Could 1000 imperial guard grunts of the average McAverageson legion kill a single Space marine?

In the space marine attacks head on, he dies to heavy weapons fire. Most space marines know this, and are smart enough not to attack head on.

It's like Predator, basically.

GET TO DA VALKYRIE

>Could 1000 imperial guard grunts of the average McAverageson legion kill a single Space marine?
yes, that's not even a real contest.

>So I was wondering if this is really an efficient expenditure of valuable human assets.
If the imperium has a single asset to expend freely, that's human lives.

Space marines are not as an inarrestable and ummovable force as fanboys think they are.
nor are they that tall.

>1000 guardsman vs a single spess muhreen
not even a fucking contest

They still would be able to survive a drop pod insertion, close combat with... well, most things, ship-to-ship boarding actions, combat in vacuum or extremely hostile environments, and most other shit spuhs muhreens are diesgned to do. Not to mention the logistics of keeping a large military operation in motion to solve a problem a squad of bog standard tactical marines can deal with.

>Couldn't you just
no

Fuck yeah, Vance Stubbs!

>to be honest Borealum was an idiot.

>Couldn't you just
>no
Games workshop meetings in a nutshell

>Those ogryns

How strong are those fricking mutants?

Depends.
Contrary to tabletop logic a single power armored marine would basically be able to hold out against and infinite number of dudes with lasguns simply because a lasgun will never ever actually penetrate power armor. If they have one heavy bolter though, things change.

No. Marines' superiority to other Imperial military branches hinges on factors other than raw damage output, the only thing 1000 Guardsmen have up on a single Space Marine. Space Marines can hunt and kill targets deep behind enemy lines for weeks or months with little or no supply line/chain of command, they are mentally and physically more robust than even the hardiest human that has ever lived. Space Marines are also extremely flexible; deploying in massed formations as much as sending a single Kill Team, allowing a plethora of tactics. Imperial Guard has little more than massed infantry and tank columns, and though there are special ops (eg Catachans), they still aren't stopping entire armed Chaos Cults on their own. A team of Space Marines could probably raze the Cult, the city it's based in, and the surrounding countryside by tomorrow.

Absolutely! Yes, the lore is inconsistent and tend to make marines absolute juggernaut but if one take a more nuanced look at the fluff, a lone marine can easily get swarmed by weaker foes, especially if he is alone.

Crazy fucking strong. They're canonically one of the few things that can solo a Space Marine (if they're both unarmed and unarmored) because they're just that good at killing shit.

They just can't do anything else, which is great, because if they were smart as well they'd likely have been wiped out long ago by the Imperium. Their retardation is their salvation.

>Could 1000 imperial guard grunts of the average McAverageson legion kill a single Space marine?

Yes. In the more realistic and older fluff, marines were said to be 10 to 100 times better than a normal soldier. Even though famous marines can fight off an entire ork waaagh in a choke point, I'm sure 1000 guardsmen against a nobody marine with no plot armor would steamroll him after the first few hundred soldiers or the first couple of tanks.

>I read that of the ultra badass recruits space marines find they typically lose 999 out of 1000 men just in the training alone.

They lose 999 out of 1000 from the surgeries. The training is not as lethal otherwise they'd have no way to replace losses. Although there are many chapters who are struggling to do so and have gone extinct because of it.

>Their retardation is their salvation.
Thank you for describing SJWs in a nutshell

>Although there are many chapters who are struggling to do so and have gone extinct because of it.
And I'm assuming that lessening the requirements or getting help from other chapters is out of the question?

Fluffwise, yes they could unless some of those 1000 brought a tank
Crunch? Never, guard are surprisingly stronk and SMs have only 1 wound

>lessening the requirements
Manpower is one of the few things the Imperium is not short on. They can always find new recruits somewhere.

>getting help from other chapters is out of the question?

Some do, especially if they're on good relations with their Parent First Founding Chapter. However, replacing losses isn't so easy, and takes a long, long time to get a Space Marine at the level of a Space Marine, with a lot of losses along the way due to the incredibly difficult nature of the surgeries involved as well as live-fire training.

Getting super-soldiers takes time and resources.

There actually would be an Imperium, it would just sell less and GW would focus even more on Knights

Thank you for bringing in an entirely unrelated subject to the thread

This has been done before. Some chapters try to rush the training or use risky geneseed with disastrous results. The Minotaurs have the wealth to pull it off but they use low quality recruits and a close-to-heresy rushed hypno indoctrination to churn out tons of recruits because they always fight as a chapter and their inferior men die in droves. They are backed up by the High Lords of Terra and insane wealth and gear though.

One famous example from 30k is Corax trying to pump out a new legion because his was shattered on Istvaan and it led to horrific Raptor mutants. This is probably why RG and Salamanders just stay at under 1000 strength in M41 and try to slowly rebuild rather than rush.

Blood Angels had to ask for neophytes from all their successors after being wiped out for the second or third time. Gabriel Seth of the Flesh Tearers got in an argument with Dante and said the BA should just be disbanded and the FT would become the new BA, but he eventually helped the BA rebuild.

To be fair Corax also had a visit from Alpha Legion.

>Could 1000 imperial guard grunts of the average McAverageson legion kill a single Space marine?

Of course. 10 guardsmen with lasguns and grenades could do it. Marines are just heavy shock troops, the IG and IN do most of the work.

>outnumber marines trillions to one
>do most of the work

Well I'd fucking hope so. The Imperial Navy is even more important than either.

Survivability is one of the important things to remember. Canonically most Space Marine chapters suffer very low rates of attrition of full marines such that the "average" Space Marine has decades of combat experience, whereas your median Imperial Guardsman is lucky to have survived past a few deployments, and will grow old and infirm in the normal human lifespan. We don't really have hard numbers for the cost of operating guardsmen versus the cost of operating space marines, but when you factor in that an SM is at least an order of magnitude more effective than a guardsman and will last several times longer, it seems likely that the expense is worth it.

A Space Marine would lose to twenty guardsmen. They are more durable, faster and stronger than normal men, but they aren't primarchs. They are relics from the Great Crusade, glorified storm troopers the Emperor used to awe other human cultures into joining him. They can still be useful as a fast response force since they have their own ships and logistics units, but they are largely irrelevant on the galactic scale.

Uh... one guardsman can kill a marine if hes lucky.

More realistically, it would take about 5.

1000 guardsmen to kill one marine? Its like you've never actually played 40k....

I can realistically see a marine fighting off 5 guardsmen unless the guardsmen were the protagonist faction and there was at least one complete hardened badass in that group.

It's five regular jackoffs vs. a walking tank that can rip hatches off vehicles with his bare hands. Normal human action movie heroes have taken out more guys simultaneously.

>a lasgun will never ever actually penetrate power armor

Fluff says that it will penetrate joints, and guardsmen field lascannons, heavy bolters, and grenades.

Depends on their equipment. A thousand imperial guardsmen with autoguns? They get slaughtered due to lacking the means to destroy his power armor. A thousand Imperial guardsmen with special weapon teams including mortars, heavy bolters, autocannons, lascannons, plasma guns, and meltaguns? Space Marine is facing extremely difficult odds now.

No, Space Marines can easily butcher twenty men with little problem, and the only chance twenty guardsmen would stand if they were spread out and all armed with plasma guns. Space Marines are capable of slaughtering thousands of people in melee in which few mortals alive have a prayer of surviving due to lacking the reaction speeds/simple speed of thought to respond. Astartes are faster, stronger, and vastly more durable than a normal human being (instant stop of bleeding + scar tissue), and this is only enhanced further by power armor. Space Marines are also the only reason why the Imperium of Man still exists, as they are often the only force able to fight threats that threaten mankind with total annihilation. But single Space Marines are capable of slaughtering entire platoons of men, and have done so in the past.

If they were spread out the marine can just snap shot all of them in one bolt round. If he's a bullshit plot armor marine he can dodge plasma too, or fire before the guardsman can fire the gun.

Any Space Marine can dodge plasma fire, but spread out across a field he'd definitely be caught in crossfire unless the Guardsmen broke down from stress. Also depends on whether or not it's a loyalist or a traitor- as traitors tend to suffer from some mild insanity after years spent in the warp and prefer the more retarded "fuck it and charge" option that would probably get them killed, whereas a loyalist is more likely to dig in and pick them all off with his bolter.

>hur dur the guardsmen have him surrounded in an open field

Are you dumb? that just means they auto die to the longer range, superhuman marksman with the carapace piercing, exploding automatic rocket launcher machine gun, and if they circled him like retards, they're just gonna kill each other from crossfire

>longer range

Unless they're so far out they can't even see him, the space marine wouldn't hold the advantage against twenty plasma guns all pointed at him.

>twenty plasma guns all pointed at him

I love how you have to stack the odds that far just to even have a chance in your argument. Why the fuck would he be within guaranteed hit plasma range from lesser accurate marskmen, who are apparently holding four plasma guns each in their octopus arms, while they ALREADY HAVE HIM IN HIS SIGHTS before the fight even starts?

Fucking stupid. First, define your fucking battleground and starting positions.

marines can move faster than the human eye can follow

And yet a small team of ace guardsmen iced six chaos marines after the marines tracked them through venomous swamps.

Marines are strong, tough, and deal lots of damage. But they're still human.

Oh, and there was a tiny village of like 40 hill folk with the guardsmen. Still, hardly the one marine vs 1000 you're wanking over

How is he wanking over it?
I mean the outcome of 1 marine vs 1000 guardsmen
is pretty obvious

I love Gaunts Ghosts so much, but that was so much bullshit. Maybe them and the village could take them out, I can believe that, but not a damn member of the Ghosts died in that battle. Or the next battles. Or the next few years on that entire warp infested, chaos ridden, unholy planet.

God I fucking hated the Gereon arc.

Using the 40k rpg's as a reference point.... Yes, but only with the use of specialised anti-armour weapons, such as plasma guns, heavy bolters, melta guns, and the like. Basic lasguns simply don't have the armour penetration and damage necessary to hurt a space marine, but the weapons mentioned above do.

Gaunt and his small team killed 3 on Gereon.

>Gaunt's Ghosts
>average McAverageson

You dumb nigga

>IG
>Imperial Guard has little more than massed infantry and tank columns

The Guard is the most diverse Army in the galaxy, user.

>IG
> they still aren't stopping entire armed Chaos Cults on their own

That is in the top three of their most common enemies actually.

Marines are deployed in two cases:
When they are close by anyway and have men to spare.
When shit hits the fan so hard, that even the Imperial Guard is looking for ways to minimize losses.

Pretty certain 60km/h isn't faster than the eye can follow, mate.

I think he is talking about reflexes.

I single guardsman with a plasmagun has about a 41% chance of killing a space marine with each shot, of which he gets two every turn.

Even armed with a trusty lasgun, a guardsman has about a 5% chance of killing a space marine on the tabletop. Meaning, at long range it takes about 20 guardsmen to guarantee a marine kill, half that at short range.

>he doesn't know about the passage where terrified guardsmen couldn't see the marine closing the distance across an open field in the blink of an eye

You probably shouldn't be discussing this retarded lore stuff if you don't even know much about it. It's even been mentioned on Veeky Forums multiple times.

40K isn't the Matrix, friend.

>using tabletop stats

You dumb nigga

>it would just sell less
Space marines are the originals, mate. The guard came later.

There is no warhammer 40,000 without space marines. And in the fluff, there is no Imperium without space marines.

Tabletop stats are the only ones that matter, "nigga".

It is the primary canon.

100 space marines absolutely could kill 100,000 guardsmen, though.

>space marines annihilate entire military strength of the planet many of whom are loyalist
>they really could have just stormed the palace and eliminated the leadership
why do space marines have to be so damn dense?

Turn traitor and you'll feel the vindicator

They had to make an example of course.

>God I fucking hated the Gereon arc.
But! Voi Shet Magir!!!

ea Gereon Arc is pretty odd, but then again the six marines hunting them were facing Gaunt, the dude and his regiment beat the fuck out of a Khorne Berzerker attack on an arty battery in the second book.

BL has inconsistent stuff at many a time. Dan Abnett is inconsistent as fuck, Salvation Reach has three SM from three chapters respectively infiltrate a space station with the ghosts and they absolutely rape everyone there.

But CSM hunters on Gereon were really underwhelming, they seemed brutal and antagonistic when they first show up and just start busting caps into the Officers, admonishing the sloppy work of the fuel convoy that was ambushed by the team, then they just spaghetti all over the tree huts of the feral mud people.

posthuman soldiers have posthuman standards of loyalty

"just following orders" isn't an excuse they'll accept

>I read that of the ultra badass recruits space marines find they typically lose 999 out of 1000 men just in the training alone.
The way you can probably look at it, is that they are more like commandos than line infantry. They insert at numerous strategic points across a planet, and take objectives: assassinate an alien VIP, close a chaos portal, secure a holy relic, etc. They would rather do that than fight huge attrition-y numbers games. (Of course, they can do that as well, but it's not ideal).

So for their purposes, it's better to have a few thousand hyper-elite than a big mass of a million average dorks. But that huge mass of average dorks will probably win through attrition if they get into a head-butting competition.

Those Chaos Space Marines were all wounded dumbass by railgun bows, and got caught in an ambush. Although the Gaunt's Ghost series tends to be bullshit anyway.

No, it's your retarded head canon. Game stats aren't even canon because they're abstractions for a GAME. The Black Library meanwhile is the direct production of GW (BL isn't a third party but GW itself as their publishing arm) and canon. There is no "primary canon" in 40k besides the most recent material if there is a contradiction.

Actually they dont need to sleep at all really.
I remember in one of the older codex's the record given was over 300 years i think.
The chapter swore never to reat untill the campaign was over by memory

I don't remember which book it's in, but there's a three way fight between two Chaos factions and the Imperium. And the Slaneshi are trying to summon a demon, and a bunch of Khornates are trying to stop it, eventually sending 5 CSM's.

Massed fire from the cultists eventually downs two of those CSMs and severely wounds a third who gets finished off by the Imperials, and one of the guardsmen narrating the Imperium in the battle notes that these guys are even worse than an underhive gang in terms of things like accuracy and discipline. But eventually they wear them down and one guy charges in with a suicide bomb.

So space marines lose to unarmed civilians? Because that's in a BL book.

Actually that was from the 6th Edition Codex Space Marines, when Marneus Calgar killed several hundred Night Lords with only medieval peasants with pitchforks as backup.

Traitor's Hand, Ciaphas Cain.

It's BS because Guardsmen cannot defeat a Space Marine no matter how hard they try with their lasguns. The Space Marine can just dodge the lasers.

>The Space Marine can just dodge the lasers.
>just dodge lasers
>dodge lasers

>implying regular guardsmen are crack shots

yeah bruh IG 100% accuracy especially on moving targets thanks to dat speed of light right

dumbass

A Space Marine cannot "dodge lasers" because that is physically fucking impossible unless they are moving at FTL speeds, which they obviously are not because doing so would mean a shitload of fun stuff kicks into effect, such as them being capable of generating infinite energy, should simply dissolve while moving, and generating the mother-of-all-shockwaves. Nobody but Barry Allen dodges lasers.

And as for Guardsmen, we only have Cadians to go off of, but they maintain a 90% accuracy rating from endlessly drilling from childhood.

Nigga what? A spacem arine is a huge fucking target and we're not talking about PDF here, but the Imperial Guard. These guys are no fucking slouches

More than able. Stop sucking the propaganda dick.

They have half their brain sleep at a time. (Left/Right)

To be fair, not all Space Marines are created equal. If Lorgar can send his Legion's retards to die at Calth, maybe modern Chaos Lords can send their incompetent morons to Gereon.

>Could 1000 imperial guard grunts of the average McAverageson legion kill a single Space marine

1000 lasgun shots dumped into a single Space Marine. Pretty obvious that would kill the marine. A few Guardsmen will die to bolter fire I'm sure; if half three-quarters of the Guardsmen miss entirely, thats still 250 lasgun hits onto Power Armor. The Marine gets vaporized.

Well they wouldn't have to be moving faster than light, just fast enough to move out of the path of the beam before it reaches them... which is still a relativistic speed at any reasonable range, but could actually be a fair bit slower than light

>If Lorgar can send his Legion's retards to die at Calth

I'm about halfway through Know No Fear, is that what Lorgar did there? I thought Kor Phaeron and Erebus masterminded that whole thing since Lorgar is a huge joke

ADB made it an "I was pretending to be retarded" move, instead of them getting hopped up on chaos juice and taking their butthurt out on the smurfs.

Does anyone have the screenshot where the player does exactly this? He uses a gazillion guardsman versus marines just so you have to roll a million dice nonstop.

Not that user but...

A laser is concentrated light. It moves at the speed of light.

You cannot dodge a laser. If you're thinking of plasma, perhaps? But still unlikely.

Not the guy you're talking to either, but you misunderstand him. If someone 100 meters away shoots you with a laser and you only need to move 1 meter to the side to dodge it, you will be moving significantly slower than c. Still faster than possible as he pointed out, but not light speed.

this is explained in a few short stories. WARNING, SOME SPOILERS

1. lorgar walked in the warp after the serrated sun experiment. in the end, he is approached by fateweaver who is bound to tell two truths. one of the truths are that he can crush the ultramarines at calth and kill guilliman, but terra will be too reinforced for horus to win (presumably by the dark angels, blood angels and ultramarines remnants). however, if lorgar doesn't stick around calth, instead creating the ruinstorm and wages the shadow crusade, the gods promise him victory.

2. in the other story, a gal vorbak fights in the underworld war on calth but this is eventually proven to be a vision. the attack on calth is years away, and said word bearer is not yet a gal vorbak and rejected by the daemon. argel tal, who is supervising the procedure, notes that there are many failures (but still within acceptable rates), and lorgar comes in and tells him instead to use those whose hatred of the ultramarines has overtaken their sensibilities.

so what can be concluded is that lorgar needs his cold blooded, rational killers to prosecute the shadow war,and the ranting zealots among the word bearers were sent to calth instead.

and yeah, lorgar was a joke until corax nearly killed him at istvaan. after that, he pretty quickly becomes a schemer on the level of kor phaeron and erebus and even one-ups erebus in Betrayer with some help from Kharn.

Please tell me your memeing me

I know, the spiritual liege probably could have done it himself, but he's gracious enough to help out the common folk with their dreams.

Lasers aren't light-speed. How do you think the Imperial Guard are able to miss so often? Even in Guardwank like Gaunt's Ghosts, Guardsmen cannot just point and shoot their lasers and expect to hit anything moving. Hell, even in the 40k Space Marine video game you can dodge lasgun shots fired by cultists.

Son, there ain't a problem in the universe that can't be solved with a sufficient amount of explosives.

IIRC, not all of the 1000 applicants end up dead. Quite a few, sure, but a good portion live on as servants to the chapter, doing menial work. In some cases, I believe there applicants may still even become guardsmen.

Serfs perform self-defense roles, too. I doubt chapters send any to the guard.

Also, Loose doesn't mean dies. For example, the Space Wolves, regarded as some of the most stringent entrance processes, with a week long hike through a mountain range in mid-winter, with nothing but a small amount of mutation at the end, washes people out far more than them actually dying. And those who wash out often become vassal soldiers/engineers/pilots for the Space wolves anyway.
only using space wolves because I know the most about their 40k entrance procedure