Should 40k vehicles have driver models?

I always found it weird that vehicles that get wrecked (don't explode) allow all embarked soldiers to leave but never the drivers.

Do you guys agree that when vehicles get wrecked (don't explode) the driver should be able to embark and continue the fight?

The driver would have similar stats as a normal infantry man but be armed with a pistol but no close combat weapon (only get the base attacks in a melee, not the +1 from close combat+pistol combo).

>The driver would have similar stats as a normal infantry man but be armed with a pistol but no close combat weapon (only get the base attacks in a melee, not the +1 from close combat+pistol combo).

Isn't that sort of what the Tau can do with pilot ejection for Crisis Suits?

>abandoning your noble steed

Machine spirit will be cry

Captain goes down with the ship, driver goes down with the rhino. As above, so below.

Tau have no such thing

>Do you guys agree that when vehicles get wrecked (don't explode) the driver should be able to embark
Well if the driver has to get back on the vehicle because it wrecked, it makes you wonder why the driver left his vehicle in the first place. Maybe that's why it got wrecked?

>Well if the driver has to get back on the vehicle because it wrecked

Sorry, I wrote the wrong word. I meant to say "disembark".

How much would thinks like space marine rhinos have to increase in price to compensate?

Isn't a basic marine like a third of the price of a rhino?

I always thought it was weird that Space Marines wear their bulky armor when operating their vehicles. The models don't make it seem like there's a lot of room inside in the first place.

The reason they don't is that it slows the game down for no real benefit.

If it's wrecked, safest spot is inside the vehicle. If it explodes, you're dead.

play 2nd edition, then

The captain sinks with his ship.

Depends on the vehicle.

Many are operated by servitors who are hard wired into the machine. There is not much hope or point in them escaping, unless to become a servo skull...

But anytime you upgrade to marine driver etc, you should get an extra body. With, as you suggested, minimal weaponry.

I always figured the driver and gunner both stayed with the vehicle (or it's pieces) to carry it away after the battle was done. They would hide there unless killed or captured and wait for the bullets to stop flying.

I've never been able to figure out where the servitor for Drop Pods sit.

Drop Pods are fully automated, just a cogitator.

Cogitator has some pretty good aim.

yes they do

the driver may only armed only with a las-pistol for self defence, if they survive the explosion, they may attempt to retreat back to home base rather than continue fighting

you can justify this in game as "driver survived, but was removed as a casualty along with his vehicle"

and would a laspistol-only, WS2 guardsman really be that useful?

>Tau have no such thing

It may have been a variant rule posted on the GW website back in the day. I don't remember.

Had a reply, Android keyboard robbed me of it. Your loss faggots it was insightful. Anyways go ahead and place that barebones-equipped pilot next to their fucked up vehicle and let them find their demise or salvation as fate demands. Just stat them as the worst possible version of their class - e.g. any Space Marine pilot should be started as a Scout for the sake of consistency. Go fuck yourself Android.

Do they really waste space marines + power Armour for jobs like drivers and pilots? iirc they don't count toward the 1000 marine chapter but thats still a stupid place for one of a very small group all things considered

>how to be wrong on the internet: the post

I headcannon that Space Marine vehicles are driven by normal dudes or brains in a box wired the fuck up to give them enhanced perception and reflexes.


Spending 50 years training a special ops dude in infiltration and to shoot the wings off a fly at 1000m only to stick him in a box seems like a waste of space even for the Imperium.

Are you saying it's a waste to give tank crews body armour? What if they have to leave their tank for some reason?

>spending ~10 years training a dude who can rest while awake, has superior reflexes, cognitive abilities, tough as nails and can interface with machinery with his mind is a waste as a vehicle operator, just put a normal human in there
>because we all know vehicle crews are permanently sealed in their vehicles and never get out or do anything else
>because we know Marines have dedicated vehicle crews and all of them aren't trained in operating the vehicles of the chapter to fill in any role that's required of them, giving them greater tactical flexibility over "uh-oh, nobody remembered to pack the driver servitor for the mission, guess we'll be walking everywhere."

Often when you take out a vehicle it's by murdering the fuck out of the guys inside that make it move.

If not, when the crew do bail their morale is most likely well and truly broken, and odds are you wouldn't want a well trained crew to try and fight with their sidearms anyway, have them get the hell out of dodge to crew another vehicle in another day instead. It's not like they're very likely to get anything much done with their pistols anyway.

And form a gameplay perspective it's another thing that takes time and has to be tracked, slowing down the game without much chance of ever affecting the outcome.

So while it could perhaps be kinda cute I'd say we're better off without in 40k. Maybe in a smaller scale, more detailed game.

well, in game terms, giving the drivers power armour makes things like land speeders not count as open-topped vehicles. Doesn't make much of a difference to anything else. Though techmarine pilots would just have their own personal suits of armour that are modified and/or part of the techmarine's body so you can't just give it to another marine.

That hasn't been around for two codices now.

Its the kind of thing you do in a campaign that has persistent death and between game advances for units. If the crew escapes your "dead" tank can keep its skills.

Tank drivers aren't wearing a full 60-80 pounds of combat kit though.

Giving a non-combat driver valuable depends on the Chapter I guess, but I assume for most Chapter's every suit is important power armor seems like it'd be a bit excessive, especially if it's something like a whirlwind driver or a Thunderhawk pilot running supplies.

Seems like the most 1-1 example would be to give drivers Scout gear, but I've read (from non-official sources) that SM drivers are all techmarines so who the fuck even knows.

Well there is a reason why 3rd edition is best edition. Even Tau where cool back then.

3rd lacked AdMech and GSC, but hey no one is perfect.

>would a laspistol-only, WS2 guardsman really be that useful?
In older editions they functioned as VP denial. Only getting half the points for a destroyed land raider or leman russ because some chucklefuck with a pistol was still alive at the end can swing a game.

Now that sounds like a fun mechanic, they should bring it back.

Yeah, it was neat. The models made for it were pretty fun.

Don't see the old vehicle cap much anymore.

>chapter's can't afford 1000 suits of power armour
>can afford to lose a dude that takes 10 years to even become a private and genetic technology beyond modern comprehension

And, again, you think a suit of power armour isn't providing anything other to the Marine than protection.

In the Army our marksmen had regular rifles assigned to them, because that way they'd always have the rifle to use when it was needed for drills requiring a regular rifle over their DMR. Signing out a few more rifles than was "needed" was much simpler in terms of logistics than to make sure the supplies always had a few extra rifles on hand for situations they were needed and to keep track of who has what rifle and when. Each dude has their kit and rifle, and special dudes have special stuff on top of that kit and rifle.

It's simpler to have the Whirlwind crew in power armour and ready to switch roles on the fly than have someone deliver their power armour and bolter to them when they're needed, and to make sure the suit is the right specs and that they're able to dress it on in battlefield conditions.

To be fair they make really really good drivers

Vehicles contain Machine Spirits. Vehicles are therefore Holy. Drivers will have some sort of training in their vehicle and therefore be aware of the Machine Spirit and the rites to communicate with it i.e. The Holy Rite of Nitrous Injection. A driver would never abandon his holy charge.
Don't know what the excuse for non-imperials is though.

user you responded to:
Good points, but I remember an in-universe one on top of it. One of the Dark Angels novels has a Ravenwing member hop into a Nephilim or something, and he says that the port where his power source usually was interfaced with the craft itself giving him a neural connection or something?

Too lazy to actually look it up, but there's two good reasons I guess.

Those same Dark Angels novels have a Marine who becomes basically combat incapable and he's told that he can work as a vehicle driver. That's gotta be at least a decent portion of most chapter's drivers, assuming everyone does it.

>A driver would never abandon his holy charge.
It happened multiple times in Gaunt's Ghosts, probably more in the fluff.

Yes, and it's a waste of book space on them too.

t. WAACFAG

3Rd ed Imperial Guard had this as a vehicle upgrade too. Two guardsmen popped out and they had nice models. I never bought it because it was an expensive upgrade that stopped your opponents getting half the victory points?
All depending on two t3 dudes surviving the rest of the game.
It was 20 point upgrade, so it was cheaper to just keep the upgrades to a minimum and buy an extra Russ

>Two guardsmen popped out and they had nice models.

D3 guardsmen.

>expensive upgrade that stopped your opponents getting half the victory points?

Weren't victory points determined by the cost of the model? So a 200pts. Russ with surviving crew would net the opponent 100pts. instead.

>All depending on two t3 dudes surviving the rest of the game.

Need to hide them well.

Shame 40k didn't have the ability to move units off the board like, say, Battlegroup. It's one mechanism to stop the late game hunt for surviving members of units to score extra points. You can move any unit off the table, but they won't count as destroyed.

Indeed it never had tactical retreat or even sensible retreats.

Why run in a straight line instead of looking for cover.
Past edition your dudes simply run in panic and now with 8th they commit sudoku.
I know the fluff reasons for both, but one looks like running panicked retards while the other shoot themself.

>and now with 8th they commit sudoku.
its more of them doing a panic retreat and abandoning the battle, they dont want to add too many weird rules, especially cosmetic rules, Id image itd be a huge mess have a bunch of scatter models running off the table

It was never a mess in third, back almost nothing could ignore moral rules.

It is just lazy rules design and it looks odd on the table.

Marine pilots are to pilots what marines are to regular troops. When was the last time you read about a rhino stalling or getting trapped in mud?

No, I even glue the ramps on my APC's shut because GW models are primarily gaming pieces not display pieces.

Some models are very nice and if well painted certainly could be used for display, but this is not their main function.

There were rules for that in older editions. Wrecking a Predator tank would have a couple marines with bolt pistols pile out

It might have worked in older editions where you had one tank at most but now I think it would be too annoying.

Anyway, in real life a bailed out tank crew would just head back to friendly lines since there tank experience makes them much more valuable being used in another tank than dying on the front line like a pleb.

I think it got annexed from one of the more recent editions, but they definitely used to have it- curiously as an experimental equipment piece only one guy could get, but there all the same.

Most of the imperium has servitor pilots, or the Adeptus Mechanicus has left careful rules about how to go about abandoning your vehicle so that the Land Raider doesn't flip a bitch and fix itself to fuck your troops.
The IG vehicles with actual pilots are far more durable than their crew. If a Sentinel isn't destroyed outright, you can assume the man inside either died, causing the wreck, or died when the thing fell over, for example.
Tau Pilots likely lack the training to do anything but drive.
An Ork driver isn't fighting when he could be looting the wreckage to come back another day. Honestly it's a wonder ANY of the units transported by a Trukk get to fighting.
Chaos probably refuses to leave until they have vented their frustration on the thing that won't bend to their will.
Eldar, I dunno, maybe vehicles are piloted by soulstones or some shit?
Necrons are integrated into most of their vehicles. They couldn't leave if they wanted to.

>The IG vehicles with actual pilots are far more durable than their crew.

So imperial guard guys just die?

In 9/10 occasions, I'd say yes. Seatbelts cost more than the Guardsman in them.

If you look at the Rhino hatch there's no way a marine can fit his pauldrons through it.