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Community is extremely toxic, so it is no doubt that so few women want to participate.

I did a test yesterday. I posted two pieces of marine art I had made on the Facebook's biggest 40K group. There was no text referencing any gender issue or indeed even mentioning the gender at all.

The male marine got some pretty normal compliments.

Female marine got bombarded with hate comments, many of them quite misogynistic and got deleted by a moderator under an hour.

In my experience same happens if you post pictures of models. Female marine models receive similar reaction.

Now lets imagine I was a woman new to the hobby and I was in the receiving end of this? Would I then feel safe to take these models into a local gamestore, to play with random people? Women have to deal with so much of misogynistic BS all the time, so they probably are not so keen to face it in their hobbies too if other options are available.

I remember on this very forum a thread years ago where some poor woman who was interested starting marines dared to ask about female marines. Like she was not advocating changing the official fluff, she was just interested doing her own army that way and to brainstorm some ideas of how that could fit in the setting. The reception was not pretty, and I would be highly surprised if she stayed in the hobby after that.

Thankfully at least moderation here has gotten somewhat better about stuff like that since. Then one of the most persistent mansplainers was a mod.

So yeah, absolutely no wonder women are not interested, and even as a guy the reception of these sort of topics receive makes me feel ashamed to be part of this hobby.

robbienw wrote:Marines are recruited from the most miniscule percentage of the toughest hardest young men on martial or extremely dangerous planets, and only a vanishingly small amount make it through the trials and the surgery to become a marine.

Not young men. Children. The language you're using is incredibly misleading here. They aren't "young men" - they are children. Even early teens is stretching it - most Astartes are recruited and begin their first stages of implantation *before they're even in their teens*.

And, as said, the standards for recruitment aren't even close to standardised. In Ultramar, recruits are from military academies, having already been raised for this in schools. On Baal, recruits are irradiated wretches. On Fenris, they're tribal boys from death worlds.
Why would Catachan girls not also be capable of these same feats?

The idea that any young women in any kind of numbers would be able to make it when so few boys can stretches credibility.

So, genetically engineering children into superhuman warriors isn't incredulous to you?

robbienw wrote:Cadians suffer from the problem of having all male bodies which then look odd with the female heads placed on, especially if you have a mixed squad. They should have done some slighter shorter bodies that were recognisably female.

I don't know if you've seen what women look like in modern military armour, but they don't look too different - and not enough to look different at the scale of 40k.

Not to mention that in male bodies there's plenty of difference already. Are you also calling for male bodies that are slightly shorter and taller, so that we have recognisably different male bodies?

There's simply no need. They aren't "male bodies" - they fit fine for both, and don't look odd at all.

robbienw wrote:SoB are all female because of the decree passive, and they are no equal to marines

So, you agree that everyone claiming that "YOU ALREADY HAVE WOMEN SPACE MARINES, IT'S THE SISTERS OF BATTLE" are wrong?

You perfectly hit the point - Sisters ARE NOT equal to Space Marines, and so efforts to compare them are futile.

robbienw wrote:The community is not toxic to women.

I'm sorry, I don't know if you missed it in one of these threads, but there are quite literally screenshots of people being toxic to people on their womanhood.

The fact is this kind of hobby doesn't and never will appeal to the majority of women no matter how much you change it.

This hobby also doesn't appeal to the majority of men and non-binaries either. No-one's trying to appeal to ALL women here.

I'm also sure that there were people who claimed that video games or roleplaying games like D&D, or even LARPing wouldn't appeal to women either. And how wrong they were.

robbienw wrote:A random non-BA chapter using female recurits because BA use sickly ones makes absoloutely no logical sense.

If the BA were concerned with only recruiting the best of the best of their child soldiers, why are they recruiting at all from Baal Secundus? Why not literally any other world in their fief?

 Crimson wrote:
SoB are a bit fetishy. They're fetish nuns with guns. Which is fine, except if that is your main avenue of female representation.

More representation there is, less pressure there is for each instance to be the representation rather than just a representation.

Yoooo . . .for real.

And it's a shame that this hasn't been explored more, particularly in the form of Sisters, but also because we sorta lost it in regards to the Guard. Both of these factions should have just as much (or more) thematic variation as Marines have, historically, but it's rarely explored because GW pumps its attention into the money-printing Marines combined with the no-model-no-rules policies.

Orks too, actually. Ork Klans used to be more distinct groups back in the day, and they all got smooshed together around 3rd ed.

robbienw wrote:
They may recruit irradiated dregs, but the male dregs are still going to be physically and mentally more capable then the female ones.

robbienw wrote:
The idea that any young women in any kind of numbers would be able to make it when so few boys can stretches credibility.

robbienw wrote:
The community is not toxic to women.

Sure, buddy. Sure.

Nothing to do with the misogyny you're placing on display.

Nothing to see here.

Not young men. Children. The language you're using is incredibly misleading here. They aren't "young men" - they are children. Even early teens is stretching it - most Astartes are recruited and begin their first stages of implantation *before they're even in their teens*.

Young men is fair, we often refer to older boys/teens as young men in the UK.

Regardless, as the implantation and training procedures progress they are growing into adult body structures with the commensurate huge skeletal and muscle structure differences between men and women.

You also have huge general differences in mentality between boys and girls at the pre-teen/early teen stage. In general boys are far more aggressive, physical and combative. The small amount of girls that mirror boys in this regard arent going to give you the numbers required to get a women through to full marine stage (if it was possible for a woman to become a marine).

Why would Catachan girls not also be capable of these same feats?

Because Catachan boys would be better.

So, genetically engineering children into superhuman warriors isn't incredulous to you?

We can accept some fantastical premises in sci-fi, but we still have to remain with the realms of believability. This is the absolute best military forces we are talking about, that take the tiniest most miniscule percentage of the best men available to the Imperium.

I don't know if you've seen what women look like in modern military armour, but they don't look too different - and not enough to look different at the scale of 40k.

Someone always come out with this tired 'women in military gear look excatly the same as men' arguments, but they never match reality. In all but exceptional cases in the modern military women look shorter and slighter than male troops.

As i said, they should have just gone down the necromunda route and done a few female Cadian bodies. It worked well with the Van Sarr and Orlocks. The Cadian bodies all look male.

You perfectly hit the point - Sisters ARE NOT equal to Space Marines, and so efforts to compare them are futile.

They aren't physically equal.

The models are great though, technically equal to the marine kits on a design level.

I'm sorry, I don't know if you missed it in one of these threads, but there are quite literally screenshots of people being toxic to people on their womanhood.

Exceptions on anonymous forums don't reflect the community overall, particularly not in real life.

This hobby also doesn't appeal to the majority of men and non-binaries either. No-one's trying to appeal to ALL women here

The hobby appeals far more per capita to men than it does to women.

If the BA were concerned with only recruiting the best of the best of their child soldiers, why are they recruiting at all from Baal Secundus? Why not literally any other world in their fief?

You'd have to ask them that. Presumably its 10,000 year old tradition.

robbienw wrote:
They may recruit irradiated dregs, but the male dregs are still going to be physically and mentally more capable then the female ones.

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:


Not to mention that in male bodies there's plenty of difference already. Are you also calling for male bodies that are slightly shorter and taller, so that we have recognisably different male bodies?

There's simply no need. They aren't "male bodies" - they fit fine for both, and don't look odd at all.

I would actually love GW models to give scaled options for taller and shorter guardsmen. Its actually a tricky modelling thing to do, especially with lots of guard, and not have ones look off.

Catulle wrote:

robbienw wrote:
They may recruit irradiated dregs, but the male dregs are still going to be physically and mentally more capable then the female ones.

robbienw wrote:
The idea that any young women in any kind of numbers would be able to make it when so few boys can stretches credibility.

robbienw wrote:
The community is not toxic to women.

Sure, buddy. Sure.

Nothing to do with the misogyny you're placing on display.

Nothing to see here.

You mistake simple biological fact for misogyny, perhaps deliberately.

But sure, keep going with the delusion given to you by Hollywood movies and TV that women and men are physically equal blank slates

robbienw wrote:

They aren't physically equal.
The models are great though, technically equal to the marine kits on a design level.

Too tall. I was so upset when I saw how out of scale they are with the rest of the range. Its the biggest let down for me with GW models.

The hobby appeals far more per capita to men than it does to women.

Currently.

You would have been confidently typing that in the 80's about RPGs. Now all women play groups with one or two token men aren't unusual.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

robbienw wrote:
They may recruit irradiated dregs, but the male dregs are still going to be physically and mentally more capable then the female ones.

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

Why do you assume mental capability to equal intelligence?

Men are more mentally capable of participating in warfare and are more aggressive.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

My daughter does a lot of dumb stuff. I wouldn't want her becoming a space marine and conquering Earth. Case closed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

robbienw wrote:

Men are more mentally capable of participating in warfare and are more aggressive.

Again, fundamental lack of understanding of a military as a system and what is wanted from its various parts. Also go read up on how long people can fight for (the UK and US have different estimates of number of days due to different definitions of combat) before the majority are combat ineffective and why veteran troops are the amazing soldiers wargames make them out to be.

Too tall. I was so upset when I saw how out of scale they are with the rest of the range. Its the biggest let down for me with GW models.

I don't think they'll ever be able to get the scale feeling right between all different factions.

Currently.

You would have been confidently typing that in the 80's about RPGs. Now all women play groups with one or two token men aren't unusual.

I mean you might see numbers increase a bit, but you aren't going to get it 50/50, most women aren't ever going to be into it

Again, fundamental lack of understanding of a military as a system and what is wanted from its various parts. Also go read up on how long people can fight for (the UK and US have different estimates of number of days due to different definitions of combat) before the majority are combat ineffective and why veteran troops are the amazing soldiers wargames make them out to be.

Look up the numbers of women in the UK infantry, Armour, Paratroopers, Marines, SAS, F35 an Typhoon pilots etc and get back to me on that

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

My daughter does a lot of dumb stuff. I wouldn't want her becoming a space marine and conquering Earth. Case closed.

I can't believe I'm going back to this well, but have you seen Jackass? Those guys would make terrible Marines, too. Just because a few individuals aren't cut out to be soldiers, doesn't mean the whole gender is.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

So now you're suggesting that women in general aren't smart enough to be Marines? It's not enough to defend the only BS reason for the lack of female Marines, it's not enough to argue women can't physically cut it... now they're too dumb?

My daughter does a lot of dumb stuff. I wouldn't want her becoming a space marine and conquering Earth. Case closed.

I can't believe I'm going back to this well, but have you seen Jackass? Those guys would make terrible Marines, too. Just because a few individuals aren't cut out to be soldiers, doesn't mean the whole gender is.

To be fair, the Jackass guys do have a high pain tolerance which is a useful trait in soldiers

robbienw wrote:

Not young men. Children. The language you're using is incredibly misleading here. They aren't "young men" - they are children. Even early teens is stretching it - most Astartes are recruited and begin their first stages of implantation *before they're even in their teens*.

Young men is fair, we often refer to older boys/teens as young men in the UK.

I'm from the UK too, and no, we don't - not with pre-teens.

When you read a newspaper and see an article talking about a ten year old getting stabbed, they're not a "young man". They're a child.

(Well, unless the child happens to be from a group that the media happens to have a bias against, to say nothing of foreign children being bombed.)

Regardless, as the implantation and training procedures progress they are growing into adult body structures with the commensurate huge skeletal and muscle structure differences between men and women.

Not as huge as the differences that having a bunch of artificial hormones and organs implanted will force.

You also have huge general differences in mentality between boys and girls at the pre-teen/early teen stage. In general boys are far more aggressive, physical and combative. The small amount of girls that mirror boys in this regard arent going to give you the numbers required to get a women through to full marine stage (if it was possible for a woman to become a marine).

Source.

Why would Catachan girls not also be capable of these same feats?

Because Catachan boys would be better.

Source.
But that's not even what I asked - are you suggesting that irradiated waifs from Baal would be just as, if not more, capable than Catachan girls? Do you deny that the conditions of living on each world has more to play than the sex of the children they're recruiting from?

So, genetically engineering children into superhuman warriors isn't incredulous to you?

We can accept some fantastical premises in sci-fi, but we still have to remain with the realms of believability.

So, child soldiers being implanted with "geneseed" from "Primarchs" made from "warp stuff", to serve in an empire that fights "Tyranids", "Orks" and Chaos Daemons" is in the realm of believability for you, but it's unbelievable that some of those soldiers could be women?

Come on.

I don't know if you've seen what women look like in modern military armour, but they don't look too different - and not enough to look different at the scale of 40k.

Someone always come out with this tired 'women in military gear look excatly the same as men' arguments, but they never match reality.

Except that they literally do.

In all but exceptional cases in the modern military women look shorter and slighter than male troops.

I can think of plenty of men who are also shorter and slighter than other men and women. You seem to be implying that women are all shorter than men, and that men are all the same size and shape.

The Cadian bodies all look male.

What about them looks male?

You perfectly hit the point - Sisters ARE NOT equal to Space Marines, and so efforts to compare them are futile.

They aren't physically equal.

The models are great though, technically equal to the marine kits on a design level.

That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it. They aren't physically equal, they aren't equal in terms of focus, they aren't equal in terms of unit quantity and depth, they aren't equal in terms of media representation, they aren't equal in terms of aesthetic range, they aren't equal in terms of creative freedom.

You know this. I ask again - do you disagree then with people who claim "you have FSM, they're called Sisters of Battle"?

I'm sorry, I don't know if you missed it in one of these threads, but there are quite literally screenshots of people being toxic to people on their womanhood.

Exceptions on anonymous forums don't reflect the community overall, particularly not in real life.

These aren't anonymous forums. Women content creators, like Louise Sugden, are REGULARLY hit with those sorts of messages. And you have the gall to say that their experiences aren't worth considering?

This hobby also doesn't appeal to the majority of men and non-binaries either. No-one's trying to appeal to ALL women here

The hobby appeals far more per capita to men than it does to women.

And how much of that is because of self-perpetuating mindsets like your own?

If the BA were concerned with only recruiting the best of the best of their child soldiers, why are they recruiting at all from Baal Secundus? Why not literally any other world in their fief?

You'd have to ask them that.

Difficult, considering that they're fictional war dolls. You're not doing well to justify this idea that they apparently HAVE to recruit the strongest children for their space crusades.

 insaniak wrote:

shortymcnostrill wrote:
These sculpts are by far the strongest argument for "there should be no female marines" that I've ever seen.

30 year old models that were poor even by the sculpting standards of the time are hardly a useful gauge of how female marines would like now.

Bit late in replying, but I was just kidding I'd actually love to see it. I think they'd make cool sculpts

the sculpts feel very of their time, but the unreleased one feels very iconic of the era (the hair in particular). i can already imagine the accompanying john blanche art

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

If the BA were concerned with only recruiting the best of the best of their child soldiers, why are they recruiting at all from Baal Secundus? Why not literally any other world in their fief?

You'd have to ask them that.

Difficult, considering that they're fictional war dolls. You're not doing well to justify this idea that they apparently HAVE to recruit the strongest children for their space crusades.

That is actualy not true. BA gene seed has this specific trait unique to it, that it does not care for the purity of the aspirant. BA could and still do, in universe, recruit from the mutated population of Baal Secondus, because if the implantation is succesful the aspirant is transformed.

There are multiple examples of such synergies between a chapters gene seed and the population it is being implanted in to. For example SW gene seed most important part is the canis gene helix, what was not expect or planed for, was the fact that population of Fenris (while it was still able to perform high tech gene manipulation) used animal genes to strenghten the population, because of the whole comet changes the planets enviroment thing. Those gene changed humans and the specific SW gene seed created two interactions. One an often instant mutation of the implanted person which created the Wulfen, and the other being a feed back loop that caused the mutation of the gene seed, so that it only worked on the population of Fenris. And even in their case it was highly voletile and prone to causing secondary mutations.
In post Cawl time line this was only partialy fixed by the fact that Cawl had access to the non mutated SW gene seed.


And for anyone wondering how a female space marine would look like, assuming a process that doesn't kill the implanted person, we very well know how they would look like. The marine change starts at a prepubescent stage, so when finished we would have a person looking like a female DDR swimmer from the 1980, that never stopped their career and juiced a few times harder, then the DDR sports women did. They would be shorter though, a gene theraphy can do nothing about a persons skeleton growth in a positive sense.

robbienw wrote:


Look up the numbers of women in the UK infantry, Armour, Paratroopers, Marines, SAS, F35 an Typhoon pilots etc and get back to me on that

You mean those same armed forces that have a staggeringly high rate of sexual assault for female service members, and well documented history of openly misogynistic and hostile behavior towards female members?

It’s easy cite hostile environments as a justification for other environments being hostile. Almost like women have a tendency avoid places which openly don’t want them and are come with a very high likelihood of being sexually mistreated.

But in UK, especialy in the case of the air force it is not true. It is actualy better to be a woman candidate then a men.

I also don't understand the staggeringly high part. As comparing to what other rates ? In other armies, at other times, comparing to the number of men being assaulted and is it flat percentage wise or proportional.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

The_Real_Chris 813538 11660821 wrote:

Again, fundamental lack of understanding of a military as a system and what is wanted from its various parts. Also go read up on how long people can fight for (the UK and US have different estimates of number of days due to different definitions of combat) before the majority are combat ineffective and why veteran troops are the amazing soldiers wargames make them out to be.

Are we talking in general or western army. Because in general a soldier will fight as long as he is told to fight, especialy when there is no one to replace them. And even in dire situations for a state, facing a full blown invasion and with men conscription no longer being possible, it is borderline hard to impossible to conscript large number of women for line units. Plus systems are all nice and good, but when a dude hit by a blast wave is roughed up, but still functions, women do not, they just break apart on a physical level. Now I have nothing but respect to the women that still join the fight, but you are not going to see regiments of women in trenchest taking a 3 hour shelling. It is just doesn't work. No one does it, not even countries that conscript women.

My favorite part of this thread so far is the argument that women can't be good space marines because girls aren't aggressive enough to be considered for recruits.

Clearly House Escher is a group passive, submissive house wifes, yeah?

I guarantee you that women, and even girls, have the capacity to be as aggressive or more so than boys. It's just not culturally acceptable for girls to do so, so they're subtly or overtly discourage from doing so, while boys get the opposite treatment.

But children that grow up on a death world or in a hive slum? You wouldn't be able to tell one feral from another. You get from either gender willing to use their body to lure you somewhere for a good knifing to get what they want.

Karol wrote:That is actualy not true. BA gene seed has this specific trait unique to it, that it does not care for the purity of the aspirant. BA could and still do, in universe, recruit from the mutated population of Baal Secondus, because if the implantation is succesful the aspirant is transformed.

Oh, I am quite aware that purity isn't the issue here. I'm referring to the idea that the population of Baal Secundus would be HORRENDOUSLY unfit compared to a Catachan or Fenrisian. We're talking irradiated and wasteland dwelling waifs here - hardly the picture of "strong young men" that has mentioned earlier.

So, evidently, if these irradiated wastelanders are fit enough to be considered Astartes, what about the women on other death worlds who would be far healthier and stronger?

Again - apparently geneseed is good enough to turn an irradiated waif from the wasteland into a strong, powerful killing machine, who is arguably STRONGER than those of other Chapters in melee combat, but it would be useless to use on women from arguably more stable and stronger stock, because... reasons?

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:
i'm a big fan of breaking down the barriers between genders. there's no meaningful differences between men, women, or anything else, anyway, so it shouldn't really matter on the tabletop, either

That is just a big fat lie. There are MASSIVE differences between men and women in terms of physical capability. For example, punching: the weakest-hitting male still hits far harder than the strongest-hitting female. There is literally no overlap (and that was a study of college kids, not trained athletes where differences would be even greater).

Men have larger hearts and larger lungs, which means that they can sustain high degree of effort for longer.

Men have different muscle insertions, especially in the upper body and shoulders. This means that they can exert larger forces in terms of punching, grappling and carrying.

Lower body structure is also significantly different. Structure of the hips and knees in particular means that women are more capable of e.g. sideways movement, but men are better and more efficient at running and jumping. And this increased range of motion women have is not necessarily a good thing, as it leads to more injuries.

All and all, it is frankly a better idea to employ early pubescent men in combat than it is to employ adult women.

And if you say "but this is fiction"!!! Yes, it is. But if you think that is a permission to do anything, why would it matter that Space Marines are all male? You already have female Space Marines anyway, and they are called Sisters of Battle.

So without getting into the specifics of what you say (other than the frankly hilarious statement about hitting power, which is easily disproved by getting one of my colleagues to punch you), sexual physiological differences have had near zero relevance to why women have been kept out of the military, which is far more about culture and traditional views. Otherwise all sorts of applications would be made of female physiological advantages (smaller frames, less calorie requirements, etc.).

It also completely and horribly misses - and this winds me up whenever topics of who makes good military personnel comes up - what the armed forces actually want. And funnily enough strong apes is a minority requirement. Military's are systems, applied to problems. You need different people, weapons and SOPs for a counter insurgency in a city compared to a near peer fighting across Germany.

We even have our own tongue in cheek paper which turns it on its head and tries to envisage reasons to allow men into an all female military noting all the problems it will create.

Anyway - a historical note. In the UK wargaming was a popular middle class activity for both genders. This possibly reflected ideas about the empire and militarism as post WW1 while interest dropped amongst both men and women, it dropped off a cliff for women. That would suggest culture views are important, alongside having a product that appeals. Have societal ideas around war and its accessibility changed in a way where it is of interest to all, and is the product itself now attractive? On the latter I think the pulp books GW churns out are more accessible, with the HH books doing better, anecdotally as they offer more than boys own adventure gratuitous bolter action, but the game itself remains rather narrow in its implementation.

Yeah, you have no connection to reality. You never tried to fight a woman, I take it, even playwrestle one? Because if you had, you would have realized that anybody saying that men and women are physiologically equal is simply plain wrong.

And yes, physical differences have A LOT to do with why women have been kept out of the military. "Culture and traditional views" are product of society responding to reality. And while part of the reason why women were kept out of the military is that it is slowed to sacrifice the childbearing portion of your population in war when you don't know how long any of you will live, part of it is the simple fact that women are, on average, less physically capable than men.

And yes, I am aware that military has different positions and requirements. And I have nothing against something akin to Starship Troopers solution - men in frontline units, women as pilots etc. But some people want to pretend that differences do not exist, which is plain dumb.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:
The only reason people want to force "female Guardsmen" and "female Space Marines" are current-year politics. Which is even more dumb since Imperium was supposed to be a pseudo-medieval fantasy theocracy in a space age setting. Feminism and other current-year stuff has no place there.

Stuff like feminism absolutely does. But not overtly, instead it should be part of the basic culture. The Ad mech embody this - really is the pile of circuits and flesh male or female? Who cares, they are beyond that. It is meant to be an alien, horrific, dystopian future. Stuff like people being ground down in horribly ways by uncaring overseers regardless of gender should be standard. All meat to the system. It can come out in 'enlightened' societies where now you have different forms of class, gender, and genetic purity control taking place which is no less 'grim dark'.

And for AdMech, it actually makes sense. But as I said - major part of appeal of 40k are its pseudo-medieval aesthetics and attitudes. Adeptus Custodes and Space Marines in particular are akin to medieval religious orders, and you will not have found women in any medieval religious military order, for a large number of disparate reasons.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Again - apparently geneseed is good enough to turn an irradiated waif from the wasteland into a strong, powerful killing machine, who is arguably STRONGER than those of other Chapters in melee combat, but it would be useless to use on women from arguably more stable and stronger stock, because... reasons?

Also Ragnar Blackman was, like, mostly dead.

Karol wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

If the BA were concerned with only recruiting the best of the best of their child soldiers, why are they recruiting at all from Baal Secundus? Why not literally any other world in their fief?

You'd have to ask them that.

Difficult, considering that they're fictional war dolls. You're not doing well to justify this idea that they apparently HAVE to recruit the strongest children for their space crusades.

That is actualy not true. BA gene seed has this specific trait unique to it, that it does not care for the purity of the aspirant. BA could and still do, in universe, recruit from the mutated population of Baal Secondus, because if the implantation is succesful the aspirant is transformed.

There are multiple examples of such synergies between a chapters gene seed and the population it is being implanted in to. For example SW gene seed most important part is the canis gene helix, what was not expect or planed for, was the fact that population of Fenris (while it was still able to perform high tech gene manipulation) used animal genes to strenghten the population, because of the whole comet changes the planets enviroment thing. Those gene changed humans and the specific SW gene seed created two interactions. One an often instant mutation of the implanted person which created the Wulfen, and the other being a feed back loop that caused the mutation of the gene seed, so that it only worked on the population of Fenris. And even in their case it was highly voletile and prone to causing secondary mutations.
In post Cawl time line this was only partialy fixed by the fact that Cawl had access to the non mutated SW gene seed.


And for anyone wondering how a female space marine would look like, assuming a process that doesn't kill the implanted person, we very well know how they would look like. The marine change starts at a prepubescent stage, so when finished we would have a person looking like a female DDR swimmer from the 1980, that never stopped their career and juiced a few times harder, then the DDR sports women did. They would be shorter though, a gene theraphy can do nothing about a persons skeleton growth in a positive sense.

Literally one of the landmark Space Marine physiological changes is increased bone growth.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AldarionTelcontar wrote:

capable than men.

And yes, I am aware that military has different positions and requirements. And I have nothing against something akin to Starship Troopers solution - men in frontline units, women as pilots etc. But some people want to pretend that differences do not exist, which is plain dumb.

Starship Troopers had both women and men, and people of all colours serving in the Mobile Infantry. They were all very frequently eviscerated by the bugs, regardless of where they were on the physical strength scale

I don't think anyone has denied than men on average are somewhat physically stronger than women, it is just that we are talking about super soldiers created via made up fantasy technology, so it literally doesn't matter one bit.

FlubDugger wrote:
Literally one of the landmark Space Marine physiological changes is increased bone growth.

Right, so why put someone with a lower baseline to start with? Because you enjoy high failure rates?

Starship Troopers had both women and men, and people of all colours serving in the Mobile Infantry. They were all very frequently eviscerated by the bugs, regardless of where they were on the physical strength scale

The book or the very silly movie?

Seriously why do people cite TV shows and movies as credible sources of scientific fact?

I for one think it is an absolute hoot that the Imperium is allowed to wipe out entire worlds, exterminate species, sacrifice a thousand humans a day to the Emperori and commit every manner of horrific atrocity, but gender inequality, that's right out. Burning heretics? We'll allow it.

For me the biggest question in this debate is simply this: what is the optimum balance of playership?

I mean, how will you know when you've reached it?

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

The book or the very silly movie?

Seriously why do people cite TV shows and movies as credible sources of scientific fact?

I don't think credible scientific facts have anything to do with 40K even remotely. Silly TV shows and movies are infinitely more appropriate comparison.

I for one think it is an absolute hoot that the Imperium is allowed to wipe out entire worlds, exterminate species, sacrifice a thousand humans a day to the Emperori and commit every manner of horrific atrocity, but gender inequality, that's right out. Burning heretics? We'll allow it.

Because issue is not the Imperium being bigoted. It is and can be. It is just better this bigotry is "fantasy bigotry" directed towards space aliens and psykers, neither of which are real.
But you're confusing in universe and out of universe reasoning. Increased representation is not an in universe issue, it is a real world issue.

For me the biggest question in this debate is simply this: what is the optimum balance of playership?

I mean, how will you know when you've reached it?

When existence of women and minorities in the game's fictions and around the gaming table has become unremarkable, and marginal increases in the representation in the fiction do not conjure an embarrassing storm of nerdrage.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

FlubDugger wrote:
Literally one of the landmark Space Marine physiological changes is increased bone growth.

Right, so why put someone with a lower baseline to start with? Because you enjoy high failure rates?

Karol's comment erroneously stated that a fictional gene therapy would not promote bone growth, while talking about super soldiers who experience bone growth as part of their transformation. There was no comment on whether there should or shouldn't be female space marines because of it, so how about you tone it down?

Crimson has a good post-with a good benchmark.