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Don't get me wrong I like motorcycles In real life ( I use to own one). But why would someone ride them in 41 millennium when you have access to things like land speeders which in my mind fit space travel/battle much better? Why would troops even attempt to ride a two wheeled transport across rough and dangerous terrain? Just seems dumb to me. Am alone on this? I know people love them....

I like what the models can do so I will buy more. But if there was a land speeder with the same profile for marines I would not.

The fluff explains Land Speeders and other hovering things being difficult for the Imperium to maintain - they were more common during the Great Crusade and Heresy eras.

Real reason - bikes look cool, therefore giant armoured space-knights riding motorcycles must be cool too. GW don't always allow practicality to play a part in model design.

But no, you're not alone, this topic comes up every so often.

Have you though about converting them into jetbikes maybe?


{Edit} Not mine, just nicked them off Google real quick - do a Google reverse image search and you'll get to the how-to most likely {/Edit}

It just adds to the cheesy over the top action hero-ness of spehhs mehreens. It is pretty absurd.


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Those jetbike conversions are way better, IMO.

Land speeder tech IIRC is ridiculously complicated and almost no one can fix or maintain them.

compared to simple bikes.

edit: Yes those are some pretty slick conversions

They are so cool !

yes I do like that much better. I need to look for some videos how to do something like this. Thanks for the idea!

Or because in real life and in a 40k universe bikes still have a use. Fast, wheeled, less things mechanically that could go wrong IE easier to maintain, can be air dropped work perfectly fine or air inserted. I think of 40k Bikes even Motorcycles today as Mechanical Horses.

Fast moving inner city flanking tool.

Motercycles are a useful tool on the battlefield. Unlike larger vehicles, they can cover rougher terrain at a faster speed. They are basically the equivalent of a horse in that in drastically increases your soldiers maneuverability.

Nothing in 40k really invalidates their usefulness.

While it certainly is true that “bikes do not belong in space” the bigger issue with this train of thought is that, more specifically, bikes don’t belong on the battlefield. Don’t get me wrong: I love riding my crotch-rocket as much as the next person, but I never mistake the entertainment I get from doing so for practicality. The simple fact of the matter is that bikes are not a practical design.

Bikes are designed to be used effectively on asphalt… and that’s about it honestly. Yes, you can buy “off-road” designed bikes, but what off-road really translates to is *used in specially prepared areas (dirt usually - preferably slightly damp and not packed in too hard) where all objects that will cause you to crash have been removed and the ground generally smoothed out* and even then these bikes will almost exclusively be going in straight lines or making slow - usually sloped in their favor - corners. Bikes have dick-all maneuverability on any type of terrain that isn’t asphalt and are inferior to their four-wheeled counterparts in pretty much every way on these surfaces. On top of that, they require extensive modifications over the base design to even work semi-effectively on these surfaces.

Our ancestors figured this thousands of years ago when they realized that “Hey Bob, when I put more points of contact with the ground on an object that are spread out from the center of gravity, the object is more stable.” Thus ended the design of the one-wheeled chariot. Bikes are not a stable platform and you cannot ever fire a weapon with any degree of accuracy from a moving bike. This is the exact reason that bikes have never been used extensively in warfare by any large military. The only time this was ever that case was WW2 - and that was only because Europe had a very nicely built system of paved roads already set up for them and they were used almost exclusively to reposition the machine gun on the side car. The only other uses they ever had was for delivery of messages/ammo and forward scouting. The problem is that Land Speeders do all of that better than they do. So, to sum things up:

- Bikes are dangerous to operators even when not under fire
- Bikes have inferior maneuvering capability to four-wheeled/tracked vehicles in all forms of terrain except asphalt
- Bikes require constant maintenance and specialized gear to function in any type of terrain
- Bikes are a terrible firing platform and would have to stop moving to hit anything when they fired
- The only roles bikes ever excelled at on the battlefield no longer exist or are are better performed by the Land Speeder

That being said, I wouldn’t worry about it. Remember this: 40k isn’t science fiction, it’s fantasy in space. Space Marines are a knight allegory and so they need their “iron steed” to ride into battle on. Practicality must give way to style in a setting like this.

^ Has apparently never ridden an off-road bike or ATV.

 Psienesis wrote:
^ Has apparently never ridden an off-road bike or ATV.

Indeed. And its not like Marine bikes have skinny little wheels. They've got some mean wide treads that would have no difficulty on rough ground.

I am a fan of the Hyperion novels and their explanation on limits of anti grav technology. In these novels there are numerous planets where the planets magnetic field isn;t strong enough or not regular enough to support standard antigrav tech. Making ground vehicles such as bikes useful.

Quite sure that this is not the reason for 40k bikes but I like to believe it.

Ig used to have bikes but we lost them, the idea of guardsmen, no matter how trained they are, barreling across a battle field on a motorcycle as abit absurd even by 40k standards. there's just too much risk.

For Space marines I think the bikes are fine though. First off the bikes themselves are not some weedy dirt bike, they're bikes designed to just as armored and rugged as the marines that ride them. That means they probably had redundant systems, armored no flat wheels, a hella robust engine to carry all that armor plating and massive astartes at breakneck speeds, some super space suspension, all that good stuff.

As for the marines riding them, well first off these are superhumans, they have strength, reflexes, senses, and cognitive abilities that far outstrip or even just plain exist in say your bog standard guardsman or even lord inquisitor. You couple that with the the enhancements to not only their physical abilities but the data feeds from their armor and its something you can even compare to a guy riding around 1940's Europe with his bike. If their favorite boarding tactic is essentially loading themselves into a big armored torpedo to crash into a enemy ship, riding a bike across a warzone seems "meh" in comparison.

Another thing I've noticed is that astartes bike seem to have control panels on them? I don't think it would be out of the realm of possibilities that a marine could link to the bike via his armor or black carapace.

Special Forces currently use bikes, and are still developing newer bikes. It is probably a bit odd to use them as they do, but given close combat exists it's not entirely odd. It also allows you to break a line. In reality they'd probably be more for general maneuvers and quicker transportation to your next destination.

In the right circumstances bikes could be pretty effective.

For example, on a remote imperial fuel colony, marauding chaos biker gangs can scream across the dry wastelands executing hit and run attacks. Before reinforcements can be called in, the bikers have ruthlessly slaughtered the unfortunate defenders and site labourers and escaped with all the fuel and trophies they can carry.

Sure, they are not going to be great in a swamp or deathworld setting, And in a large scale conflict, they are going to be of limited use.

Maybe I've watched mad max a few too many times.

Given there have been entire empires who engaged in that type of warfare its not odd at all.

Space Marines as we know them today are an incredibly absurd concept, from beginning ("super spesssss mehreeeens haev two haerts!!!" = some writer failed his biology class) to end (waistless models with impossible anatomy).

Once you accept the main protagonists of the setting do not belong in reality, everything is fair game.

What exactly is absurd about 2 hearts?

Having a pair of hearts is like having dual-CPUs in a computer. You balance the load between them both, reducing overall strain on the system, and if one fails you have a back-up. There's not really a downside to having redundant organs.

Indeed. Really it would be no different than having 2 pumps hooked up together on a single system. If one fails the other is still functioning, and the Emperor designed them so one heart would be enough to keep them alive(but 2 would also give them a huge advantage).

The same with having a 3rd lung.

 Desubot wrote:
Land speeder tech IIRC is ridiculously complicated and almost no one can fix or maintain them.

compared to simple bikes.

edit: Yes those are some pretty slick conversions

Wasn't all of the anti grav skimmer tech in the Imperium looted from Eldar and other factions since they can't develop it themselves and that's why they still have tanks with treads and ground bikes, as opposed to the jet bikes or skimmer tanks of most other factions.

Basically once they run out of anti-grav float engines, they can't get any more until they loot some xenos.

No, the technology is simply expensive to replicate. And some examples of anti-grav have been lost. But there is still plenty of human hover tech still out there, even in civilian use(The Eisinhorn and Revenor books show lots of airspeeders and hover bikes as relatively common)

What is more likely the case is that hover technology is expensive and doesn't make for practical military hardware in most cases. A hover tank would have to be less armored and have less powerful weaponry, and if its engines got destroyed while it was moving at speed it would crash and get destroyed. Better to make 100 LRBTs that don't have those problems than 10 hover tanks which are more fragile and have less firepower.

Grey Templar wrote:What exactly is absurd about 2 hearts?

Psienesis wrote:Having a pair of hearts is like having dual-CPUs in a computer. You balance the load between them both, reducing overall strain on the system, and if one fails you have a back-up. There's not really a downside to having redundant organs.

Grey Templar wrote:Indeed. Really it would be no different than having 2 pumps hooked up together on a single system. If one fails the other is still functioning, and the Emperor designed them so one heart would be enough to keep them alive(but 2 would also give them a huge advantage).

The same with having a 3rd lung.

No, not really. It's not that simple.

I'm no biology expert so I'm afraid I won't be able to provide a scientifically complete explanation, but in short, for a human being having two hearts wouldn't be too much of an improvement. It would bear little to no benefit, and could cause some issues that would heavily outweight said benefits.

Really, the "two hearts" thing is just Rule of Cool applied indiscriminately. And even if we ignore this issue, there're plenty more that would make Space Marines biologically unable to function properly.

While biology may be a little more complicated than simple piping, at its core the circulatory system is just a recirculating system with a single pump. No reason you couldn't have 2 recirculating pumps.

2 hearts would certainly work from a circulatory system standpoint. The trick is they're only useful if one goes into cardiac arrest. If there is violent trauma you typically die to blood loss. If someone shot one of your hearts out you'd still bleed out due to the volume of blood circulating to said heart. You're still cutting a major artery.

That's where the Larraman cells come in.

Depends on if you stop the bleeding or not.

If you only have one heart stopping the bleeding isn't going to help much, but if you have 2 your other heart could keep you alive while the other one heals. Plus marines have their super-clotting blood and rapid healing to help.

And 2 hearts is definitely useful from a circulation standpoint. You can have significantly more oxygen circulation.

Two hearts would absolutely work and be an improvement - they aren't humans, after all. The rest of them is genetically altered two. It isn't as if they just grabbed some guy off the street and gave him a 2nd heart. Furthermore, them having "no waste" doesn't mean that they have absolute zero. Space marines are cyborgs - the gak...quite literally...is pumped into other systems and recycled, etc. Yeah its all far fetched, but it is still feasible...not with out technology mind you, but not beyond the realm of possibility.

What were talking about again? Oh yeah, motorcycles in space. Ehh, it doesn't bother me too much. They are, after all, more raiders than anything - but, yeah, not the most practical vehicle. On the other hand, they are cheap to make and easy to maintain.

 Korinov wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:What exactly is absurd about 2 hearts?

Psienesis wrote:Having a pair of hearts is like having dual-CPUs in a computer. You balance the load between them both, reducing overall strain on the system, and if one fails you have a back-up. There's not really a downside to having redundant organs.

Grey Templar wrote:Indeed. Really it would be no different than having 2 pumps hooked up together on a single system. If one fails the other is still functioning, and the Emperor designed them so one heart would be enough to keep them alive(but 2 would also give them a huge advantage).

The same with having a 3rd lung.

No, not really. It's not that simple.

I'm no biology expert so I'm afraid I won't be able to provide a scientifically complete explanation, but in short, for a human being having two hearts wouldn't be too much of an improvement. It would bear little to no benefit, and could cause some issues that would heavily outweight said benefits.

Really, the "two hearts" thing is just Rule of Cool applied indiscriminately. And even if we ignore this issue, there're plenty more that would make Space Marines biologically unable to function properly.

More hearts = faster blood travel. Along with the three lungs of an Astartes, this pumps blood through their giant bodies much faster than a normal human and also ensures their muscles maintain a higher level of oxygenation compared to normal human muscle tissue. Oxygen is essentially fuel for muscles, and correlates directly with increased strength and speed.

The main issue I'd raise instead with space marines is how they generate instant scar tissue over wounds, which in reality would probably cause a heart attack as their blood accidentally clotted over nothing.