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"pods are hard to detect"

modern day systems would have no problem detecting and tracking something like a drop pod, it'd light up every radar, microwave, thermal, and acoustic sensor station within hundreds of miles.

Vak, are you sure you are reading what you are replying to?

Pods are hard to detect. Fact. You cannot then say 'We can easily detect pods'. You can't! That is part of the premise.

You cannot say 'we obviously can'. 40k has more than enough handwavium and if your point of immersion breaking is at drop pod detectability then I question your choice of setting.

 Vaktathi wrote:
But thats kind of exactly the whole thing here. They're portrayed as doing all sorts of stuff (like taking and holding entire planets, engaging in attritional siege warfare, etc) that they obviously have neither the numbers nor capabilities to actually carry out once looked at critically without just chalking it all up to plot armor or inventing suppositions

I agree with the take on siege warfare, it doesn't make sense. But "holding" a planet? That's really dependent on the details. They could literally hold it hostage with bombardment cannons. "Do as we say or every city with a population over X will be destroyed."

But to have fancy scanners that can find missile silos? That's very believable to me. To find communications hubs? Easy-peasy, since they're obviously broadcasting all the time. Track army movements? No problem.

 Vaktathi wrote:
I guess I missed that, but even modern day systems would have no problem detecting and tracking something like a drop pod, it'd light up every radar, microwave, thermal, and acoustic sensor station within hundreds of miles.

There's nothing even remotely stealthy about them and we certainly can detect and track meteors a fraction of the size going several multiples more than a Drop Pod's stated 12000 km/h speed today.

In your mind they aren't stealthy, but right there in IA2 is says they are hard to detect. So then that's what they are. Like I said before, they are "hard to track" in a paradigm where anti-orbital/anti-planetfall systems are relatively commonplace. Your assumptions about them are directly contradictory to their description and purpose.

Trying to actually maneuver a pod in flight and stay on course would be far more difficult to accomplish than for a missile.

I don't see how you'd make that assumption. Both have guidance fins and are computer controlled. In fact Drop Pods have thrusters while ICBMs don't at that stage.

which assumes the SM's know where they are and can engage them before/without being engaged back and that they arent mobile, none of which would necessarily be true, but which is just automatically assumed so by whoever wrote the passage, or more likely, never really thought about in detail.

If you want, you can willfully ignore the fluff. I can't stop you. But if we're talking about the plausibility of them conquering a world then the fact that they, as a matter of routine, spot and disable "missile bunkers" can't really be ignored.

 Ashiraya wrote:

"pods are hard to detect"

modern day systems would have no problem detecting and tracking something like a drop pod, it'd light up every radar, microwave, thermal, and acoustic sensor station within hundreds of miles.

Vak, are you sure you are reading what you are replying to?

Pods are hard to detect. Fact. You cannot then say 'We can easily detect pods'. You can't! That is part of the premise.

You cannot say 'we obviously can'. 40k has more than enough handwavium and if your point of immersion breaking is at drop pod detectability then I question your choice of setting.

More to the point detecting a Drop Pod is very different from detecting a Drop Pod in time to do anything about it.

 Ashiraya wrote:

"pods are hard to detect"

Pods are hard to detect. Fact. You cannot then say 'We can easily detect pods'. You can't! That is part of the premise.

what exactly does "hard to detect" mean, and by who's standards?

Hard to detect may mean they're hard to detect launching directly from the ship until they hit the atmosphere, which, sure, I'd acccept, but pretty much by fundamental definition, anything entering an atmosphere is going to be lit up like a christmas tree in some way, including literally, as long as there's an atmosphere. Even if the pod was perfectly visually and thermally hidden, the atmospheric disturbance is going to be exceptionally "loud" in terms of a detection signal, and every visualization we've ever seen of Drop Pods shows them entering very violently indeed.

Again, we detect and track things *today* that move far faster than Drop Pods, are far smaller, and far less blocky and angular and likely to bounce back perfect radar signals. If we're talking space interception, ok, I'd grant they may be difficult to detect there. once they hit an atmosphere though, there's really no subtle way to manage that. That's simply a fundamental fact of the physical reality of physics unless they work radically differently than they ostensibly claim to.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
But thats kind of exactly the whole thing here. They're portrayed as doing all sorts of stuff (like taking and holding entire planets, engaging in attritional siege warfare, etc) that they obviously have neither the numbers nor capabilities to actually carry out once looked at critically without just chalking it all up to plot armor or inventing suppositions

I agree with the take on siege warfare, it doesn't make sense. But "holding" a planet? That's really dependent on the details. They could literally hold it hostage with bombardment cannons. "Do as we say or every city with a population over X will be destroyed."

Sure, and by that standard, ok. I was envisioning more of a traditional "we have taken the planet and are going to hold it against conventional counterattack and domestic reprisal/insurrection".

But to have fancy scanners that can find missile silos? That's very believable to me.

They're concrete bunkers filled with big metal tubes and lots of wiring, lots of facilities match that profile. It's not like they send out special "missile" particles or have special targeting systems that paint targets which can be traced back to a silo the way an actively engaged SAM site does. There's no fluff to support the idea that they can just automatically detect and destroy buried missile silos, in fact, much the opposite, such as with Storm of Iron.

This is also a universe where human labor still does what machines have done on earth for hundreds of years (again, such as manually turning gun turrets on starships by chain-gang), and where common military hardware cannot match the capabilities of weapons that have been obsolete for multiple generations of military hardware.

To find communications hubs? Easy-peasy, since they're obviously broadcasting all the time.

Again, going back to my earlier example, you'd probably take ESPN off the air before you found anything of military significance. In every major city you have dozens if not hundreds of major broadcast centers for everything from radio to TV, and cell phone towers every couple of blocks, and cell phones and WiFi networks broadcasting from every person and dwelling. Likewise, tracking a broadcast station isn't going to do squat against wired networks and major communications infrastructure that isn't broadcasting over airwaves but rather fiberoptic cable and wire. Analyzing broadcast traffic isn't going to uncover Google's datacenter or the Pentagon. If one were to attack the US in this manner and just obliterate the cities putting out the largest amount of broadcast traffic, you'd have to destroy a good number of cities before you reached DC and the primary military command center.

Track army movements? No problem.

It's a problem if you don't know where such forces are stationed, where their transportation and supply stations and routes are, etc. It's easy when you've been analyzing areas for years or decades and know the terrain and traffic patterns and where the forces already are.

In your mind they aren't stealthy, but right there in IA2 is says they are hard to detect.

As I noted above, "hard to detect" is rather vague. If we're talking attempting to detect them in space, I could by that. Going by the fundamental reality of objects entering an atmosphere at great speed however, in an atmosphere even if the pod itself was perfectly invisible to radar and optical sensors (including eyes), the atmospheric disturbances and giant sheet of flame and accompanying thermal and sonic phenomena would not be.

Kinda like how a common supermarket parking lot speed bump could stop a Land Raider because it's got a ground clearance of 4"

I don't see how you'd make that assumption. Both have guidance fins and are computer controlled. In fact Drop Pods have thrusters while ICBMs don't at that stage.

A drop pod has thrusters, sure. It's also comically unbalanced and and would be very poor at maneuvering, particularly with as much mass as one would have, and if knocked off-axis would have essentially no ability to right themselves properly. We're talking about something as thickly armored as a medium tank crashing through the atmosphere at extremely high speeds on direct course for the ground, and even the tiniest of movements can send it many miles off course or worse. ICBM's don't have thrusters at that stage because don't need them, they're a far smaller object that's much harder to hit and can arrive some distance away from their target and still accomplish their goal. There's also generally multiple warheads so if one is lost another can still do the job.

If you want, you can willfully ignore the fluff. I can't stop you. But if we're talking about the plausibility of them conquering a world then the fact that they, as a matter of routine, spot and disable "missile bunkers" can't really be ignored.

Again, the point was that this is accomplished largely through plot armor, and that looking at the actual realities of such a thing would quickly break down. The fluff also has them engaging in hand to hand combat with 30m tall war machines and fighting attritional trench warfare battles, which everyone generally agrees is pretty stupid. It makes for fun reading, but if we're actually looking at how something would play out and trying to earnestly discuss how a Space Marine chapter could conquer a planet, the only way it works out for the Space Marines is if you accept that they work only with a very large helping of Plot Armor and Handwavium. That I guess is really my ultimate point.

 AnomanderRake wrote:


More to the point detecting a Drop Pod is very different from detecting a Drop Pod in time to do anything about it.

The big issue there being how long do they actually remain at such tremendous speeds, because they have to slow down to land, and they're not landing at 12000 KP/H without hitting with the impact energy of a micronuke and exerting G forces that would liquefy titanium, even with superhuman G force resilience, it would require several minutes of slowdown time.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Even if the pod was perfectly visually and thermally hidden, the atmospheric disturbance is going to be exceptionally "loud" in terms of a detection signal, and every visualization we've ever seen of Drop Pods shows them entering very violently indeed.

Now this is what you should use redirected meteors for. Which of those 100 things messing up your atmosphere is the real drop pod? Better guess fast!

 Vaktathi wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


More to the point detecting a Drop Pod is very different from detecting a Drop Pod in time to do anything about it.

The big issue there being how long do they actually remain at such tremendous speeds, because they have to slow down to land, and they're not landing at 12000 KP/H without hitting with the impact energy of a micronuke and exerting G forces that would liquefy titanium, even with superhuman G force resilience, it would require several minutes of slowdown time.

Unfortunately it's midnight where I am and I need to be up at a reasonable hour tomorrow but I'll get back to you on that.

If you only count a single chapter with absolutely no support from anything outside of it (no Navy, Inquisitors, IG, etc) then in a brute force way? Probably not. However this was the intention of Space Marines splitting into chapters; no one man would be able to wield the power of a legion of super soldiers that can conquer planet after planet.

The older fluff illustrated this better; Space Marines were the Scalpel to the IG's Hammer. Where IG smashes and crushes all opposition, the Space Marines were suppose to strike at critical points, thus allowing said Hammer to crumble the entire planet's government with one fell swoop (if your logistics, morale and livelihood are decimated under the current government, then they suffer a major loss in a grand battle, this would cause the citizens to start revolting, and the rest is just cleanup work). The reason Marines sound like they can do this in fluff is because they end up taking all the credits.

Now Chaos Marines opens up a whole new can of worms, but again it wouldn't be the marines themselves doing it, it would be basically a bunch of converts and cultists, with traitor elements of the native forces backed by daemons. The main difference is that Chaos Marines probably don't need anyone else at the beginning, while loyalist marines would.

That is assuming the Marines don't solve things diplomatically. After all having basically the barrier between science fiction and reality shattered by their mere existence is probably enough to cause a bunch of countries to cave in on the spot. I mean if genetically enhanced supersoldiers came to our doorstep offering to help us defeat the swarm of alien locusts and zombie robots out there, showed us proof of both of these, then said that the only thing they ask in return is tithes and becoming part of the imperium, a lot of world leaders would be put in a very weird place.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Even if the pod was perfectly visually and thermally hidden, the atmospheric disturbance is going to be exceptionally "loud" in terms of a detection signal, and every visualization we've ever seen of Drop Pods shows them entering very violently indeed.

Now this is what you should use redirected meteors for. Which of those 100 things messing up your atmosphere is the real drop pod? Better guess fast!

Aye, which would be a great tactic, and you could spread them far enough apart to not majorly risk collisions and still have it work.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


More to the point detecting a Drop Pod is very different from detecting a Drop Pod in time to do anything about it.

The big issue there being how long do they actually remain at such tremendous speeds, because they have to slow down to land, and they're not landing at 12000 KP/H without hitting with the impact energy of a micronuke and exerting G forces that would liquefy titanium, even with superhuman G force resilience, it would require several minutes of slowdown time.

Unfortunately it's midnight where I am and I need to be up at a reasonable hour tomorrow but I'll get back to you on that.

I look forward to it!

"Grav is your friend. The Skyhammer Annihilation force is considered broken for a reason."

A chapter doesn't have enough grav to stop a huge army of Riptides/Stormsurges. At best, they have 10-15 grav cannons because all the other heavy weapons presumably get fielded in the fluff. That's part of my point. A marine chapter doesn't have enough of anything to accomplish a single thing. Hell, a genestealer cult could get big enough to kill an entire chapter on the right hive world. 1000 is a tiny, tiny TINY number.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:


More to the point detecting a Drop Pod is very different from detecting a Drop Pod in time to do anything about it.

The big issue there being how long do they actually remain at such tremendous speeds, because they have to slow down to land, and they're not landing at 12000 KP/H without hitting with the impact energy of a micronuke and exerting G forces that would liquefy titanium, even with superhuman G force resilience, it would require several minutes of slowdown time.

Unfortunately it's midnight where I am and I need to be up at a reasonable hour tomorrow but I'll get back to you on that.

I look forward to it!

So Forge World figures, a few guesses, and a bit of approximation are giving me a density of slightly more than balsa wood for a loaded Drop Pod and a terminal velocity of over five hundred kilometers per second. Going to have to go back and try and guess better figures. (That said an object with a terminal velocity of over 2km/s will make it from low orbit to the ground in a straight line in just over three minutes if it doesn't decelerate to land, so the final number is unlikely to be under three minutes).

Of course, but it'd be more like an episode of "Star Trek" than what you're imagining.

The Space Marines' ships would probably be capable of subduing an entire world. 1000 guys on the ground with a few tanks? Never, unless there's basically no modern weapons on the world at all. The PDF is likely to outnumber them 1000 to 1.

SomeRandomEvilGuy wrote:

godking wrote:
]The Tau wona war against space marines by short cirtuiting their armor with a EMP.

Ahahaha what's that in? Tau make Marines look like chumps way too often.


On a more on-topic note; without orbital bombardment I don't see it working on modern day earth. However as previously noted in 40K as in most sci-fi there generally are a small number of important areas on a planet and if you take or destroy them the planet is yours. This mitigates the small number of Space Marines issue.

Blades of Damocles.

On topic.

Space marines might be able to subvert the ruling class and hold the important areas but they are not holding the entire planet with just a thousand men.

It took rome damn near 200 years to fully pacify Iberia and that was with a lot more then a 1000 men.

Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

It's easy with strategic weapons.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

So the Raven Guard company has achieved a very solid hold on one mountain. That leaves them with enough to go that Wikipedia has sublisted them three deep.

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

They have trouble when they have restrictions placed on their engagement methods and tools.

A force like the Raven Guard, realistically, would have zero ability to sustain itself for any period of time cut off. Ammunition resupply, parts breakage and maintenance of extremely complex armor systems (to say nothing of sustaining their energy requirements), and communications would be critical issues, and food supply would be a serious problem (for a Space Marine who would require something 20,000 calories a day to support their massive and tuned up bodies while also fighting and exerting themselves) even if they can eat things that normal humans cant, there just isnt enough chemical energy in dead squirrels, rocks and lichen to sustain that. Those SM's would quickly deteriorate the effectiveness of such a fighting force in days. It's one thing for a 5'3" 120lb dude with an AK to live in the mountains he's known all his life. It is quite another for a 700lb 8ft tall super soldier with extremely complex and bulky gear who's never set foot in that moutain range to do so.

Being 8ft tall superhumans in gigantic metal suits is also not particularly stealthy just because they're painted black.

Martel732 wrote:

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

It's easy with strategic weapons.

Again, don't need to nuke them. If we know they're stuck on a mountain, it's not hard to launch cruise missiles and fire artillery from far beyond their threat range. And bear in mind that modern artillery fires for miles, whereas the heaviest Imperial weapons carried by the Raven Guard have a maximum range of well under 500 feet (48"). We could park modern MBTs and just take them apart if they ever show their heads.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Modern militaries have trouble clearing 100 men out of a mountain that have very outdated tech compared to the military forces. What on earth are they going to do if it was a chapter like the raven guard?

And that is just one example of how things would go bad for this planet, there are a hell of a lot other scenarios that don't work out too well for us with different chapters.

It's easy with strategic weapons.

Again, don't need to nuke them. If we know they're stuck on a mountain, it's not hard to launch cruise missiles and fire artillery from far beyond their threat range. And bear in mind that modern artillery fires for miles, whereas the heaviest Imperial weapons carried by the Raven Guard have a maximum range of well under 500 feet (48"). We could park modern MBTs and just take them apart if they ever show their heads.

That works too. I was just being extreme.

So I'm having some fun working around data type overflow trying to figure out how to do these computations from high altitudes. I can tell you that a simplified model of a drop pod (an egg shape 5m wide and 8m tall weighing 35 metric tons with an approximate coefficient of friction slightly better than a sphere) nudged out of a ship (no initial velocity) at 43 kilometers above the ground will take around five and a half minutes to hit the ground with no reverse thrust.

Data is also inconclusive on whether the Drop Pod actually has an engine propelling it downwards (FW says no, but they also say it's at least ten tons lighter than makes any sense) and the only image I've got of Drop Pods launching from the spacecraft is a bit of FMV that I think is from Chaos Gate (a '90s 40k turn-based strategy game, for those in the audience who aren't old enough to remember it and haven't been digging around to see what random bits of footage are from) so I've got no idea if they're propelled out of the spacecraft at all.

Independent of the fall distance if a Drop Pod didn't have any reverese thrust it'd hit the ground at around 41.5 meters per second (about 93 miles per hour). If neither the surface or the pod deforms during impact and the pod's harnesses can deform by about a meter the passengers would be decelerating at 170g for about 0.02 seconds, which I've found documented cases of unarmoured humans taking and walking away with no injuries. The retro-rockets may not actually be necessary, given the added protection of power armour, a Space Marine's reinforced physiology, and the rarity of surfaces you could crash thirty-five tons of Drop Pod into at terminal velocity without deforming them. (Also given that you aren't allowed to deploy other armies in pods anymore I may not have to ask what would happen if a Guardsman was subjected to the same stresses)

Also it should be pointed out that it seems like drop pods have some sort of anti-grav tech on the bottom (not sure if this is stated anywhere but it looks like the same type of "bars" under a land speeder)

At least that's how I've always imagined it, in the last few hundred meters the anti-grav engages along with the retrograde thrusters and slows the pod down at non=lethal levels allowing it to maintain full speed decent until the very last second, making it "hard to detect" until it lands.

Headcannon for me anyways...

 Vaktathi wrote:
to say nothing of sustaining their energy requirements

While the nutrition requirement is indeed rather egregiously glossed over by GW, the energy requirement is not. Marines carry fusion reactors on their backs. They are not running out of power any time soon.

 Forcast wrote:
Also it should be pointed out that it seems like drop pods have some sort of anti-grav tech on the bottom (not sure if this is stated anywhere but it looks like the same type of "bars" under a land speeder)

At least that's how I've always imagined it, in the last few hundred meters the anti-grav engages along with the retrograde thrusters and slows the pod down at non=lethal levels allowing it to maintain full speed decent until the very last second, making it "hard to detect" until it lands.

Headcannon for me anyways...

5th Edition SM Codex states retro jets.

Without any help whatsoever, absolutely not. A typical codex chapter is 1,000 battle brothers. The only thing they'd conquer alone are moons and space stations. But if it's a world, then they'd definitely need local PDF or IG to help flex their muscles. Otherwise, they're losing the numbers game really bad, and even as superhuman as they are, it wouldn't be hard for a capable rebel commander to eliminate them.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
to say nothing of sustaining their energy requirements

While the nutrition requirement is indeed rather egregiously glossed over by GW, the energy requirement is not. Marines carry fusion reactors on their backs. They are not running out of power any time soon.

but bullets and gun rounds is another thing. an entire Chapter lands on a planet with a population of billions (like earth) it doesn't matter how big and bad they are, the numbers are against them.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
to say nothing of sustaining their energy requirements

While the nutrition requirement is indeed rather egregiously glossed over by GW, the energy requirement is not. Marines carry fusion reactors on their backs. They are not running out of power any time soon.

Sure, but even if we accept that, then we have issue of "Sergeant Tyrus's pack was hit when he died and ruptured intensely radioactive material all over the area, Brothers Marnus and Leraxes had breaches in their armor and were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation which will degrade their performance and would have killed lesser men, and their suit systems are now compromised".

Even setting aside that scenario, they have do have issues with the suits and weapons in other ways. Ammunition, basic water (even a Space Marine isn't immune to this need even if we accept the need is somewhat more controllable), parts and other consumables (e.g. replacement seals or servo motors and lubricant or sensor modules or armor plates and the like). Marines are almost never portrayed exactly carrying an abundance of ammunition and supplies, and are even more rarely portrayed receiving any supplies short of some sort of return to a ship or base.

In a codex astartes chapter, it includes 6 standard issue chapters, 1 assault, 1 dev and 1 scout, then the veterans, but in a full chapter you will have a space fleet ( which can destroy all life on a planet), as well as tanks, planes ect, it depends if you are going for conquer and claim or destroy.

 Lord Tarkin wrote:
Without any help whatsoever, absolutely not. A typical codex chapter is 1,000 battle brothers. The only thing they'd conquer alone are moons and space stations. But if it's a world, then they'd definitely need local PDF or IG to help flex their muscles. Otherwise, they're losing the numbers game really bad, and even as superhuman as they are, it wouldn't be hard for a capable rebel commander to eliminate them.

sure except the first indication the rebel commander has that he's fighting space Marines is proably going to be when a Squad of terminators teleports into the middle of his command center. Space Marines don't conduct line up drag out fights. they're not geared for war's of attrition. they're all about shock and awe.

lets put it this way, On taros the marines dropped into tau held territory, the tau have comparable tech to the imperium, but massively more advanced than us, the marines dug in and for 3 days they took on a massively superior force, holding out, and eventually escaping, we have no where near the level of tech that the tau do.

As a side note, people need to stop using the TT rules for ranges and how accurate and army is in the fluff, the fluff influences the rules, but the rules are not representative of the actual fluff, we know marines could take this planet out easily because... guess what, they do, against tech levels both greater and lesser than ours.

as a second side note, the models are designed by people who have no idea how such things work, were the 40k universe real, these vehicles would look very different, better clearance etc. so people need to drop that too, we know leman russ and land raiders couldn't actually get around properly.

 Formosa wrote:
lets put it this way, On taros the marines dropped into tau held territory, the tau have comparable tech to the imperium, but massively more advanced than us, the marines dug in and for 3 days they took on a massively superior force, holding out, and eventually escaping, we have no where near the level of tech that the tau do.

As a side note, people need to stop using the TT rules for ranges and how accurate and army is in the fluff, the fluff influences the rules, but the rules are not representative of the actual fluff, we know marines could take this planet out easily because... guess what, they do, against tech levels both greater and lesser than ours.

as a second side note, the models are designed by people who have no idea how such things work, were the 40k universe real, these vehicles would look very different, better clearance etc. so people need to drop that too, we know leman russ and land raiders couldn't actually get around properly.

going by the Fluff, ignore the Fluff it is geared towards making whoever they want to look good even if it defies logic, look at the battle of Macragge and the Battle of Caliban, fluff is not designed to follow logic but to follow the story they want to tell and using fluff as your basis of comparison to what would/could happen is flawed.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Lord Tarkin wrote:
Without any help whatsoever, absolutely not. A typical codex chapter is 1,000 battle brothers. The only thing they'd conquer alone are moons and space stations. But if it's a world, then they'd definitely need local PDF or IG to help flex their muscles. Otherwise, they're losing the numbers game really bad, and even as superhuman as they are, it wouldn't be hard for a capable rebel commander to eliminate them.

sure except the first indication the rebel commander has that he's fighting space Marines is proably going to be when a Squad of terminators teleports into the middle of his command center. Space Marines don't conduct line up drag out fights. they're not geared for war's of attrition. they're all about shock and awe.

Well, this assumes that the Space Marines somehow know who the rebel commander is, where he is, and that it's possible to teleport there. And there are huge numbers of fluff examples of Marines conducting drag out fights and wars of attrition they have no business engaging in

 Formosa wrote:
lets put it this way, On taros the marines dropped into tau held territory, the tau have comparable tech to the imperium, but massively more advanced than us, the marines dug in and for 3 days they took on a massively superior force, holding out, and eventually escaping, we have no where near the level of tech that the tau do.

Hrm, we have capabilities in modern militaries that the Tau could only dream of. The Tau have nothing analagous to radar or GPS guided artillery, their aircraft are all built around WW2 style dogfighting with nothing resembling the beyond visual range engagement capabilities modern aircraft have, they have nothing like an AWACS capable of detecting, tracking, and disseminating targeting data on dozens of targets to friendly fighter aircraft to engage from over a hundred miles away, and descriptions of the effects of Railsguns against Leman Russ tanks merely match what modern APFSDS rounds do to tanks, hell we even widely distribute Blacksun filter equivalent equipment to basic infantry en-masse as opposed to just on heavy equipment like tanks/suits/etc, and it's standard issue on literally everything instead of some sort of special upgrade.

As a side note, people need to stop using the TT rules for ranges and how accurate and army is in the fluff, the fluff influences the rules, but the rules are not representative of the actual fluff, we know marines could take this planet out easily because... guess what, they do, against tech levels both greater and lesser than ours.

We also have background where they die to mundane equipment that we very much have modern equivalents to, and the point of many arguments put forth has been that the Space Marines win because the author wants them to win and all sorts of logistic and combat realities are simply ignored or hand-waved away without every being addressed or usually even considered.

as a second side note, the models are designed by people who have no idea how such things work, were the 40k universe real, these vehicles would look very different, better clearance etc. so people need to drop that too, we know leman russ and land raiders couldn't actually get around properly.

If we're going to assume all the designs would look and operate differently from how they're presented, then we're talking an entirely different discussion that can't really be had because we're no longer talking about the 40k that everyone is familiar with.

Likewise, even with these wonky model designs, we can't just assume they'd look and operate different, as in many cases we also have detailed cutaway drawings given from background perspectives that reinforce how absurd their designs are.