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Title says it all - no Astra militarism or Naval support - can only 1000 of humanity's finest übermensch superman (created in Nazi-like genetic labs) conquer and subdue an entire planet say with just 6 billion people (around earth today)?

Or would it be a case of Deneriys in GoT where her unsullied couldn't even keep order in one large city?

Fluffwise, definately. Game wise, no.

Depends on the planet, and who/what's on it.

If it's something a few precision strikes can deal with, then sure. Otherwise they'd suffer from attrition/supply issues. In either case they wouldn't be able to hold an entire planet unsupported, so it would be a hit-and-run campaign.

Take, oh yes... Hold, hell no

The biggest weapon the Space Marines have against humans is that they are revered as near godlike war machines, and after key battles have been won most planets would want to give up.

But they'll never have the numbers to hold hold a planet if the populace aren't willing to give in

In current fluff it's possible, but gamewise, nevermind IRL it'd be absolutely impossible. Even with Astartes capabilities they have nowhere near the resources to conquer and hold new england, nevermind a whole planet.

Astartes capabilities were better shown off during the Great Crusade when it'd require in some cases 100.000+ to conquer a world. Chapters doing the same stuff is just ridiculous.

Assuming they had the full logistical support to conduct the range of operations, they'd make a good go of it.

They could certainly knock out most planets government, and eventually wipe out organized militaries, unless it was unusually elite and well equipped.

With planetary mobility and quick strike ability, they'd be able to keep resistance movements off balance for quite a while. Attrition would not be their friend, and eventually the billions will figure out IEDs and other booby traps.

Now, the Marines might ally with some of the natives, and use them for a lot of dirty work, but that's assuming the Marines can convince locals to do so. Of course, if the planet has something valuable, there would likely be some exchange of goods.

So, the short answer would be: yes, but probably not for too long.

There is a lack of boots.

If they could get the planet to surrender, sure. If the planet was willing to fight to the last man - no. There's only so much ground you can cover with 1000 men.

The problem with military operations that aren't flat-out extermination you need a lot of people to secure the area regardless of how much local battlefield superiority you have. The US had complete one-sided dominance over Iraq, a relatively small country, and still 250,000 men was not nearly enough to keep it secure.

This is why FW books on the matter tend to be more realistic as you have 10-12 millionish Guardsmen being used to take over sparsely populated planets.

Fluffwise easily

Particularly if that SM's name was Conrad Kurze.


Small warbands of CSM are able to conqure planets. Just a squad of 5-8 guys can incite a rebellion and topple a government then set up a system where the strongest rule. In such a system, a SM will always win.

No, they can't, they need way more boots on the ground to establish proper dominance.

It's pretty well established in the fluff that Space Marines don't do conquest - that's the job of the Imperial Guard. They're an elite commando force that acts as the tip of the spear.

A Space Marine chapter could cause mass disorder by decapitating the leadership of the planetary government and defence force, cause catastrophic damage to infrastructure through lightning commando raids on key facilities, and just generally make a mess of things. They could send the planet back to the stone age - but they wouldn't truly have "conquered" the place. Even the Legions didn't really do this - they acted as shock troops to obliterate the planetery defense forces. They were followed up by the Imperial Army who performed the grubby work of breaking local resistances and re-establishing order.

The flip side of conquest is the re-establishment of order - and you need manpower to do that. One chapter of marines doesn't have the manpower to man checkpoints, to enforce curfews, guard key facilities, all those many boring jobs that an occupying force has to perform if they want to re-establish order after they have defeated the planet's military forces.

So 500 Space Marines land in New England...

Quickly the US Army realizes they need a tactical nuclear strike and the second last thing Obama does is order a missile strike on American soil.

The last thing Obama does is melt into a puddle of goop when the Marines order a missile strike of their own.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Then the other 500 show up and we put our hands up politely and cue towards the nearest Inquisitorial Assessment Centre...

 darkcloak wrote:
So 500 Space Marines land in New England...

Quickly the US Army realizes they need a tactical nuclear strike and the second last thing Obama does is order a missile strike on American soil.

The last thing Obama does is melt into a puddle of goop when the Marines order a missile strike of their own.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Then the other 500 show up and we put our hands up politely and cue towards the nearest Inquisitorial Assessment Centre...

Apart from the marines do that against every capital city on the globe in the same day.

Oh and obviously they magically know with 100% where all the leaders are, how the planet works and blablabla. Yeah, right, omniscient marines.

 Bobthehero wrote:
Oh and obviously they magically know with 100% where all the leaders are, how the planet works and blablabla. Yeah, right, omniscient marines.

Psykers can rip thoughts from anybody on the planet, Techmarines can patch into our satellite network and siphon away data, and even your basic grunt can simply kidnap a human and devour their mind to assimilate their memories from their greymatter.

Or they just annihilate any city with a large concentration of people. For example, erase New York and London and you crash the global economy.

What was that Margaret Atwood quote?

Never question the ability of a small group of Space Marines to conquer an entire planet...

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:
Oh and obviously they magically know with 100% where all the leaders are, how the planet works and blablabla. Yeah, right, omniscient marines.

Psykers can rip thoughts from anybody on the planet, Techmarines can patch into our satellite network and siphon away data, and even your basic grunt can simply kidnap a human and devour their mind to assimilate their memories from their greymatter.

.

They'll have to find the right person, and what if our tech isn't compatible with Techmarines? No, somehow they're always able to find the right guy, hack the tech without failing, yeah, no I don't buy it.

They could definitely conquer a planet, even a company is enough for that in most cases.
I'd wager they could hold on to it in most cases as well. Precision strikes are pretty efficient at dealing with dangerous unrest, and if the planet proves to be too unruly, most Astartes are not beyond simply murdering the entire population and flying in a new one. An entire chapter has more than enough power for that.
The only planets they might not be able to take on are ones that are very heavily fortified or have very strong defensive forces. Worlds like Cadia, Krieg etc.

That said, Space Marines are not there to conquer stuff on their own, that is why the Legions were broken into Chapters in the first place. Space Marines are there to eliminate the heaviest enemy resistance and create a breach for other Imperial Forces to move in and hold.

 Bobthehero wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Bobthehero wrote:
Oh and obviously they magically know with 100% where all the leaders are, how the planet works and blablabla. Yeah, right, omniscient marines.

Psykers can rip thoughts from anybody on the planet, Techmarines can patch into our satellite network and siphon away data, and even your basic grunt can simply kidnap a human and devour their mind to assimilate their memories from their greymatter.

.

They'll have to find the right person, and what if our tech isn't compatible with Techmarines? No, somehow they're always able to find the right guy, hack the tech without failing, yeah, no I don't buy it.

Of course their tech is compatible- the Imperium manages everything from feral worlds to planets with modern day tech. Just exactly how little of the fluff have you even read?

A lot, still try to flush out the awful stuff I've read on there about psykers cutting ships with swords and other idiocies, but its a long process, sadly. And they use STC tech to manage those worlds, more often than not, means they got a common base, and most of it comes from the Ad-Mech, once again, common base and all that

Let's go up with a hypothetical situation. we'll assume modern military equipment is on par with IG weaponry as I don't wanna get bogged down in "modern tech vs 40k tech" comparisons. it's irrelevent to ask how we could see Space Marines conquer a world. secondly I'm mostly gonna focus on one or two great powers, worlds in 40k have united planetary governments so "well just because the US surrenders doesn't mean Germany would" isn't all that relevent to the discussion at hand.



so hypotheticly let's assume a planet more or less like earth is targeted for invasion. the Inqusition would have had scouts and spies in place well before hand, targets would be identified etc. while this is all going on the Imperial fleet will begin to move into position, with a space Marine strike cruiser in the vanguard. the cruiser we will assume carries a force consisting of one battle company,\ plus support assests (a squad of two of scout, squad or two of terminators, some armor, etc)


so the space marine vessel blasts through and makes orbit. it then launches it's drop pods. it doesn't launch it's drop pods at the troops, hell no that'd be a waste. instead it drops at critical command infastructure points. a droppod of 5 marines lands in the middle of the white house lawn and captures or kills the President and Cabinet. a tatical squad in a droppod lands at the pentagon and swiftly begins to tear it apart. another dropod lands in New York and siezes control of the UN building.

within an hour major command installations have fallen. the planets defenders are in complete disarray. and about this time the Imperial guard is landing and beginning to move in and begin the conquest. meanwhile the space marines are returning to orbit and perparing for phase 2. now that the battle has been joined, the Marines continue to make strikes at key areas. hitting notconcentrations of forces but command notes, ammo depots and others areas. as the Marines demolish this target the campaign becomes easy for the IG,

after the battle ends the Marines are credited pretty much single handed with the victory, and the millions of guardsmen who did most of the fighting are pretty much ignored.


Basicly Marines are used by the IoM for operations where they need to deploy small numbers of troops in a high concentration of force.

it's worth noting the biggest road block to SM sucess would be the enemy having air superiorty

It's really easy to subdue piles of dust after you exterminatus them all.
:p just saying. Most battle barges have the ability to exterminatus.

Most battleship-class capital ships have the ability to pretty much render a world down to the stone age, Astartes or Imperial Navy.

The only problem is that that more or less eliminates the point of invading in the first place; a dead ball of rock is largely irrelevant.

But yes, agree with most people here; 1000 marines on their own do virtually nothing - they've got to slog through armies tens of thousands strong. It's the combination of astartes strike forces with drop pods, gunships and orbital fire to allow them to engage on their own terms which makes them dangerous.

Can marines take a planet? Possibly.

Can they hold a planet? Probably not. Not without killing 90% of the population, at least.

A while back, I had a game of Dawn of War Soulstorm (with a bunch of mods). It was a 1v1 take and hold game. To win, a player must have control of over 66% of the capture points for a set amount of time in order to win. I was playing as Chaos Daemons, my opponent was Grey Knights.
My opponent could only field about 2-3 units of 3-5 Marines iirc, but I could field about 7 or so units of Furies.
What ended up happening was that, while I couldn't kill the knights at all, I could play hide-and-seek with them. I had multiple fast-moving units across the map, and every time the GK captured one of my points, I'd capture two of theirs.

The game was unwinnable for both of us, because I could't hold the points long enough, but the GK could never get a majority.

Moral of the story: Unless marines can be in multiple places at once, or have orbital support (for killing gak), they'll be given the runaround without getting anything out of it.

It would all depend on if they could get the population behind them through fear or admiration. If not and without supplies they would eventually lose control through attrition.

Most Primarchs were able to conquer their homeworlds, but couldn't have accomplished the task if it weren't for the people behind them.

The Dark Angels could. Imperial records do not have the exact number of Deathwing or Ravenwing on their books so there are likely to be quite a large number of them, plus the Dark Angels and all their successor chapters all operate as a single chapter/legion so they would have the numbers and resources.

They just keep the legion strength bit a secret from the inquisition....

 Slaphead wrote:
The Dark Angels could. Imperial records do not have the exact number of Deathwing or Ravenwing on their books so there are likely to be quite a large number of them, plus the Dark Angels and all their successor chapters all operate as a single chapter/legion so they would have the numbers and resources.

They just keep the legion strength bit a secret from the inquisition....

the dsark angels keep in close contact with their sucessors but to claim they operate as a legion is stretching it. also while we don;'t have exact numbers for the deathwing and ravenwing we can't presume that means they're really giant million man strong formations. we can proably assume they're not much stronger then a company. it's worth noting that having a full 100 suits of terminator armor is considered impressive, and only the best supplied chapters have that many. MANY chapters do not have sufficant terminator suits to equip every vetern with one.


Honestly I think the codex as written was intended for space Marines to require support to engage in planetary conquest. as I outlined in my earlier post, a chapter can make an easy job of it for guardsmen, but they need the feet on the ground the Guard can provide, as well as the navy to ensure air/space superiority

BrianDavion wrote:

 Slaphead wrote:
The Dark Angels could. Imperial records do not have the exact number of Deathwing or Ravenwing on their books so there are likely to be quite a large number of them, plus the Dark Angels and all their successor chapters all operate as a single chapter/legion so they would have the numbers and resources.

They just keep the legion strength bit a secret from the inquisition....

the dsark angels keep in close contact with their sucessors but to claim they operate as a legion is stretching it.

All Dark Angel successor chapters report to the Dark Angels Supreme Grand Master in secret and do his bidding. Their use of successor chapters is just a pretense to keep the Lords of Terra happy. They do operate as a legion.


In terms of a standard Space Marine chapter, they could orbital bombard a planet and they do have the option of exterminatus by completely blowing it up. They wouldn't really have the numbers to take over an entire planet quickly, but with time on their side (a lot of time!), they could take a planet apart piece by piece. Throughout the Great Crusade/Heresy it took entire legions to completely conquer a planet and even then they had auxiliary support from the adeptus mechanicus and imperial guardsmen (with the excellent warhound titans).

How does the saying go?

"To take a city send a squad, to take a planet send a company, to take a system send a chapter"

Something like that.

I think they could definitely take it easy, but they'd need guard regiments to help them hold it, unless they were planning on garrisoning it and making it their homeworld.

Come to think of it, how are we defining conquering?

-Total destruction of military capability
-Removal of leadership
-Extermination
-Replacing the leadership and exerting control
-Other