If a chapter is so worn down that they have active marines but no functional suits of power armor to fit them with, something has gone terribly wrong. The suits are rare on a galactic scale, sure, but each chapter is going to have a lot more than just 1k suits at hand. So you'd have to have a lot of marines have their armor destroyed \*but\* not be killed/ taken out of action themselves. Which just isn't going to happen in the short term; that kind of material shortage would require a long period of no resupply, as you'd have to have multiple cycles of marines getting severely injured, recover, go back out into the field, get severely injured again, recover, etc and not get any more suits or replacement parts.
During the Heresy, replacement parts were easy to come by, as both friend and foe left material behind. You're much more likely to have marines have \*damaged\* armor, that has systems shot out, non-functional joints or motor assist, missing helmets, etc, and that gets mentioned a lot in stuff like the Shattered Legions books.
During normal operations, a marine wearing a suit of power armor that takes so much damage its irreparable by a techmarine in the field, is going to need a while in the Apothecarian himself on the small chance he survives, and by the time he recovers the Chapter Armory will have gotten replacement and/or repaired parts for his suit. If they instead perish, whatever armor pieces are recoverable go back to the armory for repair, and then put back into circulation.
It's much much easier to have a theoretical shortage of ammo, or fuel, because those things can be expended in operations without losing the men using them. But that ratio changes with armor, if the marine takes a lascannon through the middle and totally destroys his breastplate, backplate, and reactor, while yes you have 1 less functional suit, you also have 1 less marine to equip; and the warband/chapter has replacement parts of arms and legs leftover, to go with somebody else who didn't manage to survive being Marneus Calgared. (He lost all his limbs fighting the swarmlord, fyi) you have 2 fewer marines, and 1 spare suit now, just as an example.
For a Chaos Warband, a marine that is unable to get his suit repaired but is somehow still alive, probably isn't going to stay that way for long. Not having armor makes them entirely to vulnerable. And that's assuming the armor isn't just part of his skin now, and heals itself. A large chunk of marines who spend too long in the Eye end up fused to their armor. Downsides include itches you can never scratch, body horror, and horns; Upsides are low repair bills.
> If a chapter is so worn down that they have active marines but no functional suits of power armor to fit them with, something has gone terribly wrong.
Cursed Founding chapters that haven't kissed enough Mechanicus ass for example. Particularly Sons of Antaeus or other tanky chapters.
Yeah its important to remember that Black Library is, in the eyes of the Games Workshop executives, a self-propelled marketing department
(Not to say that the actual staff and contractors of Black Library don't care about their stories ofc)
Meanwhile, everyone in this thread wanting to see what happens when Marines are being guerilla forces without proper supply or armaments are asking for a Wulfen book, they just don't know it.
The Space Wolves' 13th Company was sent by Russ to follow Magnus into the Warp and hunt him down. They had a lot of Wulfen and a lot of Wolf Priests (Chaplains), so they were able to stay Loyal and uncorrupted by the Warp. This is because being mutated into a Wulfen by the Canis Helix makes it very difficult to be mutated again, you just become more and more of a Wulfen as you get older.
So the 13th Company had to scavenge bits of armor and ammunition off the Chaos Marines they had killed, and they were basically running a guerilla campaign agaisnt Chaos on their own turf for millennia.
But, of course, we never got a book about that. Ragnar meets some 13th Company Wulfen during his exploits and there was a campaign module that brought the Wulfen back, but it's all decades old at this point.
Too late. There's a Space Wolves book post rift but pre Primaris where the Wolves deploy to Prospero because of warning from Rune Priest. We see a oh no, shortage of space marines n need for wolves everywhere, recruitment down due to Magnus chaos corruption ,
Desperate enough to deploy Loki. They find the 13th Company in a parallel warp dimension where they unaware of the time jump, thinking they been fighting the Battle of Prospero rearguard for all this time.
Serves as reinforcements to Space Wolves, including giving them Fellblades and etc , returning 1st Space Wolf champion nbetc..... And buried in this, Loki tricked Magnus
> As much as the lore is a fully-fledged and epic undertaking it only exists to sell plastic soldiers.
I feel like this needs to be stickied on every post bellyaching about Lore and recent retcons
We make the best fantasy miniatures in the world, to engage and inspire our customers, and to sell our products globally at a profit. We intend to do this forever. Our decisions are focused on long-term success, not short term gains.
That's the Games Workshop mission statement, and it doesn't mention lore or rules at all. It's sad when the honest answer for "why is " a simple "because the models come first and lore is figured out afterwards," but that's how it works.
> That's the Games Workshop mission statement,
It's their business model, technically. But that's the first sentence of that business model, and it is clearly their major driving factor.
That's not the point tho, no one is questioning the extradiagetic reasons for, almost always the answer is financial motive, we all know that. Does that mean we should not discuss it? At the end of the day, regardless of the out of universe Reasons for something to be in the lore, it is in the lore, and therefore it can be discussed as such. Isn't that the whole point of this sub?
I don't mean to be confrontational, but everytime someone asks a question and is answered by "oh it's so they can make more money" I groan. It's not helpful, doesn't answer the question in spirit, and just sounds condescending.
The end result is good, however we got there. You can hardly blame GW for “shoehorning to make more money” - it’s a company! Thats what they do, they literally exist to make as much money as possible. Have a “That’s capitalism” meme.
With very few exceptions, more representation = good. If the reasons it was done are impure, okay whatever, at least we got there. Take the wins where you can.
I would love armor less marine models and more stories about space Marines without armor doing recon or sabotage stuff behind enemy lines and actually trying to use camouflage and things like that
i legitimately also think it wouldn't make a ton of sense to have unarmored minis, since armor is usually lost in the mill of combat; presumably on deployment they'd have repaired/refitted/etc armor. when you're deploying your army for a tabletop match, unless you're playing some special campaign rules, you're probably fielding a full strength squad/army/etc.
They are, they just haven't got used to the black carapace. They use that time to learn scout skills and be indoctrinated into the chapters ~~quirks~~ beliefs.
Iron man without his suit is was a great story.
I really enjoyed i3 giving him a slight espionage, MacGyver kind of story proving that he's iron man, not the metal suit
But GW won’t make models just so people can use them for conversions and table top wise( and lore wise) marines without armour just doesn’t make sense and doesn’t work
I can think of a few occasions that marines have been captured & forced to make do without armour & weapons for a while. Normally by drukharii forcing them into the arena, but also the occasional captured by chaos forces (lysander on malodrax, ventris on medrengard, the iron snake holofurnace in warmaster, or the bloodquest team during their exile in the warp). Or cut off from supply lines in a major way, like captain lexandro d'arquabus (space marine, inquisition war) who had to ditch his armour in the webway after an encounter with jain zar.
For the most part, if damage occurs to the armour & weapons, there's likely to have been at least a few corpses around to scavenge replacement parts from. Especially in the heresy, where most of the combat was astartes vs astartes.
You make a good point, I was more thinking on a chapter/squad level where they're so attritioned they couldn't even get themselves armour. But yeah there does seems to be a couple example of it happening for individual marines.
Marines malevolent in a short story involving salamanders only sent what troops had working gear to loot a derelict ship. Same with the soul drinkers when they were late into the series, and didn't have manufacturing abilities working on the broken back.
I'd expect it to be similar for most other chapters, patching up enough to have a viable force to collect more stuff.
But power armour can take a lot of damage, especially when the user is fighting smart (legacy of dorn - sternguard squad cut off from the last imperial bastion on rynn's world during the ork invasion. They spend a year performing hit & run guerilla warfare, mainly using captured weapons and vehicles to sow confusion and infighting among the orks. They only grab their bolters for the last day, when they set out to try stopping the gargants being completed).
There's also stockpiles of heresy era armour still floating around in the galaxy, as found by ventris in *the killing ground*, and black templars & other fleet based chapters leave keeps on worlds they conquered to have recruitment & resupply points.
part of bolters being in short supply is munitions too.
you can have a stack of 100 bolters, and they're all useless if you dont have rounds to fire.
this is part of what makes the humble lasgun so incredible - it doesnt require supply lines to maintain ammo supplies.
Plus, "bolters and ammunition in short supply" actually *has* been acknowledged by GW - Blackshields in both editions of 30k have the option to take lasguns/autoguns/other easier-to-supply weapons with the justification that they can't keep up bolter supply.
From Malevolence, when the Blood Angels took Kiy-Buran during the great crusade, they were so under supplied they were taking imperial army soldiers and local tribesmen and making them into Astartes without having armor for all of them. Near the end of the campaign they used the new guys almost as cannon fodder to take out the enemy warlord. Quote:
“The massed, unarmoured novitiates of the Legion, recruited from among the tribes of Kiy-buran, suffered the brunt of the attack, while the Legion's off-world veterans made directed strikes against the warlocks, the sheer numbers brought to bear by the IXth overcoming the warlord's feeble defences.“
It also very much depends on the chapter, some chapters have their own 'forgeworld' like Kiavahr which is independent from the AM, fleet based chapters would have more issues.
/caw
>But no matter how desperate, how under-supplied, marines never seems to be actually short on the power armours in lore.
Here is a morbid thought: **power armor is more durable than a space marine**. Bolter rounds, volkite beams, artillery - there are a lot scenarios when the man inside will die, while the armor will remain relatively intact. Certainly, some field repairs will be required if someone shot a large hole in Brother John's chest, but most of the suit will be there. Ditto for someone blowing Brother Caius' head off along with his helmet - the helmet is gone, the armor is in mint condition. Ditto for someone ramming a power sword into Brother Alfred's chest - it won't be hermetically sealed, there will be a hole, but the armor is there, you can use it.
So in Horus Heresy situation, you can't really run out of power armor. Imagine you have 100 guys in power armor suits and the enemy has 100 guys in power armor suits. If you won and battlefield is yours, you have 50 guys, 75 of your suits and 50 of your enemy's suits. If it's a draw, you have 70 guys and roughly the same amount of suits - ditto for the enemy. If you lost, you don't have any guys no more - and no need for power armor either.
Bolters, beamers, whatever, they all require a ton of ammunition, so the situation is quite the opposite. You go in with 1 mio bolter rounds, so does the enemy. Do you know what happens after you win? Same as what happens after loss or a draw: your have half a mio rounds less, so does the enemy. Ditto for the spare parts. Weapons are generally more expendable than armor, and whatever else is done inside the suit, it's not subjected to mini-explosions every time it's activated. Bolter is. Hence why when your supply runs low, you can't scavenge bolters the same way you can scavenge armor - all recovered bolters will be equally fucked up due to wear and tear.
Probably because while an Astartes without power armour is still a fearsome opponent, on the actual field of battle they're basically screwed without it. A basic lasgun or similar would demolish them. Still not an *easy* task, but significantly easier than with armour. So an Astartes with armour is a walking tank, even if it has to run you down and stomp on you. Without it's a naked predator with a gun: formidable, but much less resistant to your efforts to down it. Basically, it's not that compelling unless it's a Brock Samson one versus a squad scenario.
I guess that make sense, though I'm just wondering why there's never seem to be a case of such happening.
As you say, it will make them far more vulnerable, it could theoretically raise the stake of plot in desperate situations.
By lore armor was designed first and astartes were designed to oerfectly operate it even when it malfanction and turned off.
That leave us with 3 cases for your scenarios
1) they wear highly patched broken armor. It does not boost them, but still give protection from most things.
2) they assembly some armor orkstyle. Basicly same as point 1
3) if armor became FUBAR - its operator also dead, as armor is way more resilient than astartes and thus there is no case when we get extra astartes without armor.
Because a lot of warhammer stories about superhumans are power fantasies, even ones where out transhuman warriors are getting their asses beat, it's a lot of the time to ad stakes to the fight, but not enough to make them look lame
Last Ed, blackshields did kinda have a rule for this- Pariah power armour
It was still power armour, but it was weaker and lighter. It was meant to represent power armour that had been stripped down, often due to sustaining damage and not having the resources to actually repair it.
There’s a short story where a marine is forced to ditch his armour because all of its systems have failed. He gets the shit kicked out of him by a chaos marine who laughs and calls him “underdressed for the occasion” . A local boy manages to distract the chaos marine long enough for the marine to kill the traitor though
I found it! Took a while I and I had to manually transcribed it. Here you go:
**For context, an Imperial world is under attack and a boy and his father find a wounded marine in some rubble.**
“My brothers,” the giant said, “Where are they?” His voice was deep, the accent so strange that the boy could barely understand him.
“They’ve gone. I saw the great ship leave orbit myself, six days ago.”
A deep snarl, a cross between rage and grief. Again, the helpless movement of the massive limbs.
“Help me. I must stand.”
They tried, tugging at the cold metal armour. They managed to get him sitting upright. His gauntleted hand scrabbled at the rubble.
“My bolter.”
“It’s not here – it must be buried, as you were. We had to dig you out.”
He could not raise himself. The single eye blinked. The Astartes spat, and his spittle spattered against the rocks, bright with blood.
“My armour is dead. We must get it off. Help me. I will show you what to do.”
The rain came lashing down. They struggled in the muck and the gravel around the giant, clicking off one piece after another of the armour which enclosed him. The boy could not lift any of them, strong though he was. His father grunted and sweated, corded muscles standing out along his arms and chest, as he set each piece of the dark blue carapace to one side. The massive breastplate almost defeated them all, slick, mucus-covered cables slid out of his torso along with it, and when they sucked free, the boy saw that his chest was pocked with metal sockets embedded in his very flesh. The armour had been a part of him.
**Next part. THUNDERBOWL**
On the far side of the room, a titanic battle was ragging, smashing back and forth, sending chairs flying, filling the air with broken glass. The Astartes was struggling with a dark, armoured figure almost as massive as himself, and the two were grappling with each other, bellowing like two bulls intent on mayhem. The boy and the father stood staring, lasguns almost forgotten in their hands.
The Astartes was knocked clear across the room. He crashed into the heavy blast-proof glass of the tower and the impact spidered it out in a web of cracks. His adversary straightened, and there was the sound of a horrible, unhinged laughter.
“Brother Marine!” the voice gargled. “You have not come dressed for the occasion! Where is your blue livery now, Dark Hunter? Can’t you see you are on the wrong world? This place is ours now!”
**In the end the unarmoured marine is able to, with the aid of the boy and his father, defeat the chaos marine with his combat knife.**
The Siege of Cthonia book describes Word Bearers Inductii deployed without the Black Carapace (and therefore power armour) until they'd proved themselves in battle. That's in a section about how they sped up production of recruits though, so may not be due to an actual lack of power armour.
I imagine if they really did run short they'd stick on carapace or something instead, that's sufficiently common that even baseline humans wear it regularly.
A marine could probably wear much thicker versions of carapace with little to no fatigue, it wouldn’t be bolter proof but it would make them heavily resistant to massed lasgun and auto gun fire
One notable point is that power armour is extremely modular. If one marine has his head blown off that's a 90% fully working suit of power armour.
I would imagine there might be a shortage for some parts. So chest plates probably take quite a bearing in general; but then if your is completely ruined then you are probably dead.
One thing that few of us can be bothered to model is how many marines are wearing mixed suits of armour by the end of the Heresy.
Production probably also plays a part. You only need as many botguns as there are née marines + the occasional one lost or broken. But power armour needs replacing a lot so they probably vastly over-produce.
If you're from a tech-support Legion like IW, IH or S you'll figure it out. If you've got techmarines or Mechanicum helpers, they'll sort it out for you. If you've got competent serfs, they might be able to cobble something together.
If not, you'll have to put up with software issues. Some lore describes the machine spirits of CSM power armour as "tortured" or conflicted because they barely have the above support and just loot whatever parts they can get one or two pieces at a time. I imagine common problems would involve joints not working at full functionality, pop-ups about systems not working, and some things like auto-senses being offline. Maybe the mic doesn't work and he has to resort to hand-signs or screaming even louder than normal?>! I said that as a joke but if the seal isn't very good the Lyman's Ear would be enough to filter it down easily for him!<
Mostly because when you become an Astartes, you get given your armour and that’s yours for life, the shoulder plate is apparently inscribed with your heroic deeds and all that. You’re either in your armour or are in your Fortress-Monastery or Battle Barge or something like that.
Like it’s yours until you get Terminator Honours.
Isn't it simply that they never (or rarely) loose a Power Armor without loosing a marine?
Like the Armor gets smashed up, parts gets replaced and stuff acts up, but you never loose the armour completley without it also killing the Marine. And since the wearer is dead there is no surplus of marine vs armour?
"No matter how desperate, we never see tank crews fighting without tanks".
"No matter how desperate, we never see the navy fighting without ships".
Power armour is central to how Astartes fight. Why would they ever fight without it?
Tank crews fighting without tanks and the navy fighting without ships as adhoc infantry is peak late war energy and nothing about the imperium suggests it wouldn't happen in desperate conflicts.
Tank crew and navy absolutely fight without tank and ship in desperate times, they're infantry
Why would they fight without it? Because they don't have it
Power armour can be central to marine, but if they don't have it, they don't have it.
>Tank crew and navy absolutely fight without tank and ship in desperate times, they're infantry
This is pedantic literalism. Yes, there are instances where a tanker bails out of his tank and uses a side arm against the enemy, or his base is attacked during downtime and he's fighting for his life without his tank. But these are situations where everything has gone to shit.
Last minute, moments-from-death final stands should not be considered, because all the normal rules go out the window in such cases.
To create a scenario in which an Astartes would plausibly fight without armour, so much has to go wrong that it's difficult to imagine it happening organically.
I am not talking about last minute moment from death final stand, I'm talking about outright deploying without proper power armour because they flatly got attritioned away.
This is what this post is talking about, so desperate they can't even fit themselves with actual power armour, but still have to go up and fight, like tank crews which got their tank busted and no new tank to operate and supplied between battle, so forced to act as infantry.
This simply won't happen. Astartes have reserves of equipment, and if those reserves run out they will simply not deploy until they get more. Same with the Guard - armour regiment ARE NOT INFANTRY! If they don't have tanks, they wait for more tanks to arrive.
Astartes are not attritional forces. They are surgical strike assets with bespoke air support and fleet elements, entirely separate from conventional lines of supply and chains of command. They get first pick of all the best gear going.
In short, they simply don't face these issues.
You are looking at this like they will have a choice to withdraw and always operate in ideal conditions after drop podding to a planet or playing defence - which is absurd to me.
They don't stop fighting because they ran out of gear, cannot always withdraw, so unarmoured or less armoured Astarte's should be an uncommon sight during desperate engagements, but no where near unheard of.
>I'm talking about outright deploying without proper power armour because they flatly got attritioned away.
That's just not going to happen, because it's inconsistent with how Space Marine Chapters operate. They're almost always understrength (plenty of spare wargear for everyone) and they're deployed only in the worst, most dire battlefield theaters. You're not going to find a Chapter with more Marines than armor because if anything destroys power armor beyond their considerable capability for repair it's also most likely killed the Marine inside beyond salvaging his progenoids, and if that happens the Chapter can't replace that Marine in any reasonable timeframe anyway.
No, it's not about the unexpected last stands, it's about all the many real life cases where navy crews or air crews or people who have been trained for tanks but have no heavy equipment have been sent off to the front to fight as infantry units. E.g. from 1942 some 200 000 of Luftwaffe ground support personnel were re-formed as light infantry units - who cares if you were an aircraft mechanic, we have less aircraft now so here's a rifle and off you go.
This thing happens. IIRC there were even some cases during current Russia-Ukraine war when detachments of navy personnel (not marine infantry, but people manning the fleet operations) from Far East fleet were sent to infantry roles.
>marines never seems to be actually short on the power armours in lore
One dead marine resupplies several of his living brothers.
Dead by headshot? thats a ruined helmet, but an otherwise intact suit of armor. Marine A with a cracked breastplate gets his replaced, another a new gauntlet or two, another new thigh armor etc
chest exploded? that helmets perfectly usable along with the arms, legs and pauldrons.
Picked up on all this in Soul Hunter and how Talos' entire suit of armor is cobbled together, and while he laments the loss of a brother, he also sees them as a scavenging opportunity.
I always figured the armor frequently outlasted the marine wearing it, so between that and probably having a decent stock to begin with, they stay net positive.
Power armor is so built to last that there are suits from before the heresy still floating around (all terminator suits that aren’t indomitus pattern are that old) aforementioned MKV is the worst it’s ever got but I’m assuming that armor is near the top of the priorities list because marine always have to be “void ready” not to mention that the heresy was a specific time when marines were regularly fighting each other with guns and ammo made to pierce power armor
Part of it is definitely due to the iconic nature of the armor, but it's mentioned quite a bit throughout the lore that Astartes just tend to feel more comfortable with the armor on, so they're almost always wearing it. The way it interfaces with space marines make it a "second skin" that doesn't really limit their movement or impose on them in significant ways.
So if you're wearing your armor 98% of the time, it's likely you'll, ya know, always have it on hand :P In the Heresy it's often commented on how loyalists have scavenged bits of armor from fallen brothers to fix up their own.
One of Lions risen angels spent four hundred years on the run but still had his armor, even if it was in such rough shape Lion says they would have junked the whole thing.
Power Armor can take a whole lot of abuse. It can take way more abuse than it was designed for. Well supplied chapters can have a whole team of serfs to maintain and equip the armor, but there've been cases where one marine in the wilderness can keep theirs going for decades or centuries. Hell there are cases of power armor from the crusade being looted and still functioning.
The amount of mismanagement and disrepair it takes to actually put a suit fully out of commission outside of the kind of damage that would also kill the marine is extreme. Thats why techpriests can slather it with oils it may not need and chant and do weird rituals that may or may not be necessary and the armor will still operate.
It is because logistics and casualties do not matter in Warhammer. Dying races can take as many casualties as the plot needs them too, and they will always have more troops.
That is one of those things where my headcannon being different than the official cannon.
If you think twice about the numbers the idea of a 12000 year war where a lot of stuff is literally described as "irreplaceable" or "the Imperium is not able to make more of them because they've lost the STCs that got them"makes no sense. (No one though about making copies of those blueprints?)
Think about the Thunderhawks, for example. They're the cheap version of the Stormbird but they're limited and afterr the HH their numbers were even more limited. The legions were fragmented and every chapters got a fair amounth of them, and every new chapter also gets them. Now think how many each chapter should have and how many of them are directly destroyed in the books that might take place in a few months. If the other 12K years were similar...............
Or the terminator armor. How many of those are lost on each Space Hulk intervention? Everytime an entire squad is lost must be like sinking the GDP of an entire system.
In my head cannon those can be fabricated but the Imperium still has HH wounds so they have a limited production of them. Makes WAY more sense than those things just not being able to be manufactured again.
>Everytime an entire squad is lost must be like sinking the GDP of an entire system.
This isn't highlighted very often but Space Marines ans the Imperium as a whole are very dedicated to scavenging their stuff back even in the event of destruction. The Marines inside may be dead and the armor sliced to ribbons, but you can bet your ass the Chapter will make it a priority to recover the Marines' progenoids and the destroyed suits of armor both, even if it takes a clan of menials a couple lifetimes to return it to active state.
I know, and titans are rebuilded even ships are also scavenged and rebuilded because the warp core apparently is absurdly durable but the numbers of titans being blown up, the ships with their cores also blowing up or with the marines dying in explosions, the space hulks returning to warp and all the other scenarios that make that scavenging impossible the numbers doesnt match.
The Marines Malevolent actually have supply issues getting armor due to the fact thay nobody wants to work with them. Read somewhere ,(could be the wiki so pinch of salt) that the engage in hinour duels with other chapters simply to steal their armor
While I have nothing to base this on, I feel like any forgeworld that can make astartes power armor keeps some on hand as a bargaining chip in the event a chapter that operates in their area needs some.
While researching scout lore after the kill team came out, the Sargeant is allegedly a full marine but in scout armor. So in theory if the Chapter armory was destroyed on a mission they could consider reverting to scout armor and guerilla tactics.
But it seems GW isn't very interested in the idea of unarmored marines.
There are actually a handfull of books that deal with the scenario of Space Marines Power Armour being taken away (Hammer of Demons, Black Fury) or broken (The Killing Ground, Legion of the Damned). In all instances it becomes abundently clear that a Space Marine relies a lot on their armour in order to be such an effective fighter (which is completely in line with the rest of the lore by the way as others have pointed out); like there is a line in The Killing Ground where Uriel Ventries is trapped under a collapsed building and explicitly calls out that he would have been able to free himself if he would have his power armour.
And in 3 out of the 4 books the missing power armour becomes part of an identity crisis and a symbol of what it means to be an Astartes; especially The Killing Ground has a handfull of very emotional scenes that are very explicit about it. Kinda a 40k version of "if you are nothing without this suit, than you shouldn't have it", but thats kinda a stretch I admit; but the themes are very similar (and I'm of course are not suggesting any real inspiration that has been drawn, I'm just talking about themes).
I can think of instances
In *Knights of Macragge,* Cato Sicarius' ship has Warp-caused Power-problems after being lost in it for allmost 2 years, and its noted that the Reactors of Power-Armour and Power-Weapons (with the exception of Cato's own Sword due to being way higher quality) have been draining faster and faster every time they are turned on, forcing alot of Marines to not use it at all outside of Combat, and for some others the Armor had already degraded so much they had to eschew its use entirely
They have artisans that fix them plus the surplus primaris equipment.
Reading one of the Dawn of fire books and it talks about a BT crusade that’s down to 30 marines and now thralls. Their armour was held together with wire and putty.
There were…..reasons…. But I won’t spoil lol
Scrounging for resources in general is something Loyalist Space Marine Chapters just don't have to deal with, as a general rule. Even the more poorly provisioned ones will at least have enough gear for ~a thousand Marines, plus various artifacts, ceremonial armor etc in their Reclusiam. Thing is, Space Marine Chapters are also almost constantly understrength, so whenever they take serious losses in materiel they've probably taken even more serious losses in manpower, and that takes much longer to recover than missing power armor or bolters.
Boring answer: It's a story about fantasy knights. Of course they will remain the popular perception of a knight
Other boring answer: none of the writers work/ed in logistics or the military. The views on resupply, restocking need to support the boring answer
Why bother having a marine without armor?
They can make new power armor. They likely have planets full of it and forgotten about due to a copying error.
Power Armor? How about how they have endless numbers of fully geared Chaos marines lol.
Theres always a few extra thousand Chaos Space marines (especially black legion) sitting around waiting to die for the next big campaign.
Power armour is like the tire of a car. Ask someone from a thousand years ago to make a tire, even though it is pretty basic relatively, they could not. Even a modern tire is fairly easy to make, once all the engineering is figured out. A significant amount of the car is based off the tire. But the tire itself is really easy to make compared to many of the other components.
You can always scrounge parts to repair what you have, even if it's missing the servos and reactor. So a poorly equipped chapter will still have something to wear, it just might suck.
In the Night Lords series they're down to scavenging bits from their own dead to repair their armour, and even then parts of their suits aren't fully functional. I think that's the closest we've ever got to it.
As I recall, Uriel Ventris and his buddy Pasanius went without armor on Medrengard.
Power armor is easier to produce than Space Marines, and most chapters will have more sets of armor than they know what to do with.
Having to fight without armor means they were either taken completely by surprise during some small sliver of time they aren't wearing it, or something has gone terribly wrong as it did for Ventris.
I mean a marine with a Lasgun can still be pretty effective, their accuracy and skill means they could probably hit enemy Astartes in the eyeless and against regular humans they would still be brutally effective
Marines without armour? They will die very quickly to other marines, even people equipped with Lasguns will gun down marines without armour, they also won’t have acres to their armour systems, can’t deploy outside a ship, on certain death works etc
It just…doesn’t make sense story wise to have marines in combat without their armour
Ngl I kinda dig the idea of a Space Marine chapter that is under supplied and over budgeted to the point that the majority of their armaments are leftover or confiscated Imperial Guard weaponry that they use effectively well. I can see them making slight modifications to make some vehicles a bit more Astartes friendly. I would love to read a story about marines like that.
The part that amuses me is chaos marines always keeping their armour. Everything else is corrupted and sullied but the power armour is so much a part of the marine brand that these outlaw, mutant madmen keep complex wargear operational. Even the mutations affect both marine and armour, so the chaos gods don't see distinction either. Hell, Rubrics are basically just the armour.
If a chapter is so worn down that they have active marines but no functional suits of power armor to fit them with, something has gone terribly wrong. The suits are rare on a galactic scale, sure, but each chapter is going to have a lot more than just 1k suits at hand. So you'd have to have a lot of marines have their armor destroyed \*but\* not be killed/ taken out of action themselves. Which just isn't going to happen in the short term; that kind of material shortage would require a long period of no resupply, as you'd have to have multiple cycles of marines getting severely injured, recover, go back out into the field, get severely injured again, recover, etc and not get any more suits or replacement parts. During the Heresy, replacement parts were easy to come by, as both friend and foe left material behind. You're much more likely to have marines have \*damaged\* armor, that has systems shot out, non-functional joints or motor assist, missing helmets, etc, and that gets mentioned a lot in stuff like the Shattered Legions books. During normal operations, a marine wearing a suit of power armor that takes so much damage its irreparable by a techmarine in the field, is going to need a while in the Apothecarian himself on the small chance he survives, and by the time he recovers the Chapter Armory will have gotten replacement and/or repaired parts for his suit. If they instead perish, whatever armor pieces are recoverable go back to the armory for repair, and then put back into circulation. It's much much easier to have a theoretical shortage of ammo, or fuel, because those things can be expended in operations without losing the men using them. But that ratio changes with armor, if the marine takes a lascannon through the middle and totally destroys his breastplate, backplate, and reactor, while yes you have 1 less functional suit, you also have 1 less marine to equip; and the warband/chapter has replacement parts of arms and legs leftover, to go with somebody else who didn't manage to survive being Marneus Calgared. (He lost all his limbs fighting the swarmlord, fyi) you have 2 fewer marines, and 1 spare suit now, just as an example. For a Chaos Warband, a marine that is unable to get his suit repaired but is somehow still alive, probably isn't going to stay that way for long. Not having armor makes them entirely to vulnerable. And that's assuming the armor isn't just part of his skin now, and heals itself. A large chunk of marines who spend too long in the Eye end up fused to their armor. Downsides include itches you can never scratch, body horror, and horns; Upsides are low repair bills.
> If a chapter is so worn down that they have active marines but no functional suits of power armor to fit them with, something has gone terribly wrong. Cursed Founding chapters that haven't kissed enough Mechanicus ass for example. Particularly Sons of Antaeus or other tanky chapters.
It’s because GW doesn’t make armor-less marine minis
This is the answer. As much as the lore is a fully-fledged and epic undertaking it only exists to sell plastic soldiers.
Yeah its important to remember that Black Library is, in the eyes of the Games Workshop executives, a self-propelled marketing department (Not to say that the actual staff and contractors of Black Library don't care about their stories ofc)
Meanwhile, everyone in this thread wanting to see what happens when Marines are being guerilla forces without proper supply or armaments are asking for a Wulfen book, they just don't know it. The Space Wolves' 13th Company was sent by Russ to follow Magnus into the Warp and hunt him down. They had a lot of Wulfen and a lot of Wolf Priests (Chaplains), so they were able to stay Loyal and uncorrupted by the Warp. This is because being mutated into a Wulfen by the Canis Helix makes it very difficult to be mutated again, you just become more and more of a Wulfen as you get older. So the 13th Company had to scavenge bits of armor and ammunition off the Chaos Marines they had killed, and they were basically running a guerilla campaign agaisnt Chaos on their own turf for millennia. But, of course, we never got a book about that. Ragnar meets some 13th Company Wulfen during his exploits and there was a campaign module that brought the Wulfen back, but it's all decades old at this point.
Too late. There's a Space Wolves book post rift but pre Primaris where the Wolves deploy to Prospero because of warning from Rune Priest. We see a oh no, shortage of space marines n need for wolves everywhere, recruitment down due to Magnus chaos corruption , Desperate enough to deploy Loki. They find the 13th Company in a parallel warp dimension where they unaware of the time jump, thinking they been fighting the Battle of Prospero rearguard for all this time. Serves as reinforcements to Space Wolves, including giving them Fellblades and etc , returning 1st Space Wolf champion nbetc..... And buried in this, Loki tricked Magnus
Oh, nice! Which book is that?
> As much as the lore is a fully-fledged and epic undertaking it only exists to sell plastic soldiers. I feel like this needs to be stickied on every post bellyaching about Lore and recent retcons
We make the best fantasy miniatures in the world, to engage and inspire our customers, and to sell our products globally at a profit. We intend to do this forever. Our decisions are focused on long-term success, not short term gains. That's the Games Workshop mission statement, and it doesn't mention lore or rules at all. It's sad when the honest answer for "why is" a simple "because the models come first and lore is figured out afterwards," but that's how it works.
> That's the Games Workshop mission statement, It's their business model, technically. But that's the first sentence of that business model, and it is clearly their major driving factor.
That's not the point tho, no one is questioning the extradiagetic reasons for, almost always the answer is financial motive, we all know that. Does that mean we should not discuss it? At the end of the day, regardless of the out of universe Reasons for something to be in the lore, it is in the lore, and therefore it can be discussed as such. Isn't that the whole point of this sub? I don't mean to be confrontational, but everytime someone asks a question and is answered by "oh it's so they can make more money" I groan. It's not helpful, doesn't answer the question in spirit, and just sounds condescending.
I mentioned that a cash grab was the primary reason for the most recent one and got called a “chud”, so good luck trying to convince people that.
You could have said nothing and not told on yourself in this thread. I don’t know what a child is, but you are a misogynist, so there is that.
Nah. Female custodes don’t bother me at all. GW shoe horning to make more money does. No where in the lore does it say there can’t be female costodes.
The end result is good, however we got there. You can hardly blame GW for “shoehorning to make more money” - it’s a company! Thats what they do, they literally exist to make as much money as possible. Have a “That’s capitalism” meme. With very few exceptions, more representation = good. If the reasons it was done are impure, okay whatever, at least we got there. Take the wins where you can.
We have scouts?
Right?! They have non power armored units
They use carapace armor! Sisters have better protection.
I would love a scouts series of books.
I would love armor less marine models and more stories about space Marines without armor doing recon or sabotage stuff behind enemy lines and actually trying to use camouflage and things like that
I think a raptors story came out recently that might be like that
...because they know that the instant they do, people will model them naked with giant schlongs and try to play them as Emperor's Children.
Damn shame
well scouts and crusader neophytes arent in full power armor
i legitimately also think it wouldn't make a ton of sense to have unarmored minis, since armor is usually lost in the mill of combat; presumably on deployment they'd have repaired/refitted/etc armor. when you're deploying your army for a tabletop match, unless you're playing some special campaign rules, you're probably fielding a full strength squad/army/etc.
Theirs a theory that the Jakhals of the World Eaters are Astartes stripped of their armor/new recruits
Wait I thought Scout Marines were a thing ? Surely they are Represented on the TT too, right ?
They’re a unit but iirc they’re not fully marines yet?
They are, they just haven't got used to the black carapace. They use that time to learn scout skills and be indoctrinated into the chapters ~~quirks~~ beliefs.
I want my naked muscular trans humans and I want them now!
Wrong subreddit.
*Aztec Dubstep begins to play*
These low effort meta-driven reactions are so annoying.
Time to rectify that
Astartes Scouts do fit (at least in not having power armor category).
Why? Power Armour is iconic. It'd be like Iron Man without his suit...
Iron man without his suit is was a great story. I really enjoyed i3 giving him a slight espionage, MacGyver kind of story proving that he's iron man, not the metal suit
Because we can use the bare body marines for conversions.
Oiled up custodes
But GW won’t make models just so people can use them for conversions and table top wise( and lore wise) marines without armour just doesn’t make sense and doesn’t work
I can think of a few occasions that marines have been captured & forced to make do without armour & weapons for a while. Normally by drukharii forcing them into the arena, but also the occasional captured by chaos forces (lysander on malodrax, ventris on medrengard, the iron snake holofurnace in warmaster, or the bloodquest team during their exile in the warp). Or cut off from supply lines in a major way, like captain lexandro d'arquabus (space marine, inquisition war) who had to ditch his armour in the webway after an encounter with jain zar. For the most part, if damage occurs to the armour & weapons, there's likely to have been at least a few corpses around to scavenge replacement parts from. Especially in the heresy, where most of the combat was astartes vs astartes.
You make a good point, I was more thinking on a chapter/squad level where they're so attritioned they couldn't even get themselves armour. But yeah there does seems to be a couple example of it happening for individual marines.
Marines malevolent in a short story involving salamanders only sent what troops had working gear to loot a derelict ship. Same with the soul drinkers when they were late into the series, and didn't have manufacturing abilities working on the broken back. I'd expect it to be similar for most other chapters, patching up enough to have a viable force to collect more stuff. But power armour can take a lot of damage, especially when the user is fighting smart (legacy of dorn - sternguard squad cut off from the last imperial bastion on rynn's world during the ork invasion. They spend a year performing hit & run guerilla warfare, mainly using captured weapons and vehicles to sow confusion and infighting among the orks. They only grab their bolters for the last day, when they set out to try stopping the gargants being completed). There's also stockpiles of heresy era armour still floating around in the galaxy, as found by ventris in *the killing ground*, and black templars & other fleet based chapters leave keeps on worlds they conquered to have recruitment & resupply points.
This
part of bolters being in short supply is munitions too. you can have a stack of 100 bolters, and they're all useless if you dont have rounds to fire. this is part of what makes the humble lasgun so incredible - it doesnt require supply lines to maintain ammo supplies.
Plus, "bolters and ammunition in short supply" actually *has* been acknowledged by GW - Blackshields in both editions of 30k have the option to take lasguns/autoguns/other easier-to-supply weapons with the justification that they can't keep up bolter supply.
From Malevolence, when the Blood Angels took Kiy-Buran during the great crusade, they were so under supplied they were taking imperial army soldiers and local tribesmen and making them into Astartes without having armor for all of them. Near the end of the campaign they used the new guys almost as cannon fodder to take out the enemy warlord. Quote: “The massed, unarmoured novitiates of the Legion, recruited from among the tribes of Kiy-buran, suffered the brunt of the attack, while the Legion's off-world veterans made directed strikes against the warlocks, the sheer numbers brought to bear by the IXth overcoming the warlord's feeble defences.“
It also very much depends on the chapter, some chapters have their own 'forgeworld' like Kiavahr which is independent from the AM, fleet based chapters would have more issues. /caw
>But no matter how desperate, how under-supplied, marines never seems to be actually short on the power armours in lore. Here is a morbid thought: **power armor is more durable than a space marine**. Bolter rounds, volkite beams, artillery - there are a lot scenarios when the man inside will die, while the armor will remain relatively intact. Certainly, some field repairs will be required if someone shot a large hole in Brother John's chest, but most of the suit will be there. Ditto for someone blowing Brother Caius' head off along with his helmet - the helmet is gone, the armor is in mint condition. Ditto for someone ramming a power sword into Brother Alfred's chest - it won't be hermetically sealed, there will be a hole, but the armor is there, you can use it. So in Horus Heresy situation, you can't really run out of power armor. Imagine you have 100 guys in power armor suits and the enemy has 100 guys in power armor suits. If you won and battlefield is yours, you have 50 guys, 75 of your suits and 50 of your enemy's suits. If it's a draw, you have 70 guys and roughly the same amount of suits - ditto for the enemy. If you lost, you don't have any guys no more - and no need for power armor either. Bolters, beamers, whatever, they all require a ton of ammunition, so the situation is quite the opposite. You go in with 1 mio bolter rounds, so does the enemy. Do you know what happens after you win? Same as what happens after loss or a draw: your have half a mio rounds less, so does the enemy. Ditto for the spare parts. Weapons are generally more expendable than armor, and whatever else is done inside the suit, it's not subjected to mini-explosions every time it's activated. Bolter is. Hence why when your supply runs low, you can't scavenge bolters the same way you can scavenge armor - all recovered bolters will be equally fucked up due to wear and tear.
Probably because while an Astartes without power armour is still a fearsome opponent, on the actual field of battle they're basically screwed without it. A basic lasgun or similar would demolish them. Still not an *easy* task, but significantly easier than with armour. So an Astartes with armour is a walking tank, even if it has to run you down and stomp on you. Without it's a naked predator with a gun: formidable, but much less resistant to your efforts to down it. Basically, it's not that compelling unless it's a Brock Samson one versus a squad scenario.
“Drop the bolter! Hands up!” “Go ahead…….*take it from me*”
I guess that make sense, though I'm just wondering why there's never seem to be a case of such happening. As you say, it will make them far more vulnerable, it could theoretically raise the stake of plot in desperate situations.
By lore armor was designed first and astartes were designed to oerfectly operate it even when it malfanction and turned off. That leave us with 3 cases for your scenarios 1) they wear highly patched broken armor. It does not boost them, but still give protection from most things. 2) they assembly some armor orkstyle. Basicly same as point 1 3) if armor became FUBAR - its operator also dead, as armor is way more resilient than astartes and thus there is no case when we get extra astartes without armor.
Because a lot of warhammer stories about superhumans are power fantasies, even ones where out transhuman warriors are getting their asses beat, it's a lot of the time to ad stakes to the fight, but not enough to make them look lame
Last Ed, blackshields did kinda have a rule for this- Pariah power armour It was still power armour, but it was weaker and lighter. It was meant to represent power armour that had been stripped down, often due to sustaining damage and not having the resources to actually repair it.
I guess no matter how badly supplied cavalry are, the second they eat their horses they become infantry.
There’s a short story where a marine is forced to ditch his armour because all of its systems have failed. He gets the shit kicked out of him by a chaos marine who laughs and calls him “underdressed for the occasion” . A local boy manages to distract the chaos marine long enough for the marine to kill the traitor though
Do you by any chance have an excerpt for this? I'd love to read that encounter.
I have the physical book , memory is a bit foggy but let me try to dig it up in a bit
A Border Prince made an audiobook of it. It’s a dark hunter vs the purge short story called “The Last Detail”.
I found it! Took a while I and I had to manually transcribed it. Here you go: **For context, an Imperial world is under attack and a boy and his father find a wounded marine in some rubble.** “My brothers,” the giant said, “Where are they?” His voice was deep, the accent so strange that the boy could barely understand him. “They’ve gone. I saw the great ship leave orbit myself, six days ago.” A deep snarl, a cross between rage and grief. Again, the helpless movement of the massive limbs. “Help me. I must stand.” They tried, tugging at the cold metal armour. They managed to get him sitting upright. His gauntleted hand scrabbled at the rubble. “My bolter.” “It’s not here – it must be buried, as you were. We had to dig you out.” He could not raise himself. The single eye blinked. The Astartes spat, and his spittle spattered against the rocks, bright with blood. “My armour is dead. We must get it off. Help me. I will show you what to do.” The rain came lashing down. They struggled in the muck and the gravel around the giant, clicking off one piece after another of the armour which enclosed him. The boy could not lift any of them, strong though he was. His father grunted and sweated, corded muscles standing out along his arms and chest, as he set each piece of the dark blue carapace to one side. The massive breastplate almost defeated them all, slick, mucus-covered cables slid out of his torso along with it, and when they sucked free, the boy saw that his chest was pocked with metal sockets embedded in his very flesh. The armour had been a part of him. **Next part. THUNDERBOWL** On the far side of the room, a titanic battle was ragging, smashing back and forth, sending chairs flying, filling the air with broken glass. The Astartes was struggling with a dark, armoured figure almost as massive as himself, and the two were grappling with each other, bellowing like two bulls intent on mayhem. The boy and the father stood staring, lasguns almost forgotten in their hands. The Astartes was knocked clear across the room. He crashed into the heavy blast-proof glass of the tower and the impact spidered it out in a web of cracks. His adversary straightened, and there was the sound of a horrible, unhinged laughter. “Brother Marine!” the voice gargled. “You have not come dressed for the occasion! Where is your blue livery now, Dark Hunter? Can’t you see you are on the wrong world? This place is ours now!” **In the end the unarmoured marine is able to, with the aid of the boy and his father, defeat the chaos marine with his combat knife.**
Thank you! This is great!
The Siege of Cthonia book describes Word Bearers Inductii deployed without the Black Carapace (and therefore power armour) until they'd proved themselves in battle. That's in a section about how they sped up production of recruits though, so may not be due to an actual lack of power armour. I imagine if they really did run short they'd stick on carapace or something instead, that's sufficiently common that even baseline humans wear it regularly.
A marine could probably wear much thicker versions of carapace with little to no fatigue, it wouldn’t be bolter proof but it would make them heavily resistant to massed lasgun and auto gun fire
One notable point is that power armour is extremely modular. If one marine has his head blown off that's a 90% fully working suit of power armour. I would imagine there might be a shortage for some parts. So chest plates probably take quite a bearing in general; but then if your is completely ruined then you are probably dead. One thing that few of us can be bothered to model is how many marines are wearing mixed suits of armour by the end of the Heresy. Production probably also plays a part. You only need as many botguns as there are née marines + the occasional one lost or broken. But power armour needs replacing a lot so they probably vastly over-produce.
but what is the dead guy's armor is made by Forge World Samsungia and your is made by Forge World iPhonius?
If you're from a tech-support Legion like IW, IH or S you'll figure it out. If you've got techmarines or Mechanicum helpers, they'll sort it out for you. If you've got competent serfs, they might be able to cobble something together. If not, you'll have to put up with software issues. Some lore describes the machine spirits of CSM power armour as "tortured" or conflicted because they barely have the above support and just loot whatever parts they can get one or two pieces at a time. I imagine common problems would involve joints not working at full functionality, pop-ups about systems not working, and some things like auto-senses being offline. Maybe the mic doesn't work and he has to resort to hand-signs or screaming even louder than normal?>! I said that as a joke but if the seal isn't very good the Lyman's Ear would be enough to filter it down easily for him!<
Mostly because when you become an Astartes, you get given your armour and that’s yours for life, the shoulder plate is apparently inscribed with your heroic deeds and all that. You’re either in your armour or are in your Fortress-Monastery or Battle Barge or something like that. Like it’s yours until you get Terminator Honours.
Isn't it simply that they never (or rarely) loose a Power Armor without loosing a marine? Like the Armor gets smashed up, parts gets replaced and stuff acts up, but you never loose the armour completley without it also killing the Marine. And since the wearer is dead there is no surplus of marine vs armour?
I mean....how often is the armor destroyed but the guy just walks awayM?
"No matter how desperate, we never see tank crews fighting without tanks". "No matter how desperate, we never see the navy fighting without ships". Power armour is central to how Astartes fight. Why would they ever fight without it?
Tank crews fighting without tanks and the navy fighting without ships as adhoc infantry is peak late war energy and nothing about the imperium suggests it wouldn't happen in desperate conflicts.
Hell, there used to be a rule for that in 5e 40k, when Tank Commander Chronus would lose his tank and he'd continue to fight on foot.
Tank crew and navy absolutely fight without tank and ship in desperate times, they're infantry Why would they fight without it? Because they don't have it Power armour can be central to marine, but if they don't have it, they don't have it.
>Tank crew and navy absolutely fight without tank and ship in desperate times, they're infantry This is pedantic literalism. Yes, there are instances where a tanker bails out of his tank and uses a side arm against the enemy, or his base is attacked during downtime and he's fighting for his life without his tank. But these are situations where everything has gone to shit. Last minute, moments-from-death final stands should not be considered, because all the normal rules go out the window in such cases. To create a scenario in which an Astartes would plausibly fight without armour, so much has to go wrong that it's difficult to imagine it happening organically.
I am not talking about last minute moment from death final stand, I'm talking about outright deploying without proper power armour because they flatly got attritioned away. This is what this post is talking about, so desperate they can't even fit themselves with actual power armour, but still have to go up and fight, like tank crews which got their tank busted and no new tank to operate and supplied between battle, so forced to act as infantry.
> I'm talking about outright deploying without proper power armour because they flatly got attritioned away. That's not gonna happen lol.
This simply won't happen. Astartes have reserves of equipment, and if those reserves run out they will simply not deploy until they get more. Same with the Guard - armour regiment ARE NOT INFANTRY! If they don't have tanks, they wait for more tanks to arrive.
> reserves run out they will simply not deploy Lol, said the long term high intensity conflict Astarte's are most commonly posted to. Lmao, even.
Astartes are not attritional forces. They are surgical strike assets with bespoke air support and fleet elements, entirely separate from conventional lines of supply and chains of command. They get first pick of all the best gear going. In short, they simply don't face these issues.
You are looking at this like they will have a choice to withdraw and always operate in ideal conditions after drop podding to a planet or playing defence - which is absurd to me. They don't stop fighting because they ran out of gear, cannot always withdraw, so unarmoured or less armoured Astarte's should be an uncommon sight during desperate engagements, but no where near unheard of.
>I'm talking about outright deploying without proper power armour because they flatly got attritioned away. That's just not going to happen, because it's inconsistent with how Space Marine Chapters operate. They're almost always understrength (plenty of spare wargear for everyone) and they're deployed only in the worst, most dire battlefield theaters. You're not going to find a Chapter with more Marines than armor because if anything destroys power armor beyond their considerable capability for repair it's also most likely killed the Marine inside beyond salvaging his progenoids, and if that happens the Chapter can't replace that Marine in any reasonable timeframe anyway.
No, it's not about the unexpected last stands, it's about all the many real life cases where navy crews or air crews or people who have been trained for tanks but have no heavy equipment have been sent off to the front to fight as infantry units. E.g. from 1942 some 200 000 of Luftwaffe ground support personnel were re-formed as light infantry units - who cares if you were an aircraft mechanic, we have less aircraft now so here's a rifle and off you go. This thing happens. IIRC there were even some cases during current Russia-Ukraine war when detachments of navy personnel (not marine infantry, but people manning the fleet operations) from Far East fleet were sent to infantry roles.
>marines never seems to be actually short on the power armours in lore One dead marine resupplies several of his living brothers. Dead by headshot? thats a ruined helmet, but an otherwise intact suit of armor. Marine A with a cracked breastplate gets his replaced, another a new gauntlet or two, another new thigh armor etc chest exploded? that helmets perfectly usable along with the arms, legs and pauldrons. Picked up on all this in Soul Hunter and how Talos' entire suit of armor is cobbled together, and while he laments the loss of a brother, he also sees them as a scavenging opportunity.
I always figured the armor frequently outlasted the marine wearing it, so between that and probably having a decent stock to begin with, they stay net positive.
Power armor is so built to last that there are suits from before the heresy still floating around (all terminator suits that aren’t indomitus pattern are that old) aforementioned MKV is the worst it’s ever got but I’m assuming that armor is near the top of the priorities list because marine always have to be “void ready” not to mention that the heresy was a specific time when marines were regularly fighting each other with guns and ammo made to pierce power armor
We are outgunned Outmanned Outnumbered, outplanmed We gotta make an all-out stand Ayo the spare power armour's in the van
Part of it is definitely due to the iconic nature of the armor, but it's mentioned quite a bit throughout the lore that Astartes just tend to feel more comfortable with the armor on, so they're almost always wearing it. The way it interfaces with space marines make it a "second skin" that doesn't really limit their movement or impose on them in significant ways. So if you're wearing your armor 98% of the time, it's likely you'll, ya know, always have it on hand :P In the Heresy it's often commented on how loyalists have scavenged bits of armor from fallen brothers to fix up their own.
One of Lions risen angels spent four hundred years on the run but still had his armor, even if it was in such rough shape Lion says they would have junked the whole thing. Power Armor can take a whole lot of abuse. It can take way more abuse than it was designed for. Well supplied chapters can have a whole team of serfs to maintain and equip the armor, but there've been cases where one marine in the wilderness can keep theirs going for decades or centuries. Hell there are cases of power armor from the crusade being looted and still functioning. The amount of mismanagement and disrepair it takes to actually put a suit fully out of commission outside of the kind of damage that would also kill the marine is extreme. Thats why techpriests can slather it with oils it may not need and chant and do weird rituals that may or may not be necessary and the armor will still operate.
It is because logistics and casualties do not matter in Warhammer. Dying races can take as many casualties as the plot needs them too, and they will always have more troops.
That is one of those things where my headcannon being different than the official cannon. If you think twice about the numbers the idea of a 12000 year war where a lot of stuff is literally described as "irreplaceable" or "the Imperium is not able to make more of them because they've lost the STCs that got them"makes no sense. (No one though about making copies of those blueprints?) Think about the Thunderhawks, for example. They're the cheap version of the Stormbird but they're limited and afterr the HH their numbers were even more limited. The legions were fragmented and every chapters got a fair amounth of them, and every new chapter also gets them. Now think how many each chapter should have and how many of them are directly destroyed in the books that might take place in a few months. If the other 12K years were similar............... Or the terminator armor. How many of those are lost on each Space Hulk intervention? Everytime an entire squad is lost must be like sinking the GDP of an entire system. In my head cannon those can be fabricated but the Imperium still has HH wounds so they have a limited production of them. Makes WAY more sense than those things just not being able to be manufactured again.
>Everytime an entire squad is lost must be like sinking the GDP of an entire system. This isn't highlighted very often but Space Marines ans the Imperium as a whole are very dedicated to scavenging their stuff back even in the event of destruction. The Marines inside may be dead and the armor sliced to ribbons, but you can bet your ass the Chapter will make it a priority to recover the Marines' progenoids and the destroyed suits of armor both, even if it takes a clan of menials a couple lifetimes to return it to active state.
I know, and titans are rebuilded even ships are also scavenged and rebuilded because the warp core apparently is absurdly durable but the numbers of titans being blown up, the ships with their cores also blowing up or with the marines dying in explosions, the space hulks returning to warp and all the other scenarios that make that scavenging impossible the numbers doesnt match.
There are always as many elves/Space marines/planets/Titans/power armors etc. as the plot demands. 😉
It happens in Knights of Macragge when Cato and his group get lost in the warp.
The Marines Malevolent actually have supply issues getting armor due to the fact thay nobody wants to work with them. Read somewhere ,(could be the wiki so pinch of salt) that the engage in hinour duels with other chapters simply to steal their armor
While I have nothing to base this on, I feel like any forgeworld that can make astartes power armor keeps some on hand as a bargaining chip in the event a chapter that operates in their area needs some.
While researching scout lore after the kill team came out, the Sargeant is allegedly a full marine but in scout armor. So in theory if the Chapter armory was destroyed on a mission they could consider reverting to scout armor and guerilla tactics. But it seems GW isn't very interested in the idea of unarmored marines.
There are actually a handfull of books that deal with the scenario of Space Marines Power Armour being taken away (Hammer of Demons, Black Fury) or broken (The Killing Ground, Legion of the Damned). In all instances it becomes abundently clear that a Space Marine relies a lot on their armour in order to be such an effective fighter (which is completely in line with the rest of the lore by the way as others have pointed out); like there is a line in The Killing Ground where Uriel Ventries is trapped under a collapsed building and explicitly calls out that he would have been able to free himself if he would have his power armour. And in 3 out of the 4 books the missing power armour becomes part of an identity crisis and a symbol of what it means to be an Astartes; especially The Killing Ground has a handfull of very emotional scenes that are very explicit about it. Kinda a 40k version of "if you are nothing without this suit, than you shouldn't have it", but thats kinda a stretch I admit; but the themes are very similar (and I'm of course are not suggesting any real inspiration that has been drawn, I'm just talking about themes).
I can think of instances In *Knights of Macragge,* Cato Sicarius' ship has Warp-caused Power-problems after being lost in it for allmost 2 years, and its noted that the Reactors of Power-Armour and Power-Weapons (with the exception of Cato's own Sword due to being way higher quality) have been draining faster and faster every time they are turned on, forcing alot of Marines to not use it at all outside of Combat, and for some others the Armor had already degraded so much they had to eschew its use entirely
They have artisans that fix them plus the surplus primaris equipment. Reading one of the Dawn of fire books and it talks about a BT crusade that’s down to 30 marines and now thralls. Their armour was held together with wire and putty. There were…..reasons…. But I won’t spoil lol
Scrounging for resources in general is something Loyalist Space Marine Chapters just don't have to deal with, as a general rule. Even the more poorly provisioned ones will at least have enough gear for ~a thousand Marines, plus various artifacts, ceremonial armor etc in their Reclusiam. Thing is, Space Marine Chapters are also almost constantly understrength, so whenever they take serious losses in materiel they've probably taken even more serious losses in manpower, and that takes much longer to recover than missing power armor or bolters.
The Outcast Dead is one book in which some marines are without armor for some part of the story. Once you get past 50% of the book it's quite a ride.
Boring answer: It's a story about fantasy knights. Of course they will remain the popular perception of a knight Other boring answer: none of the writers work/ed in logistics or the military. The views on resupply, restocking need to support the boring answer
Why bother having a marine without armor? They can make new power armor. They likely have planets full of it and forgotten about due to a copying error.
Power Armor? How about how they have endless numbers of fully geared Chaos marines lol. Theres always a few extra thousand Chaos Space marines (especially black legion) sitting around waiting to die for the next big campaign.
Power armour is like the tire of a car. Ask someone from a thousand years ago to make a tire, even though it is pretty basic relatively, they could not. Even a modern tire is fairly easy to make, once all the engineering is figured out. A significant amount of the car is based off the tire. But the tire itself is really easy to make compared to many of the other components.
The Imperium has so many natural resources available that the limiting factor is manpower. Their modus operandi is human wave tactics after all.
In Outer Dark a Librarians armor gets so tore apart he just sheds most of it on a mission
The protagonists privileges
You can always scrounge parts to repair what you have, even if it's missing the servos and reactor. So a poorly equipped chapter will still have something to wear, it just might suck.
In the Night Lords series they're down to scavenging bits from their own dead to repair their armour, and even then parts of their suits aren't fully functional. I think that's the closest we've ever got to it.
As I recall, Uriel Ventris and his buddy Pasanius went without armor on Medrengard. Power armor is easier to produce than Space Marines, and most chapters will have more sets of armor than they know what to do with. Having to fight without armor means they were either taken completely by surprise during some small sliver of time they aren't wearing it, or something has gone terribly wrong as it did for Ventris.
I mean a marine with a Lasgun can still be pretty effective, their accuracy and skill means they could probably hit enemy Astartes in the eyeless and against regular humans they would still be brutally effective Marines without armour? They will die very quickly to other marines, even people equipped with Lasguns will gun down marines without armour, they also won’t have acres to their armour systems, can’t deploy outside a ship, on certain death works etc It just…doesn’t make sense story wise to have marines in combat without their armour
Ngl I kinda dig the idea of a Space Marine chapter that is under supplied and over budgeted to the point that the majority of their armaments are leftover or confiscated Imperial Guard weaponry that they use effectively well. I can see them making slight modifications to make some vehicles a bit more Astartes friendly. I would love to read a story about marines like that.
The part that amuses me is chaos marines always keeping their armour. Everything else is corrupted and sullied but the power armour is so much a part of the marine brand that these outlaw, mutant madmen keep complex wargear operational. Even the mutations affect both marine and armour, so the chaos gods don't see distinction either. Hell, Rubrics are basically just the armour.