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 DeffDred wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
A single marine 4 man team does not go out unsupported.

You haven't read Brothers of the Snake by Dan Abnett, have you?

great book and a decent look at what a SM should be imho.

 TheCaptain wrote:

 SaintTom wrote:
Ok, some of it is ridiculous, the three guy's tackling down a space marine for one(though if they were mutated with more muscle mass or w/e then that could balance it out), but having marines actually have to fight in an engagement isn't really a bad thing; it's definitely more of what the writings need at least, and some writers do kind of try for a balance... Though that seems mainly to be in the HH series from what i can recall..

The problem is the piece was written to showcase the cultists; and they wanted to showcase them as effective squads instead of adhering to fluff and writing the 10 man squad overrun by 50 cultists and taking 2 casualties (which would have passed the fluff-test.)

Oh yes, I know and agree with you on that; I was just saying that the writer certainly could of given it more credibility with them being mutated to actually be able to tackle down a space marine in full armor, compared to them being just crazed cultists.

 Harriticus wrote:
This Dark Vengeance novel was probably rushed into publishing and made to be as close as possible to the boxset. The Dawn of War book series shows how horrible and nonsensical BL books get when they try to be an adaption of a specific game, as opposed to the 40k universe as a whole.

Dawn of war books were by C.S Goto, thus your claim is rather invalid considering he's a very poor author to begin with. Backflippin terminators and exarch suits that are mass produced...

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

 Harriticus wrote:
This Dark Vengeance novel was probably rushed into publishing and made to be as close as possible to the boxset. The Dawn of War book series shows how horrible and nonsensical BL books get when they try to be an adaption of a specific game, as opposed to the 40k universe as a whole.

Dawn of war books were by C.S Goto, thus your claim is rather invalid considering he's a very poor author to begin with. Backflippin terminators and exarch suits that are mass produced...

Where is this part about the Backflipping Terminator? I seriously want to find that part and read it. Does anyone know the page?

What we have here, gentlemen, is nothing but the opposite extreme to the countless novels, computer games and RPGs that have hyped the Astartes up to a status of immortal demigods, nigh-impervious to barrages of enemy fire.
Allow me to pick some of the statements posted in the criticism:

TheCaptain wrote:Same bolter boy gets TACKLED by the three of the cultists.
400lbs of armour, 250-300lbs of super-strong man...nah, a bunch of scrawny cultists aren't tackling that. No way.

"On its own, a suit of power armour weighs over 250 lbs, and even a Space Marine would find it difficult to move while wearing it were it not for the electrically motivated fibre bundles implanted in the armour. These fibre bundles replicated the wearer's movements, and allow him to move about easily and freely. In addition, most suits of power armour include a gravitic energy dampener which effectively reduces the weight and inertia of the suit to the same level as that of a normal human being."
- Codex: Angels of Death p.8 : Power Armour Construction

TheCaptain wrote:Heavy Gunner takes aim, shoots at four cultists with his Plasma Cannon and "All Brother Heskia kills is a large patch of undergrowth."
No. In-game, scatters can work like that. Not in fluff. No.

Why "not in fluff"? All it takes is that bunch of cultists jumping out of the way in time before the ground they were standing on a moment before is reduced to slag. Improbable, but happens all the time in various movies and novels. Coincidentally, it's generally considered okay if Space Marines do it.

TheCaptain wrote:Oh, guard has to use 10,000 guys to do what 50 Space Marines could have done? Badass.

"Give me a hundred Space Marines - or, failing that, give me a thousand other warriors."
- Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

TheCaptain wrote:No. It's their armor. Their tank-like armor.

"Individual plates of armour can be up to an inch thick and have a special honeycomb design which helps to dissipate energy and localise any damage suffered by the suit. Against most small arms, the armour reduces the chance of injury by between 50-85%, and it provides some form of protection against all except the most powerful weapons encountered on the battlefields of the 41st millennium."
- Codex: Angels of Death p.8 : Power Armour Construction

As for the autoguns, I suppose it should be pointed out that they could be loaded with special ammunition. Now, personally, the story - if it truly mirrors the descriptions in the opening post - does not really meet my own interpretation of the setting, however the same goes for a whole load of "bolter porn" Pro-Marine books, which are generally accepted by a large segment of the community. Basically, I'm just saying that, for once, this is the other side of the coin. There should be more stories like this, so that public perception can finally meet in the middle again, where it all started and where I see GW's own fluff being situated.

tl;dr: What Brother SRM said.

 -Loki- wrote:

Yes. It's even wrong stating that makind finds Norse mythology facsinating, because when you say mankind, you're at least talking about the majority of the human race. The majority of the human race doesn't even find Norse mythology fascinating, let alone a comic character or video game character.

Outright stating 'mankind finds fascinating' is a bold claim, and in this case, yes, very wrong.

Sorry, "Mankind" doesn't have anything about majority in there. It just references a portion of humanity. Which is undeniable. Didn't say mankind as a whole, didn't say "most of", didn't say "much of". Just said mankind, referring to the human species. And even then, a large portion (relatively) finds each of these things interesting.

Semantics, my friend. They're important.
-TheCaptain

 LoneLictor wrote:

 TheCaptain wrote:

 GimbleMuggernaught wrote:
Who wants to read about a guy wading through hundreds of people with nary a scratch?

It's literally the entire premise of Superman, Halo, Viking Religion, and thousands of other stories about powerful beings mankind finds fascinating.

I can see why people are mad that it's going against the established fluff, but the fact that the fluff was ridiculous to begin with makes this seem less rage inducing and more a step in the right direction. I also think that if the marines had more reasonable fluff it would also stop some of the smurf hate that seems to go on.

It's a game about supersoldiers, and everyone else is just supporting characters to show how powerful the supersoldiers are.

Why would it be good for the supersoldiers to get weaker. So they require 120 Marines to kill a Hive fleet instead of 115?


yay.

So you think what makes a story interesting is how strong the protagonist is?

You'd love God Man.

To an extent, yes. No one wants to hear about "This guy has been trained for decades, has fought a thousand battles on a hundred worlds, and has slain numberless enemies. Now watch as a half starved human punches him to death." The idea that marines are only marginally better than regular humans is just stupid, why spend so much resources making them if they can't do anything apparently?

That's a good point. For all the training and SCIENCE it takes to make a space marine, they need to get a lot of use out of them before they die. It's even worse with Grey Knights, who are even hard to train & create.

Buttons wrote:To an extent, yes. No one wants to hear about "This guy has been trained for decades, has fought a thousand battles on a hundred worlds, and has slain numberless enemies. Now watch as a half starved human punches him to death." The idea that marines are only marginally better than regular humans is just stupid, why spend so much resources making them if they can't do anything apparently?

Here we are at hyperbole again. I often have the feeling that, to a lot of people, Space Marines absolutely have to be a bunch of plot-armoured supermen punching hordes of enemies left and right with maybe a token casualty in their squad. If they can't do this, they're apparently completely useless, even when they are still represented as the best warriors the Imperium can produce.

Modern militaries spend ~5 million US dollar on a single Abrams tank compared to $33.500 for a Sherman in WW2. And still, an Abrams can be taken down by a $750 RPG. "Why spend so much resources making Abrams?"

Sometimes you just need to project as much power as possible onto a spot as small as possible, which is when you get the Space Marines. They don't have to waltz through there with godmode on, they just are the best way to do it.

... are you sure an Abrams can be taken down by an RPG? I was under the impression that those tanks are nigh impossible to kill. Not that I have a military background or anything.

 Inquisitor Ehrenstein wrote:
I've seen several books that make it seem way too easy to kill Space Marines. Probably just due to the author not understanding how they're supposed to work.

most killing strikes to a space marine in novels I have read are

head shot with a bolter round, pretty much a given if a bomb hits your head even if you have a helmet on you are dead
shots/strikes to the joints in the armor, pretty mush has been happening since armor was made
a mob against one, well they all can't be Calgar

I think that the depiction of overly weak marines is just as immersion breaking as the (far more frequent) depiction of invincible god-marines. My favorite 40k stories are those where the marines fall somewhere in the middle: Henry Zou does this well with his Chaos Marines, IMO.

A single marine is quite dangerous, but he's not invincible, and will end up quite dead in the wrong situation, like charging across an open field headlong into a Heavy Bolter nest, getting ambushed by a squad of Kabalite Warriors, or getting overwhelmed in close-combat by a ravenous horde of tyrannids. On the other hand, the Marine, a veteran of decades of warfare, likely knows how to maximize his strengths in almost every combat situation imaginable, choosing to strike when he knows victory is attainable, or at the very least creating a situation wherein he can take as many foes with him before he dies. Rather than charge the Heavy Bolter head on, the Marine would suppress it with bolter fire while a squadmate flanked and cleared it with a frag. Scouts, auspex sweeps, and veteran intuition would prevent the marines from walking into the Kabalite ambush, allowing them to turn the tables on their would-be hunters and launch a surprise attack of the own. The outnumbered marine would fall back from the swarm of charging hormagaunts, taking refuge in a chokepoint to mitigate their advantage of numbers, so he could kill them two by two rather than be taken down under the weight of their charge.

 TheCaptain wrote:
So what's the deal; is BL trying to write their characters closer to In-game statlines? Or is this just horrible writing? I personally was disgusted

I'm sorry, I must have missed the memo where you were made the final arbiter of the relative abilities of all persons in the 40K universe.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lynata wrote:

Buttons wrote:To an extent, yes. No one wants to hear about "This guy has been trained for decades, has fought a thousand battles on a hundred worlds, and has slain numberless enemies. Now watch as a half starved human punches him to death." The idea that marines are only marginally better than regular humans is just stupid, why spend so much resources making them if they can't do anything apparently?

Here we are at hyperbole again. I often have the feeling that, to a lot of people, Space Marines absolutely have to be a bunch of plot-armoured supermen punching hordes of enemies left and right with maybe a token casualty in their squad. If they can't do this, they're apparently completely useless, even when they are still represented as the best warriors the Imperium can produce.

Modern militaries spend ~5 million US dollar on a single Abrams tank compared to $33.500 for a Sherman in WW2. And still, an Abrams can be taken down by a $750 RPG. "Why spend so much resources making Abrams?"

Sometimes you just need to project as much power as possible onto a spot as small as possible, which is when you get the Space Marines. They don't have to waltz through there with godmode on, they just are the best way to do it.

QFT.

So, from what I have read of the OP, he has the following issues.
1) Autoguns can kill a Marine. (seems plausible. At that close of range I am sure a sustained burst would be able to do some damage.)
2) Space Marines miss shots. (Yup, the plasma cannon missed. gak happens, even for a superhuman soldier.)
3) Space Marines kill things "inefficently." (Bit of a wording issue, but I viewed it more of them firing into the charging cultists, and the marines each hitting one, maybe two cultists with their bursts, rather than how the OP viewed it as hitting one shot, then drastically missing the rest.)
4) The fact that marines can be knocked down my 3 or 4 cultists. (pretty sure it can happen.)
5) That a knife to the throat kills a marine. (It is a weakness in the Power armor, why not?)

Noisy_Marine wrote:... are you sure an Abrams can be taken down by an RPG? I was under the impression that those tanks are nigh impossible to kill.

Not any RPG for sure, but this one was specifically developed for that job. The weapon system itself supposedly costs $500 with a single projectile coming in at another $250 (admittedly, with the price I'm going by this forum post; then again, I'm sure it is nowhere near the cost of a tank).

Black Library stories have often portrayed the fighting completely different than actual game play, this has been going on forever , a good example is the Dreadnaught , an awe inspiring relentless engine of destruction in print that barely makes it out of the first turn alive in game .

In one Black Library book a space marine gets taken down by a simple spear. (props to the one that figures it out first.)

The WD story is not too unbelievable IMO.

You know, I read the WD story and had a very different take on it.

So, in the story, one Dark Angels Marine is struck by a shotgun blast, followed by focused fire from many cultists firing autoguns-- and even then he is only killed thanks to a lucky hit that penetrates his visor. The cultists with autoguns are also battle-hardened, and they are led by a heretical ex-Commissar who one of the Marines notes as having a high degree of tactical competency. Also, when the Dark Angel with plasma cannon fires on the cultists, they dive deep into cover to avoid being hit.

Another Dark Angel is then assaulted and overwhelmed by a different group of three cultists equipped with melee weapons. The other Dark Angels come to his aid, killing two of the assaulting cultists. The last cultist stabs the Marine in one of his armor's weak points (I think the neck but I don't remember). The downed Marine grabs the cultist's head and crushes it, but as he does so the cultist twists the knife in the Marine's neck and finishes him off, and they die together.

The Marine Sergeant then reflects on how it is rare to take fatal casualties, especially two in a single mission. All of this seems entirely reasonable to me, and meshes well with the game rules to boot. The Marines are very powerful but can be brought down by a mix of concentrated and lucky attacks-- the cultists are weak and ill-equipped relative to the Marines, but are competently led and should not be underestimated.

 Kaldor wrote:

 TheCaptain wrote:
So what's the deal; is BL trying to write their characters closer to In-game statlines? Or is this just horrible writing? I personally was disgusted

I'm sorry, I must have missed the memo where you were made the final arbiter of the relative abilities of all persons in the 40K universe.

I'm sorry, you must have also missed pretty much all GW-released fluff on Space Marines. Doesn't matter how crappily the SM codex was written, that's their fluff now, according to GW. Ward is the arbiter, big guy.

 Kaldor wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lynata wrote:

Buttons wrote:To an extent, yes. No one wants to hear about "This guy has been trained for decades, has fought a thousand battles on a hundred worlds, and has slain numberless enemies. Now watch as a half starved human punches him to death." The idea that marines are only marginally better than regular humans is just stupid, why spend so much resources making them if they can't do anything apparently?

Here we are at hyperbole again. I often have the feeling that, to a lot of people, Space Marines absolutely have to be a bunch of plot-armoured supermen punching hordes of enemies left and right with maybe a token casualty in their squad. If they can't do this, they're apparently completely useless, even when they are still represented as the best warriors the Imperium can produce.

Modern militaries spend ~5 million US dollar on a single Abrams tank compared to $33.500 for a Sherman in WW2. And still, an Abrams can be taken down by a $750 RPG. "Why spend so much resources making Abrams?"

Sometimes you just need to project as much power as possible onto a spot as small as possible, which is when you get the Space Marines. They don't have to waltz through there with godmode on, they just are the best way to do it.

QFT.

Not QFT at all. First, an Abrams has Tungsten-Uranium armor. Like ridiculously thick, hard stuff. Second, a RPG has very little chances of damaging an Abrams, even the new "Tank killing RPG" you posted.

Shown here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fcc_1304114951

That was an Abrams variant without the now-standard in urban environments TUSK upgrade package which includes heavier armor plating, and explosive-reactive anti-projectile countermeasures (as in less RPG hits, and the hits do less damage).

So yeah, maybe an Abrams could get taken down by an RPG. But it would take a LOT of RPG. About the same as the amount of cultists it would take to kill a "GW-fluff" Space marine...

TheCaptain wrote: Not QFT at all. First, an Abrams has Tungsten-Uranium armor. Like ridiculously thick, hard stuff.

What, you mean the Chobham armour that gets fitted on the Challenger 2 as well?
http://web.archive.org/web/20110604101651/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1551418/MoD-kept-failure-of-best-tank-quiet.html
Or perhaps like what the IDF Merkava sports?
http://www.haaretz.com/news/hezbollah-anti-tank-fire-causing-most-idf-casualties-in-lebanon-1.194528

Let's face it, the Soviets (and now the Russians) have developed these two-stage babies specifically to deal with NATO reactive armour; it's kind of naive to ignore it just because of the nimbus and because the military has a habit of keeping such weaknesses out of public perception.
http://www.defense-update.com/features/du-1-04/rpg-threat.htm
Here's the newest product of the line: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2008/11/20/rpg-30-unveiled-the-m1-abrams-killer/

I've been reading a lot of Ork-based BL stuff, as I've been working on my Ork army. After reading Hellsreach, Rynn's World and The Purging of Kadillus, i can safely say Marines die a lot more than we are lead to believe sometimes. It really depends on where the focus of the narrative comes from with BL books.

If the story is from the imperium point of view, each space marine death is a travesty, a warrior selling his life to buy precious moments for his brothers-in-arms, or fighting to the death to defend his objective.
If the story is from a xeno's angle,. every single Space Marine is a high-priority target. A "tuff hummie" that every alien wants the glory of killing.

From whats been quoted, the Dark Vengance book sounds about right. A squad of babbling, frothing zealots throw themselves against a small unit of DA. The Da fight valiantly, but are overrun/ overwhelmed by the maddened religious zealots, fighting not for themselves, but for their dark gods and masters.

It is easy to assume that cultists are weak, ill equipped morons, but if they're surviving the touch of chaos, then they are probably made of tougher stuff than they look.

 Gorgrimm wrote:

I'd much rather see the small, powerful SM armies cutting swathes through the ranks of hordes than fielding half a company each game.

The sad thing is that GW did once represent that in a game - which unfortunately is really no longer supported. The latest incarnation of the Epic rules did a great job of implementing marines as a rapid, elite strikeforce that hit like a hammer but would never outnumber anyone and couldn't afford too many casualties or protracted engagements. You could very easily be fighting with 10:1 odds with the game still being well balanced.

Assuming its an excerpt of the BL-novel to support the starter-box release and we don't know the full story yet, I'd guess ( as I am one of the fools who subscribed.. ) this is meant to show us each unit and model we find in said box.
Maybe if reds8n or any regular of the BL N&R thread gave it a thumbs up in a review, it could be acceptable even if the small bit in a WD isn't good. Looking at the OP, this sounds rather like another "firewarrior" accident...

Lynata wrote:What we have here, gentlemen, is nothing but the opposite extreme to the countless novels, computer games and RPGs that have hyped the Astartes up to a status of immortal demigods, nigh-impervious to barrages of enemy fire.

Yes the way the OP presented it, reads like its extreme and opposed to the background of 40k.
Lucky punches may happen, but I don't think a "success" of a few cheap 4pt models against something in the 15pts range should be part of a story if the goal is to promote the box contents.

But thats not the worst part.
The issue may be, if the course is to get those models names and a background, they will become those 'characters' and aren't given the freedom of the unnamed, basic model that will rely upon YOUR creativity and imagination.
Sure this will generate a few bucks for the company, selling boxes and books, audios and such.
Still the main advantage of 40k was its been a setting. Not a story. Not tied to a 'cinematic' . What happens if the 'replay' doesn't work?
When the 'characters' of the story can't provide? Because we haven't seen the power level of the rest, those who aren't troops....
Basically the idea of a combined release of GW and BL is good. Just don't tie all those models to a story. Maybe a few characters, maybe a type or specific loadout, but please not an all encompassing backstory.

So back to the subject of Space Marines in 40k in general.
Sure we see different takes from different authors.

But, and thats a big but, there is a given 'food chain'. If the enhanced super soldier cannot perform at the level it is expected to, because something the PDF should be able to handle is now going to get lucky, I believe this means the background was sacrificed to the demands of the bean-counters. The believable 'food-chain' ignored because a limited setup made for a pretty limited story.

What is a belivable 'food chain'?
- a civilian as the lowliest
- an angry and armed civilian
- a trained soldier
- a veteran soldier
- a enhanced soldier
- a altered human, pimped to super soldier

..and cultistst are at best on par with angry civilians IMO...

Maybe if that was traitor guard, or mutants or at least possessed..but no. Cultists, something that makes Grots look like valuable assets.

Wouldn't be much of an advert for the Chaos force in the boxed game if the cultists just got ripped to shreds in a short one sided ass kicking by the Marines...

Dunno, BL advertised the C.Z.dunn book/audio combo as Dark Angel related...

And there are the chosen, the chaos Lord and the hellbrute, wouldn't they want the spotlight in this?
If the Chaos meatshields can handle it on their own....

The "problem" with the foodchain is that it can easily be interrupted. It's not a simple "A will always defeat B" like you'd expect it when talking about a food chain in nature. Case in point, put that "trained soldier" behind a lascannon or give him a plasma gun, and he may easily take out one of those "altered human pimped-up super soldiers". Hell, even an angry and armed civilian could do that, he's just less likely to get his hands on that kind of equipment. But then again, those Cultists in the story aren't doing a 1:1 but swarming the squad, right?

As I said, it still doesn't really fit in with my own interpretation of the fluff (unless those Cultists were themselves boosted in some way, with combat stims or daemonic sorcery) - but so do a lot of "Pro-Marine" books that many people around here present as gospel, so ... meh. From what I can see it's but a case of "getting a taste of their own medicine" for once.

xttz wrote:The sad thing is that GW did once represent that in a game - which unfortunately is really no longer supported. The latest incarnation of the Epic rules did a great job of implementing marines as a rapid, elite strikeforce that hit like a hammer but would never outnumber anyone and couldn't afford too many casualties or protracted engagements. You could very easily be fighting with 10:1 odds with the game still being well balanced.

It saddens me that I missed the great era of Epic. I wish GW would pick it up again and expand it. :(

The fluff was awful. In every way.

L. Wrex

 Lynata wrote:

TheCaptain wrote: Not QFT at all. First, an Abrams has Tungsten-Uranium armor. Like ridiculously thick, hard stuff.

What, you mean the Chobham armour that gets fitted on the Challenger 2 as well?
http://web.archive.org/web/20110604101651/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1551418/MoD-kept-failure-of-best-tank-quiet.html
Or perhaps like what the IDF Merkava sports?
http://www.haaretz.com/news/hezbollah-anti-tank-fire-causing-most-idf-casualties-in-lebanon-1.194528

Let's face it, the Soviets (and now the Russians) have developed these two-stage babies specifically to deal with NATO reactive armour; it's kind of naive to ignore it just because of the nimbus and because the military has a habit of keeping such weaknesses out of public perception.
http://www.defense-update.com/features/du-1-04/rpg-threat.htm
Here's the newest product of the line: http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2008/11/20/rpg-30-unveiled-the-m1-abrams-killer/

So what, two RPGs have killed DONE DAMAGE to those (the Challenger 2) tanks in four years? Not destroyed, pierced the armour. Akin to doing a wound to a model and it rolls it's save. Or rolling to pen and getting a stunned result.

Not to mention neither of those are the Abrams, which the discussion was about. Kindof naive to think you can just change your argument to suit an advantageous positioning of yourself.

That'd be like someone coming in and saying "Well, the SM were right to die so easy! Guardsmen die that easy and they're both infantry with skin and faces."

You prove my point. It can happen, but it's (comparatively) as rare as a SM getting killed.

While I generally detest SM bolter porn and DO yearn for more realistic (yet still superhuman) depictions of SM in battle, I think this particular story swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. 3 cultists for 2 SM? That ratio has to be one in a million, otherwise Chaos has as good as won. I mean how many cultists are there in the galaxy vs SM.

TheCaptain wrote:So what, two RPGs have killed DONE DAMAGE to those (the Challenger 2) tanks in four years? Not destroyed, pierced the armour. Akin to doing a wound to a model and it rolls it's save. Or rolling to pen and getting a stunned result.
Not to mention neither of those are the Abrams, which the discussion was about. Kindof naive to think you can just change your argument to suit an advantageous positioning of yourself.

What? First of all, I'm not sure what you expect from anti-tank weapons. The real world isn't some action movie where a tank blows up leaving nothing but a pile of armour plates. Weapons such as these are designed to pierce the armour and do sufficient damage to either the machinery or the crew to disable/neutralise it. This is the way tanks and weapons against them have worked and evolved since ... about when they were first invented.

Secondly, the report isn't about two Challengers and their crews being "damaged" in four years, but about a government intentionally misleading the public and its own soldiers into thinking that this cannot happen. This was revealed only as the family of one injured tanker came forward to dispute the government's claim, so who knows how many other instances of this there were? Not me, and certainly not you either. What the report does is to dispel the common myth that the Challenger's armour - the same kind used on Abrams tanks - is somehow invulnerable against weapons such as these.

See also: http://web.archive.org/web/20061125174132/http://www.janes.com/defence/land_forces/news/jdw/jdw030620_1_n.shtml
"Details of the M1 losses were given, including one where 25mm armour-piercing depleted uranium (AP-DU) rounds from an unidentified weapon disabled a US tank near Najaf after penetrating the engine compartment. Another Abrams was disabled near Karbala after a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) penetrated the rear engine compartment and one was lost in Baghdad after its external auxiliary power unit was set on fire by medium-calibre fire."

And that's just from the short war; unfortunately we lack accurate numbers from insurgency fighting.
I certainly don't claim every single RPG-29 fired on an M1 has to kill it - what I did say it can happen. Which you opposed and then went on to claim how it can "maybe" happen but it would take "a LOT". So please, it's actually you trying to turn the argument around.

Thirdly, it appears you have missed the point. My argument isn't even about the Abrams at all; I've pulled it as a random example to show why Space Marines are worth the investment even when not deployed in godmode. I could have just as well compared the worth of an AH-64 Apache helo to a Stinger missile, just off the top of my head. Or the cost of a modern infantryman's training and equipment compared to that single 7.62mm FMJ bullet that can take him out. This isn't a particularly difficult concept, and Space Marines are certainly not the only elite Imperial force that take a lot of resources to raise. Others die even easier.

TheCaptain wrote:It can happen, but it's (comparatively) as rare as a SM getting killed.

Right, it's not like entire Chapters have been wiped out by non-Marines in the past, huh?

rabidaskal wrote:That ratio has to be one in a million, otherwise Chaos has as good as won. I mean how many cultists are there in the galaxy vs SM.

Whilst I do agree with the pendulum comparison, I would like to add that "one to a million" is way too far on the other side yet again. Let's keep in mind that the Space Marines are not the Imperium's only defenders. Indeed, they are not even its most important defenders. That would be the Imperial Guard and the PDF as well as locally raised Frateris Militias, the armies that truly keep those millions of cultists at bay. If we were to take another look at the real world again, it's like comparing the SEALs to the normal army. You wouldn't throw the former into a straight confrontation with a military force either - they would perform admirably for the short time they survive, sure, but the sheer numbers would soon overwhelm them. They've got other jobs to do, and so have the Space Marines. Their focus on rapid reaction and mobility is as important as their superhuman toughness and melee power. With the Astartes, it's all about "shock and awe" rather than protracted trench fighting (though I believe one or two Chapters have actually specialised in siege warfare).