Guilliman didn't outdo the Emperor.

[Claws and Effect]

Starting this topic to address the thing being thrown around about "How could RG and Cawl do better than the Emperor did?"

 

That makes the assumption that regular Astartes are the best the Emperor could do.

 

That premise disintegrates once you stop and remember that the guy being accused of doing better than the Emperor was HIMSELF created by the Emperor.

 

So unless Primaris Marines are better than Guilliman himself, he and Cawl didn't even come CLOSE to one-upping the Emperor.

 

We've all seen how well the Primarchs (don't) get along. Can you imagine several million of them with personalities that strong trying to form a cohesive fighting force?

 

I believe the Emperor deliberately made the Legions Astartes weaker than he could have so the Primarchs would be unquestionably in command.

 

 

Food for thought.

[Brother Captain Arkley]

http://combiboilersleeds.com/images/common-sense/common-sense-6.jpg

 

BTW I agree :)

[The_son_of_Dorn]

The whole thing is a bit half ass'd to be honest. 

 

I am all for the prospect of Better space marine. Just not because Gman says "bout time we make some spacier space marines cuz reasons" 

 

I'd buy it if for example the scions of the Emperor (his children/children's children) had DNA that naturally enhanced/accepted the gene seed and made them space marines among space marines. But the whole "let just do this after i've been in the fridge for 10k years but i'm back now" is totally meh. 

[Tyberos the Red Wake]

We already know the Emperor could do better than the regular marines and even the Primaris marines, because not only do the Primarchs exist, but Custodes and Thunder Warriors do as well.

 

People who make comments complaining about Guilliman and Cawl outdoing the Emperor simply never think critically about their complaints. Too many people on the Internet fail to use any mote of logic or reason or analyse their ideas before flinging them out into the void of the web.

[The_son_of_Dorn]

Except Custodes were far more complex to make and mass produce and train. Thunder Warriors were not versatile enough/lacked some nifty tricks.

 

Don't get me wrong, I am not arguing with your logic. Just don't put a wig on a cat and call it a lion. They will be filling a very specific gap but are by no means the next Big step in astartee evolution. 

[Tyberos the Red Wake]

Certainly, but that is assuming you consider "mass production" an important quality. I'm sure in a galaxy wide war, quantity is going to have a lot of supporters in their camp, but "quantity is a quality in its own" completely invalidates the discussion to begin with. You don't even need super soldiers at that point when you can just throw infinite regular soldiers at the problem.

 

For example, would you say that Toyota has outdone Porsche because they sold millions of Corollas but Porsche made less than 1,000 918's? No, of course not.

 

Even if RG and Cawl were able to make the Primaris, who are both better AND mass producible, can they make Primarchs? Can they make Custodes? Have they really outdone the Emperor when all they're doing is making Corolla S models?

[The_son_of_Dorn]

True the original post argues outdoing the Emperor but technically speaking and following a historical trend. The thunder warriors were supplanted by the space marines who in turn were "greater" in combat prowess than Astartees. if Primaris marines were mass produced to point were they could be a threat to the Big E and his forces it begs the argument, why did the Emperor not follow this line of creation to begin with? 

[Tyberos the Red Wake]

The Emperor purposely made Astartes weaker than the Thunder Warriors. He didn't make them weaker because he couldn't make anything stronger. We already know he can make plenty of strong guys like Thunder Warriors, or REALLY strong guys like Custodes and Primarchs. The Emperor knew he would eventually get rid of all the Thunder Warriors, so all the downsides of them may have been purposely implemented, showing once again, that the Emperor knew exactly what he was doing.

 

Regular Astartes were already mass produced to the point of being a threat to the Emperor. There's this thing called the Horus Heresy.

 

Astartes were strong enough for the purposes of the Great Crusade. Why make them any stronger? The only reason Guilliman is even pumping out so many Primaris who are so strong is because the Imperium in 40K NEEDS them. He could have easily just made more regular Astartes but apparently those aren't good enough anymore. The real reason is GW just wants to make new products. Always keep that in mind whenever you ask "why is the lore this way and not that way?" because it's important.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Tyberos the Red Wake

[Kastor Krieg]

Custodes were not mass produced. Each was hand crafted by the master artisan, Him On The Golden Throne.

And Astartes were not made 'weaker', they were made STABLE, biologically and mentally. A tradeoff of which was a bit less physical strength and speed than the Thunder Warriors. But they aren't "designed to be worse".

[Claws and Effect]

Maybe time constraints had something to do with it as well.

 

It's like a meme I saw about cosplaying:

 

Good. Fast. Cheap.

 

Pick 2.

 

Perhaps making Primaris Astartes stable would have taken too long, so He opted for a somewhat weaker version that could be stabilized much faster.

 

That much additional bone and muscle growth can't be easy on the subject. What if the additional growth the Primaris marines go through would take too long to do without running into the same problems the Thunder Warriors had?

 

Basically, he could do:

 

Quickly. Stronger. Stable.

 

Pick 2.

[HenricusTyranicus]

Well, current fluff on these Primaris chaps suggests G-man commissioned them shortly after the Horus Heresy, which suggests that the technology had been there for some time, perhaps even since the Emperor himself was making the Astartes.  

[Tyberos the Red Wake]

Custodes were not mass produced. Each was hand crafted by the master artisan, Him On The Golden Throne.

 

And Astartes were not made 'weaker', they were made STABLE, biologically and mentally. A tradeoff of which was a bit less physical strength and speed than the Thunder Warriors. But they aren't "designed to be worse".

 

Dress it up all you want, but the fact remains that Astartes are weaker and worse than Thunder Warriors in this discussion about strength and "who's better".

[robofish7591]

Maybe the new marines take a lot longer to grow than a regular marine?  This really all depends on how many chapters actually receive these new marines and how many the get, plus however many new chapters are founded by these new marines, but 10k years is a long time to only end up with 10 chapters worth total.  After the new marines are divided up maybe the chapters are told "Ok, here you go... but you might not want to stop recruiting the normal way, these new guys take a while to make."  That could definitely be a reason why they aren't better and can't replace normal marines, at least in my opinion.

 

Now just watch GW shoot my idea down when they release an article on the new chapters! 

[Claws and Effect]

Theory:

 

After engaging Chaos blessed Traitor Marines for the first time Guilliman realized that normal Astartes were outmatched on a 1v1 basis.

 

So he ordered Cawl to begin working out how to make stronger Astartes based on the Emperor mentioning that it was possible, but he also told Cawl to wait for him to personally order them into production.

 

So Cawl begins researching how to do it, because the knowledge went with the Emperor to the Golden Throne, leaving him no choice but to attempt reverse engineering something he barely understood.

 

Then when he gets close to the prototype stage, Roboute's fight with Fulgrim occurs and he can no longer give the order to move forward, which Cawl took as literally not able to made by anyone else.

 

Still, he managed to get the prototypes ready and tweak the process a little as he went. Then he started creating prototype Primaris Marines in secret and stashing them in chapters that are either above questions or so far removed they just can't be scrutinized.

 

Thus, we have had a handful of Primaris Marines all along but didn't know it.

 

We know 2 of them as Asterion Moloc and Tyberos the Red Wake.....

 

Marines that are abnormally large and fierce compared to their brethren, whose origins are shrouded on secrecy.

[Legionnaire of the VIIth]

The reason the Thunder Warriors were abandoned and destroyed was that they were not as mentally stable as the Space Marines. Their short lived mental stability made them unsuitable for the the long trips that the Great Crusade required so he canceled their program when he was satisfied that the Space Marines could do the job of conquering the Galaxy. So Thunder Warriors were superior to Space Marines in strength and ability but short lived, Space Marines could be utilized for more campaigns and for longer periods of time making them more desirable weapons.

 

During the Heresy there was a program to enhance marines and it worked until the Alpha Legion interfered. As such that corrupted knowledge most likely was kept in some capacity and would have been a great starting place for a revived project. The original project was done using the Emperor's own knowledge and research with his consent so I don't see it as out doing him given it was using what he had created. Improving on something isn't really the same as creating it in the first place. So Guilliman working off of a template created by the Emperor and possibly Corax is by no means making him superior.

 

Guilliman also wasn't the one doing the project, he only sponsored it. The work was done by scientist working with the resources provided. We don't even know what resources they had to utilize. Are they using a rediscovered STC for human enhancement from the Dark Age of Technology (whose knowledge surpassed what we saw from the Emperor) adapting it's information to Corax's project built off of the Emperor's own Primarch template? Was any alien technology or knowledge used to fill in the gaps that they didn't know themselves?

 

Then we have ~10k years of them attempting to figure out what they are doing. Maybe for some here that is a blink of the eye but I'm just your normal human and a century seems like a long time to do research and figure something out let alone 100x that amount of time.

 

Yes things were lost to humanity from the Dark Age of Technology to the Unification of Terra and some where rediscovered only to be lost during the Horus Heresy but there are still STCs and Alien technology out there that could be discovered by the Imperium of Man. That knowledge could have been utilized to make the program work.

 

I know that many people here worship the Emperor as a God but it really isn't Heresy to improve on his work, he gave Corax permission to do this after all. Someone coming in and improving something using notes made by others, based off of the actual original work of the creator, is not one upping him at all. Guilliman is just a fat cat that put people into solving a problem and reaping the benefits of it now that he is off of "vacation" and the work has finished. For all we know the project could have been done a few thousand years ago but lacking the Primarch's authority to release these new weapons and toys on the galaxy and the Bureaucracy with it's red tape kept it from seeing service.

 

Could the Emperor have created these guys, I'm of the opinion that he could have. Corax's project proved that his knowledge was capable of giving the answers needed but alas the Emperor had other projects he thought were of more importance and didn't actively set out to do it before he became the rotting corpse he now is. For all we know he might have planned on doing this very thing thing once he had finished his webway.

[Servant of Dante]

Ok, I wasn't going to step in here, buuuut, as far as in-universe mess concerned, messing with the genetics of the holy human form when you aren't the God-Emperor of Mankind is most certainly heresy, even if it isn't an insult to his intellect.

[Black Cohort]

Ok, I wasn't going to step in here, buuuut, as far as in-universe mess concerned, messing with the genetics of the holy human form when you aren't the God-Emperor of Mankind is most certainly heresy, even if it isn't an insult to his intellect.

 

Messing with standard human genetics is probably ok for a senior magos, messing with Astartes geneseed is a whole other issue.

[Servant of Dante]

 

 

Ok, I wasn't going to step in here, buuuut, as far as in-universe mess concerned, messing with the genetics of the holy human form when you aren't the God-Emperor of Mankind is most certainly heresy, even if it isn't an insult to his intellect.

Messing with standard human genetics is probably ok for a senior magos, messing with Astartes geneseed is a whole other issue.

Depends on who you ask, I'm sure :P In my mind, messing with the human genome is creating mutation, and therefore heresy. Messing with the Astartes genome is creating mutation and messing with the God-Emperor's handiwork, and doubly heretical. From a strict, puritan point of view

[Legionnaire of the VIIth]

Ok, I wasn't going to step in here, buuuut, as far as in-universe mess concerned, messing with the genetics of the holy human form when you aren't the God-Emperor of Mankind is most certainly heresy, even if it isn't an insult to his intellect.

Only if you allow the abomination that is the Ecclesiarchy to prevent you from following the will of the Emperor and his Imperial Truth.

Edited May 17, 2017 by Legionaire of the VIIth

[Lexicanum]

It's a fairly moot point.

 

Cawl worked for 10,000 years with access to the Emperor's existing research as well as the geneseed tithe that the Mechanicus collects from all chapters. He had ample time and resources to improve on the design of the Astartes.

 

Does this make him better than the Emperor at genetic engineering? No, Big E probably could have done the same if he had the inclination and a fraction of the time. But he had other problems on his mind in the final years of his throne-free life. He was finding his lost sons, then reuniting the galaxy. Then trying to replace dangerous warp travel with a stable webway. Undoubtedly, he had many plans and intentions and only so much of his own time to apply to his projects.

[SickSix]

Just want to pop in to ask where are we getting all this info on what Thunder Warriors were or were not?

 

Thanks.

[Legionnaire of the VIIth]

I was referencing what is mentioned in Horus Hersey Book I Betrayal. Having just gone back over it, not only were they prone to mental instability, they also suffered from biological failures. Also they lacked the amount of discipline found in the Space Marine Legions.

Edited May 17, 2017 by Legionaire of the VIIth

[Servant of Dante]

 

 

Ok, I wasn't going to step in here, buuuut, as far as in-universe mess concerned, messing with the genetics of the holy human form when you aren't the God-Emperor of Mankind is most certainly heresy, even if it isn't an insult to his intellect.

Only if you allow the abomination that is the Ecclesiarchy to prevent you from following the will of the Emperor and his Imperial Truth.

I know it's just bait and everyone looks at the fluff a different way . . .

 

Still trying really hard not to get baited :P

 

It's all cool. As long as no one actually goes and gets mad about someone else's view of the fluff and what is and isn't heresy (that would be silly) :D (only a little bit of irony intended)

[SW1]

GWS seemed to think it need a new product line and just shoehorned in the fluff to allow it. It's got nothing to do with the story line, it's everything to do with wanting to get more money.

 

It's the same thinking as ... TWC or Centurions.

 

What I'm really hoping is that they don't retrofit them into the 30k setting. Infact looking at the lack of twc and centurions in 30k currently offers a small hope that they have realised some will want to keep old school marines in play.

 

Lol ... What will happen will happen no amount of griping online will change the direction GWS has decided to head in.

[Sandlemad]

Just looking at genetics doesn't account for the changes the Emperor made between the thunder warriors and the astartes. Aside from the planned obsolescence, the thunder warriors were more loosely organised, less disciplined, more poorly equipped (Master of Mankind is pretty clear that they would've been eaten alive by the hyper-xenos faced during the great crusade) and apart from the emperor himself more poorly led.

 

The legions had more specialisms, fleets, support detachments of war machines, standardised gear, more sustainable and diverse warrior cultures, tighter organisation, auxilia troops, recruitment fiefdoms, reliable methods of induction/reproduction, supreme commanders in the form of the primarchs. That's a significant historical turning point, when a hardass planetary force of ragged pseudo-berzerkers was abandoned in favour of a well-supported and sustainable machine of galactic conquest. That feels significant and is presented as such in FW/BL/GW material.

 

As far as we can tell from what little background we've got, the numarines are literally just slightly large/stronger/faster marines with slightly better gear. Is that really a galaxy-shaking change? Is this supposed grand insight of Guilliman's at all the equal of the Emperor's grand plan, even if the genetic skill required is on par? In ten millennia the marines have never suffered because individuals weren't physically strong enough. It doesn't feel like a historical shift, just a fractional upgrade.

 

Something like reestablishing the legions, that I could believe as a massive change. Not saying this would be actually effective - the chapters can react better and division of forces is imperial doctrine for a reason - or in-character for Guilliman but it would feel big. Maybe GW will get at this in the fluff with things like the foundation of new chapters for the Indomitus crusade, or if they were designed to be less vulnerable to the warp's touch but as is, it's just so basic compared to what the Emperor did. So 'who can beat up who'.

 

It's some Dragonball Z power-up stuff.

Edited May 17, 2017 by Sandlemad