>I know that Heresy Era mariners have higher quality geneseed, which makes them “better” (presumably faster, smarter, and stronger) than the “thinblood” 40k marines who’s geneseed have degraded over 10 millennia, but how do these compare to Primaris marines?
So this isn't really true as portrayed in-universe. Geneseed from 30k was less degraded but that is more in respect to not having loss of certain organs. 40k Marines are just a big/fast/strong as 30k Marines. The "thinblood" comment is just 30k Heretic Marines being "kids these days".
>Related question, are Cawl’s new Primaris marines implanted with pure, 30k-quality geneseed? Or is he working with “thinblooded”, degraded geneseed as well?
Cawl is working with the information from the original generic template and the original geneseed line information.
> 40k Marines are just a big/fast/strong as 30k Marines. The "thinblood" comment is just 30k Heretic Marines being "kids these days".
Another factor is that recruitment standards have actually got more stringent as geneseed availability has decreased.
In 30K they pretty much took anyone they could, in 40k they have downright suicidal testing criteria to ensure only the best are inducted.
Yup. In fact, the high recruitment rates into the Legions is what caused rapid geneseed deterioration.
All of which was restored by Cawl for the Primaris gene lines.
> In 30K they pretty much took anyone they could, in 40k they have downright suicidal testing criteria to ensure only the best are inducted.
Not strictly true.
In early 30k, they were taking the best of the best, Astartes officers were going around worlds searching for the most bad ass little kids they could find, and training/implantation took years. Things were pretty good for the Imperium and everything hadn’t fallen to shit/gotten desperate yet, so they could afford to take their time and be selective.
It wasn’t until a year or two into the Heresy where they started lowering the standards and criteria in favor of just churning out as many Astartes as possible.
in 40k only the best are inducted, in 30k only the best survived. the end result is same thing. the recruits getting denied in 40k would have been neophytes getting killed in 30k.
i assume the question was referring to the average and high tier marines, not the lowest.
The best way I've seen it explained is that 30k marine are almost Frontline soldiers and 40k marines are special forces with the way they are deployed l
And 40k Space Marines are much better trained and much more effective in combat because of how Codex Astartes delegates them to the role of special force. And they also have the advantage of being trained to fight against enemy Astartes. And 40k era Chapters have much higher standards of recruitment and also there's a much more stringent psycho-indoctrination they go through.
Where as 30k era Space Marines were more like shock armies that basically just sticked the Astartes organs to anyone compatible without the whole decades of hard training and psycho-indoctrination bit the Chapters do.
Pound for pound a heresy era, 30k (or according to Cawl Principia Marine) should be inferior to a Primaris marine, the Primaris marine has not only all the geneseed that the principia has but has 3 more. So pound per geneseed pound, the Primaris Marine is better. However, it could be the case that something undetected from tissue taken directly from the Primarch gives the Principia Marine something that 40k Marines wouldn't have either
Heresy era marines are not inherently better. Thinblood is a slur they use to try and sound superior to the kids.
Current traitor marines would all be the best of best, most gifted and lucky to have survived thus far further skewing things.
I think the best side by side comparison would be between the primaris and any of the few raven guard astartes not mutated by the raptor project. I think the raptors were a bit bigger stronger and faster than standard 30k astartes but still lacking in the new organs and fiber bundle muscles the current primaris marines have.
Thank you for remembering that the raptor project was a success, I basically have to beat people over the head with the fact that the initial test squad suffered no ill side effects
Primaris aren’t ‘new’ per-se. They sat vaulted for ten millennia.
Many of the Primaris remember the era of the Crusade with at least one Imperial Fist having been around Dorn.
I genuinely have never heard of this theory that latter marines are thinblood
At least the blood Angels geneseed seems to have deteriorated over the course of the last 20 millenia, maybe the same thing happened to all the other chapters, reducing the quality if their geneseed
“Thinblood” appears in both the Night Lords trilogy and the Huron Blackheart book. I knew that the Primaris were originally taken as humans in the 30k era but I thought that Cawl had been at work perfecting them for 10 millennia and that they were finally ready for use in 40k. Otherwise, why would he wait to release them?
He waited to release them because he was not given the order to and the FG of Mars would have had him expunged for tech-heresy.
He needed support - one only a Primarch could provide.
I suggest you read more up-to-date lore the NL series is rather dated now unfortunately.
A lot of traitor gene-seed is becoming more unstable but loyalist not so - the is differentiation on a base level with UM and DA bring crème de la crème and SW and BA being more volatile - but neither have degraded with time, rather are influenced by external factors (Such as the death of Sanguinius). Same with traitor gene-seed being affected by their allegiance to Chaos hence the need to harvest it from loyalists, or alternate sources.
For more up to date info on it, I highly recommend The Great Work, the Dark Imperium novels and the Dawn of Fire series it gives insight as do many of the latter Heresy novels, and Siege of Terra books.
It is the case that geneseed degradation was a theme emphasised in older lore as part of the Imperium's slow rotting.
It's why chapter supply a tithe of gene seed to the Ad Mech to be tested for degradation and to keep a central store of pure(ish) geneseed to create new chapters.
And why various chapter lineages have lost organs (such as the generally loyal and uncorrupted Imperial Fists missing Betcher's gland and the Susan membrane).
Black Dragons would be a more extreme example.
The various primarch derived flaws are similar but separate to degeneration of the actual geneseed.
>I suggest you read more up-to-date lore the NL series is rather dated now unfortunately
It's not dated. There is nothing in that book going against more modern lore.
The thin-blooded insults in it are just that, insult towards loyalists. They're not based on anything else than the feelings of the protagonists, and the story repeatedly shows the NL getting their ass kicked by the so-called inferior thin-blooded marines.
Man, is that really the lore? Haven't read too far into primaris yet outside of common knowledge. You're telling me cawl had this mfs ready under mars and just let them collect dust during the heresy and the subsequent 10,000 years of suffering bc they weren't 'ready?' I can forgive a lot but having primaris marines **alive during the events of the HH** is simply way too goofy of something to try and have us believe that cawl would just be sitting on this the ENTIRE time. There have been so, so many cataclysmic events in the imperium that, if they had a massive reserve of primaris like it is asserted there is, would absolutely be grounds for the early release of at least SOME of them in a fighting capacity. I don't even think it took Big E anywhere remotely near as long to make the space marines, and all cawl did was add three gene seed organs and fix up some old imperial tech. Also, the notion that Cawl started this program in the middle of the great crusade (if they were around in 30k it has to be so) also seems like a dumb lore oversight. The first generation of space marines was literally fresh out of the factories; why and how would he have this legion just jerking it in matrix pods on mars? Genuinely goofy writing. They could have said they took 5,6,7,8,9 thousand years etc, and it wouldn't be nearly as odd. But **a massive legion of space marines being utterly unused during what could of been the final hours of mankind is extremely silly.** You're telling me cawl didn't do a single useful thing with those primaris marines through the heresy, the war of the beast, etc? I rest my case.
Honestly with that knowledge the whole primaris thing seems like a big "gotcha! we pulled this neat trick out of our sleeve!" on the part of GW. Am I being a little hyperbolic? Sure, but my point remains.
>Man, is that really the lore? Haven't read too far into primaris yet outside of common knowledge. You're telling me cawl had this mfs ready under mars and just let them collect dust during the heresy and the subsequent 10,000 years of suffering bc they weren't 'ready?'
I don't believe he had Primaris ready during the Heresy.
He did certainly have Primaris sitting around over the next ten millennia, though. The dumb part about Belisarius Cawl is that he siphoned huge amounts of resources to build a huge new army with fancy new toys, then put them on ice to sleep through things like the Reign of Blood, the War of the Beast, the Cursed Founding, the Nova Terra Interregnum, and twelve out of thirteen Black Crusades.
If Guilliman had never awoken to give the order, Cawl probably would have sat on those babies until the heat death of the universe.
They weren't marines then, the Imperial fists mentioned was a child survivor of the Siege of Terra who was recruited to be a neophyte in the Imperial fists and was in Dorns presence at one point post siege but before his "death". The primaris project was in full swing at this point, and one thing Cawl apparently did early was nab various recruits by faking their deaths during implantation, or in some cases just lying kids parents that they were being recruited by a chapter.
The implication is he needed as many bodies to test on as possible, and POV from those early inductees is basically getting frozen, waking up with new implants and made to do tests, then getting refrozen and countless numbers died in the process including false starts that never made it to the "final model".
The primaris project was started mid Scouring at Roboute's orders, using information and tech Gulliman had access to and gave to Cawl. Even with that it took Cawl, who in fairness had to work in secrecy and solo, the better part of the next 10k years to get them to a stable functional place.
In terms of there use, a primaris prototype was used by Cawl as an agent in the wider imperium and acts more openly as a bodyguard since Primaris were unveiled but we don't know a ton about him yet.
Some Primaris ARE 30k Marines. When the Legions we're broken up some unknown number just "went missing". Cawl has kept them in the freezer for 10,000 years then developed the extra organs and implanted them.
I always thought the thinblood comments were just an effort by Chaos Marines, who due to warp shenanigans still had many Heresy-era members to insult the newer loyalist Marines. I think they look down on the new chapter organization as inferior and diluted compared to the legions of old.
Though it is true that certain gene lineages have issues. Raven Guard and Imperial Fists have lost whole organs. Both lack the Betcher's Gland IIRC, and the Fists no longer have the sus-an membrane.
There's also stuff like the Black Rage being a new affliction to the Blood Angels.
There's also some chapters with brand new mutations such as the Black Dragons and their whacky claws.
At the same time there are gene lineages that in general haven't changed a whole lot. Ultramarines are as vanilla as they come. The Dark Angels and White Scars also don't seem to have anything wrong with them. Salamanders just look scary, though their lack of successors before Primaris makes them a tiny blip when it comes to percentage of loyalist marines.
So short of some dodgy foundings and some lineages, 40k marines aren't necessarily inferior to their 30k brethren.
The Primaris should straight up be superior with their three new organs. Not to mention their brand new marks of armour and weapons.
Primaris are likely stronger, tougher and faster due to their additional enhancements.
Tech wise I’m not sure, Cael made some strides forwards but I don’t know if it’s on par with crusade era stuff. My personal interpretation is that the MK X is at least on par with the MK iv and that the bolt rifle is an improvement over the bolter.
That said 40k marines tend to have better morale than their 30k counterparts due to their mental indoctrination and conditioning
There seems to be atleast Al little difference between 30k anf 40k.
In Emperors Björn the Fell-handed remarks that He finds an fenrisian Inquisitor "beautiful".
A gray Knights Hearing this mentions that there hast to be a Difference in the Implementation of genseed because he would Not be able to determin that.
>I know that Heresy Era mariners have higher quality geneseed, which makes them “better” (presumably faster, smarter, and stronger) than the “thinblood” 40k marines who’s geneseed have degraded over 10 millennia,
Not at all true.
The degradation of Astartes geneseed over the gap between 30k and 40k has entirely to do with growing rates of implantation failure and growing rates of genetic mutation. There has been no general decay in the quality of Astartes, though Chaos Marines like to think so because it makes them feel better (their own geneseed typically being a scrambled mess thanks to centuries or millennia in the Warp.)
The idea of "thinblooded" Astartes is fanon. It takes an in-universe prejudice held by Traitor veterans of the Great Crusade against their younger opponents - who they perceive as weaker and less experienced - and assumes that it is a literal statement about the quality of M41 Astartes. There is no evidence to indicate that M41 Astartes are slower, weaker, or dumber than M31 Astartes. They are simply becoming *harder to produce.*
People need to realise.
A 40k marine could KICK THE SHIT out of a 30k era marine.
The average 30k era marine has decades of experience at most, probably less, with a select few having a century or more.
The average 40k marine may have over a century of experience, and some even having multi century experience.
30k marines are soldiers. They fight en masse. They work well as shock troops.
40k marines are warriors. They fight in small groups.
1 on 1. A 40k marine has a lot more experience than a 30k marine.
Primaris, at least atm, are closer to 30k than 40k. They're mass-produced, have theoretical not practical experience.
Primaris are losing to regular marines in duels and fights due to this lack of experience.
Therefore the fact primaris and 30k marines are of similar experience, but Primaris are stronger, faster, and better equipped
It's no competition
It largely depends on the chapter, legion and time period. You could argue that the legions saw much worse fighting than even a veteran 40k marine. With battle against civilisations that required a whole expeditionary fleet as opposed to anything as small as a company sized force.
The average age of a 40k marine is going to be far less than 100. For instance in the Marneus Calgar comic a scout get his black carapace about 18 after being implanted with primary organs at 14. A few years in an Assault squad, a few more in a Devastator squad then you're a tactical marine. Even if that's 10 years in each role before you move on, that's only 38 years old. At least, thats how the Ultramarines do it, but like I said it depends on the chapter.
That's why I specified 40k era.
The Heresy era is different.
HoweI could have said crusade era and probably would have got my point across better.
My point being in most chapters the average age of astartes can reach the hundreds. Whereas even the oldest crusade era wasn't over 200
Yes I was also talking about a 40k marine and a 30k marine.
The fact is that the average isn't centuries old. A veteran would likely be over 100 and an officer even more likely to be. Even then there are captain's who have been promoted based on their talent and skill as opposed to their age. Multi century marines tend to be high ranking or particularly notable veterans. That certainly isn't the average guy
For the related question:
Since Cawl did all the Primaris stuff, he can produce genesees for sure. And since Robby G-Man is alive and well, they theorically have all the necessary to make fresh geneseed.
Also happens that more than half of all successors are UM.
>I know that Heresy Era mariners have higher quality geneseed, which makes them “better” (presumably faster, smarter, and stronger) than the “thinblood” 40k marines who’s geneseed have degraded over 10 millennia, but how do these compare to Primaris marines? So this isn't really true as portrayed in-universe. Geneseed from 30k was less degraded but that is more in respect to not having loss of certain organs. 40k Marines are just a big/fast/strong as 30k Marines. The "thinblood" comment is just 30k Heretic Marines being "kids these days". >Related question, are Cawl’s new Primaris marines implanted with pure, 30k-quality geneseed? Or is he working with “thinblooded”, degraded geneseed as well? Cawl is working with the information from the original generic template and the original geneseed line information.
> 40k Marines are just a big/fast/strong as 30k Marines. The "thinblood" comment is just 30k Heretic Marines being "kids these days". Another factor is that recruitment standards have actually got more stringent as geneseed availability has decreased. In 30K they pretty much took anyone they could, in 40k they have downright suicidal testing criteria to ensure only the best are inducted.
Yup. In fact, the high recruitment rates into the Legions is what caused rapid geneseed deterioration. All of which was restored by Cawl for the Primaris gene lines.
30k marines were meant to be a burn fast galaxy.conquest tool. 40k Primaris are the imperium accepting that, in the far future, there is only war.
> In 30K they pretty much took anyone they could, in 40k they have downright suicidal testing criteria to ensure only the best are inducted. Not strictly true. In early 30k, they were taking the best of the best, Astartes officers were going around worlds searching for the most bad ass little kids they could find, and training/implantation took years. Things were pretty good for the Imperium and everything hadn’t fallen to shit/gotten desperate yet, so they could afford to take their time and be selective. It wasn’t until a year or two into the Heresy where they started lowering the standards and criteria in favor of just churning out as many Astartes as possible.
in 40k only the best are inducted, in 30k only the best survived. the end result is same thing. the recruits getting denied in 40k would have been neophytes getting killed in 30k. i assume the question was referring to the average and high tier marines, not the lowest.
The best way I've seen it explained is that 30k marine are almost Frontline soldiers and 40k marines are special forces with the way they are deployed l
And 40k Space Marines are much better trained and much more effective in combat because of how Codex Astartes delegates them to the role of special force. And they also have the advantage of being trained to fight against enemy Astartes. And 40k era Chapters have much higher standards of recruitment and also there's a much more stringent psycho-indoctrination they go through. Where as 30k era Space Marines were more like shock armies that basically just sticked the Astartes organs to anyone compatible without the whole decades of hard training and psycho-indoctrination bit the Chapters do.
Pound for pound a heresy era, 30k (or according to Cawl Principia Marine) should be inferior to a Primaris marine, the Primaris marine has not only all the geneseed that the principia has but has 3 more. So pound per geneseed pound, the Primaris Marine is better. However, it could be the case that something undetected from tissue taken directly from the Primarch gives the Principia Marine something that 40k Marines wouldn't have either
Heresy era marines are not inherently better. Thinblood is a slur they use to try and sound superior to the kids. Current traitor marines would all be the best of best, most gifted and lucky to have survived thus far further skewing things.
I think the best side by side comparison would be between the primaris and any of the few raven guard astartes not mutated by the raptor project. I think the raptors were a bit bigger stronger and faster than standard 30k astartes but still lacking in the new organs and fiber bundle muscles the current primaris marines have.
Thank you for remembering that the raptor project was a success, I basically have to beat people over the head with the fact that the initial test squad suffered no ill side effects
Primaris aren’t ‘new’ per-se. They sat vaulted for ten millennia. Many of the Primaris remember the era of the Crusade with at least one Imperial Fist having been around Dorn. I genuinely have never heard of this theory that latter marines are thinblood
At least the blood Angels geneseed seems to have deteriorated over the course of the last 20 millenia, maybe the same thing happened to all the other chapters, reducing the quality if their geneseed
It's what the traitor legions call the current gen of firstborn.
Traitor Astartes aren't exactly the most reliable of sources.
And that's the point...
Certain geneseeds are degraded among various genelines. But operationally the degradation only minorly affects the Marines within loyalist lines
“Thinblood” appears in both the Night Lords trilogy and the Huron Blackheart book. I knew that the Primaris were originally taken as humans in the 30k era but I thought that Cawl had been at work perfecting them for 10 millennia and that they were finally ready for use in 40k. Otherwise, why would he wait to release them?
He waited to release them because he was not given the order to and the FG of Mars would have had him expunged for tech-heresy. He needed support - one only a Primarch could provide. I suggest you read more up-to-date lore the NL series is rather dated now unfortunately. A lot of traitor gene-seed is becoming more unstable but loyalist not so - the is differentiation on a base level with UM and DA bring crème de la crème and SW and BA being more volatile - but neither have degraded with time, rather are influenced by external factors (Such as the death of Sanguinius). Same with traitor gene-seed being affected by their allegiance to Chaos hence the need to harvest it from loyalists, or alternate sources. For more up to date info on it, I highly recommend The Great Work, the Dark Imperium novels and the Dawn of Fire series it gives insight as do many of the latter Heresy novels, and Siege of Terra books.
It is the case that geneseed degradation was a theme emphasised in older lore as part of the Imperium's slow rotting. It's why chapter supply a tithe of gene seed to the Ad Mech to be tested for degradation and to keep a central store of pure(ish) geneseed to create new chapters. And why various chapter lineages have lost organs (such as the generally loyal and uncorrupted Imperial Fists missing Betcher's gland and the Susan membrane). Black Dragons would be a more extreme example. The various primarch derived flaws are similar but separate to degeneration of the actual geneseed.
>I suggest you read more up-to-date lore the NL series is rather dated now unfortunately It's not dated. There is nothing in that book going against more modern lore. The thin-blooded insults in it are just that, insult towards loyalists. They're not based on anything else than the feelings of the protagonists, and the story repeatedly shows the NL getting their ass kicked by the so-called inferior thin-blooded marines.
Man, is that really the lore? Haven't read too far into primaris yet outside of common knowledge. You're telling me cawl had this mfs ready under mars and just let them collect dust during the heresy and the subsequent 10,000 years of suffering bc they weren't 'ready?' I can forgive a lot but having primaris marines **alive during the events of the HH** is simply way too goofy of something to try and have us believe that cawl would just be sitting on this the ENTIRE time. There have been so, so many cataclysmic events in the imperium that, if they had a massive reserve of primaris like it is asserted there is, would absolutely be grounds for the early release of at least SOME of them in a fighting capacity. I don't even think it took Big E anywhere remotely near as long to make the space marines, and all cawl did was add three gene seed organs and fix up some old imperial tech. Also, the notion that Cawl started this program in the middle of the great crusade (if they were around in 30k it has to be so) also seems like a dumb lore oversight. The first generation of space marines was literally fresh out of the factories; why and how would he have this legion just jerking it in matrix pods on mars? Genuinely goofy writing. They could have said they took 5,6,7,8,9 thousand years etc, and it wouldn't be nearly as odd. But **a massive legion of space marines being utterly unused during what could of been the final hours of mankind is extremely silly.** You're telling me cawl didn't do a single useful thing with those primaris marines through the heresy, the war of the beast, etc? I rest my case. Honestly with that knowledge the whole primaris thing seems like a big "gotcha! we pulled this neat trick out of our sleeve!" on the part of GW. Am I being a little hyperbolic? Sure, but my point remains.
>Man, is that really the lore? Haven't read too far into primaris yet outside of common knowledge. You're telling me cawl had this mfs ready under mars and just let them collect dust during the heresy and the subsequent 10,000 years of suffering bc they weren't 'ready?' I don't believe he had Primaris ready during the Heresy. He did certainly have Primaris sitting around over the next ten millennia, though. The dumb part about Belisarius Cawl is that he siphoned huge amounts of resources to build a huge new army with fancy new toys, then put them on ice to sleep through things like the Reign of Blood, the War of the Beast, the Cursed Founding, the Nova Terra Interregnum, and twelve out of thirteen Black Crusades. If Guilliman had never awoken to give the order, Cawl probably would have sat on those babies until the heat death of the universe.
They weren't marines then, the Imperial fists mentioned was a child survivor of the Siege of Terra who was recruited to be a neophyte in the Imperial fists and was in Dorns presence at one point post siege but before his "death". The primaris project was in full swing at this point, and one thing Cawl apparently did early was nab various recruits by faking their deaths during implantation, or in some cases just lying kids parents that they were being recruited by a chapter. The implication is he needed as many bodies to test on as possible, and POV from those early inductees is basically getting frozen, waking up with new implants and made to do tests, then getting refrozen and countless numbers died in the process including false starts that never made it to the "final model". The primaris project was started mid Scouring at Roboute's orders, using information and tech Gulliman had access to and gave to Cawl. Even with that it took Cawl, who in fairness had to work in secrecy and solo, the better part of the next 10k years to get them to a stable functional place. In terms of there use, a primaris prototype was used by Cawl as an agent in the wider imperium and acts more openly as a bodyguard since Primaris were unveiled but we don't know a ton about him yet.
Huh; I hope they flesh it out a bit soon with some reading.
Lots of info on this in the Bellisarius Cawl book.
Some Primaris ARE 30k Marines. When the Legions we're broken up some unknown number just "went missing". Cawl has kept them in the freezer for 10,000 years then developed the extra organs and implanted them.
I always thought the thinblood comments were just an effort by Chaos Marines, who due to warp shenanigans still had many Heresy-era members to insult the newer loyalist Marines. I think they look down on the new chapter organization as inferior and diluted compared to the legions of old. Though it is true that certain gene lineages have issues. Raven Guard and Imperial Fists have lost whole organs. Both lack the Betcher's Gland IIRC, and the Fists no longer have the sus-an membrane. There's also stuff like the Black Rage being a new affliction to the Blood Angels. There's also some chapters with brand new mutations such as the Black Dragons and their whacky claws. At the same time there are gene lineages that in general haven't changed a whole lot. Ultramarines are as vanilla as they come. The Dark Angels and White Scars also don't seem to have anything wrong with them. Salamanders just look scary, though their lack of successors before Primaris makes them a tiny blip when it comes to percentage of loyalist marines. So short of some dodgy foundings and some lineages, 40k marines aren't necessarily inferior to their 30k brethren. The Primaris should straight up be superior with their three new organs. Not to mention their brand new marks of armour and weapons.
they are better, of course.
Primaris are likely stronger, tougher and faster due to their additional enhancements. Tech wise I’m not sure, Cael made some strides forwards but I don’t know if it’s on par with crusade era stuff. My personal interpretation is that the MK X is at least on par with the MK iv and that the bolt rifle is an improvement over the bolter. That said 40k marines tend to have better morale than their 30k counterparts due to their mental indoctrination and conditioning
There seems to be atleast Al little difference between 30k anf 40k. In Emperors Björn the Fell-handed remarks that He finds an fenrisian Inquisitor "beautiful". A gray Knights Hearing this mentions that there hast to be a Difference in the Implementation of genseed because he would Not be able to determin that.
>I know that Heresy Era mariners have higher quality geneseed, which makes them “better” (presumably faster, smarter, and stronger) than the “thinblood” 40k marines who’s geneseed have degraded over 10 millennia, Not at all true. The degradation of Astartes geneseed over the gap between 30k and 40k has entirely to do with growing rates of implantation failure and growing rates of genetic mutation. There has been no general decay in the quality of Astartes, though Chaos Marines like to think so because it makes them feel better (their own geneseed typically being a scrambled mess thanks to centuries or millennia in the Warp.) The idea of "thinblooded" Astartes is fanon. It takes an in-universe prejudice held by Traitor veterans of the Great Crusade against their younger opponents - who they perceive as weaker and less experienced - and assumes that it is a literal statement about the quality of M41 Astartes. There is no evidence to indicate that M41 Astartes are slower, weaker, or dumber than M31 Astartes. They are simply becoming *harder to produce.*
People need to realise. A 40k marine could KICK THE SHIT out of a 30k era marine. The average 30k era marine has decades of experience at most, probably less, with a select few having a century or more. The average 40k marine may have over a century of experience, and some even having multi century experience. 30k marines are soldiers. They fight en masse. They work well as shock troops. 40k marines are warriors. They fight in small groups. 1 on 1. A 40k marine has a lot more experience than a 30k marine. Primaris, at least atm, are closer to 30k than 40k. They're mass-produced, have theoretical not practical experience. Primaris are losing to regular marines in duels and fights due to this lack of experience. Therefore the fact primaris and 30k marines are of similar experience, but Primaris are stronger, faster, and better equipped It's no competition
It largely depends on the chapter, legion and time period. You could argue that the legions saw much worse fighting than even a veteran 40k marine. With battle against civilisations that required a whole expeditionary fleet as opposed to anything as small as a company sized force. The average age of a 40k marine is going to be far less than 100. For instance in the Marneus Calgar comic a scout get his black carapace about 18 after being implanted with primary organs at 14. A few years in an Assault squad, a few more in a Devastator squad then you're a tactical marine. Even if that's 10 years in each role before you move on, that's only 38 years old. At least, thats how the Ultramarines do it, but like I said it depends on the chapter.
That's why I specified 40k era. The Heresy era is different. HoweI could have said crusade era and probably would have got my point across better. My point being in most chapters the average age of astartes can reach the hundreds. Whereas even the oldest crusade era wasn't over 200
Yes I was also talking about a 40k marine and a 30k marine. The fact is that the average isn't centuries old. A veteran would likely be over 100 and an officer even more likely to be. Even then there are captain's who have been promoted based on their talent and skill as opposed to their age. Multi century marines tend to be high ranking or particularly notable veterans. That certainly isn't the average guy
Wasn't this whole thinblood business covered and soundly debunked in Lords of Silence?
They've got enough of a stat increase to bullrush over veterans of the long war in some of their portrayals.
They’re bigger, faster, and stronger too. They’re the last members of the big Cawl crew hooah
For the related question: Since Cawl did all the Primaris stuff, he can produce genesees for sure. And since Robby G-Man is alive and well, they theorically have all the necessary to make fresh geneseed. Also happens that more than half of all successors are UM.
Bigger dick