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Warhammer 40k General thread

Fourthspartan56 said:
So let me get this straight, it's wasteful to have a Space Marine chapter specialized for fighting Chaos. One of the most dangerous existential threats that exists, arguably only comparably to the Tyranids or fully Awakened Necrons in the threat it can pose to Humanity.

Really?

I'm beginning to wonder if we have radically different definitions of wasteful :V
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The existence of an anti-daemon chapter isn't wasteful, the stuff that goes into equipping them, their recruitment processes and their policy of killing anyone who might have seen them despite Chaos being well aware of them are the wasteful bits.
 
The Curious Fan said:
The existence of an anti-daemon chapter isn't wasteful, the stuff that goes into equipping them, their recruitment processes and their policy of killing anyone who might have seen them despite Chaos being well aware of them are the wasteful bits.
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I think Guilliman dropped that idea. Of course, the Imperium being the dysfunctional entity that it is, probably still does it because random administratum jackass number 23446573452624 forgot to file the memo through the proper channels.
 
Patak said:
I don't know more "heroic", but they do look a little more.. tacticool ?

Especially the Primaris Reivers, Infiltrators, Incursors and so on that have a spec-ops aesthetic.

Hell the Reivers even have those skull masks that make me think of Call of Duty: Ghosts or something.
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i mean the normal Space Marine Models are pretty cute in itself.

yeah they look more modern in their armor then classic space marines.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Hang on, I don't think this true.

All the canon I've seen posits that Space Marines are the ultimate warriors. Sure they can die if sufficient firepower is applied to them but if that's enough to make them useless then there are no useful soldiers, the foes the Imperium faces such as the Eldar or Necrons are capable of mulching just about anything if they can hit it with the right weapons. That's not some unique downside of Space Marines, a Guardsman would be far more fucked if in the same position.

Space Marines are far superior qualitatively to any baseline human soldier, that they're extremely expensive and borderline irreplaceable is true but besides the point. They're ultra-special forces, if you want a disposal and cheap force that's what the Imperial Guard is for. When it comes to hitting hard and taking out priority targets the Space Marines are exemplary. Strategically they're absolutely invaluable to the Imperium, they're the furthest from wasteful or unjustified.
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I didn't say they were useless, merely wasteful. :p

For what they're designed to do the Space Marines are highly effective, the problem is that making them is insanely expensive. If you have one that's great but if it dies then it's almost genuinely irreplaceable and that's kind of a big problem. Also it's worth noting that what they're designed to do and what the tabletop/rts games like dawn of war kind of implies they do are different things. Flavour/lore wise Space Marines are the mono-molecular tip of the spear, and they're meant to be used in that way. If it's gotten to the point that you have 500 Marines in tanks in a pitched battle then someone has actually fucked up, concentrating that kind of force in that small of a space is meant to be a) beyond necessary and b) quite risky because if something hits one of them it might hit all of them and then you've lost 500 at once. They're arguably at their most useful when they internally police breakaway states/rebellions inside the Imperium, because there they can just show up at a place with all the infrastructure already set, decapitate the leadership and install the new Imperial governor, and then leave again without wrecking the manufactorium or whatever makes the planet important.

That last bit is interesting because Space Marines in the early editions are semi-consistently presented more as super-police than super-soldiers. Like the Imperium calls them soldiers and they certainly can perform very well in a kind of spec-spec-spec-ops role but a lot of the rogue trader art and so on presents them as suped up Judges from Judge Dredd. You could say that the Imperium is kind of in a permanent state of occupation for which the Space Marines are the enforcers, and the actual military campaigns are largely waged with normal humans because they're actually expendable, maybe with a group of Space Marines to act as tacticians even. The Imperium spends all this wealth to make the Space Marines so that it can use them to keep the humans in line and feed them into the 'actual' war machine in that sense.

Some of this verges on headcanon I must admit but that's basically the way I view the Imperium. :V
 
The Curious Fan said:
And then the setting introduced extra wasteful variants (Grey Knights) and made the Custodes an army.
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Ironically the custodes have more manpower then the grey knights. They are the ten thousand afterall.

But, like, the custards have an entirely different concept behind them then space marines. Space marines were always a blunt instrument of fascist control. They exist to bludgeon problems with military force. They struggle outside that context (Guilliman is trying, but I honestly hope he doesn't succeed because narratively it would be a problem if space marines ended up in charge. There is already a bit too much eugenics)

Custodes are like supposed to be philosophers and poets and deep big thinkers too because the emperor styled himself an intellectual and so surrounded himself with people he literally raised as babies to think like he did and parrot back his particular brand of intellectualism. Them fighting is just cause the emperor was actually a brutal warlord and so his tailor made best friends had to be able to hang. But they were never intended to be smashed into a problem over and over until it was dead like space marines were.
 
Not sure the Custodians ever got back to being 10,000. Certainly after the Webway, calling them that was something of a bad joke.

I'd say the Astartes are much more special forces than police. The Crusade era muddies this a bit, though generally when Legion forces took the field there would be many more Imperial Army, Solar Auxilia or even Mechanichum taghma depending on the Legion.
 
The Curious Fan said:
The existence of an anti-daemon chapter isn't wasteful, the stuff that goes into equipping them, their recruitment processes and their policy of killing anyone who might have seen them despite Chaos being well aware of them are the wasteful bits.
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Ah gotcha, that's fair enough then. I wasn't sure if you referring to their existence as a whole or their practices, I'm not going to die on the hill of defending the latter. The Imperium certainly isn't a polity with sensible policies and norms.

Delirium said:
I didn't say they were useless, merely wasteful. :p

For what they're designed to do the Space Marines are highly effective, the problem is that making them is insanely expensive. If you have one that's great but if it dies then it's almost genuinely irreplaceable and that's kind of a big problem. Also it's worth noting that what they're designed to do and what the tabletop/rts games like dawn of war kind of implies they do are different things. Flavour/lore wise Space Marines are the mono-molecular tip of the spear, and they're meant to be used in that way. If it's gotten to the point that you have 500 Marines in tanks in a pitched battle then someone has actually fucked up, concentrating that kind of force in that small of a space is meant to be a) beyond necessary and b) quite risky because if something hits one of them it might hit all of them and then you've lost 500 at once. They're arguably at their most useful when they internally police breakaway states/rebellions inside the Imperium, because there they can just show up at a place with all the infrastructure already set, decapitate the leadership and install the new Imperial governor, and then leave again without wrecking the manufactorium or whatever makes the planet important.
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If they are useful at what they do then by definition they are not wasteful.

To waste resources is to spend them in a way that does not lead to an outcome that is worth the costs. An obscenely expensive medical treatment that saves lives is by definition not wasteful if you value the lives saved. The Space marines are the same, they're expensive as hell but they serve a crucial role in fighting against the enemies of Humanity and thus are not wasteful.
 
The Astartes are explicitly depicted as ripping through threats that could and did annihilate mortal and even Mechanicum forces a hundred times more numerous. As early as Horus Rising an Army force have spent days trying to crack a stronghold, only to see Garviel Loken's company (500 marines, at a guess?) crack it in an afternoon for the loss of three battle-brothers.

Revisited Mortis and realised why I just couldn't remember how it ends. Having started very strong and got to a really good second act, it falls down in the third because within the Titan combat itself, the dynamics rather peter out. I wonder if French might've benefited from leaving Chris Wraight to do a short story of Shiban's long walk back to Colossi (though I think that itself is one of the best parts of the book) and dig into the Legio Mortis (difficult as that may be with them all Chaos-corrupted).

I do love Ignatum's depiction, though it does show up the majority of other Legio depictions through the Heresy, especially the blandness of MacNeil's with Mortis and Tempestus. It's really weird to go through the whole thing of Tetracauron and go being all "Teeth of the Cog, we are the Incandescence, don't you try and machinesplain to the Princeps Maximus" and remember that the Dies Irae was crewed by people who might as well have been standard Imperials.
 
While I think it can be argued that a lot of Astartes pomp is wasteful (Brother, do you really need all that gold trimming?), I cannot agree that Astartes are themselves wasteful. The Imperium has mastery of biomancy, they can't build robots like the T'au.

But I guess when you're a child being forced given organs to become ultimate warriors and forever serving as a soldier, rituals, glories and trophies are the best ways to placate them.

The Space Marines may have a little pomp, as a treat.
 
bluntblade said:
Not sure the Custodians ever got back to being 10,000. Certainly after the Webway, calling them that was something of a bad joke.

I'd say the Astartes are much more special forces than police. The Crusade era muddies this a bit, though generally when Legion forces took the field there would be many more Imperial Army, Solar Auxilia or even Mechanichum taghma depending on the Legion.
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the custodes spent millennia literally doing nothing but guarding the imperial palace, I'm pretty sure that in the time after the heresy they were more than capable of making up for their losses.
 
The Custodes were super demoralised and depressed for a long time what with the not!death of the Emperor. The feeling of failure? Of being extreme disappointments in their own eyes?

I can relate. :V
 
Random quibble: I think we could do with more stories where a lieutenant of Abaddon's is an antagonist. Let me see a story from 34K or something where some Chapter are facing a Black Legion force under Vortigern or Amurael.
 
stratigo said:
Ironically the custodes have more manpower then the grey knights. They are the ten thousand afterall.

But, like, the custards have an entirely different concept behind them then space marines. Space marines were always a blunt instrument of fascist control. They exist to bludgeon problems with military force. They struggle outside that context (Guilliman is trying, but I honestly hope he doesn't succeed because narratively it would be a problem if space marines ended up in charge. There is already a bit too much eugenics)
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Considering the current fucked up status quo, Guiliman suceeding would overall improve things. I really want him see getting rid of things like the Echlesiarchy for example.
 
Hykal94 said:
While I think it can be argued that a lot of Astartes pomp is wasteful (Brother, do you really need all that gold trimming?), I cannot agree that Astartes are themselves wasteful. The Imperium has mastery of biomancy, they can't build robots like the T'au.

But I guess when you're a child being forced given organs to become ultimate warriors and forever serving as a soldier, rituals, glories and trophies are the best ways to placate them.

The Space Marines may have a little pomp, as a treat.
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I mean the systems that space marines by existing perpetuate are very wasteful. But the whole imperium is wasteful. Like space marines encourage brutal exploitative societies just to have the pick of adolescent males who have already had combat experience. And most of those die anyways. It is super wasteful.

mr_stibbons said:
IIRC, only the emperor could make new Custodes.
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They know how to ake more. It starts at infancy as opposed to adolescence though.

Sabertooth said:
Considering the current fucked up status quo, Guiliman suceeding would overall improve things. I really want him see getting rid of things like the Echlesiarchy for example.
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Guilliman is stepping into the vacant place of the strongman that the imperium lacked. He is revitalizing it, but in a very fashy way, which he can't do anything to help because of the nature of the imperium. Considering how fashy it already is, I am rather uncomfortable with the idea of the eugenics program that is the space marines turning out to just be better at everything then normal humans because, well, fuck game struggles with how it portrays fascism already and what kind of audience that attracts.
 
stratigo said:
Guilliman is stepping into the vacant place of the strongman that the imperium lacked. He is revitalizing it, but in a very fashy way, which he can't do anything to help because of the nature of the imperium. Considering how fashy it already is, I am rather uncomfortable with the idea of the eugenics program that is the space marines turning out to just be better at everything then normal humans because, well, fuck game struggles with how it portrays fascism already and what kind of audience that attracts.
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Space marines are genetically engineered super soldiers, they're not designed to be some sort of ubermensch to replace humans, they're designed to be a weapon nothing else.

The fact that Guilliman wants the Astartes to become more than just living weapons should be taken as a good thing, as that means they would be taking back some measure of their humanity.
 
Parth said:
Space marines are genetically engineered super soldiers, they're not designed to be some sort of ubermensch to replace humans, they're designed to be a weapon nothing else.

The fact that Guilliman wants the Astartes to become more than just living weapons should be taken as a good thing, as that means they would be taking back some measure of their humanity.
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The blood angles trying to regain their humanity through works of art or the spacewolves genuinely being swell to non marines is a better way to show those struggles then "Our genetically engineered from an all male physically perfect population is actually the best leaders of the imperium". Cause, like, mate, space marines are created by eugenics. If they slot in as leaders in place of normal humans, that's just another step along the path of fascism that games workshop won't think about, and that's bad.
 
stratigo said:
I mean the systems that space marines by existing perpetuate are very wasteful. But the whole imperium is wasteful. Like space marines encourage brutal exploitative societies just to have the pick of adolescent males who have already had combat experience. And most of those die anyways. It is super wasteful.
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This... isn't relevant to what's being discussed.

Just because the system being defended is wasteful does not make the Space Marines wasteful themselves. Unlike say the nobility you could conceivably see the Space Marines existing in say a Fully Automated Gay Space Communist society, because they're genuinely effective.

Now it is worth noting that in such a society it's very unlikely that they'd be remotely similar in terms of their cultures and institutions, things like Chapter Serfs would be very unlikely to exist, but the concept of highly augmented uber-special forces is not something that's bad or stupid. Quite the contrary given the kind of monsters that exist in the 40k universe.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
This... isn't relevant to what's being discussed.

Just because the system being defended is wasteful does not make the Space Marines wasteful themselves. Unlike say the nobility you could conceivably see the Space Marines existing in say a Fully Automated Gay Space Communist society, because they're genuinely effective.

Now it is worth noting that in such a society it's very unlikely that they'd be remotely similar in terms of their cultures and institutions, things like Chapter Serfs would be very unlikely to exist, but the concept of highly augmented uber-special forces is not something that's bad or stupid.
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The space marines are wasteful themselves because of the systems they directly perpetuate to cull recruitable populations. There's absolutely no reason Fenris needs to be the way it is, or Baal, or any of hundreds of hellworlds the spaces marines keep frozen in hellish conditions because of, well, "hard men" eugenics. The Ultramarines get it right where they.... don't ensure their recruiting worlds are shitholes of monsters, radiation, and feudal warfare so they can recruit "harder" men. It's the hard times meme taken to excess, which, I hope we all know, is bullshit. And once upon a time maybe the GW writers knew it was bullshit. But too much these days is this played straight.

But the very fact of creating a space marine also just kills a large percentage of selected candidates too, and that's a massive waste as well.
 
stratigo said:
The space marines are wasteful themselves because of the systems they directly perpetuate to cull recruitable populations. There's absolutely no reason Fenris needs to be the way it is, or Baal, or any of hundreds of hellworlds the spaces marines keep frozen in hellish conditions because of, well, "hard men" eugenics. The Ultramarines get it right where they.... don't ensure their recruiting worlds are shitholes of monsters, radiation, and feudal warfare so they can recruit "harder" men. It's the hard times meme taken to excess, which, I hope we all know, is bullshit. And once upon a time maybe the GW writers knew it was bullshit. But too much these days is this played straight.

But the very fact of creating a space marine also just kills a large percentage of selected candidates too, and that's a massive waste as well.
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Once again, you're not engaging with what's actually being discussed.

The discussion is not whether or not defending the Imperium is good for Humanity. Obviously it's not. The question is whether or not the Space Marines themselves can be said to be wasteful, as beings. If Space Marines were plopped in a completely different society would they be justified? My answer is unsurprisingly a resounding yes.

Really the only thing you've mentioned that's relevant is the human cost of producing Space Marines. And that's easily justified given how capable Space Marines are and how many humans exist in the Imperium.
 
stratigo said:
The blood angles trying to regain their humanity through works of art or the spacewolves genuinely being swell to non marines is a better way to show those struggles then "Our genetically engineered from an all male physically perfect population is actually the best leaders of the imperium". Cause, like, mate, space marines are created by eugenics. If they slot in as leaders in place of normal humans, that's just another step along the path of fascism that games workshop won't think about, and that's bad.
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Um,

you do realize that Eugenics and Genetic engineering are in no way shape or form the same thing right? Eugenics is about selective breeding, to get the whole blonde hair blue eyes thing.

Genetic engineering is using science to alter someone, say by giving them a third lung, or any of the implants that Astartes get during the creation process.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
Once again, you're not engaging with what's actually being discussed.

The discussion is not whether or not defending the Imperium is good for Humanity. Obviously it's not. The question is whether or not the Space Marines themselves can be said to be wasteful, as beings. If Space Marines were plopped in a completely different society would they be justified? My answer is unsurprisingly a resounding yes.

Really the only thing you've mentioned that's relevant is the human cost of producing Space Marines. And that's easily justified given how capable Space Marines are and how many humans exist in the Imperium.
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So you are saying that as a spherical cow space marines are good. Which is kind of purposeless because they are in fact ACTUALLY really wasteful in ways they don't have to be because of their institutions, and space marines are just as much their institutions and belief systems as they are transhuman super men.

Parth said:
Um,

you do realize that Eugenics and Genetic engineering are in no way shape or form the same thing right? Eugenics is about selective breeding, to get the whole blonde hair blue eyes thing.

Genetic engineering is using science to alter someone, say by giving them a third lung, or any of the implants that Astartes get during the creation process.
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The space marines genetic engineering only works eugenically. You literally cannot pick any human individual and make them a spacemarine. You can only pick adolescent males at peak physical condition. No women. No one disabled. No one not super fit and in perfect health. No one too old.

And if you then make them the actual leaders of the imperium. Well then the leadership is limited to men in peak physical condition.
 
stratigo said:
And if you then make them the actual leaders of the imperium. Well then the leadership is limited to men in peak physical condition.
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Most of the pre-Guiliman leadership was already folks with various degrees of augmentation, life extending treatments and other various modifications.
 
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