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.

So I had always wondered, according to the fluff, terminator armour is no longer produced. Therefore they are a well kept relic of the chapter. So where does the new foundings got their terminator armour? And I don't think that the parent chapters will give them

Terminator armour is being produced, where did you get the idea it wasn't?

Certain sources says no, as the technology of makin them are lost

 Metaljunx wrote:
Certain sources says no, as the technology of makin them are lost

That doesn't make any sense, the STC for Terminator armour was created during the Great Crusade by the Mechanicum. It was adapted from the STC for the maintenance suits for Plasma reactors, they just basically combined Power Armour STCs (yet another invention of the GC) with the maintenance suit, and voile, Tactical Dreadnought Armour was born. The thing to remember about all forms of human Powered Armour is that combat versions weren't really developed during the DAoT, since the Iron Men had done all the fighting for thousands of years. It wasn't really until the Iron Men Rebellion (the start of the Age of Strife) that humans had to get their hands dirty, afaik.

Afaik, really old fluff had it that terminator armour was virtually impossible to produce anymore.
In any case, that has long since been retconned. Terminator armour is still very precious and hard to produce, but it can be done. Aside from newly made sets, new Chapters usually also receive part of the wargear from their founding Chapter, which may include sets of terminator armour.

From what I understood, certain forge worlds have the means and technology to create new suits of Terminator armor, but not all of them, hence it still being considered rare and precious.

New Terminator suits are being made but at a speed that would make glaciers seem like they're breaking the sound barrier. Even then a lot of "new" suits are simply cobbled together out of battlefield salvage. So, it is often the case that the newer a chapter you are the less Terminator suits you can field. Unless you're a special snowflake *cough*Minotaurs*cough* and have friends in higher places.

There's a few ways to explain this.

Originally IIRC the idea was the technology was lost but there were so many suits made during the Heresy that new chapters would get them from their parent chapter when founded. It was very rare for a chapter to have even enough suits for the entire first company. Deathwing were unique because only the DA could field 100 terminators at a time.

Now like others have said I think the idea is they can be made but it's very, very rare. And a chapter would have compete with everyone else who wants terminator armor (Grey Knights, Inquisition, other chapters, high level Imperials) as well as everything else that tech priest/workshop/forgeworld could be producing instead.

I also imagine you'd have suits being cannibalized and parts shared around. A termi suit is a complex machine, it's not just the armor plates that are hard to make, you also have the servos, the interface, the sensors, the power source etc. So it may be that in this sector you can make everything but the interface, in that sector you can make everything but the power crystals etc...

So if a suit is destroyed you just need to salvage one vital part, everything else can be replaced.

Finally we can just say that it's a pattern or patterns of Terminator armor that were lost. THe Cataphractii Terminators have some options normal ones do not, so it might be that's what lost, but the general idea of really heavy armor is still doable.

So if a suit is destroyed you just need to salvage one vital part, everything else can be replaced.

As an interesting aside, this was a 40k scenario a couple of editions back - with a guard army being sent to sweep an area of feral orks to allow salvage of a terminator suit that had been lost on a previous mission.

But yes, it can be produced - and equally, the Siege of Vraks book states that some chaos forge worlds can also produce terminator plate, but at an unimaginable cost in time and effort - so that it's normally far more economically sensible to find someone who currently has one, kill them and take it.

I always work on the idea that the crusade era TDA is the "best" stuff and the new stuff today is modern replicas made from half understood plans with substandard gear. They still work but not as good as the old stuff.

The old stuff is now age old and long maintained and tweaked and so has ended up on par with modern stuff just becuase of its age.

 Lord_Inquisitor_Doge wrote:

 Metaljunx wrote:
Certain sources says no, as the technology of makin them are lost

That doesn't make any sense, the STC for Terminator armour was created during the Great Crusade by the Mechanicum. It was adapted from the STC for the maintenance suits for Plasma reactors, they just basically combined Power Armour STCs (yet another invention of the GC) with the maintenance suit

If the Mechanicum invented it then it wasn't an STC, STC refers to designs from the STC system manufactured during the Dark Age of Technology, it's not Imperium-speak for any form of blueprint.

Very slowly new suits can be built or old ones rebuilt but its slow and only in the capabilities of advanced forge worlds.

A new chapter may be lucky to feild a single squad though.

I guess the Imperium forgot how mass production works too. It's only a matter of time before they forget how to have sex and then humanity dies.

Martel732 wrote:
I guess the Imperium forgot how mass production works too. It's only a matter of time before they forget how to have sex and then humanity dies.

Haha, seems like that sometimes. I liken it to a factory today that builds old video game systems, for example, the NES - if the very best NES consoles were built using original parts, but those parts are no longer available due to being 10,000 years old, then all you can do is build replacement parts...the only problem is, you don't really know exactly what they were made of, or the best way to even use what you have. You can still make replica NES consoles, they're just not like the originals.

It's called reverse engineering. A mass spec will tell you something is made of generally.

Mass production relies on a couple of things that, in our fictional universe might not apply.

1-Raw materials: How common is Admantite? How common are 99.9999% pure energy crystals? How long does it take to grow synthi-muscle fiber for the controls? What if these and the 1000 other things needed to make termi armor require scowering half the sector, half the segmuntum or half the galaxy?

Keep in mind Chaos, Orks and anyone else who uses conventional tech is looking for them too?

2-Cooperation: The Imperium is an empire, loosely held together by military force and faith. Just because foundries on Necromunda can work adamantium and the workshops on Riza can bond it to the endoskeleton does not mean that Necromunda and Riza actually do business with each other.

3-Sharing information: The Imperium is also a medieval society, if you're the one guy in the whole sector who knows how to build the neural interface for a terminator suit, why would share that information? Why would you publish it in the Journal of Power Armor Interfaces? You'd write it in a secret cypher in a tome you lock up under your bed and only build them when you're paid a planet's ransom.

And so on...

Now I want to write a 24-part Dark Heresy Campaign where the only goal is to build the Inquisitor a new suit of termi armor.

If the imperium can't even manage this level of coordination, it would be long dissolved.

New technologies would replace the old ones if a production bottleneck occurred. A single planet can discover a ton of gak by itself. Imagine hundreds or thousands. 40ks level of stagnation is impossible.

When was the most recent founding, anyway? The latest ones I see listed are all like M37...

Martel732 wrote:
If the imperium can't even manage this level of coordination, it would be long dissolved.

New technologies would replace the old ones if a production bottleneck occurred. A single planet can discover a ton of gak by itself. Imagine hundreds or thousands. 40ks level of stagnation is impossible.

And that is answered by the mechanicus' stagnant dogma where there is really no such thing as "new technology" allowed to handle something like a bottleneck.

 buddha wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
If the imperium can't even manage this level of coordination, it would be long dissolved.

New technologies would replace the old ones if a production bottleneck occurred. A single planet can discover a ton of gak by itself. Imagine hundreds or thousands. 40ks level of stagnation is impossible.

And that is answered by the mechanicus' stagnant dogma where there is really no such thing as "new technology" allowed to handle something like a bottleneck.

They'd be ignored. Because that's what humans do. The Mechanicus is also an impossible institution. As I said, 40K's setting really breaks my suspension of disbelief hard. Humans advanced technologically even during the real Dark Ages. Things were lost with Rome and Alexandria, but were known elsewhere or rediscovered.

It's the same impossible situation present in Battletech. A lazy excuse for a setting.

40K's Imperium would be gone in a few generations, tops. Regardless of what GW's fluff says.

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).

My fanon for Centurions is that they were an attempt to create a mass-producible replacement for Terminator armour, but the project was deemed a failure until the design was repurposed to fit a different role.

 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).

My fanon for Centurions is that they were an attempt to create a mass-producible replacement for Terminator armour, but the project was deemed a failure until the design was repurposed to fit a different role.

With as few marines as GW says exist in their setting, outfitting them with whatever they want with the resources of thousands of worlds would be trivial. GW's writers fail at galactic scale miserably. There'd have to be millions of marines per chapter to have any impact at all. And chapters would be constantly wiped out by Xeno WMDs and have to be continuously refounded. I don't care what GW says, that's how galactic warfare would be fought. Sections of planets are worth trading for most of a marine chapter. And marine home worlds would be constantly burnt down to the mantle to eliminate them.

Martel732 wrote:

 buddha wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
If the imperium can't even manage this level of coordination, it would be long dissolved.

New technologies would replace the old ones if a production bottleneck occurred. A single planet can discover a ton of gak by itself. Imagine hundreds or thousands. 40ks level of stagnation is impossible.

And that is answered by the mechanicus' stagnant dogma where there is really no such thing as "new technology" allowed to handle something like a bottleneck.

They'd be ignored. Because that's what humans do. The Mechanicus is also an impossible institution. As I said, 40K's setting really breaks my suspension of disbelief hard. Humans advanced technologically even during the real Dark Ages. Things were lost with Rome and Alexandria, but were known elsewhere or rediscovered.

It's the same impossible situation present in Battletech. A lazy excuse for a setting.

40K's Imperium would be gone in a few generations, tops. Regardless of what GW's fluff says.

umm Battletech's been recovering lost star league technology and in many cases developing new technology beyond what the Star League can do, for awhile now..

Showing my age. I meant classic Battletech.

Martel732 wrote:
Showing my age. I meant classic Battletech.

I did too. even if we include only the old FASA stuff you had LBXs in sizes of 2, 5 and 20, Ultra autocannons in sizes of 2 10 and 20, streak missile systems above SSRM2s, Light and Heavy Gauss rifles, rotory Autocannons, C3, iNARC, Light Fusion Engines, and then there's all the experimental stuff that was in max tech.

so by 3060 I'd say the Inner Sphere's basic military technology had actually surpassed the line military tech of the SLDF.

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

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

ohh you mean like 3025?

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.

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

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.