Should space marines really be piloting their aircraft (and ground vehicles)...

What about a chapter dedicated to being fighter pilots? Like marines that sortie against other such vehicles or assist their brothers in ship boarding actions? Is it possible to have top gun marines

in the old days, scouts did that. then GW forgot and started making spess muhreens in ground combat heavy armour pilot vehicles because MUHREENZ LMAO

It would be preferable from a resource standpoint for Marines to not need to pilot their aircraft, but keep in mind that physical endurance matters a fair bit in aircraft combat, and there's not a lot that's going to beat a marine at functioning under high pressure and physical stress.

That way Marine-piloted aircraft can maneuver harder, and faster than those piloted by more squishy races (including normal humans).
It's quite an advantage, so why would you even consider giving that up?

The way I always saw it is that marines are to valuable to risk with anyone other than marines piloting there close support craft. Serfs for large multi crew vessels

I don't see why you can't have scouts driving Rhinos and other tanks.
Flyers would make sense in the way that they can pull off maneuvers that would kill a normal human...if only they didn't look like boxes with engines strapped to them.

Never forget that Tau pilots outmaneuvered Necron pilots, who are hardwired to their machines and have processing-power that makes Eldar look like toddlers. Gonna need the very best to compete with the blue xenos.

Never forget that Tau outadapted a race that is literally adaptation given physical form. Bet Tau women fuck better than Slaanesh too.

Tau are able to throw specialization and technology at any and all problems, especially the tech-development side is a rarity among the other species in the setting.

In any other setting the Tau would be top of the heap, but they're relatively small though definitely ascendant in 40k.

When you are driving your super duper elite corps through infernal conditions in a vehicle worth more than a hive city, you want motherfucking Dominic Toretto on the wheel.
And yes pilots count for the maximum, that is why you have the reserve companies.

in 30k, there were enough of them to probably form a corps of pilot-trained Marines. In 40k, it's a small pool of Techmarines in a Chapter who do the actual piloting. Servitors man sponsons like on Storm Ravena or Land Raiders, but specialists like Techmarines are usually selected. Unless you're a Whiter Scar and can just pilot things as a sixth sense.

In the Ragnar Blackmane books he once wonders how cool would be being a thunderhawk pilot. Then his squad partner tells him that joystick pushing is for losers and that being first wave infantry is the fucking radest.

>9

>"You wanna be one of them pilots? Do you enjoy working a dick? Cus that's what using a joystick may as well be like! Flyings fer pussies, mashing xenos and stomping traitors is where it's at!"

One of the Horus heresy books depicts the 8th legion using mostly normal humans for their space craft pilots and crews (fighters, bombers and capital ships) plus servitors etc. With the chapter system post heresy I can't imagine they have gone and flipped the other way considering the reduction in space marine manpower.

The idea of marines piloting vehicles is pretty retarded, I feel like a writer who goes that way is missing the point.

Space ships were always serf manned except for half a score of officers. Considering the scale of the fleets in HH, the wings of attack craft were probably human piloted too. But thunderhawks are SM piloted. Even the FW model has marines as pilots.

I always thought of Space Marines as too proud to ride in vehicles being piloted by regular humans.

I only ride in buses if the driver is at least an 8/10

I was always a fan of the idea that SM pilots/tank crews were specialy trained chapter serfs with extensive cybernetic modification (similar to the ad mech) to bring their reactions and technology interfacing up to Astartes levels.

We Top Gun now

>Never forget that Tau pilots outmaneuvered Necron pilots, who are hardwired to their machines and have processing-power that makes Eldar look like toddlers. Gonna need the very best to compete with the blue xenos.

It was air-superiority fighters against Necron aircraft, who are noted to not be particularly mobile in the first place and are strike craft over actual fighters. I swear people will completely forget everything about the scenario just to make Tau look better, just like their writers.

Ah yes, outadapted, which totally explains how the Tyranids were constantly adapting to, and beating the Tau during that campaign until they reached the Imperial/Tau warzone and the two decided to work together.

>Bet Tau women fuck better than Slaanesh too.
Someone better test this
I volunteer

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I only ride on buses with no Salamanders on them.

Because everyone knows you need power armor to pilot.

>no qt chapter serf pilot minis

That's a glass window between him and the outside. armor probably helps in case it breaks. Also, if for whatever reason he needs to get out of the vehicle, he won't be able to just slap on power armor. Makes me wonder what their helmet would look like if they weren't wearing power armor though.

Speaking from experience as a soldier, you have to wear that shit even when you're in an cramped armored murder box, especially the helmet.

second

>transports you in and out of the combat zone
>maintains your flyers and armor
>devoted to serving you faithfully
Chapter serfs are the best

Salamanders sit in the back of the Thunderhawk

They did it when they were Legions.

Not to fly it, to survive getting shot at and crashing.
Dress for the fall, not the ride.

sisters should be the ones dropping marines off at the war in the chapter minivan

>Soccer Moms of Battle
The Emperor's Wisdom shines brightly within you, Battle Brother!

Yo skinny bitch, real women have abs!

That's armoured sci-fi glass. Anything that goes through it shouldn't have issues with power armor.

Aren't chapter serfs the ones that didn't make it through the selection?
And no, having no Y chromosome is not a good reason to fail the selection process.

>That's armoured sci-fi glass. Anything that goes through it shouldn't have issues with power armor.
Sure.

The ecclesiarchy considers the astartes to be members of pagan cults, and tolerates their existence only because of their lineage with the emperor.

>Aren't chapter serfs the ones that didn't make it through the selection?
At least in part, but there's really saying they're all failed initiates.

Yeah, chapter serfs are the drop-outs who couldn't make it as astartes, but chapters are also supported by female servants to bang out some new recruits in future generations. Anons will keep conflating them as serfs for some reason.

Yeah if I remember, there's a difference between the "Serfs" who are deliberately attached to a chapter as support staff in battle, and the rest of the population of humans under that chapter's control, like on their recruitment worlds. Serfs can marry and make babbies, so while there would probably be plenty of women surrounding the serfs at one point or another, they aren't themselves Chapter Serfs.

>in the old days
Oh, you mean like how in 2e, if a vehicle went down and you made the roll, the space marine drive could get out and fight on foot?
You are spouting bullshit, user.

Why are space marines piloting a vehicle inherently bad?

If a space marine is a better ground pounder than a guardsmen, why isn't he equivalently better in a combat vehicle?

Because he's a lot better as shock troops, but only slightly better as a pilot.

If a Navy SEAL is better than a marine, why isn't he better in a helicopter?

space marines are certainly excellent pilots, likely superior to any normal human pilot, but I think most anons' problems with it feels like a waste of the marine's time to stick them in a flyer when they could just have a normal human do it and get back to the important work of spit-roasting xenos with their chainsword.

>what is transparent ceramic

Thinking about it, see-through ceramite plates on power armor, making it so you can see all the servomotors insisde, would be cool as fuck.
I bet you'd get all the techpriestesses.

Because autistic anons think that a group designed to excel at all theaters of war should restrict themselves to one of them.
They are simply stupid, and that is really about it.

>Guardsman fights, kill 2 enemiles
>Space Marine fights, kills 20 enemies
>Guardsman pilots, kills 2 tanks, 10 infantry
>Space Marine pilots, kills 20 tanks, 100 infantry.

Any time a Space Marines spend training as a pilot, he's not spending training for ground combat.
Meaning he'll be worse than a regular tactical, so most of his (very rare and expensive) equipment and mutations go to waste.

Unless you want SMarines to do janitor jobs in the fortress-monastery because their superhuman reflexes and bodies make them clean the floor twice as fast as a regular human.

>Guardsman fights, kill 2 enemiles
>Space Marine fights, kills 200 enemies
>Guardsman pilots, kills 2 tanks, 10 infantry
>Space Marine pilots, kills 10 tanks, 100 infantry.

I'm just wondering why they have to wear their power armor while piloting aircraft.

Those big shoulder pads inside a confined cockpit must surely get in the way

This is applying the limited lifespan and capacity of humans to space marines, and exactly why it is wrong.
As though veterans also aren't accomplished pilots and knowledgeable of all parts of the chapter arsenal?
They can hook the vehicle into the armor's ports via the black carapace.

>Gee that boltgun is too expensive to trust to a normal human so we'll put them in this cheap ass land raider while you fight on foot.

They usually don't, servitors and serfs do the bulk of it with Marines stepping in when things are especially hairy.

I always thought it was the chapter serfs. Serfs being a misleading name. Serfs are usually described as being very well trained and equipped by their chapter for their various tasks, especially by normal imperial standards. Also well treated and even well respected within some legions/chapters as an ignoble but fundamentally enabling component of a legion/chapter. I imagine Serfs that are expected to fulfill combat support roles like piloting, logistics and supply , fleet crews, weapon and armor maintenance, would be equipped and trained to support their marines as best as humanly possible. Like squires and men at arms support a knight.

I have no problem with them piloting vehicles.

Since the oldest non-dread alive is 1500 years old, the 'old wolf' is not even 700yo, and brother sergeants usually have two service studs for 100 of service total, I think you greatly overestimate the average lifespan of a Marine.

And if their learning capacities were so great that they could learn everything at the same time (which is a pretty retarded concept), there would be no need for the whole Devastator -> Assault -> Tactical progression.

And since serfs were initially selected for the chapter's recruitment needs. We're talking at the top 1% of a planet, probably catachan-level barbarians.
So no lowly servants by any means.

Their superhuman reflexes and physical augmentations make them superb pilots as a rule, and one-to-one better than any mortal could be (there are exceptions) simply because they can push their bodies and minds harder, farther, and faster than a human can.

G-Forces and solar radiation ain't nothing to fuck with, and there's only so much of that you can really protect against if you're unaugmented.

Given how ludicrously expensive space marines seem to be to train and equip and just how few of them there are they should probably never be doing anything other than line breaking in the middle of an army of regular soldiers or doing concentrated surprise attacks on enemy strongholds.

One large bomb could kill like half a chapter with the tactics they use in the books and on the table. Space marines make almost no sense from an actual tactical standpoint.

High value asset destruction, command decapitation, VIP kill/capture, supply and reinforcement interdiction.

Almost anything outside of the above missions would be wasteful for marines to partake in.

Basically irresistible attacks on the most critical and strategically weighted parts of a conflict.

As the years have gone by it's one of those things that's began to bug me too. And that's before you start counting up vehicle crews, which is 2 Marines each in most cases. Even with heavy use of Servitors and Serfs on starships and such, you're at least going to stick a squad of Marines on the smallest ships, just to keep order and boarding actions.

And I'm one of those folks that agrees that about 100 Marines could take most 'civilized' worlds (without derailing onto that arguments, targeting command and control assets, as well as primary infrastructure, could render a world unable to realistically resist further attacks, at which point most sane people capitulate).

Furthermore, when you look deeper into the lore, especially of the last 3-4 editions, you see that half the First Founding Chapters have been behaving like Legions anyway. From the Ultramarines calling upon all their successors during the First Tyranic War, to the Dangles and Bangles keeping close ties to most of their own out of necessity, due to their respective secrets. While the Imperial Fists regularly get together to test their skills in duels against each other, and have called upon each other for help on several occasions, while the situation with the Black Templars having possibly 8,000 Marines (shutup, it's better that way, since it makes their relatively high-attrition tactics more viable). And the Space Wolves being revealed an edition or two ago to have never broken up and always been around 10,000 Marines

I'm pretty purist about stuff, but I'm fine with things like this because it's a logical explanation to many tricky questions that's been like the elephant in the corner for years. I don't even mind the shit with Abbadon do much anymore, when they decided to retcon in that many of his Black Crusades were about destroying pylons in places other than Cadia, since it also makes the pylons in Cadia not entirely responsible for the whole galaxy getting ripped in two.

>tl;dr
>GW writers have always sucked at math
Though in their defense in some small way, back in the 80's most people thought about millions, like the way we think about billions now. It's hard to explain unless you lived through it.

Best contemporary comparison I have is Game of Thrones, they talk about the crown being in debt for millions of gold, and such. While I'm told the novels knock a 0 or two off the end of all those figures.

What this user says here Let me use some of my /k/ommando training to elaborate. IF some Space Marines had to attack the US (silly example I know, but bear with me, because I'm speaking tactics, not strategy), they wouldn't take on whole infantry divisions or tank brigades on the battlefield, but instead begin to kill the chain of command from the top down, and make heavy use of their superior technology to fight battles on their terms, in places that benefit their capacities the most.

With teleportation technology they could bypass all of the layered defenses of NORAD and destroy it as effectively as any ICBM could, while a drop-pod assault on the Pentagon is just the sort of crazy thing I could see them doing as well, since Space Marines are nothing if not confident

there are plenty of chapters that worship emps as a god. also in case you forgot a space marine primarch is the guy who wrote everything they believe in

Not the most suited for veneration

>tfw the word bearers wrote modern imperial religion

Why do most of the Imperium's anti-air and jets use autocanons and lascannos, even though missiles have outclassed flak cannons in aerial combat for 60 years now?

Because you can't shoot down a hail of bullets or a laser with a laser.

The old pewter Thunderhawk had Space Marine gunners making the heavy bolters, turrets, too.

Most SAM missiles or hell strike missiles can't be shot down, while having vastly greater range than mere lasers or bullets

This is 100% correct and it makes sense that they'd provide support for the chapters, perhaps even in 40k.

30k makes an explicit mention of a super heavy tank still ripping and tearing shit while be piloted by an iron hand serf before finally taken out of action,

That being said, it makes sense that valuable airframes with specific specialtiesmust be piloted by astartes to get the most out of them (and the fact they're considered as relics from the good 'ol days).

This would be especially applicable to space craft defending the fleet and whatnot, aside from that we have machine spirits and our tech-shamans, so I would expect two (or one tech marine) to be able to pilot a predator or rhino by using machine spirit gimmicks.

I've often wondered that. Space Marines are pretty much maximized and specialized for infantry-level fighting to make best use of their abilities.

But vehicle crews and pilots? Why not use a different suite of genetic/nanotech/cybernetic upgrades to literally make better pilots and crews?

Aesthetics my man, that and modern day AA missiles in 40k would immediately be branded as an Abominable Intelligence and mars send assassinations would take place.

I thought crusading chapters already do that by making an excuse that their high casualties and high frequency of warp travel warrants higher recruitment numbers. The Templars and Minotaurs do this all the time.

That sounds like normal grunt talk

Huh. Ya know, that picture could be a way to sneak in "female Space Marines" to make the screamers shut up while still respecting the lore.

In real-life, women actually have the biological advantage in high-G piloting over men, given to the way their musculature and circulation systems are laid out to facilitate childbirth, center of gravity being lower (and therefore markedly closer to the CoG of the aircraft), and their generally smaller size. With the same level of training they can take higher G's for longer periods that the majority of male pilots.

Give them upgrades that enhance vision, blood flow, general toughness and neurological acuity, toss in some skeletal and musculature enhancements and violla. IoM Marine Pilot.

I always assumed the pilots are scouts or neophytes. Technically, the Codex states that a chapter can have as many neophytes in their company as they see fit because they're not considered full members of the chapter yet. Most chapters should just go beyond the mere 100 recruits expected for the 10th company in case they face horrendous losses, which happens a lot to many chapters, that requires replacing their numbers ASAP.

A high-power laser SHOULD be the undisputed king of anti-aircraft gunnery. It's point and click. I don't give a fuck if the pilot is a necron had-wired to the flight computer and hopped up on eversor drugs, it's not reacting faster than light.

Tell that to the Iron Beam system coming online in a couple years. If modern technology can shoot mortars and katyushas off course with a laser, future tech wins with no contest.

Drop pod assault on the pentagon. I imagine a dozen or so drop pods crashing through the building and surrounding area. Some squads secure a landing area for thunderhawk transports to drop a few predators in case the US decides to bring some really heavy firepower. Other squads systematically butcher the occupants. Some terminators teleport into the tunnels beneath to block the underground exits and also butcher the occupants and demo data centers. In 2 hours the whole ordeal is over, the building is a smoldering wreck with a few drop pods remaining (dangerous and still active with their bolters for anyone who approaches) and the space marines are on their retrieval thunderhawks back into orbit.

Basically US military logistics for most branches completely smashed, without leadership, and suffering immediate brain drain and experience loss in an afternoon. Before the armed forces command can restructure, the astartes are already hitting another high value target.

And taken into a whole of Imperial combat strategy, while the Astartes are hitting centers of command and control and severing the arteries of supply, the Guard would be hitting places where military forces are already in deployment, seizing and holding strategic points, and keeping any mobile forces locked down in preparation for strikes from support assets.

It's actually the same sort of strategy and tactics large, professional armies and Marines train for as a baseline. There just hasn't been a war of such scale as to call for it since World War 2. And in that war, the logistics and communications weren't really up to the task of pulling it off.

oh man that means the Primaris are going to be SUPER PILOTS BETTER THAN EVERYTHING and then the Ultra Primaris they release later will be EVEN BETTER THAN THAT OMG

>20,000 drivers

Gotta have transport always ready anons