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Who knows. All of it is technobabble nonsense so unless you have a direct quote from GW saying they did or did not exist there's no way to extrapolate from other fluff.

Toofast wrote:
When the whole point is to make a bigger/faster/stronger human, why would you start with a female body?

Because the whole point of power armor is that none of those things are relevant. You use women because if a woman has better combat skills she will be a better soldier. The argument against female soldiers applies far more to guardsmen than to marines.

(And because the result of marine enhancements is something that is no longer human, so there's no reason to believe that starting from a male base gives any different results than starting from a female base.)

 Crimson wrote:
It is pretty pointless to argue about "realism" of these enhancement processes. Marines gain ability to read people's memories by cannibalising them FFS! It is all nonsense, really. It works the way it does because GW says it does, and they can just as easily change or retcon it if they want.

Exactly. It's all technobabble nonsense and there is no point in theorizing about how "a wizard did it" works. Marines are all-male because GW says so, if GW wanted to sell female marines tomorrow they'd throw some other "a wizard did it" stuff at the problem and suddenly female marines would be part of the setting. And you certainly can't extrapolate any of it to anything other than marines.


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the ancient wrote:
No doubt theres probably a few females out there if equally trained and equipped, could beat up a dude, but you dont double your research costs, for probably a less than, being generous, than a 1% of 2% return. When your testing and recruitment already has very low rates of success.

Literally every single female in power armor has the exact same strength as every single male in power armor. The whole point of power armor is that the armor itself provides the strength, the human inside is just pushing the button that tells the armor what to do.

Power armour, isnt just a whoever you put in it, it works the same. It amplifies their strength. Its more of a, if you can only lift a wheel barrow, you can now lift 2. But if you can drag a car, you might be able to drag a bus kinda thing. They still work just as hard inside the shell.

That is not how power armor works. If you want more strength from power armor you just increase the gain on the servos. If a female in power armor can't drag a bus then neither can a male.

Just spit balling. Maybe Emps tried. Apart from ease of use with males, The Ossmodula, could give females a pregnant type body., Haemastamen might have problems every month. Progenoids disposes of material every month, not store it. Most enhancements seem to work in combination with the base. Enhances male aggression, bulk.

Which is all technobabble nonsense like the entire marine process in general. You could pick any of those reasons if you don't want female marines to exist in the setting but there's no reason any of them must be true.


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Hecaton wrote:
That explanation of puberty is simplified to the point of error.

No, it's actually correct. Your genes contain both male and female recipes, the Y chromosome simply triggers the hormone mix that causes the body to follow the male recipe. This is why hormone treatments for transgender people are so effective, all you have to do is flip the switch on what recipe your body follows. So if you need a taller person to make a taller marine and you also need to start at a certain age point you will in fact be better off taking a tall girl over a short boy and then activating all of the marine enhancements.

Hecaton wrote:
Memories are stored in molecules - if they can absorb those molecules, it's theoretically possible to gain access to those memories.

No, memories are stored in the arrangement of cells. If you destroy that arrangement there is nothing left. It's like saying you can access the contents of a computer if you take the hard drive out, grind it into sand, and then eat the sand. It's pure "a wizard did it" magic.

Hecaton wrote:
Nah. In every depiction it's been portrayed as a modifier on the user's strength - the strength of the person inside it still matters. That's why Inquisitor Coteaz doesn't have the strength of a space marine.

GW can say it all they like but that's not how power armor works. It's like saying that if you take an olympic sprinter and a normal person and put them both in the same model of airplane the sprinter's plane will be faster.

The most charitable interpretation is that because the Imperium is a backwards theocracy run by lunatics and the admech is a cargo cult they've simply forgotten how to edit the gain value in the control software and only the strongest users are capable of reaching the maximum strength of the armor.

You're in Dunning-Kruger territory here. There are a number of other factors that affect puberty, and the Y chromosome has genes not found on the X chromosome.

No, I've just slightly simplified things for you and given the 101-level explanation since you don't seem to understand genetics. The Y chromosome is a signaling device that triggers the male recipe (with the default recipe being female). This is why you have people with chromosomes other than XX or XY who have no idea what their actual genes are unless they have some other reason to get genetic testing done.

Hormone treatments for transgender people have a host of complications and distinctions from a human's unaltered biology; it's not easy, it's not a matter of simply "flipping a switch," even if done during puberty.

Only because they can't start at birth and so some of the recipe has already been followed. But aside from not being able to undo the things that have already been done the result is pretty much indistinguishable from someone who had that hormone mix since birth.

The "age point" would be earlier for girls if they entered puberty earlier

Depends on how the magic works. If the spell requires the target to be at a certain stage of development then perhaps this is true. If the spell has to be cast on the target's 10th birthday because 10 was the sacred number of the wizard who created it then this is false, 10 will be the age regardless of chromosomes.

Hecaton wrote:
but you can reconstruct the structure of a brain from DNA

Lolwut. No, you very definitely can not. The connections between cells that form memory are absolutely not encoded in DNA, they are formed during your life to create those memories.

Hecaton wrote:
No, it's more analogous to putting an olympic sprinter vs. an unathletic normie on a motor-assisted bicycle. It will make anyone faster, but the athlete will reach higher performance.

No, because power armor is not merely an assist. Machine strength is far stronger than human strength, it's like suggesting the professional athlete's jet could be faster because you could hook up a little propeller to some bicycle pedals and add a bit of extra thrust.

It's more complex than that.

Yes, I already said it's more complicated and that I gave you the simple version because you, like GW, are describing something that is nonsense from a scientific point of view.

(And based on your comments about reading memories from DNA I really have to question your supposed professional qualifications here.)

Right, but the references to the process imply it has more to do with the stage of development than 10 being a sacred number.

The references are technobabble nonsense. You can't extrapolate anything from it because none of it makes any sense whatsoever.

The "magic" could also say it only works with male souls in which case girls are out, trans boys are in.

Exactly! It's all magic and completely arbitrary. A trans man with XX chromosomes may very well make a perfect space marine because the magic requires a male soul, not XY chromosomes, and the Imperium is a cargo cult that doesn't understand its own process beyond "grab a bunch of boys and see if any of it works".

Or maybe the reality is that the marine process only works on XX chromosomes and all marines are trans men. All XY males die in the attempt to create a marine, only trans men can survive the process. Cis women could also work, of course, but the Imperium is a cargo cult and never bothers to try.

The process that creates the brain is. All the information you need to construct a human brain is in human DNA. The process whereby neurons make connections is encoded in DNA, etc.

And, once again: memories are not encoded in DNA. DNA can, at best, get you to the raw structure of the brain before it starts making connections during your life. It's like suggesting you can read the contents of a hard drive by looking at the engineering documents from the factory that made it.

Hecaton wrote:
Given that it enhances the strength of the user, but the user's strength is still relevant, it is, by definition, an assist. So... you're wrong.

Or GW, once again, has a very poor understanding of the concept. It wouldn't be the first time GW published stupid lore.

It's fantasy tech but it references real-world biological phenomena, so yes, you can extrapolate out what's going on.

It "references" them in a stupid way that has nothing to do with the real phenomena. It's no different than "reverse the polarity of the graviton singularity to modulate the phase of the plasma beam". Yes, those are all real words that reference things that exist. No, it doesn't make any sense. No, you can not extrapolate anything from that word salad.

You should read what I wrote again. DNA holds information, this is not the same thing as saying DNA carries memories.

Memories are stored in molecules - if they can absorb those molecules, it's theoretically possible to gain access to those memories.

and

The process that creates the brain is. All the information you need to construct a human brain is in human DNA.

Are you willing to admit that the concept of eating a brain to access memories, as space marines are capable of doing, is utter ing nonsense and any attempt to explain it as anything other than magic is laughably wrong?

Hecaton wrote:
No. Of all the things GW says, the idea that there's a body frame system built into the armor that works as a strength assist sounds completely plausible.

Only if you don't understand the vast disparity between human strength and machine strength. Even light industrial machinery that isn't designed to maximize strength can easily rip you in half if you aren't careful with it. Adding human muscle strength to that would be about as useful as adding the bicycle-driven prop to an F-22.

It's less weird than what you just described in terms of physics.

Only if you don't understand biology. GW uses the terms but they have no connection to reality.

Let's back up and talk about those two sentences there - the "information" I was describing was the information about how to construct a brain, which should have been obvious in context. The idea that memories are stored chemically has some strong bases in research. Any other questions before we move on?

Yes, let's look at what that context is. This is what I said:

No, memories are stored in the arrangement of cells. If you destroy that arrangement there is nothing left. It's like saying you can access the contents of a computer if you take the hard drive out, grind it into sand, and then eat the sand. It's pure "a wizard did it" magic.

To which you replied:

That's not a good analogy because you can't reconstruct a hard drive from sand - but you can reconstruct the structure of a brain from DNA, and re-arranging cells in a given brain doesn't produce new memories. There's a molecular basis for memory, though some of it may be stored in the extracellular matrix.

It's very clear from context this is about the information content of the brain, not the recipe to construct a blank brain, because that's what my original analogy explicitly referred to. If you didn't understand and thought you were talking about something else that's fine, but don't condescendingly talk about "context" when the context is so very clearly against you.

Hecaton wrote:
I'm very aware of machine strength. Given that power armor doesn't completely obviate the strength of the user, we can assume that it's *not* the kind of device you're describing.

That's like designing a car with no engine and talking about how you need superior male strength to push it. It might technically be true but it's an unimaginably bad design that doesn't deserve to be called a car.

Though I suppose that could be a valid interpretation of the fluff given how stupid and self-destructive the Imperium is. Is your theory that marines need to be male because only males have sufficient strength to make the "armor" function at even a level where it can compete with that plastic knight costume from the halloween store?

They're written in a far more plausible way than the sentence with physics terminology you described. And it's funny you're knocking my understanding of biology considering you were claiming there's no difference between a human with XY chromosomes compared to a human with XX and an sry gene.

Given that people often are not aware that they have chromosomes other than XX/XY until they have genetic tests done for some unrelated reason I stand by that assertion.

No, I understood exactly what was going on, but it's clear that you barely understand what you're saying. When talking about the "information content" of the brain, as you put it, I used the term "memories." When talking about the information in DNA about how to construct a living organism, including its brain, I used the term "information."

Lolwut. The context here is the space marine ability to recover MEMORIES by eating a brain.

A.T. wrote:
As perhaps a better comparison the Boston Dynamics 'big dog' robot - 240lbs of servos and power supply capable of carrying 340lbs over and above. If you could wear it as an exoskeleton that's a lot but it's not 'invalidate the user' levels of strength, especially when the user is a genetically engineered superman and the servos need to operate both at those strength levels and at speeds that will not compromise the agility of said superman.

Nope. We know that marines are capable of things like ripping apart tanks with only their armored hands, that's way beyond "a bit of a boost".

Hecaton wrote:
Making a flexible powered suit of armor that a user can operate via neural link is not a small ask. See the other poster referencing BigDog; there's not actually that much room for hydraulic pistons to give machine press strength in power armor.

Except, again, we have examples of things like marines ripping apart tanks. That is way beyond giving a small strength boost.

Right, and your analogy of a hard drive is incorrect. The better analogy is if the space marine had an electromagnetic sensor on his tongue and could lick a hard drive and read the bits.

No, my analogy was exactly correct. Eating a brain destroys its structure and therefore destroys any information content it might possibly have had (assuming it wasn't lost when the person died).

Donwr have evidence that they can't with their bare hands? Let's see the passage.

Even as Valdor swung round to face the next foe, he glimpsed one of the Angels rip the turret from a Serpent troop carrier and fling frag-charges through the gaping holes. By the time combat was joined again, that machine was just another blackening ruin and its slayer was already racing toward his next target.

Or:

Tanks did not slow the Space Marines down. They clambered up on to them, ripped off durasteel hatches as if they were made of paper and dropped grenades into the interior.