How come the other races in 40k don't have their own equivalent to space marines?

no wonder the filthy goddamned tau shits will die in a fucking curbstomp once the imperium decides to grace them with the UNSTOPPABLE FURY OF MANKIND

>what are aspect warriors
>what is the entirety of the fire caste

The technology used to make Space Marines is really advanced, I doubt the Tau have anything like. Bio-engineering seems outside of their comfort zone.

As for Eldar they strike me as being big on racial purity so I doubt they'd want Space Marines even if they could make them.

Plus in fluff Aspect Warriors are supposed to be above and beyond Space Marines anyway.

This thread is copy pasta, newfags.

>What are the Tau Crisis
>What are the eldar paths

Im picturing a super soldier tau looking something akin to Beta-ray Bill but blue.

Orks got nobs.

I'm fairly sure they reproduce asexually.

The Tau will never create something like space marines, because it raises the risk of Tau that act independently of the Ethereals, or even Super Tau that revolt and wage a war of extermination against the original Tau.

>>what is the entirety of the fire caste

Ever so slightly genetically developed descendants of the original Fire Caste, and by no means super soldiers. Biologically they're not even on-par with Humans in a lot of physical aspects, but they got a few nice mental advantages in there.

baum tish

>The technology used to make Space Marines is really advanced, I doubt the Tau have anything like. Bio-engineering seems outside of their comfort zone.

Who needs more bio-engineering when you can do cybernetic engineering & work with heavy suits of armor instead?
Elite pilots in crisis suits are more than adequate in their own right, especially considering the "youthfulness" of the Tau as a race.

Space Marines were created due to the Emperor's understanding of his enemies. Tau are not very familiar with the Warp and have very distinct limitations (such as in travel).

>Orks naturally evolve into killing machines
orks do enhance their soldiers, sometimes
(well often but it works sometimes, see meganobz)

Show me how many emperors that slickheads or knifears have and then we can see how many genertically engineered from his geneseed troops they can make.

hmph, Crisis suits are hardly a "weapon to surpass space marines"

Tau have suit pilots, Eldar have Windriders.

>why haven't any of the other races created or employed dedicated elite shock troops

But they have, tau have their battlesuits, elder have their aspect warriors, Tyranids have their warriors and other fuckery, etc. etc.

The organization is different though but basing space marines as super human badasses too cool for the majority of the chain of command makes them stand out as many other reasons.

>Eldar have Windriders

Alright, I chuckled.

Bio-engineering is within their comfort zone, but they employ it in a different way. An Imperial genetor's report in the fourth edition Tau codex observes the presence of synthetic proteins in Tau internal organs and suggests them as evidence that their evolution has been accelerated artificially.

The Tau don't need Space Marines. Crises Suits are already superior and cheaper to to build and take less time to train.

In the books, we see 3 Crises Suits wipe the floor with a group of marines, crushing them underfoot during entry and vaporizing them with plasma. The surviving marines were forced to flee the battle.

The Tau inside might not be suped up with bullshit cybernetics and unique organs, but that hardly matters if they can point and click marines off the map.

>when you can do cybernetic engineering & work with heavy suits of armor instead?

Because when chaos turns their gaze into you...

Yeah you know what happens next.

Because Marines are oh so resistant to the taint of Chaos

>but this supposed to be something like one space marine per Imperial planet
Even less than that. Aren't there only about 1 million marines?

Marines are far more resistant to Chaos than inanimate objects and artificial sentience, are you stupid? Even if we don't mention the ONE HUNDRED PERCENT success rate of possessing an inanimate object, the sentience can rebel even without Chaos's influence like the Men of Iron.

The suits have pilots, buddy. They aren't unmanned.

Does Tau tech even have Machine Spirit ? Surely if Chaos isn't interested in their pitiful souls it woul take interest in battlesuits if it could posses them wouldn't it ?

Meganobz aren't enhanced. They're just big nobz that managed to get enough teef to buy a suit of scrap metal terminator armor.
The only time the orks will enhance other Orks is when the dok replaces some squishy bits for metal bits.

This is 40k. The fluff is inconsistent and full of propaganda and errors. It's part of the charm.

And Farsight and Shadowsun are both already corrupted with a possessed sword and armor respectively, what's your point.

>drones aren't unmanned

Daemons can't see Tau well. Also, the Daemons find the Tau not only unappetising but difficult to posses. This is due a combination of tiny souls and strong adherence to the Greater Good.

Chaos doesn't have a 100% success rate of possessing objects, though. You are only counting the times it worked.

Chaos only has the opportunity to possess stuff it it becomes exposed to the warp directly, or sufficient warp energy through rituals or breaches or shit.

Whenever warp energy exists in the material realm, every object within visual range that DIDN'T become demonically possessed is a failure. Even if one object gets possessed there, there are usually a dozen or more objects that didn't.

Every time a guardsmen or a space marine goes into combat against demons and their weapons don't grow teeth and turn on them, that's a failure to possess.

As long as you be good to your machine spirit, it won't turn on you.

>Whenever warp energy exists in the material realm, every object within visual range that DIDN'T become demonically possessed is a failure. Even if one object gets possessed there, there are usually a dozen or more objects that didn't.

No, that's retarded. You can't fail at possessing something you had no intention of possessing. The only failures that count are the ones where a daemon tried to possess a rock or suit of armor and failed.

You don't walk down a block of houses and say each door you didn't open means you have a 0% chance of opening doors.

Why the fuck should they?
If i wanted to play army a vs army b i would be playing chess all the time.

Play Horus Heresy instead.

>Beta ray Bill but blue

Genestealers are basically Space Marines and Tyranids have a lot of survivable frontline infantry. Doesn't change the fact that technology wielding factions would never ever put bodies on the ground over drones. But 40k is totally nonsensical.

Tau aren't badass to have space marines anyway. Enhanced species would probably be harder to control for Ethereals as well.

Not that they even need that. You are a retard for asking such bullshit and forgetting about ridiculous battlesuits and tons of xenos allies such as kroot.

But aren't Tyranid warriors literally the nid Space Marines?

Tyrant Guards are.

The Cain novels insist that the Tau "enslave" their machine spirits forcing them to do what they want them to with no reverence. They also say that the order xenos has considered trying to turn their tech against them (I think) but decided it was a waste of time.

Tau tech is essentially a perverse abomination compared to the mechanicum.

Although I doubt the Cain novels are canon anymore, there you go.

Kinda. Tyrant Guard (or whatever they are called) are literal Tyranid space marines, as they are based partially on space marine DNA, and even have a psuedo-black carapace

How soon before the Tau build their own Iron Men and the 40k galaxy gets to go through that shit again

Aspect Warriors and Crisis Suits?

Like, each race basically does have space muhreen equivalents already

They kinda do. Farsight has a broadside that's piloted by a malfunctioning training AI.

They basically already did, Drones get smarter the more of them there are

Soon.

The Harlequins are super human in terms of Eldar and Solitaires aren't far off Primarch levels of ridiculousness

Well yeah but that's implied to be from an outside race's (most likely Eldar) meddling and not the tau evolving themselves.

Plus Crisis suits are mass producable compared to the SMs.

Tau have baby factories, neuronal implants and gene and cybernetic engineering programs among their hobbies.

>hmph, Crisis suits are hardly a "weapon to surpass space marines"

It is if you take off the Imperial goggles.

No Crises Suits have accomplished the feats that Space Marines supposedly can, where according to the hyperbolic lore a single space marine can take over a hive world using just one clip of bolter ammo and no backup, and hold that world for a hundred years.

At the same time, every time Crises Suits fight Space Marines in the books the space marines take heavy losses.

Crises Suits SEEM to be stronger than SM, they just don't have 20,000 years of propaganda propping them up.

Suits do have higher toughness and more wounds. They're on par with terminators, having the most experienced pilot the more advanced weaponry.

A reminder that Terminator armour is nothing more glorified engineer suits from the Dark Age of Technology.

I always assumed the machine spirit would be based on or similar to the mind of the species that created it. Because the inside of the machine would be based on the way the species function.

So what? Modern tanks are glorified water storage vehicles by your logic.

Think only the Imperium believes in a machine spirit. Though eldar have soul stones on their weapons, they don't need to constantly rub oil on them to make sure they work.

Pretty much. 'Machine Spirit' is an invented term to describe machines that have some degree of autonomy but are "good" as opposed to abominable intelligences. So a Landraider with an autopilot has a 'machine spirit' because the AdMech don't want people declaring a crusade against it.

Over time, this term has come to be misused more and more to the point that many admech believe that even inanimate tools have machine spirits in a sort of personification. A lightbulb doesn't break, its machine spirit dies.

Why did mankind's mechanical servants rebelled, when the ones working for Eldar never did in a million years?

Mon-Keigh are just dumb

>Genetics are witchcraft
That is why humans can't have nice things

Eldar have mechanical servants?

Had. It's one of the reasons behind the Fall. Robots did all the work, so the Eldar had nothing to do but to indulge themselves in endless hedonism.

No one knows for sure.

Signs point to mankinds psychic awakening. Psykers only started to be born and studied towards the very end of the DAoT.

My favorite theory is that the AIs psyker research go tot he point where they realized the true implications of mankind's psychic potential, and the effect it would have on the Warp. You have to remember, humanity is the ONLY reason the Chaos Gods are as dangerous as they are in 40k. Other races worship them, but no other species has such a perfect combination of psychic power and lack of control. The Orks are more numerous, but they don't feed the Chaos gods nearly as much. The Eldar are more powerful souls, but have a much tighter grip on themselves than mankind does. Mankind stumbling into psykerdom empowers the chaos gods and gives them the chance to break into the material realm and consume the universe. Without mankind, the gods are not that strong and the universe is safe.

This left the AI two choices: the first was to stop the psychic awakening itself, which probably wasn't realistically possible.

The other was to dramatically reduce the human population to a controllable level that wouldn't supercharge chaos so much. Bring humans back down to just a planet or two worth of population, at least until we fully matured as a psychic species and no longer were prey to Chaos. A few worlds, under the complete and total protection provided by DAoT machines run by superAI.

Obviously the humans would never agree to such an action by choice, so the machines had to do it by force. Inaction would have meant utter doom.

And they might have been right! Think how strong and dangerous Chaos is, and now consider how many humans and planets must have burned during the war against the machines. The Emperor never fully reclaimed all of the territory once held by the DAoT, so we know it was huge.

If the machines hadn't pruned human worlds, the material world would probably already be destroyed.

...

>Their machines work
>Heresy

Emprah used Chaoshax to create the Primarchs, and since no one else has figured out how to create Primarchs, they can't make muhreens.

It's more than just genetic engineer that created the astartes.

Never heard of it, source pls.

wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Fall_of_the_Eldar

Strange how I never noticed that before.
How come no mechanical creations survived the fall?

Because Craftworlders have the Path of the Menial Labourer, Exodites reject any particularly advanced technology and Commorites use slaves instead of robots so they have a constant background of low-level suffering to feed off of.

>crisis suit
>more experienced than terminators

>Who needs more bio-engineering when you can do cybernetic engineering & work with heavy suits of armor instead?

Does that mean that Xeno is the first step towards a genuine Space Marine tier super-soldier for the Tau?

Never said they were more experienced than terminators, but are similar.

>How come the other races in 40k don't have their own equivalent to space marines?
Cause that would make the setting fucking boring. Go play chess if you want symmetric games.
>You would've thought the Elder or Tau would've tried creating their own elite batch of enhanced super soldiers, they have both the technology and fanaticism necessary.
Strictly speaking the Tau are the Eldar supersoldiers. Xenology insinuated that Tau were created to be Chaos resistant by an 'unknown' outside force.
Eldar have a problem with their souls being eaten by the god they created upon death, so vat growing loads of people is not a good idea.
An the Tau just build bigger suits. They might have the technology, but I don't think creating new castes is really something that would mesh with their society.
In a way they are just as rigid and traditionalist as the Imperium.

Bill is basically commander Farsight.

Well, the AdMech sees machines failing to work as their machine spirits expressing their displeasure. Tau machines never break down, ergo their machine spirits are obviously enslaved/mistreated.

Like a man who brags that his wife never answers back to him.

>No Crises Suits have accomplished the feats that Space Marines supposedly can, where according to the hyperbolic lore a single space marine can take over a hive world using just one clip of bolter ammo and no backup, and hold that world for a hundred years.
The point is that Marines are able to function behind enemy lines and without infrastructure to support them.
They can operate without sleep thanks to dolphin brain, their armor recycles waste into nutrient paste and they can eat anything short of stone and metal.

A tau pilot sits in a powerful machine, but he is dependant on support and infrastructure a lot more than Marines. In addition to that, at their core hue they are still just squishy average joes.
They need sleep and they can't just keep going if they lose limbs or have one of their hearts pierced.
The fact alone that Marines can literally fight non-stop around the clock for weeks put them into a different league.

>At the same time, every time Crises Suits fight Space Marines in the books the space marines take heavy losses.
Of course. You are talking about suits with weapons that are usually being mounted on vehicles. A regular fire warrior could never lift one of those things.
Marines are armed with bolters, not stuff that isn't even man portable anymore.
If every Marine would be armed with heavy lasers it would look different.
Marines are often described as walking tanks, but their armor is just a suit. Calling Tau suits walking tanks would be a better fit since they also pack heavy weaponry.

There's only supposed to be 1000 marines per chapter. So less than 1 million marines, unless there's 1000 different chapters.

Space Marines are a huge waste of time from a logistical standpoint. The amount of initiates they go through just to find one that the geneseed will properly implant in is ridiculous, not to mention the extreme quality and rarity of their equipment (all of which means elaborate bargaining with the Imperium's surly, barely-not-heretical theocracy of an arms industry), which, at the end of the day, only provides the Imperium with about a million Space Marines who can't be bothered to reliably coordinate their efforts with the Guard or Navy. Considering the fact that even the fastest Warp jumps in the Imperium take weeks, and there are as many (if not more) planets in the Imperium as Astartes, they don't matter all that much in purely practical terms.

The Imperium isn't a place run on practicality, however, and the Space Marines are pretty essential to running it. Firstly, they're really, really good at picking dramatic, crucial places to pull off daring missions and last stands, where their actions will have the most effect on the enemy, and, more importantly, on regular human morale. Second, and more importantly, the Astartes are living, breathing connections to the physical life and mission of the Emperor, his will made manifest in flesh, proving that ordinary humans can be elevated to glorious strength and purpose through Him on Terra and His Servants. We are not weak, we are not helpless, we have *hope*.

As for why the Emperor made them in the first place, humanity in the DAoT needed strong, enduring, intelligent leadership to survive the Galaxy and what was to come, and the Emperor couldn't provide it all himself. The Primarchs were another twenty immortals intelligent and inspiring enough to reliably help carry out the master plan without direct supervision from the Emperor, and the legions that served them on the Great Crusade would help instill awe in the conquered peoples for this new Imperium and the benevolent supermen ruling it.

Good summary.
Shame the BL make the Primarchs out to be like toddlers with anger issues, while calling them half-gods.

The whole thing worked so much better when we knew less. The novels should never have gotten so close to the Primarchs imo. They should just have been the vehicles driving the plot from the background, making the occasional appearance, while the book are written from a boots on the ground perspective.

As of Master of Mankind, the Emprah just saw the Primarchs as weapons, he never had any interest in them leading the human race, he just needed to conquer the galaxy rapidly before mankind's psychic awakening turned the whole place into one giant eye of terror.

Marines are basically just biological Men of Iron, and they fucked humanity for the same reasons; they realised they were the ones doing all the work and humans were reaping all the benefits.

Damn Bill, philosophically and physically superior than us mere mortals could ever hope to be.

Bill must be an old one.

I think that the reason behind all the waste is because the genessed mutations. After 10,000 years, they don't have much geneseed with enough purity to make millions of marines. Hence the ridicolous trials to become a space marines and the clumsiness of the whole process.

Indeed, the Astartes were meant to be a means to an end. Much like the Thunder warriors were created for the sole purpose of conquering Terra and then abandoned, marines were meant to do the same but for the entire galaxy.
Of course the Heresy saw this never to come about, leaving the imperium to cobble together whatever worked to defend themselves after the 'death' of the big E. Space marines by that point were so much part of the Imperium's identity and newly forming religion that dismantling them (however practical that might be) would be tantamount to Heresy.

Well thunder warriors couldn't survive past a few years. Their organs are running on super drive and they just burn out.

>Calling Tau suits walking tanks would be a better fit since they also pack heavy weaponry
But they don't? Broadsides do, but Crisis Suits are for the most part, armed with weapons that could be man-portable, but would be overly bulky, unwieldy, or impractical. Tau plasma doesn't avoid Gets Hot because it's a heavy weapon, but because they deliberately lowered the power output. Sure, a Fire Warrior could probably cart around a Missile Pod. But a suit can get that weapon where's it's needed faster, target better, and can carry more ammo. Burst cannon can even be scaled down easily - we saw that with the original XV-15 suits. Power or ammo requirements likely make it silly to issue to troopers, but it could be done.

Crisis and Stealth suits are the Tau version of marines. 'Walking tanks' are Broadsides and the larger suits.

>armed with weapons that could be man-portable, but would be overly bulky, unwieldy, or impractical.
Overly bulk, unwieldy and impractical is the antithesis of man-portable.
I meant weapons that you can actually use and not just lift and lug around, if you have to.

The point I was making is that marines are simply more versatile. If a marine runs out of ammo he can just pick up another gun. And he is able to long term operate largely independent.

Crisis and Stealth suits may be the equivalent in terms of 'powerlevel' if you will, but they are not nearly as versatile or independent, by virtue of having the guns mounted on the suit.

>In theory, damage to the Battlesuit unit, whether it be through the lopping off of limbs, the firing of bullets into the chassis, electrocution, burning, or the "beheading" of the primary optic sensor, will not cause pain or discomfort to the pilot inside. However, veteran Battlesuit pilots have been known to develop ho’or-ata-t’chel, which are sympathetic ghost pains and phantom reactions to external damage. This condition is also known as Battlesuit Neurosis, and can cause serious problems in the lives of Battlesuit pilots outside their Battlesuit. Fire Warriors have been known to be so traumatised at losing their Battlesuit's sensor cluster "head" that they have spent months in a psychosomatic coma. Some Battlesuit veterans at the end of their careers may also develop quirks such as trying to fly without their Battlesuit, or not being able to understand why they walk or move properly in normal life when their Battlesuit was damaged.

Gundo still man-portable! Just use tripod when use! Mwee!

Remember the Thunder Warriors?
Remember the Horus Heresy?