It's fairly commonly acknowledged in the fluff that, between the initiation trials, the gene-seed implantation (and attendant risk of fatal rejection), the training (with live ammo and real danger), and needing to spend some years as a Scout, only one Aspirant in a hundred lives to get his Black Carapace implanted and become a full fledged Marine.
What percentage of Guardsmen do you think live through the average campaign?
Consider that the next time you're about to Guardwank.
Probably a lot more than 1%, I'd assume.
So how the fuck do we have marine chapters that go to the last fucking man, and still exist? With all that training bullshit, it would seem almost more prudent to have simple clones using the geneseed.
Or is that already a practice?
Yeah, the IG couldn't function if they got all their troopers wiped out in every campaign. You need veterans for an army to work.
Clones have phenomenally bad luck in 40k, for whatever grimderp reason. Closest they have to that is Chapters who have taken heavy losses sometimes implanting progenoids in vat-grown bodies then harvesting those when they're ready to be made into a new set of gene-seed.
The most grimderp part of the lore, it stands out among all other failures by the writers. On a related not writers rarely think the logistics of what they depict through, they just write things to try and convey feelings usually. 1 in a 100 look at how hard that is, they must be so elite, is what they want you to think. They dont want you to think 1 in 100 how the fuck do they sustain that? They never thought of it, why should you?
"Logistics" is not really a concept which goes through any 40k writers' mind. Unless it's to say "a lot".
It's because you can't copy-paste souls.
>expecting a joke setting to make sense
Yeah, but what is so special about normal procreation that creates a soul?
Even if fertilization was necessary for whatever reason, you can just harvest a bajillion eggs and sperm and mix/match to get "unique" people.
Shit like this is how you get the Age Of Strife. The Dark Age of Technology happened because in warhammer, anything that makes too much logistical sense via technological advancement is prime grounds for chaos fuckery.
So wouldn't that make clones great tools against Chaos fuckery, since Chaos abhors anything lacking souls (or anything just having less soul)
Clones aren't the same thing as blanks. Blanks are living anathema to the Warp. They aren't just soulless, they have pure anti-soul where their soul should be. Clones do have a soul, it's just a degraded copy of another person's, this has a tendency to make the universe hate you. Well, hate you more at least.
>So how the fuck do we have marine chapters that go to the last fucking man, and still exist?
Because the Imperium usually stocks the geneseed of most Chapters and then in case of a wipeout they use it to restart the ill fortunate Chapter. If existing stock of said Chapter lacks in numbers they simply blend in geneseed from other Chapters.
This is also the method of creating new Chapters.
>With all that training bullshit, it would seem almost more prudent to have simple clones using the geneseed.
In the WH40K universe clones, like AI, have high chance of getting FUCKED by Warp and extremely BAD luck.
It's only the Afriel that seems to suffer from it.
For all we know kriegers are cloned, and they aren't particularly unlucky.
They are unlucky just by being kriegers...
this
Imperium of man can manage 1000 psykers a day so i think some chapters can easily do 1000 recruits for couple of Sphess Smurfs in couple of years ain't that much if you consider jacked as fuck populations of whole planets
actually from first harvesting to actually becoming a fully fledged Space Marine, the odds are one in several thousand. And they only pick the strongest to begin with.
Before you ask for the source for that, I can't remember and it's really bugging me. Something the begins with Marines wandering through a battlefield on a feudal world, just ignoring the combat going on around them, picking out teenage boys.
>Yeah, but what is so special about normal procreation that creates a soul?
Semen is actually ectoplasm. When you ejaculate, you are trimming off a bit of soul to jump-start another one.
Yeah, but there has been kriegers long beforethe cloning began, so you can't attribute their lack of luck to this.
On the contrary, the fact that AIs got corrupted by chaos seems to indicate the possibility of spontaneous soul generation, IMO.
I always took it as Chaos easily filling the void where a soul would otherwise be.
True, but think about where a lot of those chapter recruit from. Sure the ones that pull from hive worlds are fine, but what about chapters that pull from feudal or death worlds? You cant tell me those planets have huge populations. And they dont take just anybody they have standards, finding fucktoy of guys up to said standards has to be hard. The only reason I suppose it may be viable is because once they finally get a marine he can last for decades or even centuries which means they only need a small stream of recruits rather than regularly refilling their ranks every few years. Cept this is 40k so marines die by the boatload and they actually would need a lot of replacements.
I hate auto correct so much, fuck ton that should be fuck ton not fucktoy
That's an interesting concept.
The quest for "becoming a real boy" and getting ruinous powers instead of genuine emotions seems grimdark enough for the setting.
I would read your writefaggotry/homebrew, user.
Sure thing darling, we all know you are a dirty boy.
Vat grown individuals aren't clones in 40k, so I guess each soul has a unique ID code. So unless you are a genetic TWIN or a completely separate genetic mix of sperm and egg, if you clone someone like Macharius down to every fiber of his being, he won't have a soul because Macharius's original soul already exists/existed.
I don't really think there is an explanation it's just something we're supposed to roll with. Clones = bad, soulless, and ill-fated.
>What percentage of Guardsmen do you think live through the average campaign?
I'd assume 30% if we assume 'average campaign' to mean protracted and open warfare, but as high as 95% for putting down rogue PDF like a lot of their operations turn out to be, so if we count survival of deployment against all threats, I'd say 60% survival? Still a meat grinder, but with plenty of vets to educate the whiteshields on the trip to the warzone before grabbing their meltas and hopping in a transport.
...