(RAR) Unnamed Ultramarine VS M1A1 Abrams (40K + Real Life)

[Simon_Jester]

I think that Marines may not, on the whole, be as cyberneticized as you think, Skimmer. They're normally portrayed as having implanted or ingrown organs that have been bio-engineered to provide various enhancements. They typically start getting cyborged up after they start losing body parts.

That said, they're still enhanced in a variety of ways, including mentally, and you're basically right that it cannot plausibly take that much time to train one of them. Then again, I've heard it indicated that they 'only' spend about five years in training (some of which is actually time required for them to adapt fully to all the new stuff that's been implanted into their bodies). Then they're sent off to operate as scouts and light infantry first, before doing anything else, which is... I don't know, is that weird or logical?

Plus, to make a Space Marine you have to start with a boy who's barely out of puberty- adults are too old for the bio-enhancements to take hold. In which case you have another reason to keep them in training for several years before putting them in the field- because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

[Archinist]

because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

Is there somewhere in the source material which states that people in 40K have to be over 18 to be conscripted?

[Simon_Jester]

I very, very much doubt it. Why would you think that?

[NecronLord]

Plus, to make a Space Marine you have to start with a boy who's barely out of puberty- adults are too old for the bio-enhancements to take hold.

To quote the now non-canon Space Marine: "Such lads of calibre must be sought out early in another respect as well; for bodily modifications must commence as soon after the onset of adolescence as could be. A recruit of eighteen years old was unthinkable; he would become a puissant man but only a runt among his superhuman peers."

At least in the Horus Heresy they could make marines out of adults, but they were comparatively weak.

Is there somewhere in the source material which states that people in 40K have to be over 18 to be conscripted?

Quite the opposite. Marines must be recruited as soon after the onset of puberty as possible. It's essentially adolescent power fantasy, in the same style as (but more bloodthirsty than) Harry Potter; "You are special my lad and are to be trained for an awesome destiny!" As it says in the previous quote, 18 is an unthinkably high age.

[Lonestar]

To quote the now non-canon Space Marine: "Such lads of calibre must be sought out early in another respect as well; for bodily modifications must commence as soon after the onset of adolescence as could be. A recruit of eighteen years old was unthinkable; he would become a puissant man but only a runt among his superhuman peers."

Of course, in one of the Blood Raven books they actually turned a Guardsman...the very first one, I think.

[Simon_Jester]

True. But if we're looking for a general pattern that describes Space Marines, the vast majority of them are recruited as adolescents or children. And the process of adding bio-engineered implants is complex enough that it's quite reasonable to assume that the newly made Space Marine will need years to fully adapt and 'grow into' the role of supersoldier. In which case you might as well spend this same period of time giving them extremely thorough training.

[NecronLord]

Of course, in one of the Blood Raven books they actually turned a Guardsman...the very first one, I think.

Goto at his finest.

Of course, child soldiers are a thing in the Imperial Guard (Whiteshields). Perhaps one of the most grim-dark pictures ever is somewhere in one of the Only War books, with a child soldier in kit that fits, implying that someone out there manufactures child-sized arms and equipment for the guard.

[Rogue 9]

Of course they do. Cadia puts children under arms from the age of twelve as a matter of course; one simply does not grow up on the planet and not wind up in the Whiteshields. The Imperium being what it is, the Mechanicus and manufactorum worlds are not going to pretend that doesn't happen.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

Is there somewhere in the source material which states that people in 40K have to be over 18 to be conscripted?

I always assumed sixteen(median) for Guardsmen and Naval personnel, since this a British company and British writers behind the games and novels.

And, since when does kit in any military fit?! I always thought the only two sizes were too small and too large.

[Lord Revan]

because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

Is there somewhere in the source material which states that people in 40K have to be over 18 to be conscripted?

I always assumed sixteen(median) for Guardsmen and Naval personnel, since this a British company and British writers behind the games and novels.

And, since when does kit in any military fit?! I always thought the only two sizes were too small and too large.

At least 2 sizes too small for most of the times though the M91 uniform seemed to fit better then the older M62 one

as for the IG I suspect as with pretty much everything in the Imperium there's no real standard and it's mostly based on local customs with some broad rules as to what is considered "acceptble recruit".

[Simon_Jester]

Of course they do. Cadia puts children under arms from the age of twelve as a matter of course; one simply does not grow up on the planet and not wind up in the Whiteshields. The Imperium being what it is, the Mechanicus and manufactorum worlds are not going to pretend that doesn't happen.

Given that Cadia is regularly invaded by actual, literal demons, who are certainly not going to spare children, and that universal military service is the only thing that gives that fortress world any chance of survival... this is not a surprise. If being unarmed and defenseless does not mean that twelve year olds are safe from an enemy invasion, then shoving a laser rifle into their hands and starting their basic training at twelve makes a certain amount of sense- you have nothing to lose from doing so.

And since "Cadian Pattern" is a major standard for industrial production throughout the Imperium, even on worlds very far from Cadia itself, that sets a standard.

[Sea Skimmer]

I think that Marines may not, on the whole, be as cyberneticized as you think, Skimmer. They're normally portrayed as having implanted or ingrown organs that have been bio-engineered to provide various enhancements. They typically start getting cyborged up after they start losing body parts.

I'm pretty sure they literally have a mechanical device replacing the lungs. And just replacing the lungs and spleen would up resistance in a measurable fashion. Honestly I can see no reason why to stop at this point either, at least if the goal really was the best possible troops and not showmanship.

Then they're sent off to operate as scouts and light infantry first, before doing anything else, which is... I don't know, is that weird or logical?

Logical, and they took that from real life, all the various elite forces throughout history have tried to give troops a baptism of fire in easy conditions. For most of history the emphasis was simply on making a kill, because killing was so up close and personal, for modern combat being a scout, in certain narrow contexts, would be logical instead. You learn to survive before you worry about killing, because killing is easy.

With knights the earliest exposure would be young squires were required to kill off the enemy wounded as they lay on the ground. 40K grimdark is kind of lame in this respect, it makes stuff like that loose its rational impact.

Problem is if you want a Space Marine to live centuries the only real way that is going to happen is if the benign conditions are the overwhelming default. That was what I was really trying to get at with the fragmentation issue. You can be incredibly resistant to damage, and the enemy still only has to get lucky once. When you put troops whom are just heavy infantry against mechanized forces the later forces end up with absurdly high numbers of kill opportunities. When Space Marines do shit like charge across open fields it's just going to be hopeless, even if the 50mph claim were true which in fact, as far as I can tell that and all other speed estimates for them are just asspulls.

The typically low size of Space Marine units makes that worse, they can't physically occupy a large enough combat zone to protect themselves from many forms of attack the way say, a mechanized army corps can keep large areas of its formation out of range of enemy mortars and ATGMs.

Staying on the defensive in built up areas can help, but really the best way to do it is just only seek combat where the Space Marine actually is the largest thing around, which means stick to being traditional Marines on ships as much as possible, and not Marines like the USMC's Army Junior Setup. Army Junior brings main battle tanks for a reason!

Plus, to make a Space Marine you have to start with a boy who's barely out of puberty- adults are too old for the bio-enhancements to take hold. In which case you have another reason to keep them in training for several years before putting them in the field- because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

That doesn't make sense. They are supposed to be physically huge, why would that be started after they've already radically slowed down their natural growth rate? Puberty should be the latest starting point! Really it should be much earlier, so as to filter the process better since for reasons unknown this is somehow an expensive process, for people who build city sized cathedral warships.

To quote the now non-canon Space Marine: "Such lads of calibre must be sought out early in another respect as well; for bodily modifications must commence as soon after the onset of adolescence as could be. A recruit of eighteen years old was unthinkable; he would become a puissant man but only a runt among his superhuman peers."

At least in the Horus Heresy they could make marines out of adults, but they were comparatively weak.

Yeah, doing this after puberty would be silly. Logically you'd start the training the same as knights training, age 7, for the exact same reasons. That's old enough to detect various health problems, identify mental traits, the child has a good sense of self and a small measure of independence, so you aren't literally needing to supervise them every single second ect... but still early enough to heavily mold the child's fundamental outlook on life. No elaborate brainwashing computers needed, just control of the social environment. Send them off to a military school to learn loyalty to the empire and basic skills alongside a normal education, see how well they evolve and response to discipline, then at age 11-12 you send the best 5% to ROID DEATH SCHOOL and the rest either get tossed into an incinerator, for the sake of purity and secrecy or whatever the hell, or assigned to supporting arms formations if 40K somehow needs the heresy of less murder .

[Lord Revan]

Unless there lore is changed signifigantly from the Edition the augments are as follows (should be noted that not all SM chapters have the full list)

1. Sus-an membrane (biological brain implant)
2. Occulobe (eye enhancement method unknown but implied biological)
3. Belcher's gland (modified saliva gland)
4. Neuroglottis (taste enhancement method unknown though implied biological)
5. Progenoids (geneseed storage and reason why most unknowns are implied to be biological rather then mechanical)
6. Lyman's ear (hearing enhancement method unknown but implied biological)
7. Multi-lung (breathing enhancement explictly bio-engineered)
8. Secondary heart (exactly what is reads on the tin, method unknown implied biological)
9. Cataplesean Node (sleep enhancement, method unknown implied biological)
10. Preomnor (eating enhancement, method unknown implied biological)
11. Omophagea (another eating enhancement method unknow implied biological)
12. Mucranoid (skin enhancement method unknow implied biological)
13. The Black Carapace (powersuit interface possibly cybernetic but unknown method)
14. Larraman's Organ (healing enhancement method unknown but most likely biological)
15. Ossamodula (skeletal enhancement, method unknown implied biological)
16. Haemastamen (blood enhancement method unknown implied biological)
17. Melanochrome (skin enhancement method unknown implied biological)
18. Oolitic Kindney (poison nulifying organ implied to be biological)

It should be noted that everything needed to make a Space Marine enhancements is stored in the Progenoid organs (there's 2 of them) no additional materials have been implied or stated (at least not in any source I know of) this also the reason why those implants whose manufacture method is unknown are implied to be biological as the Progenoids don't contain nanotech (as far as we know) but the genetic blueprint for the organs.

[Sea Skimmer]

Modified saliva gland? So what, is 40K STILL too afraid to use the anti cavity vaccine we have today, but refuse to ever test on humans least it cause a runaway bacterial infection that causes the test subject to die in a couple hours? No wonder they are so incapable of defeating even one of their enemies, bunch of sheep hugging vegan pansies, except a pansy is a pretty aggressive plant in clumps. So I retract that, many plants are superior to this level of lame.

Taste enhancement seems incredibly useful... Reminds me of the Squidbillies episode in which it is revealed Dan Halen is creating an army of Nicotine Addicted Super Warriors, the ones with marginal strength and hyper sensitive to pain. That level of logic. Tastes like nerve gas sir! Good job Corporal! We could have used a piece of treated colored paper from 1957 to figure that out without you poisoning yourself, and apparently removing your helmet first to try, but this was clearly better, have a medal! Oh well your Chapter can put this medal on a wall or something since you died.

Why do we need a skin enhancement in a guy who fights in armor? Is this the solution to how they don't get skin infections in armor?

God, this is what I get for trying to play along even slightly, more revelations of stupid. Seriously, this was created by fun but ignorant people cannibalizing everything sci fi in sight in the 1980s. And it was pretty dumb even then, I always liked normal Warhammer more. Normal Warhammer actually works, its just real life with magic. If this is all these guys have then wankery like claiming they run 50mph is right out, and frankly none of this is going to make a real difference in a real battle.

A second heart for example, how does that really help? If you've go a hole in the first heart your going to bleed to death. The heart probably won't stop in the reality and many people have survived it, but seriously your going to die in the vast majority of cases because you 1) loose blood pressure and 2) loose all your blood if the heart doesn't stop because its aggressive pumping it out of your circulatory system! A second heart might partly mitigate 1) but only by making 2) much worse! Where the hell does a second heart fit anyway? That isn't a small organ. An extra spleen full of extra blood, ideally one not so fragile as real ones, as I know from experience a while back, thank you those who noticed I was missing, that would help, but no sign of something like that here.

Better eyes? Okay, but we can't increase the light gathering power or angular resolution off the best humans if were stuck with biology...so were still going to need binoculars or that insane but real concept for magnifying contact lenses (it works, too painful to use for more then a few minuets presently). Gene splicing kids before birth would probably accomplish more, then at least you could make the eyeball as big as possible and perhaps find a way to prevent the lense from hardening with age.

The only thing that will really on that list is they have higher endurance, but that will only matter past 48-72 hours sustained operations, and against superiority numbers the enemy will just sleep in shifts anyway, while slowly murdering them with the impunity of artillery barrages ect. And this is still giving them benefit of the doubt on other fundamental problems like their obvious lack of any ammunition capacity what so ever or the technological changes from the mid 1980s to now. Most elite cannon fodder ever.

[Lord Revan]

said gland allows marines to spit acid, I didn't go into to details as to what those enhancements actually do as I didn't deem to relevant.

[Lord Revan]

ok the enhancements do the following(I'm not gonna relist the names just saying what they do but order is the same as in the previous list)

1. Allows the marine to enter suspended animation
2. improves low-light vision and generally makes the marine's vision sharper
3. allows spitting of acidic poison
4. improves the sense of taste and smell allowing the detection of trace amounts of toxins
5. Geneseed storage
6. improved voice filtering and balance
7. special bio-engineered lungs for toxic enviroments or water
8. blood flow boost and back up heart incase the primary is disabled
9. allows marines to stay active while "sleeping"
10. allows marines to consume materials that are toxic to baseline humans
11. allows marines to gain information from eating their enemies (this is one the weirder ones)
12. protects the skin from extreme tempatures and vacuum
13. Powersuit interphase allowing for more finer control then baseline humans
14. Allows quicker scarring of wounds to prevent bleeding
15. strengthens the skeleton
16. makes the blood "more efficient"
17. protects the skin from radiation thru special pigments
18. Improves resistance to poisons and gas

should be noted that with exception of 5 or 13 (Progenoids or the Black Carapace) most marines chapters have lost the ability to do one or more of these implants and it's rare to find a chapter that has all 18 enhancements avaible to them, though Progenoids and the Black Carapace are considered to vital that loosing the ability to make either of those enhancements essentially destroys a chapter.

[Simon_Jester]

I think that Marines may not, on the whole, be as cyberneticized as you think, Skimmer. They're normally portrayed as having implanted or ingrown organs that have been bio-engineered to provide various enhancements. They typically start getting cyborged up after they start losing body parts.

I'm pretty sure they literally have a mechanical device replacing the lungs. And just replacing the lungs and spleen would up resistance in a measurable fashion. Honestly I can see no reason why to stop at this point either, at least if the goal really was the best possible troops and not showmanship.

Everything I've read or heard suggests that the organs are in fact biological, although they are the product of bioscience so advanced that they're probably a lot more resistant to shock and 'squishing' and bleeding out and so on than the baseline human organs they replace or supplement.

In terms of things that might impact the durability of the lungs and spleen, Space Marines have:

1) Enhanced and modified bones reinforced with ceramics stronger than normal bone, and a rib cage that has fused into a solid layer of interlocking "bulletproof" plates.
2) Blood that clots very rapidly on contact with air, although this may have little effect on internal bleeding.
3) A "multi-lung" which is explicitly biological, but which can take over for the natural lungs, and which can breathe a variety of unbreathable atmospheres. May or may not be more shock-resistant than the normal lungs.
4) There's no explicit replacement or modification of the spleen, but several of the implant organs relate to blood production, filtration, and so on, and I wouldn't be surprised if a Space Marine can survive a crushed spleen a lot better than a quasinormal human (i.e. the blood flow cuts off before the victim just dies from massive interal bleeding, and the implant organs take over).

They also get complete replacement of their ears with bio-engineered ears that I suspect are harder to puncture or damage, at least I'd make the "Lyman's Ear" that way.

Then they're sent off to operate as scouts and light infantry first, before doing anything else, which is... I don't know, is that weird or logical?

Logical, and they took that from real life, all the various elite forces throughout history have tried to give troops a baptism of fire in easy conditions. For most of history the emphasis was simply on making a kill, because killing was so up close and personal, for modern combat being a scout, in certain narrow contexts, would be logical instead. You learn to survive before you worry about killing, because killing is easy...

Problem is if you want a Space Marine to live centuries the only real way that is going to happen is if the benign conditions are the overwhelming default. That was what I was really trying to get at with the fragmentation issue. You can be incredibly resistant to damage, and the enemy still only has to get lucky once...

True. The thing is, Space Marines are not consistently employed as heavy infantry as such. They're space= and airmobile on the operational level and often on the tactical level, they often have their own AFV support (not just dreadnoughts but actual tanks). They spend a lot of their time raiding, hitting, and running, and when they do clash with a genuine enemy army they bring armies of their own a lot of the time.

The very wide range of portrayals of them include a lot of diverse and in many cases stupid depictions, though.

When you put troops whom are just heavy infantry against mechanized forces the later forces end up with absurdly high numbers of kill opportunities. When Space Marines do shit like charge across open fields it's just going to be hopeless, even if the 50mph claim were true which in fact, as far as I can tell that and all other speed estimates for them are just asspulls.

Frankly yes. There's a reason why Games Workshop came up with a stat line for "Movie Marines" who can do some of the more dramatic and ridiculous stuff they're shown doing in the novels, and it involves them being able to survive multiple hits from antitank weapons and other just-plain-absurd stunts.

The more convincing portrayals I've seen tend to show them doing almost everything except hold down territory in fixed combat against large-scale forces of fighting troops.

The typically low size of Space Marine units makes that worse, they can't physically occupy a large enough combat zone to protect themselves from many forms of attack the way say, a mechanized army corps can keep large areas of its formation out of range of enemy mortars and ATGMs.

Staying on the defensive in built up areas can help, but really the best way to do it is just only seek combat where the Space Marine actually is the largest thing around, which means stick to being traditional Marines on ships as much as possible, and not Marines like the USMC's Army Junior Setup. Army Junior brings main battle tanks for a reason!

So, in fairness, do the Space Marines, but again, you're not wrong, and out of the range of portrayals of Space Marines I've seen, the more convincing ones tend to have them doing it that way.

Plus, to make a Space Marine you have to start with a boy who's barely out of puberty- adults are too old for the bio-enhancements to take hold. In which case you have another reason to keep them in training for several years before putting them in the field- because even after five years' training they're still chronologically eighteen or so.

That doesn't make sense. They are supposed to be physically huge, why would that be started after they've already radically slowed down their natural growth rate? Puberty should be the latest starting point!

When I actually stopped to look it up, I saw "age range of ten to fourteen," so no, not really after puberty. Please allow me to correct my phrasing.

Really it should be much earlier, so as to filter the process better since for reasons unknown this is somehow an expensive process, for people who build city sized cathedral warships.

That's what they actually do- when possible they start the modifications on boys before puberty or right as it's starting, now that I actually look it up.

And the reason it's expensive isn't so much high prices, it's that there are physical limits on how often you can do it. One of the limitations is that you have to implant a biological "gene-seed" into a prospective Space Marine for them to turn into an actual Space Marine. And the primary source of gene-seed glands is from the bodies of other Marines, each of which grows two during their lifetime. So for practical purposes, if you start 'baking' one Marine, you get one gene-seed gland to make another one after five years, and a second one to make another after ten, and that's it.

So your Space Marine chapter can only grow if you're able to harvest more than one gene-seed organ per Marine you make. And since a lot of Marines are lost in combat, some of them under circumstances that make retrieving their gene-seed impractical, it can be tough for Marines to keep their numbers up. And if they suffer major casualties in a situation where they can't retrieve the bodies (e.g. three companies get vaporized by a nuke), the impact on their numbers can take a long time to rebuild from.

Now that I think about it, this is also a reason to keep your Marines "in training" for several years. It's not just to make them more effective soldiers, it's to make sure their first gene-seed organ can be harvested before they go out into combat, so that even if they get splattered by a bomb or something, their career doesn't result in a net loss in the total number of Marines your chapter can possess.

On the other hand, this means you don't actually need Space Marines to live hundreds of years for things to work; if they mostly die after a 15-20 year career you're probably doing fine just in terms of keeping up your numbers.

Yeah, doing this after puberty would be silly. Logically you'd start the training the same as knights training, age 7, for the exact same reasons. That's old enough to detect various health problems, identify mental traits, the child has a good sense of self and a small measure of independence, so you aren't literally needing to supervise them every single second ect... but still early enough to heavily mold the child's fundamental outlook on life. No elaborate brainwashing computers needed, just control of the social environment. Send them off to a military school to learn loyalty to the empire and basic skills alongside a normal education, see how well they evolve and response to discipline, then at age 11-12 you send the best 5% to ROID DEATH SCHOOL and the rest either get tossed into an incinerator, for the sake of purity and secrecy or whatever the hell, or assigned to supporting arms formations if 40K somehow needs the heresy of less murder .

This is, I suspect, how the more sensible chapters operate.

Modified saliva gland? So what, is 40K STILL too afraid to use the anti cavity vaccine we have today, but refuse to ever test on humans least it cause a runaway bacterial infection that causes the test subject to die in a couple hours? No wonder they are so incapable of defeating even one of their enemies, bunch of sheep hugging vegan pansies, except a pansy is a pretty aggressive plant in clumps. So I retract that, many plants are superior to this level of lame.

The actual nature of the Betcher's Gland is stupider but less wimpy; it collects poison from the bloodstream and concentrates it, potentially giving the owner the ability to spit corrosive venom. Obviously this is totally useless under anything like normal combat circumstances. Plenty of Marines apparently give zero fucks about it, don't have it, and do fine anyway.

Taste enhancement seems incredibly useful... Reminds me of the Squidbillies episode in which it is revealed Dan Halen is creating an army of Nicotine Addicted Super Warriors, the ones with marginal strength and hyper sensitive to pain. That level of logic. Tastes like nerve gas sir! Good job Corporal! We could have used a piece of treated colored paper from 1957 to figure that out without you poisoning yourself, and apparently removing your helmet first to try, but this was clearly better, have a medal! Oh well your Chapter can put this medal on a wall or something since you died.

Yeah. I get the feeling that a lot of the Marines' special abilities only make sense if you imagine them as needing to go out and do wilderness survival for months at a time or something, which actually makes sense if they operate like conventional special forces, not so much when they're elite shock troops who only fight in or near built-up environments.

To be fair, they DO have an organ that is designed to knock the Marine into a coma while rapidly scouring their body for toxic agents; whether it'd work on nerve agents... probably not, no.

Why do we need a skin enhancement in a guy who fights in armor? Is this the solution to how they don't get skin infections in armor?

No, it's to support the neural interface jacks that plug into their armor. No other significant function. So, less stupid but arguably still stupid.

[quoe]A second heart for example, how does that really help? If you've go a hole in the first heart your going to bleed to death. The heart probably won't stop in the reality and many people have survived it, but seriously your going to die in the vast majority of cases because you 1) loose blood pressure and 2) loose all your blood if the heart doesn't stop because its aggressive pumping it out of your circulatory system! A second heart might partly mitigate 1) but only by making 2) much worse! Where the hell does a second heart fit anyway? That isn't a small organ. An extra spleen full of extra blood, ideally one not so fragile as real ones, as I know from experience a while back, thank you those who noticed I was missing, that would help, but no sign of something like that here.[/quote]I will note that Space Marines are probably seven feet tall for a reason. Maybe part of the reason is to make room for all these random extra organs.

I will also note that Space Marine circulatory systems are weird and act more like a sensibly engineered damage control system in that they stop flowing quickly, blood flow around injuries tends to get shut down in short order, and toxin filtration kicks up when there is an increased risk of toxins being present. Some of this may impact the consequences of a heart injury.

Also, Space Marines are physically bigger than humans and engage in some very intense physical activity some times; they may need the backup heart just to keep up blood flow without having some of the problems you get in real people with giantism.

Better eyes? Okay, but we can't increase the light gathering power or angular resolution off the best humans if were stuck with biology...so were still going to need binoculars or that insane but real concept for magnifying contact lenses (it works, too painful to use for more then a few minuets presently). Gene splicing kids before birth would probably accomplish more, then at least you could make the eyeball as big as possible and perhaps find a way to prevent the lense from hardening with age.

Well, they're formally supposed to have superhuman night vision and angular resolution, but I'm not saying that's biologically possible.

The only thing that will really on that list is they have higher endurance, but that will only matter past 48-72 hours sustained operations, and against superiority numbers the enemy will just sleep in shifts anyway, while slowly murdering them with the impunity of artillery barrages ect. And this is still giving them benefit of the doubt on other fundamental problems like their obvious lack of any ammunition capacity what so ever or the technological changes from the mid 1980s to now. Most elite cannon fodder ever.

Not normally employed as cannon fodder anyway, at least not when you look at the overall integrated average of how they are portrayed.

Like, in the book I actually liked (which portrays Marines as weird, but competent-ish), you have:
-One Marine sent to investigate and if possible deal with what may or may not be an alien spaceship crashing on a planet.
-Squad-level raid to recapture an oil refinery from an enemy that isn't all that numerous.
-Squad/platoon level sweep in mechanized vehicles to locate rebels who may have bizarre demonic support you'd need a superman to fight.
-Squads attacking a city occupied by aliens, where an army of Imperial Guard is present; I may be editing common sense into a situation where it is lacking but I seem to recall the army of Guardsmen providing fire support.
-Of course, then you get the chapter doing something dimwitted like rallying hundreds of Marines to get into pitched infantry combat against a hundred thousand orks without support, but this is explicitly portrayed as a dumb move by Marines who got arrogant and grossly underestimated the enemy's actual strength.
-More squad-level raids and operations.

[NecronLord]

Problem is if you want a Space Marine to live centuries the only real way that is going to happen is if the benign conditions are the overwhelming default. That was what I was really trying to get at with the fragmentation issue. You can be incredibly resistant to damage, and the enemy still only has to get lucky once. When you put troops whom are just heavy infantry against mechanized forces the later forces end up with absurdly high numbers of kill opportunities. When Space Marines do shit like charge across open fields it's just going to be hopeless, even if the 50mph claim were true which in fact, as far as I can tell that and all other speed estimates for them are just asspulls.


Staying on the defensive in built up areas can help, but really the best way to do it is just only seek combat where the Space Marine actually is the largest thing around, which means stick to being traditional Marines on ships as much as possible, and not Marines like the USMC's Army Junior Setup. Army Junior brings main battle tanks for a reason!

The speed things are indeed asspulls.

The marines are a combined arms force however. They have everything from APCs (Rhinos) and IFVs (Razorbacks, Land Raiders) to tanks (Predators) combat aircraft (Stormhawk and Xiaphon Interceptors) they've got attack-helo expies (Stormtalon Gunships) and dropships, vehicle transport dropships such as the thunderhawk transporter and Warhawk. They've got WW2 style tank-destroyers (Vindicators) and rocket artillery (Whirlwinds), they've got air-defence tanks (Stalkers) and ground support planes (Fire Raptors)

They've got little hover-jeeps called Land Speeders which come in a variety of forms including a troop-transport for scout units. They've got motorbikes and HMG thingies on little catepillar tracks, and sentry guns.

They have their own starships which are built around close range orbital battles and fire support for ground troops, which include escort craft right up to big battleships.

They have rocket packs that function as parachutes as well as jetpacks.

They've got drop pods and they've got decoy drop pods that contain sentry guns or short range rockets instead of troops, and more besides.

They used to have even more, including bigger (and bigger) tanks, bigger dropships, and jet-cycles, and a full suite of long-range space combat ships for fighting space battles but these are variously lost technology or under the control of the Imperial Navy.

There are things they lack from the combined arms suite of a modern nation, the ones that spring to mind are gun-artillery (the Imperial guard has this though), man-portable mortars (though they have a tracked mortar) and a wet navy.

They also have various pre-fab firebases, landing pads, defensive installations that they can use to support a campaign (without mentioning dubiously official things like air-dropped power generators & sentry guns from the computer games) but for the most part they're a highly mechanized force that strikes directly from their starships.

The typically low size of Space Marine units makes that worse, they can't physically occupy a large enough combat zone to protect themselves from many forms of attack the way say, a mechanized army corps can keep large areas of its formation out of range of enemy mortars and ATGMs.

Quite right.

Yeah, doing this after puberty would be silly. Logically you'd start the training the same as knights training, age 7, for the exact same reasons. That's old enough to detect various health problems, identify mental traits, the child has a good sense of self and a small measure of independence, so you aren't literally needing to supervise them every single second ect... but still early enough to heavily mold the child's fundamental outlook on life. No elaborate brainwashing computers needed, just control of the social environment. Send them off to a military school to learn loyalty to the empire and basic skills alongside a normal education, see how well they evolve and response to discipline, then at age 11-12 you send the best 5% to ROID DEATH SCHOOL and the rest either get tossed into an incinerator, for the sake of purity and secrecy or whatever the hell, or assigned to supporting arms formations if 40K somehow needs the heresy of less murder .

Logic has little to do with it, by design. They find the most metal killers because of this not because it's actually beneficial.

For instance the Ultramarines literally do what you just described. They recruit from the existing military academies where children are indeed trained from a young age for imperial service and invite the best to take part in (ancient Greek) olympic-esque games which are (mostly) non-Lethal. Children are sent to military schools in Ultramar at the age of 6 initially, and selected to go to the Fortress of Hera and compete to be ultramarines after many years of instruction already.

The rest of the space marines, do it in various headbanging ways like ritual death duels or making their entire homeworld into constant war-zones for child soldiers to flourish, or recruiting juvinile delinquents and then brainwashing them. But this is reflected in the lore. The Ultramarines unsurprisingly have the largest recruiting base and are able to replenish their losses much quicker than the others. The Ultramarines defining trait is their comparative reasonableness and efficiency of their training and recruiting. Some other chapters are more keen on hand-to-hand battle and other such things, and succeed despite that, but none can match the success overall of the Ultramarines.

A second heart for example, how does that really help? If you've go a hole in the first heart your going to bleed to death. The heart probably won't stop in the reality and many people have survived it, but seriously your going to die in the vast majority of cases because you 1) loose blood pressure and 2) loose all your blood if the heart doesn't stop because its aggressive pumping it out of your circulatory system! A second heart might partly mitigate 1) but only by making 2) much worse! Where the hell does a second heart fit anyway? That isn't a small organ. An extra spleen full of extra blood, ideally one not so fragile as real ones, as I know from experience a while back, thank you those who noticed I was missing, that would help, but no sign of something like that here.

There are actually a couple that affect the blood. The secondary heart is able to increase oxygenation somehow, the Haemastamen increases the haemoglobin content of the blood and makes it more efficient and the Larraman's Organ makes the blood clot much, much quicker, in the RPG they have approximately half the chance of dying from blood loss due to critical wounds as humans because of this.

But really the organs are only a small part of what makes them formidable. It's the combination of very quick reactions, excellent logistical support and superior equipment and training that makes them dangerous.

I don't recall anything about them having superior eyesight especially, and indeed they use binoculars, scopes and other such tools a lot. the current 'long range weapons' "Devastator" squad kit has every single guy with a helmet with additional gear, scopes and so on, the sergeant even has a periscopy/lamp thingy on his back, and many other marines have other wide-lens eyepieces for their helmets on other kits, art and books, etc. The quad mortar linked above again has its crew with a large eyepiece and a backpack periscope device to give them better vision. Given that they have no official optical enhancements by default, I'd assume that's where most narrative examples of superior eyesight comes from. Additionally the helmet eyepieces bypass the eye and optic nerve completely, and directly generate images in the brain (shutting down the eyes while worn) to give them immunity to flash, and the most basic helmet has some other vision options like IR.

A marine in fatigues isn't that formidable (though I wouldn't want to wrestle one). A marine in power armour isn't really that shiny either; the better organized rebel groups would easily deal with a bunch of bozos charging around open fields. Bozos that have Attack of the Clones style tank landers that can fly their vehicles straight up to you and come supported by orbital bombardment and their own aircraft are harder to deal with.

Perhaps the most relevant advantage of their biology is that they are able to pick up and wield what are to humans crew-served weapons, almost like a rifle for instance space marine vs imperial guard lascannons.

The only thing that will really on that list is they have higher endurance, but that will only matter past 48-72 hours sustained operations, and against superiority numbers the enemy will just sleep in shifts anyway, while slowly murdering them with the impunity of artillery barrages ect. And this is still giving them benefit of the doubt on other fundamental problems like their obvious lack of any ammunition capacity what so ever or the technological changes from the mid 1980s to now. Most elite cannon fodder ever.

It's hard to murder them with artillery barrages when they're bombing you from space; really the space marines objectives (when they're sensibly portrayed) tend to be short high intensity missions with lots of support from either their own resources (listed above) or other imperial forces.

Ammo capacity is a problem. It might amuse you to know that some sensible person in the USA games-workshop website once gave out rules for a space marine ammo & supply transport vehicle (the Rhino Advancer) that was converted from their APC. It's dubiously official at best though as are old rules for combat engineers. Logistics gets no love.

The kits include ammo pouches etc, but they're often left off and there aren't really enough of them for realism's sake.

As I say, it mostly depends if his gun is good enough to harm a tank (I don't think so unless he gets lucky, which is conceivable) or if he has some of the (vast amount of) anti-tank weaponry marines have.

[Kingmaker]

Don't tactical marines (which is what I'm assuming our random smurf is) carry a variety of grenades, including krak grenades? He still has to get close enough to use it, of course, but a krak grenade is a dedicated anti-tank weapon that should be capable of killing/disabling an Abrams.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Don't tactical marines (which is what I'm assuming our random smurf is) carry a variety of grenades, including krak grenades? He still has to get close enough to use it, of course, but a krak grenade is a dedicated anti-tank weapon that should be capable of killing/disabling an Abrams.

Krak, frag, and I think, blind. You can purchase plasma grenades for him as well, IIRC.

They've got motorbikes

I thought only the Dark Angels employed those.

[Elheru Aran]

They've got motorbikes

I thought only the Dark Angels employed those.

Nah, they're pretty standard actually. Space Wolves, Ultras, hell the archetypal bike army is probably White Scars.

[NecronLord]

I do not believe blind grenades are standard; if they are that would give him a substantially better chance, as they are functionally obscuring against visual, IR and other spectra IIRC.

[Simon_Jester]

The rest of the space marines, do it in various headbanging ways like ritual death duels or making their entire homeworld into constant war-zones for child soldiers to flourish, or recruiting juvinile delinquents and then brainwashing them. But this is reflected in the lore. The Ultramarines unsurprisingly have the largest recruiting base and are able to replenish their losses much quicker than the others. The Ultramarines defining trait is their comparative reasonableness and efficiency of their training and recruiting. Some other chapters are more keen on hand-to-hand battle and other such things, and succeed despite that, but none can match the success overall of the Ultramarines.

Hm. If so, it would provide a justification for the Ultramarines' success and why we have so many references to lots and lots of chapters being Ultramarine-descended- besides the obvious one of Matthew Ward being a doofus.

It'd be something of a Darwinian process- the Ultramarines run their little fiefdom better than most of the other chapters, are in a better position to recruit sane, balanced people into their own chapter which reduces their casualty rate, and are better placed to "fission" and found new chapters quickly.

[Elheru Aran]

Part of the reason the Smurfs have so many successor Chapters is they were ungodly huge before the First Founding thanks to quite possibly swallowing up a Lost Legion or even both of them. Something absurd like ~200K Space Marines. Whittling that down to Chapters of a thousand Marines each will make a *lot* of successors.

The Word Bearers were the only other Legion that came close, and even they were only about half that in size IIRC. That's a big part of why they were tasked with bottling up the realm of Ultramar along with the World Eaters-- the other part was Lorgar carried a major grudge against Guilliman.

[NecronLord]

The rest of the space marines, do it in various headbanging ways like ritual death duels or making their entire homeworld into constant war-zones for child soldiers to flourish, or recruiting juvinile delinquents and then brainwashing them. But this is reflected in the lore. The Ultramarines unsurprisingly have the largest recruiting base and are able to replenish their losses much quicker than the others. The Ultramarines defining trait is their comparative reasonableness and efficiency of their training and recruiting. Some other chapters are more keen on hand-to-hand battle and other such things, and succeed despite that, but none can match the success overall of the Ultramarines.

Hm. If so, it would provide a justification for the Ultramarines' success and why we have so many references to lots and lots of chapters being Ultramarine-descended- besides the obvious one of Matthew Ward being a doofus.

It'd be something of a Darwinian process- the Ultramarines run their little fiefdom better than most of the other chapters, are in a better position to recruit sane, balanced people into their own chapter which reduces their casualty rate, and are better placed to "fission" and found new chapters quickly.

The fact is that it's actually true. Matt Ward gives reasons why they're the absolute best, he didn't just ass-pull it. The fans don't like that, because they're regarded as the newbie army for 40k, but there are many reasons in the lore why they are the most powerful and with one of the best battle records.

For instance, one of the forms of cooperation between ultramarines successors is that one chapter of the successors will actually send troops to join the ultramarines chapter on loan when they take losses, to ensure that the first founding chapter always remains active and can therefore carry the flag for the whole legion. (Genesis Chapter)

Another one, not by Matt Ward, is that they work very closely with a particularly favoured stormtrooper regiment to bolster their numbers and capabilities (55th Alphic Hydras whose very suspect name makes one think of the Alpha Legion but are so far seemingly loyal)

They maintain strong links with the Imperial Navy and Guard, and also maintain a large armed force in the Realm of Ultramar called the Ultramar Auxilia whose equipment is reminiscent of stormtroopers note the power cable on his weapon indicating it's a hellgun in equipment. Ultramar regularly contributes Imperial Guard regiments even though it is not required to by law and maintains "several hundred regiments" ready to respond to a crisis. The ultramarines are also known to take Imperial Guard raised from their realm to support them on campaign.

Administration, joint operations skill (including with the Tau on a few occasions) are among the reasons for the Ultramarines' preeminence.