I'm going to use the opportunity and say that it bothers me how space marines do not make any sense in a setting that takes itself as seriously as post-2nd edition 40k. Space marines seem to be less numerous, less capable, and more expensive to make than conventional tanks. What's the point in having 1-2 million of them running around? Just make a bunch of tanks instead.
In-universe I guess the argument would (or should) be that they're this aging relic of the imperium's golden age kept going through sheer momentum & essentially holding the feudal logistics of the imperium hostage through ancient treaties and vows of loyalty, just enough to shore up the crumbling imperium while never actually achieving any lasting victory. Their gear slowly goes downhill as knowledge is lost, their geneseed succumbs to the various flaws/mutations, their numbers whittled down through attrition.
Of course instead of doing something that could be interesting they decided to just lionize the brainwashed child soldiers into cool guys with big guns that shoot all the undesirables aliens, mutants, and heretics. After all, you gotta have an easy entry point posterboy (no feeeemales allowed in the space marine club) faction that you can use to sell overpriced plastic to impressionable kids
In-universe I guess the argument would (or should) be that they're this aging relic of the imperium's golden age kept going through sheer momentum & essentially holding the feudal logistics of the imperium hostage through ancient treaties and vows of loyalty, just enough to shore up the crumbling imperium while never actually achieving any lasting victory. Their gear slowly goes downhill as knowledge is lost, their geneseed succumbs to the various flaws/mutations, their numbers whittled down through attrition.
This justification doesn't work with the pre-Heresy era.
For that I'd just say the emperor is a fascist egomaniac who wanted an ubermensch to build his empire and brutally put down anyone who opposed him. For all the talk of the imperium being for mankind the regular rank-and-file proles are constantly murdered without a second thought for little to no reason. Summary execution is the norm, you can get turned into a servitor because you failed to meet a quota, or just shipped off to one of the forever wars where you get killed in Space Afghanistan by some dude who just doesn't want to be enslaved by this fascist theocratic state. At best the emperor views humanity as beings fit only to be enslaved and exploited until death (and beyond, hello corpse-starch) so it's unsurprising he would want a separate warrior class that are loyal only to him and his handcrafted tools/sons (oops). He didn't want to give humanity the tools of their liberation, he wanted to make tools to oppress them.
In short, the space marines fighting aliens real good is a secondary function, the primary function of space marines was having a force of unbreakably loyal psycho-indoctrinated child soldiers who will gun down striking workers and anyone else that has even the slightlest issue with the imperium.
it's unsurprising he would want a separate warrior class that are loyal only to him and his handcrafted tools/sons (oops)
This contradicts the lore. The Emperor and Malcador knew that the Heresy would happen in advance and were preparing in advance. They knew that those soldiers would not be loyal to the Emperor. Unless your point is that he wanted to deliberately arm the other side, in which case I don't see what sources you can back your claim with.
Look I'll admit I play fast and loose with 40k lore, I like 40k despite GW, not because of them. They had/have some interesting ideas for the setting but I don't take their word as gospel as quite frankly it's all made up so I happily ignore what I don't like. I don't know the deep lore of the emperor & malcador because it's more interesting to me when we barely knew anything about that entire period. I really don't like the idea that he saw it coming tbh, it's boring and verges too close to the "he's a literal god" part of 40k. So fair enough if he knew half would be traitors and not unbreakably loyal, but that's one of the parts of the lore I'll continue to not bother with.
I really don't like the idea that he saw it coming tbh
Neither do I.
My overarching point is that at least 40k is a wasted setting. It has a bunch of compelling ideas which it fails to utilise.
In general, I find it not worth in the slightest to engage with the setting. I'm an unfortunate person who hyperfocused on reading about it randomly at some point about 20 years ago.
There seems to be some sort of scale-based plot armour. Like i cannot recall even a single time where some really powerful monster/hero gets taken out by overwhelming firepower, like ship lance or nuke to their face, they always need to come to personal combat, duels or something like this. Well, Angron was iirc stomped by titan once, but he survived, and everyone seemed to be more shocked that this even happened than with him surviving.
In-universe it's a combination of A) who's going to go tell the 9ft tall demigod that they're not allowed to exist anymore, and B) Space Marines are uber spec-ops who excel in surgical strikes that cripple enemy armies' leadership that a tank simply can't do, and are therefore a massive force multiplier despite their small numbers.
Out of universe, GW can't imagine advertising with anyone other than SpHeS mAhReEnS or generally acknowledging that xenos exist other than the occasional Necron novel that slaps unreasonably hard.
Lorewise they do "just make a bunch of tanks." The Space Marines are basically their own autarkic mini-empires that collaborate with the Imperium and run around larping, while the other 99.99...% of the Imperium never sees them and just fights with tanks and guns instead. They're rare enough that a single digit number of them showing up for a major fight is exciting and inspiring for the human soldiers, because Space Marines are more celebrity icons of their faith worshipped as literal angels by the public than they are an effective fighting force.
The Heresy was an event that crippled the Imperium and it revolved primarily around the SM.
They're rare enough that a single digit number of them showing up for a major fight is exciting and inspiring for the human soldiers, because Space Marines are more celebrity icons of their faith worshipped as literal angels by the public than they are an effective fighting force
Before the Heresy they were fielded as full standing armies, which was extremely wasteful and clearly ended poorly. Afterwards they basically become a footnote, being fragmented into tiny fiefs barred from ever having more than 1,000 members each. Basically all of the post-Heresy expansion and maintenance of the Imperium was done by mundane humans fielding shittons of tanks.
Do you have a source to back that claim?
That's just a collective commentary on the lore, there's no one place to find it. The rarity of Space Marines is brought up pretty regularly but also it's just crunching out the numbers between the ~1,000,000 Space Marines vs the ~20,000,000,000,000+ Imperial Guard, and the commentary on their effectiveness is just commentary on how frequently they eat absolute shit and prove less effective as a fighting force than humans. For example, the Battle of Macragge seeing the Ultramarines present run off and corner themselves and get completely wiped out, while the Imperial Navy won the war in space and the Planetary Defense Force won the war on the ground without the Ultramarines.
Before the Heresy they were fielded as full standing armies, which was extremely wasteful and clearly ended poorly
Apparently, not because of a lack of effectiveness, which is what doesn't make sense.
Afterwards they basically become a footnote
Do you have a source to back this claim?
being fragmented into tiny fiefs barred from ever having more than 1,000 members each
IIRC there are as many of them post-Heresy as pre-Heresy. About 2 million, including all of the renegades and Chaos-aligned ones..
That's just a collective commentary on the lore, there's no one place to find it
I'm sorry, but it sounds like this is just your headcanon that is not supported by the official material. With these standards, I can make up my own setting and present it as 40k 'as it should be'.
The rarity of Space Marines is brought up pretty regularly
They did not become rarer post-Heresy. They got more fragmented.
and the commentary on their effectiveness is just commentary on how frequently they eat absolute shit and prove less effective as a fighting force than humans
Are you claiming that there are no examples of the opposite?
Apparently, not because of a lack of effectiveness, which is what doesn't make sense.
Pre-heresy they were fielded as infantry alongside tanks, in Imperial Guard numbers. Post-heresy they always get fielded with fewer Space Marines than a single Guard regiment does tanks, and usually in smaller numbers than a Guard armored regiment fields baneblades.
Do you have a source to back this claim?
Have you ever actually read any of the lore? This is all really basic stuff. "Space Marines are so rare as to be materially irrelevant" is the coldest take there is: they're outnumbered 1,000 to 1 by entire planets, tens of billions to one by Guardsmen, millions to one by main battle tanks, etc. The scale of the setting clashing with the lore about how few Space Marines there are is an established and known thing, there's frequent lines about how they're so rare that they're basically considered mythical, a single company of 100 joining a crusade force of millions is considered a very big deal (and then the lore makes sure to write them dying stupidly to accomplish nothing, because lmao), major wars for critical planets almost never see involvement from Space Marines because there aren't enough Space Marines for every major conflict to even have one, etc.
Pre-heresy they were fielded as infantry alongside tanks, in Imperial Guard numbers
Each legion was about 100 000 to 200 000 marines (low end being Raven Guard with 80 000 and Thousand Sons with 85 000, high end being Ultramarines with 250 000). There were about 2 million of them in total, i.e. about the same number as post-Heresy if we count the renegades.
Have you ever actually read any of the lore?
I'm going to ask you to not escalate this into hostility.
"Space Marines are so rare as to be materially irrelevant" is the coldest take there is
They were just as rare pre-Heresy and during Heresy. Evidently, this argument doesn't work.
The scale of the setting clashing with the lore about how few Space Marines there are is an established and known thing
Which just reinforces my original point that SM make no sense in a setting that takes itself seriously. There is no point in making what is essentially a much more expensive and worse tank.
there's frequent lines about how they're so rare that they're basically considered mythical, a single company of 100 joining a crusade force of millions is considered a very big deal
Given that they were not more numerous pre-Heresy, and, in fact, were much more concentrated, this argument should apply even more to that era, but, evidently, it does not.
Each legion was about 100 000 to 200 000 marines (low end being Raven Guard with 80 000 and Thousand Sons with 85 000, high end being Ultramarines with 250 000).
That's roughly two orders of magnitude larger than the absolute most any post-Heresy chapter can theoretically field, and three orders of magnitude larger than what they actually do field at the very most.
The concept was always wasteful and dumb, but at least initially it was more "what if a normal army, but they're all supersoldiers in heavy power armor with rocket launching machine guns?" instead of "what if like three or four guys showed up on their own without really working with anyone else, but they have armor and stuff and they look cool so everyone clapped even though all the real fighting was done by tens of thousands of tanks and several million human soldiers?"
They were also pushing forwards much smaller fronts as part of a much smaller Imperium, against mostly scattered and poorly equipped enemies. They don't really make sense in that context either, but it's still very different from the much, much larger Imperium closer to M41 where there are a billion worlds and mature, organized industrial war machines churning out the tanks and guns that the Imperium relies on, and in that context the Space Marines are almost entirely absent.
Which just reinforces my original point that SM make no sense in a setting that takes itself seriously. There is no point in making what is essentially a much more expensive and worse tank.
Yeah, Space Marines are dumb as written, but the setting does at least acknowledge that all the major work is, in fact, done by the infinitely larger forces of the Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard even if it still barks and claps like a trained seal when some Space Marines bother to show up somewhere to take 90% casualties while trying to knock out a single fortified position and then run away because they took losses that will take decades for them to replace.
Pre-Heresy is very silly and basically explained by the Emperor being sort of a self-aggrandizing dipshit who wanted his special good boy army of supersoldiers to go off and wow a bunch of scattered planets into thinking he was cool, before he got to sit for 10,000 years with no one to talk to except whatever random psyker his psyker phone dialed up that year (that last bit is half a joke, but possibly at least partially canon).
That's roughly two orders of magnitude larger than the absolute most any post-Heresy chapter can theoretically field
And? There were in total the same amount of them. What is the significance of the fact that overarching organisations of SM became smaller?
Pre-Heresy is very silly and basically explained by the Emperor being sort of a self-aggrandizing dipshit who wanted his special good boy army of supersoldiers to go off and wow a bunch of scattered planets into thinking he was coo
Is there any acknowledgement in-setting that this idea makes no sense?
And? There were in total the same amount of them. What is the significance of the fact that overarching organisations of SM became smaller?
Because they were showing up as actual armies as part of a campaign that was fighting on few enough fronts for them to actually be able to show up a lot of the time? They were a much larger and more relevant part of the Imperial war machine at that point than they were millennia later after the Imperium grew through Rogue Traders and further crusades, industrial worlds were built up, and forge worlds were recovered.
Is there any acknowledgement in-setting that this idea makes no sense?
No, just like there's no acknowledgement that orks are very silly comic relief characters. The setting is written extremely drily, even when it's talking about the extra big linebacker mutants with redundant spleens (actual lore) who drool acid (actual lore), eat their enemies' brains to gain their knowledge (actual lore), have photochromic skin that makes their complexion instantly adapt to whatever light level they're in so they don't have to worry about sunburns or vitamin D (actual lore), and fight with chainsaws and rocket launching machine guns. Even if Space Marine fanboys have tried making them less silly in more recent editions they're still an absolute shitpost of a concept, and the fact that everyone in-universe thinks they're really cool and invincible and holy even though they're these dorky dipshits who constantly lose all the time is an amazing gag.
But all that is kind of getting away from my original point, which was that the Imperium itself does "just make tanks instead," and it makes absolutely absurd numbers of them because of its huge scale. Space Marines only get made by the tiny independent Space Marine chapter-states that are allied with but entirely independent of the Imperium, and in the overarching scale of the setting they don't ever really show up or do much of anything compared to mundane human armies despite their prominence in the lore.
Because they were showing up as actual armies as part of a campaign that was fighting on few enough fronts for them to actually be able to show up a lot of the time?
A bunch of separate forces, stationed in different places, etc. are going to be able to participate in a wider range of conflicts.
If you are making a claim that there are fewer conflicts in 40k than there are in pre-Heresy era, I'm going to ask for a source.
No
In which case it seems very much like what you said was just your headcanon that is not supported by the official material.
Even if Space Marine fanboys have tried making them less silly in more recent editions they're still an absolute shitpost of a concept
I.e. they fit much better with the pre-3rd edition version of the setting? I agree. And my point has been from the start that they make no sense in a setting that takes itself seriously.
But all that is kind of getting away from my original point, which was that the Imperium itself does "just make tanks instead,"
But it doesn't. In both the pre-Heresy and 40k eras they do make more SM, and even develop the Primaris version instead of just using the resources for more actually useful stuff.
Space Marines only get made by the tiny independent Space Marine chapter-states that are allied with but entirely independent of the Imperium
Their relation to the wider Imperium is closer to being pseudo-feudal vassals of the Imperial government. I wouldn't call them 'entirely independent'.
OTOH, this is not particularly relevant to the topic, and is more of a nitpick.
I'm going to use the opportunity and say that it bothers me how space marines do not make any sense in a setting that takes itself as seriously as post-2nd edition 40k. Space marines seem to be less numerous, less capable, and more expensive to make than conventional tanks. What's the point in having 1-2 million of them running around? Just make a bunch of tanks instead.
In-universe I guess the argument would (or should) be that they're this aging relic of the imperium's golden age kept going through sheer momentum & essentially holding the feudal logistics of the imperium hostage through ancient treaties and vows of loyalty, just enough to shore up the crumbling imperium while never actually achieving any lasting victory. Their gear slowly goes downhill as knowledge is lost, their geneseed succumbs to the various flaws/mutations, their numbers whittled down through attrition.
Of course instead of doing something that could be interesting they decided to just lionize the brainwashed child soldiers into cool guys with big guns that shoot all the
undesirablesaliens, mutants, and heretics. After all, you gotta have an easy entry point posterboy (no feeeemales allowed in the space marine club) faction that you can use to sell overpriced plastic to impressionable kidsThis justification doesn't work with the pre-Heresy era.
For that I'd just say the emperor is a fascist egomaniac who wanted an ubermensch to build his empire and brutally put down anyone who opposed him. For all the talk of the imperium being for mankind the regular rank-and-file proles are constantly murdered without a second thought for little to no reason. Summary execution is the norm, you can get turned into a servitor because you failed to meet a quota, or just shipped off to one of the forever wars where you get killed in Space Afghanistan by some dude who just doesn't want to be enslaved by this fascist theocratic state. At best the emperor views humanity as beings fit only to be enslaved and exploited until death (and beyond, hello corpse-starch) so it's unsurprising he would want a separate warrior class that are loyal only to him and his handcrafted tools/sons (oops). He didn't want to give humanity the tools of their liberation, he wanted to make tools to oppress them.
In short, the space marines fighting aliens real good is a secondary function, the primary function of space marines was having a force of unbreakably loyal psycho-indoctrinated child soldiers who will gun down striking workers and anyone else that has even the slightlest issue with the imperium.
This contradicts the lore. The Emperor and Malcador knew that the Heresy would happen in advance and were preparing in advance. They knew that those soldiers would not be loyal to the Emperor. Unless your point is that he wanted to deliberately arm the other side, in which case I don't see what sources you can back your claim with.
Look I'll admit I play fast and loose with 40k lore, I like 40k despite GW, not because of them. They had/have some interesting ideas for the setting but I don't take their word as gospel as quite frankly it's all made up so I happily ignore what I don't like. I don't know the deep lore of the emperor & malcador because it's more interesting to me when we barely knew anything about that entire period. I really don't like the idea that he saw it coming tbh, it's boring and verges too close to the "he's a literal god" part of 40k. So fair enough if he knew half would be traitors and not unbreakably loyal, but that's one of the parts of the lore I'll continue to not bother with.
Neither do I.
My overarching point is that at least 40k is a wasted setting. It has a bunch of compelling ideas which it fails to utilise.
In general, I find it not worth in the slightest to engage with the setting. I'm an unfortunate person who hyperfocused on reading about it randomly at some point about 20 years ago.
There seems to be some sort of scale-based plot armour. Like i cannot recall even a single time where some really powerful monster/hero gets taken out by overwhelming firepower, like ship lance or nuke to their face, they always need to come to personal combat, duels or something like this. Well, Angron was iirc stomped by titan once, but he survived, and everyone seemed to be more shocked that this even happened than with him surviving.
In-universe it's a combination of A) who's going to go tell the 9ft tall demigod that they're not allowed to exist anymore, and B) Space Marines are uber spec-ops who excel in surgical strikes that cripple enemy armies' leadership that a tank simply can't do, and are therefore a massive force multiplier despite their small numbers.
Out of universe, GW can't imagine advertising with anyone other than SpHeS mAhReEnS or generally acknowledging that xenos exist other than the occasional Necron novel that slaps unreasonably hard.
Lorewise they do "just make a bunch of tanks." The Space Marines are basically their own autarkic mini-empires that collaborate with the Imperium and run around larping, while the other 99.99...% of the Imperium never sees them and just fights with tanks and guns instead. They're rare enough that a single digit number of them showing up for a major fight is exciting and inspiring for the human soldiers, because Space Marines are more celebrity icons of their faith worshipped as literal angels by the public than they are an effective fighting force.
The Heresy was an event that crippled the Imperium and it revolved primarily around the SM.
Do you have a source to back that claim?
Before the Heresy they were fielded as full standing armies, which was extremely wasteful and clearly ended poorly. Afterwards they basically become a footnote, being fragmented into tiny fiefs barred from ever having more than 1,000 members each. Basically all of the post-Heresy expansion and maintenance of the Imperium was done by mundane humans fielding shittons of tanks.
That's just a collective commentary on the lore, there's no one place to find it. The rarity of Space Marines is brought up pretty regularly but also it's just crunching out the numbers between the ~1,000,000 Space Marines vs the ~20,000,000,000,000+ Imperial Guard, and the commentary on their effectiveness is just commentary on how frequently they eat absolute shit and prove less effective as a fighting force than humans. For example, the Battle of Macragge seeing the Ultramarines present run off and corner themselves and get completely wiped out, while the Imperial Navy won the war in space and the Planetary Defense Force won the war on the ground without the Ultramarines.
Apparently, not because of a lack of effectiveness, which is what doesn't make sense.
Do you have a source to back this claim?
IIRC there are as many of them post-Heresy as pre-Heresy. About 2 million, including all of the renegades and Chaos-aligned ones..
I'm sorry, but it sounds like this is just your headcanon that is not supported by the official material. With these standards, I can make up my own setting and present it as 40k 'as it should be'.
They did not become rarer post-Heresy. They got more fragmented.
Are you claiming that there are no examples of the opposite?
Pre-heresy they were fielded as infantry alongside tanks, in Imperial Guard numbers. Post-heresy they always get fielded with fewer Space Marines than a single Guard regiment does tanks, and usually in smaller numbers than a Guard armored regiment fields baneblades.
Have you ever actually read any of the lore? This is all really basic stuff. "Space Marines are so rare as to be materially irrelevant" is the coldest take there is: they're outnumbered 1,000 to 1 by entire planets, tens of billions to one by Guardsmen, millions to one by main battle tanks, etc. The scale of the setting clashing with the lore about how few Space Marines there are is an established and known thing, there's frequent lines about how they're so rare that they're basically considered mythical, a single company of 100 joining a crusade force of millions is considered a very big deal (and then the lore makes sure to write them dying stupidly to accomplish nothing, because lmao), major wars for critical planets almost never see involvement from Space Marines because there aren't enough Space Marines for every major conflict to even have one, etc.
Each legion was about 100 000 to 200 000 marines (low end being Raven Guard with 80 000 and Thousand Sons with 85 000, high end being Ultramarines with 250 000). There were about 2 million of them in total, i.e. about the same number as post-Heresy if we count the renegades.
I'm going to ask you to not escalate this into hostility.
They were just as rare pre-Heresy and during Heresy. Evidently, this argument doesn't work.
Which just reinforces my original point that SM make no sense in a setting that takes itself seriously. There is no point in making what is essentially a much more expensive and worse tank.
Given that they were not more numerous pre-Heresy, and, in fact, were much more concentrated, this argument should apply even more to that era, but, evidently, it does not.
That's roughly two orders of magnitude larger than the absolute most any post-Heresy chapter can theoretically field, and three orders of magnitude larger than what they actually do field at the very most.
The concept was always wasteful and dumb, but at least initially it was more "what if a normal army, but they're all supersoldiers in heavy power armor with rocket launching machine guns?" instead of "what if like three or four guys showed up on their own without really working with anyone else, but they have armor and stuff and they look cool so everyone clapped even though all the real fighting was done by tens of thousands of tanks and several million human soldiers?"
They were also pushing forwards much smaller fronts as part of a much smaller Imperium, against mostly scattered and poorly equipped enemies. They don't really make sense in that context either, but it's still very different from the much, much larger Imperium closer to M41 where there are a billion worlds and mature, organized industrial war machines churning out the tanks and guns that the Imperium relies on, and in that context the Space Marines are almost entirely absent.
Yeah, Space Marines are dumb as written, but the setting does at least acknowledge that all the major work is, in fact, done by the infinitely larger forces of the Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard even if it still barks and claps like a trained seal when some Space Marines bother to show up somewhere to take 90% casualties while trying to knock out a single fortified position and then run away because they took losses that will take decades for them to replace.
Pre-Heresy is very silly and basically explained by the Emperor being sort of a self-aggrandizing dipshit who wanted his special good boy army of supersoldiers to go off and wow a bunch of scattered planets into thinking he was cool, before he got to sit for 10,000 years with no one to talk to except whatever random psyker his psyker phone dialed up that year (that last bit is half a joke, but possibly at least partially canon).
And? There were in total the same amount of them. What is the significance of the fact that overarching organisations of SM became smaller?
Is there any acknowledgement in-setting that this idea makes no sense?
Because they were showing up as actual armies as part of a campaign that was fighting on few enough fronts for them to actually be able to show up a lot of the time? They were a much larger and more relevant part of the Imperial war machine at that point than they were millennia later after the Imperium grew through Rogue Traders and further crusades, industrial worlds were built up, and forge worlds were recovered.
No, just like there's no acknowledgement that orks are very silly comic relief characters. The setting is written extremely drily, even when it's talking about the extra big linebacker mutants with redundant spleens (actual lore) who drool acid (actual lore), eat their enemies' brains to gain their knowledge (actual lore), have photochromic skin that makes their complexion instantly adapt to whatever light level they're in so they don't have to worry about sunburns or vitamin D (actual lore), and fight with chainsaws and rocket launching machine guns. Even if Space Marine fanboys have tried making them less silly in more recent editions they're still an absolute shitpost of a concept, and the fact that everyone in-universe thinks they're really cool and invincible and holy even though they're these dorky dipshits who constantly lose all the time is an amazing gag.
But all that is kind of getting away from my original point, which was that the Imperium itself does "just make tanks instead," and it makes absolutely absurd numbers of them because of its huge scale. Space Marines only get made by the tiny independent Space Marine chapter-states that are allied with but entirely independent of the Imperium, and in the overarching scale of the setting they don't ever really show up or do much of anything compared to mundane human armies despite their prominence in the lore.
A bunch of separate forces, stationed in different places, etc. are going to be able to participate in a wider range of conflicts.
If you are making a claim that there are fewer conflicts in 40k than there are in pre-Heresy era, I'm going to ask for a source.
In which case it seems very much like what you said was just your headcanon that is not supported by the official material.
I.e. they fit much better with the pre-3rd edition version of the setting? I agree. And my point has been from the start that they make no sense in a setting that takes itself seriously.
But it doesn't. In both the pre-Heresy and 40k eras they do make more SM, and even develop the Primaris version instead of just using the resources for more actually useful stuff.
Their relation to the wider Imperium is closer to being pseudo-feudal vassals of the Imperial government. I wouldn't call them 'entirely independent'.
OTOH, this is not particularly relevant to the topic, and is more of a nitpick.