Misc 40K questions.

[Bedlam]

What I find interesting is that despite Geneseed removal and protection being very important to Space Marines they never seem to keep track of their, for lack of a better word, Paternity. I dont recall any Space Marines mentioning that they were made from the seed of Space Marine Bob who single Handedly clensed the planet of Didcot or such like. It may be a purposeful way of keeping unity in the Chapters be just having that the Geneseed is from the Chapter as a whole rather than individuals but it does seem odd that there are no references to spacific individuals.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Geneseed comes directly from the Primarch (though in many Chapters' cases, there has been a lot of degradation). The glands don't really have any individual significance, and in fact any such individual distinction is counter-productive: the Apothecaries fight hard (and occasionally lose) to keep the geneseed as pure as possible. Any deviation, mutation, or straying from the original Primarch's genetic material is a huge, huge no-no.

[Azazal]

What I find interesting is that despite Geneseed removal and protection being very important to Space Marines they never seem to keep track of their, for lack of a better word, Paternity. I dont recall any Space Marines mentioning that they were made from the seed of Space Marine Bob who single Handedly clensed the planet of Didcot or such like. It may be a purposeful way of keeping unity in the Chapters be just having that the Geneseed is from the Chapter as a whole rather than individuals but it does seem odd that there are no references to spacific individuals.

There kind of sort is a tracking like this in one of the short stories in HEROES OF THE SPACE MARINES a chaos champion from the Black Legion has sworn to kill any and all Imperial Fists that are created using the geneseed of an IF Captain that was his friend pre-heresy, but then sworn enemy post heresy.

[transnove]

If you look at the fluff on how Space Marines are made you see that they're given massive hormonal treatments to get them as big as they are, and spend the rest of their lives taking even more treatments to keep them physically stable. If those treatments include anabolic steroids, which seems likely as that's the class of drugs you need to have that effect on a human body, then friend Astartes' testicles are going to be roughly the size and progenerative usefulness of a couple of mushy peas. Even if he still has the hormonal wherewithal to get it up, his chances of impregnating a woman are at or about nil. And he'll need oestrogen inhibitors to stop him growing breasts and probably something to keep his roid rage within boundaries consistent with his being an effective and disciplined warrior.

[Cykeisme]

The transformation program actually involves a lot of genetic tampering and implanting of bio(mechanical?) devices into the Marine's body, although admittedly some of those implants are described as influencing development at least partially through introducing hormones in the body.

However, I doubt they're simply anabolic steroids; Astartes are not short-lived expendable super-soldiers that are meant to kick ass and die quick. On the contrary, Crusade-era Astartes are described as being outright immortal in terms of aging and health issues, though degeneration in geneseed means that most or all present-day Astartes may not be.

Thus, I doubt we can immediately link the side effects of anabolic steroids directly to the side effects of the Space Marine transformation process, although we can't rule it out either.

[Night_stalker]

Yeah, when the Astartes were created, I'm sure the Emperor didn't intend on them having kids.

[Connor MacLeod]

I was going to save this for when I covered Angels of Death, but oh well...

All Space Marine Chapters use gene-seed to trigger and control the processes that transform an ordinary mortal into a Space Marine. The gene-seed is encoded with all the information needed to reshape ordinary cell clusters into the special organs Space Marines possess, and it contains viral machiens which rebuild the body to the template contained within the gene-seed. However, from the beginnint there was no set way to activate the gene-seed.

Indeed, at the time when the Chapters of the First founding were created, the process was still highly experimental and many different ways of controlling and managing the change were tried. This led to the Space Wolves using the ritual known as Blooding, the Imperial Fists using the process known as the Hand of Faith, and the Blood Angels using Insanguination.