Imperial Guard with Space Marine Gunships

[Elheru Aran]

Honestly I wouldn't call a STC an 'AI' generally. It's a machine that either (to my understanding) holds the pattern of creating specific pieces of technology, or can produce that piece of technology on its own. Doesn't have to be particularly intelligent to do that.

Wasn't really trying to argue that the STC was evidence that all AI can be corrupted, just quibbling over a particular point of order. (but agreed, fuck Heldane)

No comment on the Necron thing though?

[NecronLord]

Yeah, Abnett calls the iron-man factory a Standard Template Constructor, as opposed to a Standard Template Construct Template, which is the pattern, and a Standard Template Construct Archive, which is the library thing.

Some necron constructs are engineered to resist chaos, some aren't, but every reasonable interpretation of necrons is a long way from the memed up 'thinking machine = INSTADAEMON' stuff. It's an example of the fandom taking one incident and running miles beyond its actual implications.

[Rogue 9]

The Guard isn't actually supposed to be badly trained and many planets' Guard forces are pitched as highly professional. The theory is that the Guard is the best 10% of the planetary defense force, or otherwise provides what would be by our standards an elite military force.

The problem is that some planets send their dregs rather than their best, or are such hellholes that they cannot provide healthy, well-trained, well-equipped soldiers at all (e.g. because of massive pollution, or social decay such that the corrupt planetary governor just drafts criminal troublemakers and ships them into space figuring that they'll all get slaughtered).

Doing so is extremely risky business for the governor, though. If the Munitorum deems a planetary tithe unacceptable, the planetary governor's life is forfeit.

[Lord Revan]

The Guard isn't actually supposed to be badly trained and many planets' Guard forces are pitched as highly professional. The theory is that the Guard is the best 10% of the planetary defense force, or otherwise provides what would be by our standards an elite military force.

The problem is that some planets send their dregs rather than their best, or are such hellholes that they cannot provide healthy, well-trained, well-equipped soldiers at all (e.g. because of massive pollution, or social decay such that the corrupt planetary governor just drafts criminal troublemakers and ships them into space figuring that they'll all get slaughtered).

Doing so is extremely risky business for the governor, though. If the Munitorum deems a planetary tithe unacceptable, the planetary governor's life is forfeit.

Also the inquisition might want to "have words" with a governor that consistently sends poor quality troops to fight the imperium's wars and unlike Departmento Munitorum that's so massive and convuluted that it might take centuries to act of a poor tithe, if the inquisition sees a problem it's generally delt with ASAP.

[NecronLord]

Or two different inquisitors, one of whom wants the Imperium to fall, fight over it and nothing gets done.

[Simon_Jester]

Re: NecronLord:

My apologies; I had misunderstood and mis-remembered much of the relevant evidence, and am now convinced that the Mechanicus's prejudice against machine life is an unwise one, rather than a wise one.
___________________

In regards to the Imperial Guard tithe... how do I say this...

I'm not saying that it's common for low-quality troops to end up in the Imperial Guard, but it's not unheard of. The Guard does have an allotment for conscript units that come in vast platoons of soldiers who fight in melee like a Tau and who have the marksmanship of an Ork, after all...

And given Guard doctrine, I suspect that the Imperium's high command can't even agree consistently on whether it wants the best of the best or just a mass of readily renewed cannon fodder. Which reduces the likelihood of anyone taking it into their head to say it is wrong as such for a planetary governor to send poorly prepared troops. There are plenty of Guard officers of the 'brutal and insensitive to losses like a sick parody of a World War One general' variety, and they likely wouldn't even notice as long as they follow orders.

Besides, there are quite a few planets which produce soldiers that just can't be that good by galactic standards (Kanak comes to mind, they're too primitive to really be that useful when you think about it, even if they are physically big and badass).

[Rogue 9]

Re: NecronLord:

My apologies; I had misunderstood and mis-remembered much of the relevant evidence, and am now convinced that the Mechanicus's prejudice against machine life is an unwise one, rather than a wise one.
___________________

In regards to the Imperial Guard tithe... how do I say this...

I'm not saying that it's common for low-quality troops to end up in the Imperial Guard, but it's not unheard of. The Guard does have an allotment for conscript units that come in vast platoons of soldiers who fight in melee like a Tau and who have the marksmanship of an Ork, after all...

And given Guard doctrine, I suspect that the Imperium's high command can't even agree consistently on whether it wants the best of the best or just a mass of readily renewed cannon fodder. Which reduces the likelihood of anyone taking it into their head to say it is wrong as such for a planetary governor to send poorly prepared troops. There are plenty of Guard officers of the 'brutal and insensitive to losses like a sick parody of a World War One general' variety, and they likely wouldn't even notice as long as they follow orders.

Besides, there are quite a few planets which produce soldiers that just can't be that good by galactic standards (Kanak comes to mind, they're too primitive to really be that useful when you think about it, even if they are physically big and badass).

I think the Imperium's tithe grades account for what a world can produce when considering what constitutes an unacceptable tithe. Which isn't to say places don't get misgraded to their disadvantage for maximum GRIMDARK, or other ridiculous things (like the infamous Hammeront IV, all posthumously sentenced to death for desertion for failing to turn up to a warzone because they'd died to a man in their previous one).

[Elheru Aran]

back to the technology thing:

Aren't Tau largely exempt from Warp influences in some fashion? Which might explain how their technology remains largely incorrupt?

Regarding tithes:

They seem to *mostly* function as designed, otherwise people would be complaining far more and the Imperium would be losing a lot more battles.

They HAVE to either be well trained on their home planet (IIRC the Planetary Defence Forces are used as one source of tithes on some worlds, training up new recruits to replace the tithes) or on board the troop ships, or if the war zone is large enough (planetary scale) they could conceivably be trained in specific tactics when deployed planet-side.

Certainly we see a lot of 'these Guardsmen are half trained conscripts who can do little better than throw rocks at the enemy'-- but we also see some highly trained, well equipped units. It's all across the map, frankly. So concluding that *all* Guard fall into the former category is unwise.

[Honorius]

]Because you started making mistakes I never made after the age of seven?

Does it occur to you that I use capitalization to draw attention to certain words in my writings. I do the same in my narratives I write as an EMT so those reading my reports are drawn to important medications or conditions I find in the field which I Capitalize to make them stand out to the eye so those reading it don't glide over it and miss something important.

How you write things is vastly different from me, likely as we do different work in real life.

The Crassus fulfills part of the same role. The other part of that role is "be small enough to transport with practical aerospace shuttles and drop into a combat zone." Because Land Raiders can do that. The Crassus super-IFV can't do that.

Because the Imperium for whatever reason didn't design a shuttle for it for the Imperial Guard to use, or did and its just not reflected in fluff.

The mission of a piece of military hardware isn't just about what it does on the battlefield. It's about what it can do off the battlefield, and what it takes to sustain and support that piece of hardware.

Off the battlefield, a Land Raider sits in maintenance or storage. A Crassus is busy ferrying supplies around or in maintenance by Techpriests and Munitorum workers. So its looking like the Land Raider is less useful in some regards.

But the maintenance needs are basically the same type.

Very well. Even if we remove the electronics, though, we're still left with the challenge of producing the Land Raider's hull, armor, engine, and suspension. If the Adeptus Mechanicus can easily mass produce those things, prove it. Their ability to mass produce the Crassus isn't relevant because the Crassus is much larger and cruder and grossly inferior to its weight in Land Raiders in terms of combat ability.

The hull is just slabs of metal welded together or riveted (40K for ya there). The power plant is essentially an enlarged engine used in Rhinos which are given to Arbites and Sororitas who given their size need millions of them. Fuck Space Wolf novels have traitor guardsmen using Predator Tanks.

Also Techpriests use Land Raiders as well and there are countless billions of them. If only a fraction actually fight, that's still millions of Land Raiders in the hands of a military force outside the Astartes who are really not that special and if anything a massive waste of resources better spent improving the Imperial Guard and its own Special Forces known as Tempestus Scions.

So really the road blocks aren't materials, but resource allocation.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

back to the technology thing:

Aren't Tau largely exempt from Warp influences in some fashion? Which might explain how their technology remains largely incorrupt?

By and large, yes, which was why they had difficulties accessing the Warp, and their Warp-capable craft can only travel FTL at 20% of the other Warp-using races(which may or may not include the Necrons).

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Because the Imperium for whatever reason didn't design a shuttle for it for the Imperial Guard to use, or did and its just not reflected in fluff.

Dropships(company-scale shuttles)and other Imperial Guard assault shuttles have been depicted in the Black Library fluff. In particular, the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor's Hand depicts the company-scale dropship(from a Galaxy-class...troopship), as well as a smaller, squad-scale shuttlecraft used by Comissar Tomas Beijie, when he confronts Cain and the company he takes with him, on the city-sized mineral dredger near the climax of the novel.

Also, the opening scene of the novel Fifteen Hours describes a craft similar to the dropship above, as it attempts to insert onto an Ork infested planet, only to be shot down and forced to crash-land by the greenskins.

There's also a shuttle deployment described in the second Ciaphas Cain novel Caves Of Ice, but I'm unsure whether these were Imperial Guard shuttles or the shuttle complement of the civilian freighter the 597th Vahallan has hired to transport them to their next deployment.

[Simon_Jester]

]Because you started making mistakes I never made after the age of seven?

Does it occur to you that I use capitalization to draw attention to certain words in my writings. I do the same in my narratives I write as an EMT so those reading my reports are drawn to important medications or conditions I find in the field which I Capitalize to make them stand out to the eye so those reading it don't glide over it and miss something important.

How you write things is vastly different from me, likely as we do different work in real life.

Well, one of us is ignoring the rules in elementary school English textbooks and one of us isn't, and that's all I have to say on the matter.

The Crassus fulfills part of the same role. The other part of that role is "be small enough to transport with practical aerospace shuttles and drop into a combat zone." Because Land Raiders can do that. The Crassus super-IFV can't do that.

Because the Imperium for whatever reason didn't design a shuttle for it for the Imperial Guard to use, or did and its just not reflected in fluff.

Any vehicles they have to airdrop a Crassus are necessarily much bigger than a Thunderhawk, which means they do not fill the same roles.

You can't just keep making a vehicle bigger indefinitely as a way of compensating for inferior technology, and still have it do the same job. A two hundred ton vehicle with great firepower and troop capacity is not the equal of a seventy ton vehicle with the same firepower and comparable troop capacity. Because making vehicles bigger has logistical consequences, it adds cost and complexity and limits the ways you can operate, as Skimmer explored in another thread when talking about what a nightmare it would realistically be for Baneblade superheavies to move around on the battlefield.

The mission of a piece of military hardware isn't just about what it does on the battlefield. It's about what it can do off the battlefield, and what it takes to sustain and support that piece of hardware.

Off the battlefield, a Land Raider sits in maintenance or storage. A Crassus is busy ferrying supplies around or in maintenance by Techpriests and Munitorum workers. So its looking like the Land Raider is less useful in some regards.

But the maintenance needs are basically the same type.

No wonder you named yourself after the incompetent moron of a Roman emperor who got Rome sacked by barbarians for the first time in 800 years...

Still missing the point. A vehicle massing hundreds of tons will have greater logistical requirements than one massing tens of tons. It will not be able to physically drive on or fit in the same terrain and infrastructure. Roads will collapse under its weight. Physically deploying it is harder, because you can't fly in with a medium shuttle and drop it off in the middle of a field. You have to find a much larger cargo vehicle that will likely need a dedicated landing pad (or at least much more favorable terrain) to drop off the Crassus.

The Crassus may be the only Guard vehicle that is like the Land Raider (in that it is a heavy IFV, a category the Guard doesn't otherwise have). But it is so much larger and bulkier that if it tried to do a Land Raider's job it would fail. And the massively greater weight strongly suggests that it is technologically inferior. So in no sense is it something that is properly compared to the Land Raider, any more than a 19th century steam locomotive should be compared to a modern pickup truck.

Very well. Even if we remove the electronics, though, we're still left with the challenge of producing the Land Raider's hull, armor, engine, and suspension. If the Adeptus Mechanicus can easily mass produce those things, prove it. Their ability to mass produce the Crassus isn't relevant because the Crassus is much larger and cruder and grossly inferior to its weight in Land Raiders in terms of combat ability.

The hull is just slabs of metal welded together or riveted (40K for ya there). The power plant is essentially an enlarged engine used in Rhinos which are given to Arbites and Sororitas who given their size need millions of them. Fuck Space Wolf novels have traitor guardsmen using Predator Tanks.

An armored tank hull, especially one that is superior to almost any other vehicle of comparable size in the galaxy (note the side and rear protection on the Land Raider) is not necessarily simple or crude to manufacture. The armor materials may be exotic or unusual, for instance.

What evidence do you have that the Land Raider engine is just a bigger version of the Rhino engine?

Also Techpriests use Land Raiders as well and there are countless billions of them. If only a fraction actually fight, that's still millions of Land Raiders in the hands of a military force outside the Astartes who are really not that special and if anything a massive waste of resources better spent improving the Imperial Guard and its own Special Forces known as Tempestus Scions.

So really the road blocks aren't materials, but resource allocation.

The Techpriests routinely use the most advanced and powerful technology the Imperium has, and hoard it for their benefit. They're also the ones running around with conversion beamers and gravity guns- that doesn't mean such weapons are commonplace or that there are enough to outfit large numbers of Imperial Guard units.

There might well be enough to outfit a few Guard units and it might be a modest improvement for them, but it's silly of you to just casually assume there are millions of the things kicking around unused.

Could a modest number of L

[Esquire]

]Because you started making mistakes I never made after the age of seven?

Does it occur to you that I use capitalization to draw attention to certain words in my writings. I do the same in my narratives I write as an EMT so those reading my reports are drawn to important medications or conditions I find in the field which I Capitalize to make them stand out to the eye so those reading it don't glide over it and miss something important.

How you write things is vastly different from me, likely as we do different work in real life.

If I may interject - as a fellow medical professional, I understand the temptation to drift into jargon.

Do not give into that temptation. If you're capitalizing somebody's Heat Exhaustion (or whatever) so that the ER doctor won't miss it, fine, but it makes you look stupid when you carry the habit over into more (/differently) structured writing environments. After all, you don't use the standard style in your work; why would you use your work style in a standard setting? There's no time pressure here and we're all going to read your posts as carefully as might be expected. You get called on this in many of the threads you post in, maybe it's time to take the hint.

[NecronLord]

back to the technology thing:

Aren't Tau largely exempt from Warp influences in some fashion? Which might explain how their technology remains largely incorrupt?

No, they aren't. They're blunt but not blank.

They have no detectable psychic emissions, compared to humans, but they have more than say, a rock. Or an inorganic robot.

[NecronLord]

back to the technology thing:

Aren't Tau largely exempt from Warp influences in some fashion? Which might explain how their technology remains largely incorrupt?

By and large, yes, which was why they had difficulties accessing the Warp, and their Warp-capable craft can only travel FTL at 20% of the other Warp-using races(which may or may not include the Necrons).

Ether-drive has been the subject of concerted efforts by Games Workshop to remove it from recent publications and say it doesn't exist, like necron inertialess drive. Consider how you will.

However, even in that fluff, the Tau were capable of building and turning on true warp drives. But without the understanding of what Gellar Fields are and why they're important, their test flights were disasters. Nothing about the tau themselves stops them entering the warp.

[Lord Revan]

IIRC the fluff was that Tau have so weak presence in warp that if they don't go out of their way to attract attention of the dark powers they're more or less safe from them, but the Tau are not blanks and can be effected by the warp they're just more resistant due the low warp presence.

[NecronLord]

Exactly. Nothing that would repel daemons from their kit if 'AI = Instadaemon' is true.

[Simon_Jester]

I will take your corrections on AI-related issues, NecronLord.

I also note that I've privately decided to totally ignore the silly "no FTL for Tau" concept, simply because it makes no sense that their interstellar empire could sustain itself without FTL drive that has performace at least of the same order of magnitude as the Imperium.

[Rogue 9]

Their interstellar empire is much smaller than the Imperium by several orders of magnitude. It could work, but then there's the wrinkle of the events of War Zone Damocles and the Tau's close pursuit of the retreating defenders of Agrellan. The Imperium had a few days to set up an ambush, but not the weeks or more you'd expect if pursued by a significantly slower force.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yes and no.

The Marines specifically have faster vehicles and better astronavigators than anybody in the Imperium except the Inquisition and maybe the Assassins. They also tend to protect the area immediately around them; for example the Iron Snakes protect a small area of space known as the Reef Stars. So their response time can be considerably less than you might think. It's no 'fly around the galaxy in half a day' but it could be as little as a few days to as much as, yeah, a few months. There are also Chapters that don't have planetary homes and just fly around in massive fleets, Chapters which send companies out on long distance missions, and so forth.

Short response times imply dispersing the best forces and vehicles into penny packets, in a situation in which is it a canon fact that the Empire is being deeply invaded by multiple enemies. So okay maybe that's true, but it's only true as a sign that Imperial deployment and strategy are horrible, and Honorious's idea's have plenty of merit if for no other reason the because the existing idea is flawed in terms of basic military principles. You don't use your best shit as boarder guards when you can draw on pretty much unlimited, in any functional sense, legions of cannon fodder to do that job.

The guys cruising around on ships all the time, good idea, but yeah, Marines acting as actual Marines. They should stick to that. Too much of this is being shaped by the post 1940 history of the USMC alone, against all other history.

As for intelligence, most Chapters have psychic Librarians available; a certain degree of foresight is possible, though of course that's always subject to interference. Orbital surveys once they arrive are also quite possible, and in fact IIRC are specifically mentioned a few times. It's not like they just come out of space and charge blindly at the enemy... well maybe the Space Wolves, but they're crazy anyway.

Sure, but that gives up all notion of tactical surprise, and operational surprise soon after depending on how fast enemy tanks can drive around, and thus is a problem if your trying to employ hand picked highly trained assault troops with only a medium scale of equipment. Remember your flying around in giant spaceships, the enemy can physically see you with small optical telescopes, the naked eye even if your in a medium or low orbit, and fuck all you can do about that.

That said, Space Marines leading frontal assaults is fairly rare. The reason we see it so often is because most of the novels and such are from their perspective and we see a disproportionate amount of Marine actions. Note that frequently we see it coupled with special-forces type actions such as precision strikes upon weapons batteries, power supplies, shield generators and so forth; it's not just a wall of Marines.

Without tactical surprise operations like that are operation certain death. They could only succeed against an incompetent or weak enemy, which is no endorsement of Space Marine value. And that's jus a big fundamental problem about conducting long distance operations in deep space, and the kind of thing the creators seem bad at handling, and the fanbase horrible. People want to play up the setting, use it as excuses for this or that, and then ignore what the setting means.

The most powerful weapon modern special operations forces have today is a radio, for good reasons.

Even in Storm of Iron, which has the Iron Warriors attacking a fortress, they're using a lot of Traitor Guard and Titans to supplement their forces. The Horus Heresy books, which are pretty much all about Marines being used as full armies, also explicitly describe hordes of human soldiers supporting the Legions.

One might question if you have Titans on the field, why you even bother to employ space marines? They make sense as regime protection units. but dictators usually try to avoid using those units in conventional battles for good reason. And certainly if you do use them, use them last, not first. Even Saddam with his deluded Arab Warrior mentality he held onto when the American totally did not capture the airport, understood that idea.

Army+ formations would sure help, but then you would expect proportional losses, and of course, while its only a notional type of formation, just dealing with a planet like earth should require several theater group sized units. Which seems to be going on the entire strength of the Space Marines. This is a universe with mega cities after all. Lets remember that say New York City has about the GDP and population of Sweden. And Sweden could call up 650,000 legit troops in 1989. This not good!

Now you do have some special cases such as Conscripts, the occasional penal battalion, and a few feral worlds which sends a bunch of half-mad savages in animal skins wielding clubs, some medieval-ish worlds which send guys wearing gladiator outfits or Aztec feathers... (god the third edition Guard codex was silly) but lasguns and flak armour are pretty much the default mode for the majority of the Guard, and most regiments are reasonably competent and well trained. How competent their *leadership* is may be another matter, but the standard mk 1 Guardsman is generally going to be a decent enough soldier.

...That's not good for the utility of the space marine. Elite forces usually succeed by either attacking where the enemy isn't, or attacking an enemy which does not pass the basic competence test, as nobody is ever born a solider. A warrior, perhaps. Concentrating the best equipment and forces with the guard as strategic reserves would make far more sense then spreading them across the 3D borders of the rhelm in a vain effort to fight at every poin of contact. All the more so if the Space marines must also defend their own static garrisons while doing so.

Blatantly the Empire is patterned off the last century of the Roman Empire, we've always known this, but one of the things Rome tried to do before it fell was form strategic reserve armies, abandoning its forward defense strategy. This proved to be too little, too late, probably in no small part because plague had too reduced the population base as a whole, but either way, the need for the change, as well as the need for heavier and more specialist troops was seen and acted upon. Trying to say the Imperium of Man is doing the right thing while its supposed to be failing is a pretty damn silly way of looking at it. I do not understand why so many of you want to argue against change.

Clearly what they need is a coup to overthrow whatever morons are ruling in place of the Emperor and adapt this kind of reform. The Space Marines are in need of reform at best, obsolete at worst. Too bad as everyones darling boy it's pretty well impossible that the creators would unleash the kind of win that could go into such a coup and reform, in the legitimate name of the Emperor to save him from his own spoiled brats.

[Honorius]

The guys cruising around on ships all the time, good idea, but yeah, Marines acting as actual Marines. They should stick to that. Too much of this is being shaped by the post 1940 history of the USMC alone, against all other history.

Many chapters that are fleet based do exactly that and stick to void warfare where their armor and intense training enables them to rapidly seize enemy vessels and clear Space Hulks and Space Stations.

But its also established that power armor is an STC design as well as Terminator Armor, so really again the Astartes are a waste of resources when stock humans can be fitted with power armor like the Sororitas and much cheaper semi-powered armor used by Stormtroopers who being more numerous than Marines, often do the same job and their predecessors of the Solar Auxilia were the ones that actually conquered much of the galaxy in the Great Crusade while the Astartes despite their fame were a drop in the bucket in terms of effectiveness and impact.

In fact the HH: 4 goes out of its way to point out Port Maw and the Coronids fell not because Asartes were ubermench, but because the defenders were so utterly betrayed from within that their defenses were in disarray as Horus struck, and even then, it took days of heavy combat and heavy losses amongst his Astartes for Horus to achieve his initial objectives. Hell Vraks showed that as stupid as fuck the Krieg's tactics and leadership was, they held their own against Chaos Space Marines for months before they were finally relieved and inflicted heavy losses on the traitor Astartes.

Fuck, half the Mechanicum turning traitor was far more damaging than half the Astartes turning traitor, because at their basis, the Astartes are glorified shock infantry while the Mechanicum Forces that turned traitor were combined arms armies with fuckloads of firepower that were needed to breach the Imperial Palace. They are also the only ones able to supply the high tech know how to maintain the weapons the Imperium and by etension the Chaos Forces need.

[NecronLord]

Reminder: There are less sisters than there are marines by an order of magnitude.

The Church's vanity project being able to afford power armour doesn't mean stormtroopers ever could.

[Simon_Jester]

Huh. Really? Only something on the order of a hundred thousand Sisters of Battle? I would never have expected that. Wow.

[NecronLord]

Sixty thousand maximum (and probably far less - each major order is between five hundred and ten thousand persons) in the major orders with minor orders being unspecified but never stated to be the majority of sisters.

[Sea Skimmer]

Huh. Really? Only something on the order of a hundred thousand Sisters of Battle? I would never have expected that. Wow.

And it be relevant, you certainly should expect far more. Delta Force for example has about 300 operators, against 300 million US citizen. 60k x 1 million ratio implies 60 billion person population, but with the kind of Hive Cities 40K is supposed to have you might manage to get 60 billion people on a single planet, easily. So this requires that they be held to an even higher standard of rare, though maybe not actually any more selective (just don't select more when full).

For people who are supposed to be secret police/elite regime protection truppen though low numbers are a rather impossible limitation to overcome in actual operations. You've got to go kick down actual doors, put cap's in actual asses ect.... But at least in their case it would be reasonable to assume they really are only a figurehead organization.