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 Vaktathi wrote:
By the same token, we have gobs of established 40k fluff of Space Marines being killed by such mundane things as teeth, claws, unpowered blades wielded by human-strength level opponents, and common infantry mortars.

Aren't most of these instances where the marine is alone, already wounded, and vastly outnumbered? If you get enough people you can probably get somebody in close enough to pull off something like a helmet and get to the marine's throat. Plus for every one of these instances, there's an instance of a marine getting the full weight of a Dreadnought stepping on his armor and that not killing them. So we need to average that out.

For MC there is an exact measure of his toughness so we use that.

I mean we also have the Space Marine game to compare the durability of a SPACE MARINE CAPTAIN (they have +++ resilience for plot armour so a tactical marine should probably be 1/3 of how durable Tythus was in the game hardest difficulty).

And in that difficulty even fething gretching wrecked me.

 Galas wrote:
How is Legendary canon when "Heroic is the way Halo was meant to be played" is in all the games?

I'm not saying you are wrong, I just can't find where they said Legendary is the canon.

My recall may be off on this one, I thought I remembered that Legendary was once considered canon but when I looked it seems like Heroic is.

That doesn't change that much though, MC can still die to normal modern rifle fire and military sidearms.

 Galas wrote:
I mean we also have the Space Marine game to compare the durability of a SPACE MARINE CAPTAIN (they have +++ resilience for plot armour so a tactical marine should probably be 1/3 of how durable Tythus was in the game hardest difficulty).

And in that difficulty even fething gretching wrecked me.

I'm pretty sure none of the 3rd party games are canon. Canon is the books, codices, and probably the movie.

 Galas wrote:
So how by those calculations you have a ton of 40k fiction where lasgun shots hit humans, cultists and ork boyz and they suffer non lethal damage?

I mean. I have not done any kind of scientific calculations , as flawed as those are when working based in like, a ton of assumptions, so my reasoning holds much less water but this feels a ton like... chosing the worst examples of one canon and the most "powerfull" ones of 40k canon to justify it.

The reality is that 40K never tried to have any form of physical realism so they just do cool stuff and shots black holes at each other.


I'll say again. If space marine power armour can protect them from a ton of lasgun fire but an ork boy hitting it with a choppa can kill it on a single strike are you telling me by those calculations each time an Ork Boy slap something it is more powerfull than a real life high explosive hand grenade?

I think Dan Abnett books do a good job of showing the scale of power in the 40k universe. Autoguns are just as lethal as any old handgun against people not in full carapace and a lasgun is fully capable of blowing off a limb (ie Eisenhorn's hand) when struck. He also points out that a lasgun will only hurt a marine if it hits some of the squishier parts like the joints. Plus bolters turn people into piles of gore and chainswords cut through just about anything. He seems to be more consistent than most

 Slowroll wrote:
I think the Space Marine would be able to totally own WALL-E, Johnny 5, and probably Chappie.

The fully equipped S.A.I.N.T. robots were each supposed to be carrying a 25 megaton nuke to go along with their anti-tank laser, so that one might be a draw :p

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
By the same token, we have gobs of established 40k fluff of Space Marines being killed by such mundane things as teeth, claws, unpowered blades wielded by human-strength level opponents, and common infantry mortars.

Aren't most of these instances where the marine is alone, already wounded, and vastly outnumbered? If you get enough people you can probably get somebody in close enough to pull off something like a helmet and get to the marine's throat. Plus for every one of these instances, there's an instance of a marine getting the full weight of a Dreadnought stepping on his armor and that not killing them. So we need to average that out.

For MC there is an exact measure of his toughness so we use that.

They're not all alone/wounded/vastly outnumbered by any means. Storm of Iron has an ancient Heresy era veteran Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marine siege engineer get taken out by a Guard mortar just...kinda randomly. We've got the Ultramarines movie where dozens of Chaos Space Marines are effortlessly mown down by simple bolter fire. We've also got CSM's being killed by jungle tribal warriors in Gaunts Ghosts books.

The lore is just wildly inconsistent. We have books where a squad of Space Marines take out literally thousands of Dark Eldar without a single casualty in one night of urban combat (somehow without running out of ammo), and we have Wyches killing armored marines with unpowered blades in other fluff. We have Marines being crushed by tank treads in some fluff, and others where they survive being stepped on by Titans.

Dan Abnett is actually particularly bad in this regard, with some of the most extreme examples at both ends coming from his writing.

Marines have also changed and morphed over time in game terms, quite radically so. At the game's inception, 6 lasgun shots from basic Guardsmen would kill a basic Tactical Marine, who was T3 W1 and only got a 5+sv against such a weapon, in 9th edition you'd need 36 such shots to kill the same basic T4 W2 3+sv Tactical Marine.

Doesn't Master Chief have bizarre "luck powers" which prevent him from ever losing anything? This seems like an odd fight to focus on.

 Vaktathi wrote:
They're not all alone/wounded/vastly outnumbered by any means. Storm of Iron has an ancient Heresy era veteran Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marine siege engineer get taken out by a Guard mortar just...kinda randomly.

How is that the same as the examples given above for unaugmented humans killing a marine in melee? Besides, that mortar is more powerful than a frag grenade and it doesn't seem odd that those kill marines.

We've got the Ultramarines movie where dozens of Chaos Space Marines are effortlessly mown down by simple bolter fire. We've also got CSM's being killed by jungle tribal warriors in Gaunts Ghosts books.

Okay... What are you trying to say here? Are marines just uncalculable or are you just against the idea of analyzing fiction?

We have Marines being crushed by tank treads in some fluff, and others where they survive being stepped on by Titans.

We have examples of unaugmented humans surviving fun stuff like literal steamrollers and falling out of airplanes at 40,000 feet, does that mean we're as tough as MC or a marine?

 Flipsiders wrote:
Doesn't Master Chief have bizarre "luck powers" which prevent him from ever losing anything? This seems like an odd fight to focus on.

Well he does fly pretty good for a brick, and can survive reentry without a drop pod.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
Are marines just uncalculable

Basically yes. Their variation between stories, authors, and over time, especially in conjunction with their ever-evolving game stats (particularly relative to most other units in the game that haven't changed so much), basically means they're whatever someone wants them to be. There's more than enough lore, art, cinematics, game stats, etc to support pretty much any version people want to hold on equal footing with any other.

If one's going to compare a Space Marine to Master Chief for instance, doing it as "Space Marines as presented in X book to MC in Y game" is probably a more functional way of doing that, otherwise it's just too contradictory and convoluted to make any meaningful comparison.

40k fluff is so inconsistent though.
In literally the same book, one lasgun shot blows a guy's arm off, another catches someone in the throat and they survive.
The lore is so stupendously vast and inconsistent it's just impossible to pin down the capabilities of 40k.

Starship Troopers mobile infantry (book, NOT movie) might also be at the level of a 40k Space marine.

Book mobile infantry would just nuke them at distance.

 Frazzled wrote:

Starship Troopers mobile infantry (book, NOT movie) might also be at the level of a 40k Space marine.

Book mobile infantry would just nuke them at distance.

Agreed, the closest thing to Mobile Infantry would be something like a Crisis suit I'd think, but even more heavily armed.

Flipsiders wrote:Doesn't Master Chief have bizarre "luck powers" which prevent him from ever losing anything? This seems like an odd fight to focus on.

He's Parker Lewis & Batman rolled in to one...
Parker Lewis never loses
Batman always wins

So what would MC's stat line be? His armor is just not as good as normal Astartes armor...but since Sororitas armor is also a 3+ and I don't think anyone thinks their PA is as good as Astartes armor, we can probably say Mjolnir armor is 3+

As for his physical stats... Spartans are better than normal humans but are they as good as Astartes on the tabletop? In the lore, an Astartes would wreck a Spartan in the lore, but on the tabletop...they are pretty much the same.

So, IMO, A Spartan II would use the same stat line as an Astartes, but has worse weapons basic weapons (autogun vs boltgun).

For the forcefield, I would say it is equal to either an Iron Halo or Rosarius (4+ Invul). If there were more granularity, you could say that Mjolnir would be the bottom of the 3+ armor, while Astartes armor would be the top of the 3+, there just isn't enough difference on the tabletop.

The only thing that Spartans MAY have over Astartes is a higher Ld score. They may start at 8, and MC would have a 9?

-STS

Well, Master Chief John Spartan 117 would definitely classify as a Special Character, so some special leeway would apply to his status, and his determination definitely puts out a Ld 10 vibe.

The Save is kind of a challenge because we never experience a Spartan II in combat without their armor. Still as a deflection method it seems rather... poor. Really, the only non-MMORPG that provided a deflection mechanic for shields or armor (that I can think of) comes from a very old, almost hard sci-fi game called Independence War.

The forcefield is hard to say. It acts as a reliable source of rechargable Wounds, and I don't think that people really would want to bring in a much better Living Metal rule in to play that restored the majority of the Chief's Wounds.

 Charistoph wrote:
Well, Master Chief John Spartan 117 would definitely classify as a Special Character, so some special leeway would apply to his status, and his determination definitely puts out a Ld 10 vibe.

The Save is kind of a challenge because we never experience a Spartan II in combat without their armor. Still as a deflection method it seems rather... poor. Really, the only non-MMORPG that provided a deflection mechanic for shields or armor (that I can think of) comes from a very old, almost hard sci-fi game called Independence War.

The forcefield is hard to say. It acts as a reliable source of rechargable Wounds, and I don't think that people really would want to bring in a much better Living Metal rule in to play that restored the majority of the Chief's Wounds.

He could act like an Apothecary that ups his own wounds?

-STS

Something that I think people aren't crediting re xenomorphs is that the marines killing them aren't packing autoguns.

To quote the film "10 millimeter explosive-tip caseless. Standard light armor piercing round"

They fire 10mm/0.4 cal explosive tipped rounds and their magazines had a 99 round capacity.

So I don't think saying xenomorphs are crappy because they were killed by guardsmen is accurate.

 Hellebore wrote:
Something that I think people aren't crediting re xenomorphs is that the marines killing them aren't packing autoguns.

To quote the film "10 millimeter explosive-tip caseless. Standard light armor piercing round"

They fire 10mm/0.4 cal explosive tipped rounds and their magazines had a 99 round capacity.

So I don't think saying xenomorphs are crappy because they were killed by guardsmen is accurate.

Still, if comparing them to Astartes who basically have a much larger round, are more accurate, and more disciplined, a Deathwatch team could handle the situation a little better than 10 Colonial Marines with a few turrets.

I think the best a single xenomorph could expect is taking down a Marine with it as its blood sprayed all across it. Even the Colonial Marines could have handled that. But a xenomorph hive with a queen and a small colony of about 157 people plus their animals to breed off of? That would be a different story.

 Hellebore wrote:
Something that I think people aren't crediting re xenomorphs is that the marines killing them aren't packing autoguns.

To quote the film "10 millimeter explosive-tip caseless. Standard light armor piercing round"

They fire 10mm/0.4 cal explosive tipped rounds and their magazines had a 99 round capacity.

So I don't think saying xenomorphs are crappy because they were killed by guardsmen is accurate.

The problem with this is that in 40K you go from autoguns (S3) to bolters (S4). I don't think that their weapons are quite on the "bolter" level of lethality. Maybe they are on the low low end of it?

Lets check some sources... the 10mm x 24 used in the M41 uses a 210 grain (13.6 gram) bullet. It (the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, page 14) says that "the terminal ballistics characteristics have been optimized for maximum lethality against infantry wearing personal armor." I can't find anything relating to the amount of explosive in the bullet to compare it to a bolt pistol or other weapon in 40K.

You would have to do some convincing to make those bolter equivalents (S4). Now we can say that the Sniper rifle used by the CMC is equivalent to an IG sniper rifle since that round is a 10mm x 28 (same as the smartgun) and uses a high explosive armor piercing round with a max effective range of 2950 meters, or a ball round that reaches 3,800 meters. That matches up fairly well with anything the IG has for a sniper rifle, and may come close to the performance of the Exitus rifle.

As for the Xenomorphs sucking...they don't really suck, but the bog standard xeno is, IMO, a Genestealer. I would say the drones are Hormagaunts, the warriors are Genestealers, the praetorians are Broodlords, and the queen would be a Lictor. That makes the drones pretty "easy" to kill. Plus, when the Marines finally started shooting, they had Flamers, Grenade Launchers, autoguns and Heavy Stubbers (what I would think the Smartguns are).

 Charistoph wrote:
But a xenomorph hive with a queen and a small colony of about 157 people plus their animals to breed off of? That would be a different story.

I think that would be a "fair fight" for a full Deathwatch squad. Especially when you start considering some of the psionic abilities the Xenos show in the comics or books. Humans even start making cults allowing themselves to be impregnated by the aliens. Plus, the Queen has psionic control over her minions, etc. Finally, the xenos don't just stop growing...if there is enough food or space, they just keep growing into Praetorians (IIRC) and if they are the last alien left, they can grow into a Queen if they have to. Plus, there are all sorts of different types of xenos, depending on what sort of creature they popped out of. You can easily reflavor those types of xenos as "counts as" for anything you might want. There are gorilla ones, bull ones, snakes, etc. in the Aliens canon.

-STS

They may not be S4, but I could see the gun looking like this:

range 18" S3 AP-1 D1 Assault 2

 Hellebore wrote:
They may not be S4, but I could see the gun looking like this:

range 18" S3 AP-1 D1 Assault 2

I was just going to say AP -1...I think 24" Rapid Fire 2 might be better than 18" Assault 2, but yeah, AP -1 fits the bill for me Either works good for me.

Colonial Marines also get Carapace armor as standard, so their Armor Save is better than normal IG.

Oh, and the Xenomorphs would definitely get Acid Blood, Living Bomb (for the Boilers), Terror From the Deep, Deep Strike, Chamelonic Skin, Bounding Leap, Adrenal Glands, and all the psyker skills except Onslaught (mainly because Xenos are a pure choppy army except for spitters and boilers).

-STS

So, could be, that I got carried away a little bit...

it's not "SciFi" in any way, but a powerful waterbender could just bloodbend the marine to death.
I don't see realistic chances for any other element, though. Firebenders are going to despair, as well as air- or earthbenders.

I know, I'm not exactly on topic. But I watched the series the last few lockdown weeks and felt like I had to comment here.

Nibbler wrote:
So, could be, that I got carried away a little bit...

it's not "SciFi" in any way, but a powerful waterbender could just bloodbend the marine to death.
I don't see realistic chances for any other element, though. Firebenders are going to despair, as well as air- or earthbenders.

I know, I'm not exactly on topic. But I watched the series the last few lockdown weeks and felt like I had to comment here.

I dunno. I definitely agree a Waterbender who knows bloodbending has the BEST odds, but I wouldn't discount Earthbenders so easily. 'Specially metalbenders.

Sadly: my favourite space smuggler, Mal Reynolds would be just a leaf on the wind before a Space Marine.

VonGerrow wrote:
Sadly: my favourite space smuggler, Mal Reynolds would be just a leaf on the wind before a Space Marine.

He does have the Protagonist's Luck stat, and he largely wouldn't even try to fight a Space Marine, but just get away. In that, he might have a chance.

 Charistoph wrote:

VonGerrow wrote:
Sadly: my favourite space smuggler, Mal Reynolds would be just a leaf on the wind before a Space Marine.

He does have the Protagonist's Luck stat, and he largely wouldn't even try to fight a Space Marine, but just get away. In that, he might have a chance.

Isn't there a gunslinger or pistolero stat line for an Inquistor retinue somewhere?

-STS

P.S. A better idea for Mal is just to use a Guard Sergeant, or Veteran Guard Sergeant...he was a Sergeant. Give him an Big Pistol (same stat line as a las pistol) and no armor (or maybe a 6+ for the duster?)

-STS

 JNAProductions wrote:

Nibbler wrote:
So, could be, that I got carried away a little bit...

it's not "SciFi" in any way, but a powerful waterbender could just bloodbend the marine to death.
I don't see realistic chances for any other element, though. Firebenders are going to despair, as well as air- or earthbenders.

I know, I'm not exactly on topic. But I watched the series the last few lockdown weeks and felt like I had to comment here.

I dunno. I definitely agree a Waterbender who knows bloodbending has the BEST odds, but I wouldn't discount Earthbenders so easily. 'Specially metalbenders.

#

I completely forgot about metalbending... you're right, ofc.
They would have a pretty good chance, crushing those cans.

Nibbler wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:

Nibbler wrote:
So, could be, that I got carried away a little bit...

it's not "SciFi" in any way, but a powerful waterbender could just bloodbend the marine to death.
I don't see realistic chances for any other element, though. Firebenders are going to despair, as well as air- or earthbenders.

I know, I'm not exactly on topic. But I watched the series the last few lockdown weeks and felt like I had to comment here.

I dunno. I definitely agree a Waterbender who knows bloodbending has the BEST odds, but I wouldn't discount Earthbenders so easily. 'Specially metalbenders.

#

I completely forgot about metalbending... you're right, ofc.
They would have a pretty good chance, crushing those cans.

Ceramite technically isn't metal, so metalbending wouldn't work.

So, what would the statline for a metalbender or other benders be? I am assuming it would be a psyker power...which one?

-STS