from one battle to the next with very little time in between and they basically just replace damaged armor plates with new plates from storage and actually mention that there isn't enough time to paint it so its it's natural color.

Seems to me someone would have done something wrong at some point and had to paint all the replacement parts to match armor in use. I mean they know what the plates are going to be used for, might as well go ahead and prep them. They do not make it seem like this is an unusual occurrence.

That what happens when you go all soft and mushy on your chapter serfs. They exist to serve, not sit around all day eating cheetos and sucking up the air conditioning.

Ok so in your opinion, is this too much wear and tear? It still needs some earth effects around the bottom but it's basically done. Thoughts?

Do you like it? If yes, then it's good.

jwr wrote:

 Flanker wrote:
I As mentioned above, GW likely has little/no idea how long their guys are in the fight. If you take a look at modern soldiers, they're kitted out with ammo galore, grenades, med kits, water, snacks, NVGs, etc. for a single raid or patrol. Take a look at a SM. He has his bolter and that's it. Rarely, one guy will have a knife or a couple grenades and, even rarer, an extra magazine.

That's more a function of GW making display models and art that promotes the product, not "realistic" 40k combat. What SM is going to walk into combat against a horde of Orks or Nids with one magazine...30 bolter rounds? 30 rounds. Against an entire horde, where you know off the bat you're going to be outnumbered 10 or more to one? Errr, no. Every SM would have ammo packs on each hip, frag and krak grenades right in front, a combat knife in easy reach. They don't run out of ammo 2 minutes after contact and die gloriously or get bailed out by the IG. GW must have a few guys on staff who've served in the Brit military and know how fast one goes through ammo even in a quick engagement. The heroic scale of the bolter against the SM model itself doesn't help matters, either, so a "realistic" ammo load looks busy, fast. I'm fighting that with my army-in-progress now. Plus, I haven't read a lot of the BL, but what I have read never went into SMs swapping magazines. More like a 40k spaghetti western where the bolters never run out of ammo so nobody reloads. So, in terms of artwork, modeling and fiction, GW glossed over the whole "ammo basic load" thing. Which, in a game of minis and dice, isn't really that important.

Fair enough, but the gist of what I thought OP was asking was what those guys would look like if they really were fighting on distant planets millennia from now. I thought he was asking how he could model his guys to look more realistic as opposed to what GW is selling.

Flanker, that's what I was asking.

In a drawn out engagement, then yes, they will suffer extensive damage. (Some of the artwork does show this, incidentally.)

However, Space Marines are a sci-fi equivalent of various heraldric knight traditions (and more importantly, the fictional vision of them). They are intended to make a striking visual impression. For virtually all chapters, prior to combat they or their chapter serfs will go to exhaustive length to make sure their armor is painted, polished, repaired, and adorned to perfection. The Space Marines, even some Chaos Legions, step off the gangplank into each new war zone factory fresh.

(So, there's really no wrong way to do it.)

 RavenGuard55 wrote:
I did some searching and I can't find the answer to my question. First off, I have a decent sized marine army and just started khorne. I'm always looking to expand my hobby techniques and was looking to make some allies but can't decide whether or not to add chaos allies or marine allies. I'm looking to add some allies that look like they've nearly spent their entire careers in the fight.

If a marine, either imperium or chaos, is in a battle and/or a war, what is the duration that marine is expected to fight? If the duration is high, it would seem that their armor would be way more worn than normal art work depicts. Even the painted minis in the codexes are near perfectly clean with a scratch here and there. I understand they're trying to make the model look presentable but they're also showing a future soldier with polished armor. In our day and time a vehicle can be in a war zone for a year and it looks nearly destroyed. The battles/wars fought in the 41st millinium are fought in environments that can't even be imagined. Could it be expected for a marine fighting in a battle to nearly have all of the paint removed from his armor? Or am I missing some fluff aspect? Like do they go back into orbit on one of the ships where their armor is re-tooled and polished up? My question applies to vehicles as well. I just acquired 6 tanks and absolutely do not want some polished up pretty tanks. I can't find this answer anywhere and am seeking the answer of the fluff gods. Thanks in advance for any help.

Keep in mind that 40k is really more of a "fantasy" universe than a scifi one, and with basically zero attention paid to practical realities of war. Space Marines are basically fantasy Knights with a sci-fi skin and cranked up to 11.

Just as you don't see marines with worn armor, you don't see them packing rations, ammo pouches & bolter magazine reloads, spare armor parts or repair kits, etc.

If you look at middle-ages Knights, they'd go to war in magnificent armor and a marvelous panoply of iconography and colors. This worked because they had an entire household of servants to carry their gear, help them put their armor on, carry provisions, etc, while a battle would only really ever last a few hours and they may only ever be called out to fight a real battle against a capable opponent maybe a couple of times in their life at most in the vast majority of cases, often just once or never at all (other actions often not involving battle but rather intimidation or simply pillaging of those who cannot defend themselves). They also would only ever have to put on their full kit very rarely. This is really what the Space Marines are based off of.

Space Marines, as portrayed by GW, stop working very quickly once you start to apply reality to them. Given the battles they're described as engaging in, and the duration of such conflicts SM chapters would extirpate themselves in a matter of years or even months or weeks, even if casualty rates were a tiny fraction of what modern soldiers face, and we don't even get into the mind-bogglingly huge logistical issues they'd face.

Now, strictly with regards to armor appearance, they do have servants that take care of their armor and repair/repaint/etc it between battles, but GW's also wildly inconsistent on this, and the way many 40k battles are described the Space Marines would never have a chance to do so before the end of a campaign.

Basically, treat them like you would TV show characters, where they always wear the same thing in every episode and no matter what they go through nothing happens to the wardrobe.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Basically, treat them like you would TV show characters, where they always wear the same thing in every episode and no matter what they go through nothing happens to the wardrobe.

This describes it well. Space Marines are GW poster boys, equivalent to TV show main characters. They don't lose their gear or get messed up any worse than they can fix in between shows.

 Vaktathi wrote:


Now, strictly with regards to armor appearance, they do have servants that take care of their armor and repair/repaint/etc it between battles, but GW's also wildly inconsistent on this, and the way many 40k battles are described the Space Marines would never have a chance to do so before the end of a campaign.

And that's more or less what I was asking. I'm tired of the freshly painted look. I also know that missions given to space marines can vary from removing one individual to eradicating near entire worlds.

Everyone has chipped in with some great responses. Thank you all for the help.