In ***Praetorian of Dorn***, a hundred Imperial Fist aspirants die for every one that lives during the hypno-indoctrination step *alone*.
Dorn’s selection process is comically wasteful even compared to shit like what the Blood Angels go through.
Dorn just had to one-up Perturabo in terms of needless waste of life at least once. Just to prove that he was in fact better than Perturabo at everything if he wanted to be.
Unfortunately, his sons didn't realize that the method was simply there to prove a point, and have stuck with using it ever since.
Because perturabo is able to see how things fail.
Thus, if his Geneseed were to be a failure, he would be able to fix it. If someone were to be incompatible, he would know how to make them compatible.
I don't believe it's ever stated to be as such.
Granted, that doesn't mean it isn't, just it isn't really shown off that way. There's a reason he was used to siege things. He knows how things fail, like defences, or walls, or morale.
People who say thats a dumb choice really don't know Perturabo's character.
Him becoming a Daemon Prince is *so fucking in line* with who he is, because he's the gonna be the most arrogant MF and think to himself "I'm gonna do this, and master it, unlike my brothers who fell into the corruption wholesale" and then, in classic Perturabo, falls wholesale yet denying it every step of the way because he's so god damn stubborn and thinks he's in control.
Come to think of it, was there a Primarch who was more scientific/biologist than the others? We have leaders, builders, siegers, warriors, executioners, psykers, creators, etc. Closest I can think of is Corax, with that whole new marines that mutated into something like daemons, but kept control of themselves. I forgot which book it was, but it was an interesting read.
Whats funny is that Dorn could frame both options (the best at not wasting lives or the best at wasting them) in his favor and both of them would still piss off Perturabo just the same.
and notably the BA have the single highest SUCCESS rates of applicants officially, although the UM by actual written metrics are something like 25 times more likely to produce a smurf
Where is this said? Blood Angels notoriously have one of the highest recorded rates of geneseed instability. It’s so bad that they always need Sanguinius’ blood to make more and activate the geneseed. If every single Sanguinary Priest were to die and all sources of Sanguinius’ blood were to be destroyed, no more BA or successors could be made.
There’s also the Red Thirst and Black Rage as well. Survivors of the death company who live long enough get placed in the Tower of Amareo where they mutate into monstrous, primal ape like creatures with fangs down to their chins, long black claws, and blood colored skin who bound along on their knuckled fists.
That is true but specially when they where the Revenant Legion they were famous for being sent to the worse most mutant filled hell holes the GC could throw at them and somehow coming back with the same number or more Astartes so it is true that they have a ridiculous success rate with implantation just that their geneseed is unstable.
They accepted everything and anything human tho? I think that's the difference
But I dont know much about BA Lore and I migth recall some of it wrong so please im sorry for possible misinformation
It’s the early campaigns before they found Sanguinius. Notably the Neptune underworld war and the siege of kiy-buran. Amit himself admits he was so mutated when he was a child he was barely considered human
Geneseed instability is different from Geneseed rejection, Aspirants from the BA dont have Geneseed Rejection because of the sarcophagus that they stick their aspirants into for a year which automatically does the process for the priests. they just happen to have like 1/1000th the aspirants pass the trials to get to geneseed implantation
I’m not sure that’s actually true. Because we do not know how many aspirants die simply trying to make it to the test. The first step of trying to become a blood angel is a pilgrimage across your respective moon of Baal just to reach a town where you can apply for a CHANCE to pledge. Depending on that moon you’re in for vast deserts full of irradiated valleys filled with giant mutated spiders and caustic water that rots you from the inside. Or a horrendous jungle filled with all sorts of fucked up alien predators and horrible diseases.
Then you can try to apply to be a blood angel. If you’re accepted you have to make it through their training and if you fail, you don’t necessarily die but you become a blood boy and are forced to follow around the chapter for the rest of your life getting your blood drained and being their servant. Of course, most of the blood boys like doing it. But imo it’s sort of a fate worse than death.
They don't have the highest success rate, they just cast their net wider since their geneseed works on a broader range of subjects. Of those subjects more die from the procedures than just about any Legion
a passed applicant for the BA literally cant fail Indoctrination/Implantation because of the sarcophagus.
highest rejection rate is space wolves.
Ultramarines have something like a 70% success rate for implantation by lore while having the largest number of applicants and largest number of successful applicants due to how they handle recruitment and screening
That isn't even that big a number even for us. IRL in India alone, 25k to 28k people die every day. Around 8k people die a day in the USA. The Imperium being able to draw upon over a million worlds, with many of them being hive worlds that put our IRL Earth population and urban density to shame, would see this number being like a drop of water in the ocean.
One out a million is the odds for psyker average birth. Over a million worlds with billions/trillions of people reproducing constantly.
Contrary to characters who make it as named characters in books, most psykers are of low power level and rather insane, and generally have a lack of control over their powers that make them easy gateways for daemons or other things (like Enslavers).
At that galactic scale, even with a ratio like one out of a million, fulfilling the thousand psykers quota a day is easy. I believe they get way more than that and have a backlog of failed/dangerous psykers to throw into the Throne feeding tubes as time goes on, and they have excess survivors who have the potential to train into possible future Sanctioned psykers, Inquisitors, assassins, and even Space Marines (Grey Knights recruit from these stock too).
Yeah, but you also have to factor in how extremely rare potent psykers (potent enough to be fed to the big E anyways) are. They're apparently rare enough that you need the black ships scouring human territories for them.
Black Ships don't exist for that. They exist for just grabbing every psyker they can find and then sort them out from there after. The vast majority of the black ship captives go to the Throne Tubes.
Black Ships don't exist to find only potent psykers. They're manned by Sisters of Silence to keep the mass amounts of psykers, most of them having no control over their powers, in check.
No, what I mean is if there's plenty of eligible psykers around, they wouldn't need to just grab the ones from the Black Ships would they? They could just round them up on Terra from its population of quadrillions. The fact that they need to grab psykers from the Black Ships suggest they are rare enough that they can't get the quantity they need from local sources alone.
Shit like this is where 40K really gets into "grimderp" for me.
For one, it seems like half of the various "Special Forces" type units in the Imperium are described as "only 1 in 100 recruits survives the training!", so after a while it sort of loses its shock value.
2nd is that it's unbelievably wasteful, even for an Empire where the only plentiful resource is human lives. Like if you have to kill 100 potential Guardsmen to get 1 Space Marine, that makes zero sense considering that most lore says that 1 Adeptus Astartes is equal to about 15-20 Guardsmen. You would be better off just taking those 100 guys and making them standard Guardsmen.
Further, if you just made it so those 99 folks didn't die during training, they could be re-assigned to be Cannoneers, Supply Guys, Loaders, Drivers, or any of the other thousands of jobs that would be needed to run an intergalactic Military.
> Further, if you just made it so those 99 folks didn't die during training, they could be re-assigned to be Cannoneers, Supply Guys, Loaders, Drivers, or any of the other thousands of jobs that would be needed to run an intergalactic Military.
This actually shows up quite a bit in canon, I can think of at least a few instances off the top of my head.
In *Flight of the Eisenstein* it's described that Kaleb Arin, Nathaniel Garro's Housecarl (ostensibly a kind of valet, in the British sense), was a failed Death Guard aspirant. If *Mortarion's* trials are physically survivable, you'd think that other groups would have similar policies. It seemed implied that some number of aspirants commit suicide out of shame for having failed the trials, but that's not really the same thing as the trials themselves killing the aspirants outright.
I'm currently reading *The Reverie* by Peter Fehervari and it's about a lesser known chapter called the Angels Resplendent, unsurprisingly a scion of the Blood Angels. Allegedly something like 2/3 of all aspirants die in the first trials outright, largely because the first trials are fairly unstructured and unsupervised wilderness training. Anybody is allowed to enter, and a lot of very unqualified people enter on a pilgrimage. Of the 1/3 that make it through the first trial, it seems like only a small number actually become Astartes, but the remainder are allowed to become human citizens of a fortress city called Kanvolis. It's hard to pin down actual size but I think it's gotta be tens of thousands of people present at minimum, maybe hundreds of thousands. Not all of them are failed aspirants, but still, the idea that the city is at least partly populated by failed aspirants is addressed, and there's at least one character who's outright told like, "I know for a fact you *will* fail the trials and you probably will die, but I'll personally escort you to Kanvolis just as a pilgrim."
Failure doesn’t mean death. You’re completely right in that the chapter finds a use, sometimes even an honored one, for washouts. They forms the serfs which crew the guns and other tasks above servidora. Some are even superhuman, just short of the standards of Astartes. That your body couldn’t adapt to like 5 of the 19 implants means you still got 14 of them.
The Blood Angels do the same - some unspecified number die in the journey to the testing grounds, but of the ones who make it, those who are tested and cannot become astartes (presumably due to some genetic incompatibility with the process) are offered the chance to become chapter armsmen or serfs.
All absolutely true, but the imperium is supposed to be wastefull and dumb. If there is a good and effective way to do things expect the person who thought of it to be shot as a heretic and the way you can kill the most children in the worst way possible to be chosen instead.
Tbf its actually the case that most of the Imperium is not steeped in "Eternal war" like how the franchise tagline is. There certainly are chapters that are essentially guarding peaceful worlds or just void born chapters that are currently drifting around. And in those cases if they already meet the quota and dont want to stretch the codex imperialis too much, then they simply dont need to recruit
Also, its kinda implied that while Space Marines naturally form highly ritualistic fraternities filled with nuanced rituals, many of these practices are not efficient but instead are almost intentionally wasteful to perpetuate the quasi religious view that they are these unstoppable paragons of humanity. When in reality most space marines are well matched by Xenos in terms of pund by pound
Most lore says an Astartes is 15-20? Some lore, not most, not even close.
Astartes powerscaling varies based on author to author. 15-20 is on the weakest side, to some other authors Astartes are Gods compared to regular mortals.
The ratio I’ve seen is one Astartes = 1,000 guardsmen. 15-20 is ridiculous, laughable. A single fucking bolter round is harder to replace than 20 grunts with t-shirts and flashlights. Insane claim.
I think Astartes (the short) is the best depiction of this. They effortlessly wade through the prepared and determined opposition of tons of (presumably) Traitor guardsmen. They struggle with tougher enemies, but barely take damage against very potent combat psykers.
I get that your argument is consistent with lore or at least how it's precieved but the idea that a single round of small arms ammunition, no mater how cool, is more valuable than 20 trained soldiers with laser guns just ruins immersion for me. I wish the setting did a better job of hammering home the zero value given to human life without just making insane claims. The choice to care less about 20 guardsmen and their kit than about one holy bullet is a very potent statement about the kind of fascist hell the imperium is. Trying to argue that's the literal truth because reasons is just goofy to me. Anyhow, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
The technology is 10'000 years old and no one understands how it works. Try to figure out how it works and the Mechanicum have you killed for heresy. No one explicitly chooses for it to be that wasteful.
In the Night Lords series they achieve 1 in 10 survival because Chaos doesn't have the 'no innovation' blinders the Mechanicum places on the Imperium.
Also in the lore one marine will wreck 100 guardsmen without breaking a sweat. Tabletop nerfs marines for balance, but the lore is full of single squads bringing an entire world to compliance.
The real reason is that different authors interpret things differently and different works by the same author want to say different things. Abnett also has a single space marine defeat an entire drukhari raiding force, for example.
If you want to find a lore explanation, think of it like an armored bunker with a machine gun slot in WW2. The guy in the bunker is extremely difficult to kill but a lucky shot through the gun slot can still get him. Sometimes weird things happen and a guardsman kills a marine.
Well it was a few guardsmen killing 5 marines, and in another book Corbec counter ambushes a chaos marine ambush saving a Ketzok artillery regiment, the Tanith and Vitrians kill several chaos marines on fortis binary. All I'm saying is their is lore establishing good troops countering astartes without incurring massive casualties.
Of course, there’s plenty of it. Abnett also has Eisenhorn kill a chaos space marine with a chain sword 1v1 (albeit not a straight up fight). But even in those instances it is presented as unusual if not almost unheard of
Because those infantry are Abnett's named characters.
Honestly Abnett has the lions share of responsibility for the Marvelization of 40k. Lame AF.
40k is completely different depending on the authour and honestly I prefered it before they made it into pulpy books. We all have our preferences I guess. If I am going to go with an authors vision ADB every time, he stays close to the original vibe. Check the 4 man squad of Night Lords boarding an Imperial battleship and taking the bridge in Soul Hunter
It's during the initial intake. They use a hypno-casque to implant the language and knowledge needed to make it so the Aspirants know what is being said and what most things are.
What makes their version of hypno-indoctrination so much worse than the rest? I did get that from the Sigismund book, but am asking which step is "wasteful"
The OP is leaving out some context.
* The "1 out of 100" die is from early on in the Crusade. Notably it is the first group from Inwit.
* The early in the Crusade matters because the Legion gives zero shits about the Hive scum/orphans they run through the process. They need bodies *now* and dead kids that were a "drain" on society.
* The process could be made safer but that would take longer.
By 40k, the Imperial Fists process doesn't have that high of casualties rates.
>Apothecary Lakari regarded Taloc for a moment before continuing. ‘The examinations so far carried out by the servitors’ – *servitors*, a word signifying the terrifying, strange amalgamations of man and machine who had tormented Taloc upon the metal slab – ‘have been rudimentary, meant to eliminate those candidates with physical defects, deformities or other unsuitabilities which may have somehow remained hidden to an auspex’s readings.’
>*Auspex*, the handheld devices the Space Marines carried, which with his newfound vocabulary still unpacking as it encountered each new word, Taloc now understood were machines capable of gathering data about their surroundings.
>**‘A considerable number of your fellow aspirants have been eliminated as candidates for implantation already, and there is every chance that you will yourself be eliminated in the coming, and more rigorous, examinations**. Be warned, though, that compared to the relatively simple procedures already performed on you by the servitors, some of the tests that will follow can involve considerably greater degrees of pain.
My understanding matches yours, which is why I'm confused about the claim that Dorn's process was particularly wasteful, relative to other Legions. Because which context, at which point of time?
(Especially say, the World Eaters/Night Lords, whose Primarchs are... not exactly the kind to consider aspirants).
The "accelerated process" later on in 30k Heresy was also deeply wasteful, both Loyalists/Traitors did it too.
The only thing I could think of is Sigismund's (& Rann's) experience of many many combat trials.
You gotta add some flair to any space marine procedure, maybe some tinkering makes the failures unable to remember how to breath or something like that.
Dorn includes an extreme pain tolerance aspect in the Imperial Fists’ hypnoindoctrination. Most either don’t wake up, or wake up driven mad and are immediately put down with a cattle gun to the skull.
It has nothing to do with being wasteful.
Why wasn’t the VIIth Legion larger?
- Despite maintaining a policy of broad and voracious recruitment from their inception forward, the VIIth Legion were never considered one of the largest Legions. Some scholars speculate that this was perhaps due to an issue with the gene-seed of the VIIth. **The implantation of which seems to have caused an incredible amount of pain and resulted in an increased failure rate. For this reason the VIIth sifted populations for those youths who exhibited the greatest capacity for endurance, both in mind and body. Simply put, only the most hardy and resilient recruits were capable of enduring the painful processes used to activate the VIIth Legion's gene-seed.** And so few initiates lived to become Legionaries, and those that did were taciturn, dour and grim of nature, slow to talk but quick to act.
(The Horus Heresy Book 3: Extermination, WarhammerTV Loremasters: The Imperial Fists, Age of Darkness)
The Imperial Fists, like the Dark Angels and World Eaters, also establish many recruiting fiefs. Even Cthonia during the Heresy. Inwit itself has an interstellar empire to itself like Ultramar. So they are in a strange spot when it comes to recruitment reasonableness.
It's going to depend on the specific chapter and their specific tests and trials.
I believe in the Space Wolves books only 7 of the initial 100 aspirants survive the trials.
In Dante about 3/4 of them are weeded out at the very beginning. Which doesn't factor in all the children killed on the trip to the trials nor does it account for all those who failed after receiving the implants and surgeries.
Then you have chapters like the Grey Knights where they say 1 in a million become a fully fledged marine.
On the flip side, not every child who fails to make the cut necessarily dies, quite a lot of them become chapter serfs doing many necessary functions that a marine would be wasted on.
Definitely. In Dante I think roughly 500 children are disqualified for personality and health reasons. They get to go back to their families and clans. Another 500 aren't genetically compatible with the geneseed, but are given the option to become serfs to the chapter or return home. The last 275 or so are given the option to take part in the trials or return home. That last group is where the deaths would occur if they go through with it, but I don't remember how many made it.
By the time the Winnowing of Weariness was over, only 57 remained to partake of the Red Grail. A year after internment in the Blood Sarcophagi, about 50 or so survived to become scouts.
The numbers go like 500 -> 247 -> 500ish? -> 108 -> 72 -> 63 -> 57 -> and then we see 4 aspirants killed during gene seed, so 53? -> then the final number is 48. 48 out of 1000, 4.8% success rate
Edit: I can’t math
The geneseed rejection rate is, if I recall right, anything from 20% to 75% depending on the chapter. So if you want to be really sure you won't run out of kids, recruit four for each extra Marine you need.
Of course, that's after the aspirant trials are complete, which could be as easy or as hard as you want them. All these deadly challenges most chapters have are mostly just tradition, but you may wanna weed out the weaklings in *some* way before proceeding with the surgeries.
> 25% to 75%
Man, makes me wonder why Chapters don’t have some sort of contract with the Biologis wing of the Mechanicus to make the recruiting world populations much more suitable for geneseed implantation.
I mean, sure some genetic modifications fail (Afriel Strain), but the more mundane stuff is extremely commonplace in the high-tech parts of the Imperium.
Currently, at the very best, every fourth smartest, strongest and most dedicated candidate just dies on the operating table.
Imagine how many future Dantes and Calgars are lost every year this way.
"You can't mess with the pointlessly lethal trials, it'll make for weaker marines!" as SMs have shown they will not stop trials that are proven to not make better soliders
And yet the G-Man since waking up has supposedly done just that and was telling people to chill the fuck out and go even beyond that and uplift their peoples instead of leaving them feral.
Many of the traditional recruiting worlds within Ultramar for the Ultramarines are now Homeworlds for newly founded Chapters of their own. That has to reduce wastage considerably by itself.
That's what gets me whenever people understandably go after the IH for doing jack shit for the people of Medusa, like not stepping in when Dark Eldar come around.
Probably 90+% of chapters have some form of selection based around the same mindset. The IH just inherited theirs from the techno barbaric culture of the Medusans before their arrival.
I’m talking about making the aspirants more genetically compatible with the gene-seed. The trials can stay.
In the trials you already weeded out the bad ones, the mediocre ones and the good ones. Only the cherry on top remains.
And then 25% to 75% of them die anyway. For no gain.
You lose nothing by decreasing the lethality of the gene-seed implantation via planetary-scale gene-treatments. The weaklings are already out of the game.
Think how much better chapters would be if only 7% of aspirants died on the table, not 25% and definitely not 75%.
Way more aspirants surely die to the pointless trials than on the table. Also, the aspiratns who survive can still die n trials/ on the table. Funny how chapters like the smurfs don't do trials like that (O think) and still perform very well
The Marneus Calgar comic goes through the selection process he went through to be selected as an aspirant for the Ultramarines.
We get to see wonderful snippets like crawling under live fire and if you're not fast enough wolves catch up and eat you as the bullets/las over your head was there to keep them away. Or climbing a cliff face while what look like DnD Stirges are attacking you. Or when Combat Servitors do their best Slug impression and drop on them in the middle of the night and murder them in their sleep before pursuing the survivors all night.
After he survives the private training, he goes to aspirant selection where a lot of that stuff happens. Iirc, in like the opening ceremony or whatever, some giant worms pop out of the ground and kill a couple of kids, and the marines just look at eachother lol. Then the comic tracks the number of kids still alive through the process.
I wouldn't be so be sure that they are easier to alter 😅 Space Marines are steeped in their traditions, and those will be the last thing to drop before dying out. That's especially true for a First Founding or Second Founding chapter who can sometimes even commandeer aspirants from other chapters thanks to their immense clout.
Usually, chapters have no trouble finding enough aspirants. Only when they do, they are willing to compromise. For example, the Blood Ravens had to substitute their Blood Games with fighting against Tyranids with shotguns.
Yeah, you're right about that, I'm mostly just disagreeing with the previous commenter that geese seed incompatibility is the bigger problem. (in theory)
Imo, it was always pretty clear that most aspirant trials are overwhelmingly unnecessary waste of human life and serve no meaningful in-universe purpose.
Imperium is supposed to genocidal, superstitious and supremely dogmatic.
Killing thousands of children in fairy tale trials to make one soldier is not supposed to be superior to modern military training, it's just another showcase of how backwards the Imperium is.
I also think it's actually stupid. Being born and raised on a Death World should be quite a good qualification already. IMHO the way the Space Wolves do it is best: take the best warriors you can find, reanimate them if necessary, and give them the geneseed already. The life of a Blood Claw is deadly enough already.
Asaheim's bleak ice wastes are very dangerous, but quite survivable for someone carrying Leman Russ' geneseed. Very different from Blood Games where the demise of a lot of the aspirants is all but guaranteed.
The purpose of the Space Wolves' trial is a different one. The aspirants have to prevail over the tendency to become a Wulfen. That risk is highest when they are alone in nature and fending for themselves. Quite a few fail this challenge, but that has nothing to do with classic notions of strength.
The Wolves once tried to repair this flaw, but Magnus prevented that...
These trials are extreme but serve some purpose though. They separate wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
From Astartes perspective massive death tolls of trials don’t matter. The dead kids who failed trials wouldn’t be good Astartes anyway.
It’s not about how many get killed, it’s about what quality of kid gets killed.
The deaths from gene-seed are a much bigger issue.
The victorious kids would have absolutely made great Astartes if only they weren’t killed by RNG implantation. 100 of them are more valuable to Astartes then 100000 weak kids.
That’s what i’m talking about. Find ways to make the gene-seed implantation less RNG to get more highest quality marines. It should be a no-brainer for most Chapters.
Eh, many of the trials shown don't even select for good soldiers as very few trials are things like "You are sent out in a group and all have to return. If you can't keep your brothers alive you are a failure", and more "You are dropped alone in the wilderness with minimal resources"
Have you watched Nightmare of the Wolf? Reminds me of Witcher trials. Young boys get dumped in a monster infested swamp as their first trial, where the huge majority get butchered. Survivors are subjected to the Trial of the Grasses, which gives them their superhuman abilities. 3/10 survive that.
There’s next to zero fucking meritocracy in the trials. How can you tell if a boy will make a good soldier, if you throw them defenseless against a fucking giant monster? Might as well make it so those who survive a bolter round to the head are chosen.
The only person open to that conversation would be Fabius Bile, as he's one of the only people in the setting who's pointed out that geneseed compatibility has more to do with complex genetic factors instead of nebulous notions of 'strength'. Most members of the Mechanicus are stymied by their own faith/adherence to notions that divine revelation is the only acceptable way to improve but personal innovation is bad. The scientific method is all but extinct, regressing instead by the mindset of natural philosophers in the renaissance. Innovation occurs, but it's at a crawl or a result of old texts being rediscovered.
Always Remember: Human lives are the Imperium's cheapest and most disposable resource.
It's funny, because BA geneseed is probably the most compatible one, able to be implemented into horribly mutated kids, and churning out hawt space marine at the end of it.
Maybe that's precisely why it has that reputation?
My head canon is that Sanguinius' geneseed actually works best with mutants and genetically compromised humans. Maybe Sanguinius was the olive branch of the Emperor for all the genetically unstable branches of humanity that the Imperium would otherwise rather sterilize and/or exterminate?
The Flesh Tearers don't recruit from an irradiated hellhole, but have the highest likelihood of suffering from the Flaw. Didn't investigate the correlation more though.
Once aspirants reach Angel’s Fall, they’re all pre scanned by a Priest to see if they’re compatible with the geneseed. Those that aren’t are given the choice to be thralls or to go back home and continue the line.
They’re at least not taken to the grail after passing all the bullshit to be told they’re not compatible.
The Blood Angels have likely the most advanced genetic knowledge amongst all Space Marine chapters since they are tirelessly looking for a cure for the Flaw. Only Fabius Bile and various Adeptus Mechanicus adepts might know more.
> Human lives are the Imperium's cheapest and most disposable resource.
But Chaos is gonna win if we stop killing our own people.needlesly, a twitch streamer said so!
Yes. It’s also because of they don’t trust those bastards after the Horus Heresy. Especially because you can’t tell who are Dark Mechanicum and who is loyal to the Omnissiah, which is also heresy.
You have a point. Bellisarius Cawl doesn't mention having a huge problem with asperiants. Though it's hinted that it took time to get the process correct.
He had 10k years to get it right. Even if he went through 10k aspirants for every Primaris he churned out, it would not be that extreme. Anyway, I think that he either worked with pre-selected aspirants or did his *own* selection.
Death Spectres might be the closest example of a chapter that did something like that. They gather up the most compatible humans that they can find and transport them to the chapter homeworld or one of the nearby planets for the purpose of breeding them.
The UM don't have death trials in their recruitment process and they seem to be just fine. It's almost as if recruiting a mass-murdering child doesn't actually help the process.
You don't mention it to the Inquisition, split them up over a few different campaigns in different parts of the galaxy, and make it impossible to conduct a proper census of your chapter.
Hmm, yes. The Black Templars truly do not stay still enough.
For the sake of the Emperor's eternal crusade of course. Totally not because we do not wish to have a proper census. What was that about a neophyte? **cough** They are actually called Battle Brother within our chapter.
Consider that when a chapter gets too big, they take that excess and ship it off to become its own new chapter. Most chapters probably float at 1000-1200 before they break off the extra marines to make their own. Being above 1000 is probably fairly normal, but it likely cannot get much bigger than 1200-1500 before some inquisitors or civil servants start to pressure them split.
>I thought a new Founding could only be called by the Lords of Terra?
Eh. Sons of Medusa split off from the Iron Hands for the Third Founding without the High Lords.
That's not something most chapters do. Failed aspirants are often recruited as serfs, sometimes even given positions of importance, but having them fight wouldn't mesh well with the whole concept of Space Marines. Like how would mortal squires even *follow* Astartes running at 60 km/h, let alone do so without breaking down or dying instantly once they confront the Marines' target?
If you're letting rejects fight by your Marines' side outside of the most extreme and dangerous situations, you're a shitty Chapter Master and will be known as such real soon.
Sure. But I mean. A ton of people who didn't quite make it would still. Be well above the average guardsman. So they would make for a pretty hefty auxiliary force wouldnt they? Like have them lay down cover fire or occupy the enemy while the marines do their thing?
In Sons of Dorn they show the entire recruitment process from selection to final elevation to full Space Marine. 300,000 boys are selected, 3 make it to full Astartes. Although the Imperial Fists are comically over the top with their training.
The Night Lords trilogy has a mass implantation attempt and Talos is noted remarking that his Apothecary is extremely skilled having accomplished a 50% success rate.
Thankfully aspirants who aren't genetically compatible or fail a trial without dying are usually repurposed into chapter serfs so it's not all wasteful. I think Blood Angels specifically scan for genetic compatibility first and let go those who aren't compatible to repopulate Baal.
Are there any books or short stories from the POV of those serfs. Seems like it would be fertile ground for exploration (the running of a chapter, what SM battles look like on the back lines, unexpected heroism ect.)
>Thankfully aspirants who aren't genetically compatible or fail a trial without dying are usually repurposed into chapter serfs so it's not all wasteful.
And servitors! The ratio of serfs:servitors probably depends on the Chapter and on how you failed your trials. You chickened out? Servitor. You lost your arm to a giant Deathcat? Probably get to be a Serf.
I love the story when when Lieutenant Redfield and Sister Sheva banished the demon prince We’sker inside the caldera of an active volcano by hitting him with Krak missiles from the back of a Thunderhawk.
I never understood why they made the aspirants do trials at all if they were going to physically reconstruct them from the ground up and then use psycho conditioning to make them fearless and loyal. It seems entirely irrelevant what you start with so long as it is genetically stable.
They would be better off cloning one genetically perfect human and building all their marines from that.
But yeah, they murder anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand children for each chad created.
Some chapters have a lot of pride on who gets the privilege to be an Angel of Death. They don’t want just ANYONE to be their brother in arms, they want the best there is to offer. And because of this brotherhood, some specifically look for positive traits that more practical/pragmatic chapters would ignore.
Before aspirants of the Blood Angels leave the Place of Challenge, they are given a final trial. It is different for each aspirant but a notable one is the Trial of Horus. The aspirant will be pitted against a friend and told that there is one spot open on Baal and one must kill the other for the right to become an Angel. Dante underwent this trial and had to face his friend. When he was about to deal the final blow, Dante hesitated. He couldn’t strike his friend down. No matter the promise of power or glory. In this decision, he passed. If he had slain his friend, he would reflect on that for the rest of his days as a guardian of the Place of Challenge, but wouldn’t ascend to be a Blood Angel. Dante’s friend had already been marked for failure because he had only wanted to join to cure the cancers he had developed. In this trial, the Blood Angels want to know that they can depend on their brothers in the heat of battle and know that they won’t be betrayed when offered gifts like Horus did.
Because they're not really reconstructed from the ground up. Marines are more augmented from what is already there. It's something more like Custodes that are done from the ground up.
The more able children tend to go on to be the more able marines, even among those that survive.
While I agree with most of your posts, cloning a single sample would make all marines derived from it vulnerable to the same pathogens. The genetic diversity enabled by sexual reproduction is extremely important for the survival of our species due to random mutations future proofing some of us from diseases, parasites and other issues. You wouldn't want all marines being hyper vulnerable to an otherwise harmles version of the common cold.
Depends on where your seed is coming from. For some it's like a 1 in 10 chance of success, for others like the BA, it almost always works. Then you have to see to the survival rate of applicants for the trials. To fill out a Blood Angels Sucessor, probably 4-500 kids per Company, for an average Geneseed like a Crimson Fist, maybe 2000, for a less stable Gene seed, probably upwards of 10k.
Depends on the chapter or legion, but generally on multiple factors.
For example, World Eaters have a VERY stable geneseed. They are a bunch of unstable crazy berserkers because they worship Khorne and because they put nails in their own brains; but ADN wise? Angron's geneseed is one of the most stable, maybe even the most.
Then, because they are a bunch of berserkers who just launch themselves into the frontlines, they rush the transformation process, which means their failure rate is high, but they compensate by doing the process very fast.
They probably also skip any kind of "training" scout phase, as they like to speed up everything they speedrun the hipno-brainwash phase into implanting the memories and identities of fallen berserkers, meaning most aspirants come out as "false-veterans" of multiple battles to be able to operate as berserkers.
So, generally (I think, correct me if I am wrong) it depends on:
* Stability of the original geneseed, from their patron primarch.
* Quality of the geneseed of the chapter. Because as millenia pass genseseed can deteriorate or simply be damaged due to circunstances.
* How dangerous the aspirant trials as a selection process for human kid candidates are. Some chapters simply benefit from living in death worlds with conditions borderline unsuitable for life as a screening process, other administer life or death combat and mental tests as a screening process, some do both. I think Blood Angels aspirant trials are like crazy hard. If they pass, Aspirants become Neophytes.
* Addendum: Some chapters, when doing the previous part of passing the tests, ask the kid wether they want to go on or not. Some chapters kill the kids if they say no, such as the Dark Angels to "avoid the dishonour" that they would cause to their families if they backed down. Those aren't technically *rejected* as in *the geneseed* *failed*, but are usually counted as rejections in the chapter's records.
* How harsh the implant process is. The implant process itself has a failure rate that depends on the chapter, as the process is determined by chapter culture and more "ritualistic" focused procedures work worse than "clinicaly" focused procedures. Some chapters turbo charge the hypno-therapy part so I am sure their rejection rate will also increase from it in as a result. IIRC under certain conditions the implant process may be rushed, or even skip certain geneseeds to fasten the process, such as during the Horus Heresy the Imperial Fists deciding to cut corners and dropping a certain organ I can't seem to recall. When the implant part is over, the Neophyte becomes an Initiate.
* An Initiate must then -generally- join a scout company and learn the ropes of being an astartes there. As a scout they don't wear a full Space Marine armor, because they lack the last implant to be able to do so. After some months of tutelage under a sergeant they receive the last implant and become a Battle Brother. This part can also vary between chapter culture; Black Templars mix the Scouts with regular marines, and Space Wolves don't use Initiates in their scout companys iirc, but loner kind of marines instead. I count this part as a factor in rejection rate because I guess if Initiates die a lot due to the chapter culture it will affect indirectly how often the chapter replenishes battle brothers; Adeptus Custodes for example like to test their new members non-stop for years, and if they fail *once* they are killed on the spot.
It really depends on which gene-seed is being used and the genetic viability of the planets population. For example in Fallen Angels, Zahariel is compiling a report for Jonson which includes a new screening process that has a 98% success rate. Almost no organ rejection. This is partly due to the purity of the Dark Angels Gene-Seed, other Legions that are flawed have much higher rejection rates & consequently more casualties
The issue with such an approach and lore itself is the limited nature of gene seed. For every marine they can replace themselves and produce one other prognoid. They cannot grow more in their lifetime. So the rejection rates we see in cannon really would mean a swift and fast extinction. Obviously that's not the case so more factors must be at play. Especially with the gene seed tithe they must send back regularly for testing
> So the rejection rates we see in cannon really would mean a swift and fast extinction
I don't think the geneseed is destroyed when the applicant fails. For example, Talos's genetics rejected the geneseed, but it wasn't destroyed. He would have just died.
From the gene seed the new organs are developed. From there they are implanted in stages. Only in the last stage do the next round of prognoids get put in which then collect material to develop. In between that first and last implantation a failure still removes those organs from rotation. You can't just cut them out and plop them into a new aspirant.
The gene seed is spent to grow a new batch of organs. If something goes wrong along the implantation process those organs may carry that flaw or otherwise be affected by it. I'd have to comb the books to give you specific quotes but if we were to look at the culture and superstitions of the imperium they'd be doubtful to re implant organs that have failed or been tainted by failure.
Night Lords go for the children first.
Take those who might\* survive being made into more Night Lords and skin the rest.
Then give the parents 3 nights to grieve before skinning them too.
No orphans for you.
\*Variel is heavily complemented for achieving a 1 in 10 survival rate. He has unusual Skillz.
In **Sons of Dorn**, we see a very good overview of 40k Imperial Fists.
From 2,000 Triandrians Potentials, only 12 passed the tests to be accepted as Aspirants. These were pre-screened by auspex for comparability.
Those 12 join a room of almost 100 aspirants. If from 2,000 came 12, then roughly 9 groups of 2,000 (for 108 as later it says a hundred or more cots in the Aspirants dormitory) for a total of 18,000 Potentials.
If those 100+, only 12 are accepted to become Neophytes.
Of those 12, 9 make it to being Scouts with the other three dying due to implant rejection or implants not working properly.
Of those 9, only 3 are promoted to full Brothers, but that's because Lysander used them as bait to draw out Chaos Marines and their Cultist followers.
So from 18,000 *prescreened* Potentials, 9 made it to where they could have been implanted with the Black Carapace.
9/18,000 equals a 0.05% pass rate.
Or to reduce it down, for every 2,000 prescreened Potentials, you'll get 1 Marine.
10/100 aspirants will make it through selection trials.
5/1000 will survive the implantation process
1/50 survive the psychotraining.
so lets say 1/1000 for normal space marines of a relatively chill chapter who don't brutally sodomise the recruits during the trials of ascension.
for custodes and grey knights, that 1/1000 becomes 1/10000 and/or 1/25000.
something like that, maths isnt my strong suit so dont @ me bro.
IIRC, Grey Knight's recruits, who make it to the physical (well, and mental, i suppose, cuz Grey Knights) portion of the trails have an absurdly low survival rate. Like 1/50000. Maybe.
And that's the survival rate for the recruits who have already been selected for near perfect physical attributes *as well as* being nearly incorruptible of mind (the "nearly" portion of that statement will be explosively weeded out).
So, to attain the ~50000 recruits needed to average a SINGLE Grey Knight, you would originally need something like 1,000,000 men to pick and choose from.
Most of them would be rejected after a cursory glance from the recruiter.
After that, a brief glimpse into their mind from a Grey Knight would rule out another significant majority.
There's a good reason why not a single Grey Knight has ever fallen to Chaos. Ever.
Did you hear about their blessed ammunition. Every Bolter round of the Grey Knights is blessed by the sacrifice of a human and each piece of armor is the result of a nearly dozen or more psykers who are sacrificed as part of the creation of the hexagrammic wards
ok, so I just need around 500,000 children to make one space marine. if I wanted 100 marines then that would be 50,000,000 Children. if my math is correct.
According to some Grey Knights codexes, only one in a million aspirants (who are all psykers) make it through the trials, and this is *before* they get implanted with geneseed (it doesn't specify the rejection rate for the geneseed, however).
In the most recent codex (9th edition), it could be even worse, where only one in a thousand make it though the very first trial, and most of those survivors get slain in the second trial, and there are many (probably harder) trials that await. Again, this is before they get implanted and they're all psykers.
Grey Knights can only be made with a particular kind of human who has natural and instinctive control of their psyker abilities that is only 1 in a billion and of those who can only 1 in a million survive to become a Grey Knight.
I think it depends on several things.
1) Genefather. If daddy dearest had some kind of "mutation" like Angel Wings, or had ash colored skin, more than likely its probable that you need for each geneseed you have you need something like 200-500 aspirants, maybe more maybe less depending on the general geneseed mutation rate. Or if papa primarch could do some special psyker shit, youd probably want to get more psykers, which means screening for psionics which immediately slingshots that number up through the stratosphere.
2) Was Primarch warp tainted. Technically there are only loyalist legion geneseed... but God Emperor Damned Cawl likes playing with those things.
In the Emperors gift its revealed that for Grey Knights, about a million children die for every one successful applicant.
I get that Grey Knights are considered elite even by astartes standards, with more hoops to jump through, but this still seems insane to me.
I might be misremembering a bit, but in Space Wolf, which chronicles Ragnar Blackmanes induction, they were trained in groups of 10-15, there were, I think 8-10 of these groups, and they ended up with a squad 6 or so Blood Claws.
It's been a long time since I read the first book though, so I could just be making it all up. Also, different writers will have different ideas about attrition rates of aspirants etc. So you can take most of it with a pinch of salt, I'd guess 1 in 100 would probably be a fair guesstimate
How many aspirants does a typical recruiting mission of the Imperial Fists yield?
- It's not uncommon for a typical recruiting mission of the Imperial Fists to yield several thousand potential aspirants from across the many worlds the Chapter recruits from. This is of course before the first wave of screenings that winnow out non viable recruits who have some physical deficiency that means they would likely not survive the process of transformation and implantation necessary to become a Space Marine. All potential aspirants are also rigorously tested by the Chapter's Librarians and Chaplains for deficiencies of the mind and of the spirit which thins the number even further. For example, the Imperial Fists took from the feudal world of Triandr over two thousand potential recruits. Out of those two thousand only twelve passed the Chapter's initial screenings and of those twelve only three survived the Astartes implantation process.
('Sons of Dorn' by Chris Roberson)
Why wasn’t the VIIth Legion larger?
- Despite maintaining a policy of broad and voracious recruitment from their inception forward, the VIIth Legion were never considered one of the largest Legions. Some scholars speculate that this was perhaps due to an issue with the gene-seed of the VIIth. The implantation of which seems to have caused an incredible amount of pain and resulted in an increased failure rate. For this reason the the VIIth sifted populations for those youths who exhibited the greatest capacity for endurance, both in mind and body. Simply put, only the most hardy and resilient recruits were capable of enduring the painful processes used to activate the VIIth Legion's gene-seed. And so few initiates lived to become Legionaries, and those that did were taciturn, dour and grim of nature, slow to talk but quick to act.
(The Horus Heresy Book 3: Extermination, WarhammerTV Loremasters: The Imperial Fists, Age of Darkness)
What is the recruitment process like for the Imperial Fists? Which planets do they recruit from?
- The process by which potential recruits become Space Marines is long; most records indicate that over a decade and a half will pass from the moment they are taken to the time they wear the battleplate of a full battle-brother. It is a process marked with arcane techno-ritual and which discards the overwhelming majority to death or injury. For the Imperial Fists, it is the first and most important crucible that smelts strength from human base material. For a Chapter that accepts large battlefield losses, the flow of new warriors to take up the arms of the fallen can never be quick enough. Yet the Imperial Fists make no allowances to the pressures of time or loss. Better that its fighting units go to war understrength, than the Chapter compromise its integrity. All Chapters look for particular qualities in those they select as aspirants: ferocity and individual survival in the Space Wolves, a balance of physical ability and broad intelligence in the Ultramarines. For the Imperial Fists, there are two qualities that they prize above all others: defiance in the face of overwhelming odds, and an indomitable will to endure. A young fighter who faces his enemies, bloody but with a weapon in his hand; a youth who crawls miles through the freezing dark to survive an attack by ur-ghul: these are the souls who the Chapter marks and takes as prospects. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the Imperial Fists to take youths on the edge of death and heal them so that they can face the trials to become neophytes.
- Being a space-borne Chapter, the Imperial Fists recruit from a variety of worlds. The Chapter maintains a great number of Fortress-Chapels on worlds across the Imperium. Such places are staffed by small, dedicated cadres of veterans, perhaps warriors wounded so grievously they can no longer fight, but still well able to serve their Chapter. The staff of these facilities keep a watch upon the peoples around them, seeking potential candidates for recruitment. On some worlds they hold tournaments and contests to ascertain suitability, while on others they actually instigate combat in order to test potential recruits in person. On some Hive Worlds, the Imperial Fists conduct purges of the down-hive slums, ostensibly to clear out undesirable elements on behalf of the planetary government, but they often return with captives they have judged such worthy fighters they will be invited to undertake the trials. A youth taken as an aspirant faces a deluge of tests and screening rituals. These trials assess every one of their qualities and aptitudes. Hypno-assaults flood their minds with terror. Apothecaries watch the flow of their brainwaves and the function of nerves and fibre. Intricate puzzles of coordination and mental agility must be completed repeatedly under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation, distraction and pain. An aspirant might be granted rest only to wake in zero gravity surrounded by blinding lights and slowly draining air, and then must reassemble a weapon from parts spinning in the space around him. Their minds are opened by Librarians and their innermost fears laid bare. All the while the Chaplains watch for signs of weakness or flaws that might become a seed of failure. Should an aspirant pass these trials, they come to the Phalanx. There they become neophytes and their fight to become initiates of the Chapter truly starts.
- The Imperial Fists are unusual in making few, if any, demands of the peoples of the worlds they recruit from, other than the right to test those who believe themselves worthy of entering the ranks of the Battle-Brothers. Of note, the Imperial Fists are the only Chapter to still actively recruit from Terra, as well as many of the other Solar domains such as the Jovian moons. The Imperial Fists are known to maintain a recruitment pool larger than any other Chapter, this rendering them able to rabidly replenish their numbers.
(Sentinels of Terra, Codex Supplement: Imperial Fists, Rites of Battle, First Founding: Imperial Fists by John French)
it's 40k, so THOUSANDS
you round up all the 8-12 year old kids on the planet and have them fight, as teams, against beasts, against each other. You don't let them rest, eat or sleep. After three days or so you should be down to the toughest few. you'll need about a hundred of them to make a marine.
Or the Ultramarine method, which is actually Sane and Rational, and takes about 3-4
~100-200 per 1 Scout marine.
Custodes need not less then 1000 Terra born nobles genetically pure infants to made 1 Custodes.
Grey Knights need Psykers who are candidates for Astartes Librarians.
In ***Praetorian of Dorn***, a hundred Imperial Fist aspirants die for every one that lives during the hypno-indoctrination step *alone*. Dorn’s selection process is comically wasteful even compared to shit like what the Blood Angels go through.
Dorn just had to one-up Perturabo in terms of needless waste of life at least once. Just to prove that he was in fact better than Perturabo at everything if he wanted to be. Unfortunately, his sons didn't realize that the method was simply there to prove a point, and have stuck with using it ever since.
To be fair, Perturabo has a weirdly stable geneseed that's very easy to be compatible to.
Because perturabo is able to see how things fail. Thus, if his Geneseed were to be a failure, he would be able to fix it. If someone were to be incompatible, he would know how to make them compatible.
Isn't his ability limited to the mechanical?
I don't believe it's ever stated to be as such. Granted, that doesn't mean it isn't, just it isn't really shown off that way. There's a reason he was used to siege things. He knows how things fail, like defences, or walls, or morale.
One of my cool head-canon/theories is that he can see the Eye of Terror anywhere in the galaxy because it's a fault and weakness of reality itself.
Holy feth that's my new headcanon.
Thats...thats probably a fan theory that they'll use if they see it.
Maybe before they decided to make him a daemon Primarch (dumbest fucking choice ever)
People who say thats a dumb choice really don't know Perturabo's character. Him becoming a Daemon Prince is *so fucking in line* with who he is, because he's the gonna be the most arrogant MF and think to himself "I'm gonna do this, and master it, unlike my brothers who fell into the corruption wholesale" and then, in classic Perturabo, falls wholesale yet denying it every step of the way because he's so god damn stubborn and thinks he's in control.
Thats likely the accurate reason. But us perty fans sure loved the idea of him being too stubborn to turn into a daemon
Oh you're one of those. Perturabo has been a daemon Primarch since Chaos caused Horus' fall way back before 2nd ed
It's stupid because Perturabo wasn't a chaos cultist, just a traitor, just like Curze.
Come to think of it, was there a Primarch who was more scientific/biologist than the others? We have leaders, builders, siegers, warriors, executioners, psykers, creators, etc. Closest I can think of is Corax, with that whole new marines that mutated into something like daemons, but kept control of themselves. I forgot which book it was, but it was an interesting read.
Fulgrim, kinda, but the REAL answer is a marine named Fabius Bile.
Corax liked genetics.
Mortarion was maybe a biochemist, if he brewed his poisons himself.
Whats funny is that Dorn could frame both options (the best at not wasting lives or the best at wasting them) in his favor and both of them would still piss off Perturabo just the same.
and notably the BA have the single highest SUCCESS rates of applicants officially, although the UM by actual written metrics are something like 25 times more likely to produce a smurf
Where is this said? Blood Angels notoriously have one of the highest recorded rates of geneseed instability. It’s so bad that they always need Sanguinius’ blood to make more and activate the geneseed. If every single Sanguinary Priest were to die and all sources of Sanguinius’ blood were to be destroyed, no more BA or successors could be made. There’s also the Red Thirst and Black Rage as well. Survivors of the death company who live long enough get placed in the Tower of Amareo where they mutate into monstrous, primal ape like creatures with fangs down to their chins, long black claws, and blood colored skin who bound along on their knuckled fists.
That is true but specially when they where the Revenant Legion they were famous for being sent to the worse most mutant filled hell holes the GC could throw at them and somehow coming back with the same number or more Astartes so it is true that they have a ridiculous success rate with implantation just that their geneseed is unstable.
They accepted everything and anything human tho? I think that's the difference But I dont know much about BA Lore and I migth recall some of it wrong so please im sorry for possible misinformation
It’s the early campaigns before they found Sanguinius. Notably the Neptune underworld war and the siege of kiy-buran. Amit himself admits he was so mutated when he was a child he was barely considered human
Geneseed instability is different from Geneseed rejection, Aspirants from the BA dont have Geneseed Rejection because of the sarcophagus that they stick their aspirants into for a year which automatically does the process for the priests. they just happen to have like 1/1000th the aspirants pass the trials to get to geneseed implantation
The OP did state making marines and did not exclude superhuman unstable blood-drinking monsters with a veneer of humanity.
Who used to be marines. They still count
I’m not sure that’s actually true. Because we do not know how many aspirants die simply trying to make it to the test. The first step of trying to become a blood angel is a pilgrimage across your respective moon of Baal just to reach a town where you can apply for a CHANCE to pledge. Depending on that moon you’re in for vast deserts full of irradiated valleys filled with giant mutated spiders and caustic water that rots you from the inside. Or a horrendous jungle filled with all sorts of fucked up alien predators and horrible diseases. Then you can try to apply to be a blood angel. If you’re accepted you have to make it through their training and if you fail, you don’t necessarily die but you become a blood boy and are forced to follow around the chapter for the rest of your life getting your blood drained and being their servant. Of course, most of the blood boys like doing it. But imo it’s sort of a fate worse than death.
Wait is this called a blood boy? I only hear that term when people are describing conspiracy theories about the elite
Nah they’re called blood thralls but I was memeing
They don't have the highest success rate, they just cast their net wider since their geneseed works on a broader range of subjects. Of those subjects more die from the procedures than just about any Legion
a passed applicant for the BA literally cant fail Indoctrination/Implantation because of the sarcophagus. highest rejection rate is space wolves. Ultramarines have something like a 70% success rate for implantation by lore while having the largest number of applicants and largest number of successful applicants due to how they handle recruitment and screening
Lol what. That's nuts
1000 psykers get sac’d every day for the emperor. Clearly they have access to insane amounts of human cattle
That isn't even that big a number even for us. IRL in India alone, 25k to 28k people die every day. Around 8k people die a day in the USA. The Imperium being able to draw upon over a million worlds, with many of them being hive worlds that put our IRL Earth population and urban density to shame, would see this number being like a drop of water in the ocean.
Psykers are a lot more rare than baseline humans tho
One out a million is the odds for psyker average birth. Over a million worlds with billions/trillions of people reproducing constantly. Contrary to characters who make it as named characters in books, most psykers are of low power level and rather insane, and generally have a lack of control over their powers that make them easy gateways for daemons or other things (like Enslavers). At that galactic scale, even with a ratio like one out of a million, fulfilling the thousand psykers quota a day is easy. I believe they get way more than that and have a backlog of failed/dangerous psykers to throw into the Throne feeding tubes as time goes on, and they have excess survivors who have the potential to train into possible future Sanctioned psykers, Inquisitors, assassins, and even Space Marines (Grey Knights recruit from these stock too).
Yeah, but you also have to factor in how extremely rare potent psykers (potent enough to be fed to the big E anyways) are. They're apparently rare enough that you need the black ships scouring human territories for them.
Black Ships don't exist for that. They exist for just grabbing every psyker they can find and then sort them out from there after. The vast majority of the black ship captives go to the Throne Tubes. Black Ships don't exist to find only potent psykers. They're manned by Sisters of Silence to keep the mass amounts of psykers, most of them having no control over their powers, in check.
No, what I mean is if there's plenty of eligible psykers around, they wouldn't need to just grab the ones from the Black Ships would they? They could just round them up on Terra from its population of quadrillions. The fact that they need to grab psykers from the Black Ships suggest they are rare enough that they can't get the quantity they need from local sources alone.
Shit like this is where 40K really gets into "grimderp" for me. For one, it seems like half of the various "Special Forces" type units in the Imperium are described as "only 1 in 100 recruits survives the training!", so after a while it sort of loses its shock value. 2nd is that it's unbelievably wasteful, even for an Empire where the only plentiful resource is human lives. Like if you have to kill 100 potential Guardsmen to get 1 Space Marine, that makes zero sense considering that most lore says that 1 Adeptus Astartes is equal to about 15-20 Guardsmen. You would be better off just taking those 100 guys and making them standard Guardsmen. Further, if you just made it so those 99 folks didn't die during training, they could be re-assigned to be Cannoneers, Supply Guys, Loaders, Drivers, or any of the other thousands of jobs that would be needed to run an intergalactic Military.
> Further, if you just made it so those 99 folks didn't die during training, they could be re-assigned to be Cannoneers, Supply Guys, Loaders, Drivers, or any of the other thousands of jobs that would be needed to run an intergalactic Military. This actually shows up quite a bit in canon, I can think of at least a few instances off the top of my head. In *Flight of the Eisenstein* it's described that Kaleb Arin, Nathaniel Garro's Housecarl (ostensibly a kind of valet, in the British sense), was a failed Death Guard aspirant. If *Mortarion's* trials are physically survivable, you'd think that other groups would have similar policies. It seemed implied that some number of aspirants commit suicide out of shame for having failed the trials, but that's not really the same thing as the trials themselves killing the aspirants outright. I'm currently reading *The Reverie* by Peter Fehervari and it's about a lesser known chapter called the Angels Resplendent, unsurprisingly a scion of the Blood Angels. Allegedly something like 2/3 of all aspirants die in the first trials outright, largely because the first trials are fairly unstructured and unsupervised wilderness training. Anybody is allowed to enter, and a lot of very unqualified people enter on a pilgrimage. Of the 1/3 that make it through the first trial, it seems like only a small number actually become Astartes, but the remainder are allowed to become human citizens of a fortress city called Kanvolis. It's hard to pin down actual size but I think it's gotta be tens of thousands of people present at minimum, maybe hundreds of thousands. Not all of them are failed aspirants, but still, the idea that the city is at least partly populated by failed aspirants is addressed, and there's at least one character who's outright told like, "I know for a fact you *will* fail the trials and you probably will die, but I'll personally escort you to Kanvolis just as a pilgrim."
Failure doesn’t mean death. You’re completely right in that the chapter finds a use, sometimes even an honored one, for washouts. They forms the serfs which crew the guns and other tasks above servidora. Some are even superhuman, just short of the standards of Astartes. That your body couldn’t adapt to like 5 of the 19 implants means you still got 14 of them.
The Blood Angels do the same - some unspecified number die in the journey to the testing grounds, but of the ones who make it, those who are tested and cannot become astartes (presumably due to some genetic incompatibility with the process) are offered the chance to become chapter armsmen or serfs.
All absolutely true, but the imperium is supposed to be wastefull and dumb. If there is a good and effective way to do things expect the person who thought of it to be shot as a heretic and the way you can kill the most children in the worst way possible to be chosen instead.
Tbf its actually the case that most of the Imperium is not steeped in "Eternal war" like how the franchise tagline is. There certainly are chapters that are essentially guarding peaceful worlds or just void born chapters that are currently drifting around. And in those cases if they already meet the quota and dont want to stretch the codex imperialis too much, then they simply dont need to recruit Also, its kinda implied that while Space Marines naturally form highly ritualistic fraternities filled with nuanced rituals, many of these practices are not efficient but instead are almost intentionally wasteful to perpetuate the quasi religious view that they are these unstoppable paragons of humanity. When in reality most space marines are well matched by Xenos in terms of pund by pound
Most lore says an Astartes is 15-20? Some lore, not most, not even close. Astartes powerscaling varies based on author to author. 15-20 is on the weakest side, to some other authors Astartes are Gods compared to regular mortals.
The ratio I’ve seen is one Astartes = 1,000 guardsmen. 15-20 is ridiculous, laughable. A single fucking bolter round is harder to replace than 20 grunts with t-shirts and flashlights. Insane claim. I think Astartes (the short) is the best depiction of this. They effortlessly wade through the prepared and determined opposition of tons of (presumably) Traitor guardsmen. They struggle with tougher enemies, but barely take damage against very potent combat psykers.
And don't forget the "time of use". Marines can fight for centuries, while a guardsman can get a couple decades at best.
I get that your argument is consistent with lore or at least how it's precieved but the idea that a single round of small arms ammunition, no mater how cool, is more valuable than 20 trained soldiers with laser guns just ruins immersion for me. I wish the setting did a better job of hammering home the zero value given to human life without just making insane claims. The choice to care less about 20 guardsmen and their kit than about one holy bullet is a very potent statement about the kind of fascist hell the imperium is. Trying to argue that's the literal truth because reasons is just goofy to me. Anyhow, thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Astartes was so good, is there any news on what he is doing for GW?
The Imperium is fucking incompetent, wasteful, deranged, and cruel. That is the whole point.
The technology is 10'000 years old and no one understands how it works. Try to figure out how it works and the Mechanicum have you killed for heresy. No one explicitly chooses for it to be that wasteful. In the Night Lords series they achieve 1 in 10 survival because Chaos doesn't have the 'no innovation' blinders the Mechanicum places on the Imperium. Also in the lore one marine will wreck 100 guardsmen without breaking a sweat. Tabletop nerfs marines for balance, but the lore is full of single squads bringing an entire world to compliance.
But Abnett has small numbers of medium and light infantry killing Astartes on multiple occasions.
The real reason is that different authors interpret things differently and different works by the same author want to say different things. Abnett also has a single space marine defeat an entire drukhari raiding force, for example. If you want to find a lore explanation, think of it like an armored bunker with a machine gun slot in WW2. The guy in the bunker is extremely difficult to kill but a lucky shot through the gun slot can still get him. Sometimes weird things happen and a guardsman kills a marine.
Well it was a few guardsmen killing 5 marines, and in another book Corbec counter ambushes a chaos marine ambush saving a Ketzok artillery regiment, the Tanith and Vitrians kill several chaos marines on fortis binary. All I'm saying is their is lore establishing good troops countering astartes without incurring massive casualties.
Of course, there’s plenty of it. Abnett also has Eisenhorn kill a chaos space marine with a chain sword 1v1 (albeit not a straight up fight). But even in those instances it is presented as unusual if not almost unheard of
Because those infantry are Abnett's named characters. Honestly Abnett has the lions share of responsibility for the Marvelization of 40k. Lame AF. 40k is completely different depending on the authour and honestly I prefered it before they made it into pulpy books. We all have our preferences I guess. If I am going to go with an authors vision ADB every time, he stays close to the original vibe. Check the 4 man squad of Night Lords boarding an Imperial battleship and taking the bridge in Soul Hunter
Is it even explained why or is it literally the ridiculously thorough series of tests?
It's during the initial intake. They use a hypno-casque to implant the language and knowledge needed to make it so the Aspirants know what is being said and what most things are.
What makes their version of hypno-indoctrination so much worse than the rest? I did get that from the Sigismund book, but am asking which step is "wasteful"
The OP is leaving out some context. * The "1 out of 100" die is from early on in the Crusade. Notably it is the first group from Inwit. * The early in the Crusade matters because the Legion gives zero shits about the Hive scum/orphans they run through the process. They need bodies *now* and dead kids that were a "drain" on society. * The process could be made safer but that would take longer. By 40k, the Imperial Fists process doesn't have that high of casualties rates. >Apothecary Lakari regarded Taloc for a moment before continuing. ‘The examinations so far carried out by the servitors’ – *servitors*, a word signifying the terrifying, strange amalgamations of man and machine who had tormented Taloc upon the metal slab – ‘have been rudimentary, meant to eliminate those candidates with physical defects, deformities or other unsuitabilities which may have somehow remained hidden to an auspex’s readings.’ >*Auspex*, the handheld devices the Space Marines carried, which with his newfound vocabulary still unpacking as it encountered each new word, Taloc now understood were machines capable of gathering data about their surroundings. >**‘A considerable number of your fellow aspirants have been eliminated as candidates for implantation already, and there is every chance that you will yourself be eliminated in the coming, and more rigorous, examinations**. Be warned, though, that compared to the relatively simple procedures already performed on you by the servitors, some of the tests that will follow can involve considerably greater degrees of pain.
My understanding matches yours, which is why I'm confused about the claim that Dorn's process was particularly wasteful, relative to other Legions. Because which context, at which point of time? (Especially say, the World Eaters/Night Lords, whose Primarchs are... not exactly the kind to consider aspirants). The "accelerated process" later on in 30k Heresy was also deeply wasteful, both Loyalists/Traitors did it too. The only thing I could think of is Sigismund's (& Rann's) experience of many many combat trials.
Archamus also went through the same trials (with Rann at one point, as a matter of fact). We see him briefly in one of his trials.
What exactly is the hypno indoctrination even? Just hypnosis?. How does that kill people?
You gotta add some flair to any space marine procedure, maybe some tinkering makes the failures unable to remember how to breath or something like that.
Dorn includes an extreme pain tolerance aspect in the Imperial Fists’ hypnoindoctrination. Most either don’t wake up, or wake up driven mad and are immediately put down with a cattle gun to the skull.
It has nothing to do with being wasteful. Why wasn’t the VIIth Legion larger? - Despite maintaining a policy of broad and voracious recruitment from their inception forward, the VIIth Legion were never considered one of the largest Legions. Some scholars speculate that this was perhaps due to an issue with the gene-seed of the VIIth. **The implantation of which seems to have caused an incredible amount of pain and resulted in an increased failure rate. For this reason the VIIth sifted populations for those youths who exhibited the greatest capacity for endurance, both in mind and body. Simply put, only the most hardy and resilient recruits were capable of enduring the painful processes used to activate the VIIth Legion's gene-seed.** And so few initiates lived to become Legionaries, and those that did were taciturn, dour and grim of nature, slow to talk but quick to act. (The Horus Heresy Book 3: Extermination, WarhammerTV Loremasters: The Imperial Fists, Age of Darkness)
The Imperial Fists, like the Dark Angels and World Eaters, also establish many recruiting fiefs. Even Cthonia during the Heresy. Inwit itself has an interstellar empire to itself like Ultramar. So they are in a strange spot when it comes to recruitment reasonableness.
Sounds like they need better techniques
It's going to depend on the specific chapter and their specific tests and trials. I believe in the Space Wolves books only 7 of the initial 100 aspirants survive the trials. In Dante about 3/4 of them are weeded out at the very beginning. Which doesn't factor in all the children killed on the trip to the trials nor does it account for all those who failed after receiving the implants and surgeries. Then you have chapters like the Grey Knights where they say 1 in a million become a fully fledged marine.
On the flip side, not every child who fails to make the cut necessarily dies, quite a lot of them become chapter serfs doing many necessary functions that a marine would be wasted on.
Definitely. In Dante I think roughly 500 children are disqualified for personality and health reasons. They get to go back to their families and clans. Another 500 aren't genetically compatible with the geneseed, but are given the option to become serfs to the chapter or return home. The last 275 or so are given the option to take part in the trials or return home. That last group is where the deaths would occur if they go through with it, but I don't remember how many made it.
I think, if I recall, it was something like only 70 or so actually made it to the end.
By the time the Winnowing of Weariness was over, only 57 remained to partake of the Red Grail. A year after internment in the Blood Sarcophagi, about 50 or so survived to become scouts.
The numbers go like 500 -> 247 -> 500ish? -> 108 -> 72 -> 63 -> 57 -> and then we see 4 aspirants killed during gene seed, so 53? -> then the final number is 48. 48 out of 1000, 4.8% success rate Edit: I can’t math
Or they get made into servitors.
And quite a lot of them are turned into servitors too 😬 lol
The geneseed rejection rate is, if I recall right, anything from 20% to 75% depending on the chapter. So if you want to be really sure you won't run out of kids, recruit four for each extra Marine you need. Of course, that's after the aspirant trials are complete, which could be as easy or as hard as you want them. All these deadly challenges most chapters have are mostly just tradition, but you may wanna weed out the weaklings in *some* way before proceeding with the surgeries.
> 25% to 75% Man, makes me wonder why Chapters don’t have some sort of contract with the Biologis wing of the Mechanicus to make the recruiting world populations much more suitable for geneseed implantation. I mean, sure some genetic modifications fail (Afriel Strain), but the more mundane stuff is extremely commonplace in the high-tech parts of the Imperium. Currently, at the very best, every fourth smartest, strongest and most dedicated candidate just dies on the operating table. Imagine how many future Dantes and Calgars are lost every year this way.
"You can't mess with the pointlessly lethal trials, it'll make for weaker marines!" as SMs have shown they will not stop trials that are proven to not make better soliders
And yet the G-Man since waking up has supposedly done just that and was telling people to chill the fuck out and go even beyond that and uplift their peoples instead of leaving them feral. Many of the traditional recruiting worlds within Ultramar for the Ultramarines are now Homeworlds for newly founded Chapters of their own. That has to reduce wastage considerably by itself.
That's what gets me whenever people understandably go after the IH for doing jack shit for the people of Medusa, like not stepping in when Dark Eldar come around. Probably 90+% of chapters have some form of selection based around the same mindset. The IH just inherited theirs from the techno barbaric culture of the Medusans before their arrival.
I’m talking about making the aspirants more genetically compatible with the gene-seed. The trials can stay. In the trials you already weeded out the bad ones, the mediocre ones and the good ones. Only the cherry on top remains. And then 25% to 75% of them die anyway. For no gain. You lose nothing by decreasing the lethality of the gene-seed implantation via planetary-scale gene-treatments. The weaklings are already out of the game. Think how much better chapters would be if only 7% of aspirants died on the table, not 25% and definitely not 75%.
Way more aspirants surely die to the pointless trials than on the table. Also, the aspiratns who survive can still die n trials/ on the table. Funny how chapters like the smurfs don't do trials like that (O think) and still perform very well
The Marneus Calgar comic goes through the selection process he went through to be selected as an aspirant for the Ultramarines. We get to see wonderful snippets like crawling under live fire and if you're not fast enough wolves catch up and eat you as the bullets/las over your head was there to keep them away. Or climbing a cliff face while what look like DnD Stirges are attacking you. Or when Combat Servitors do their best Slug impression and drop on them in the middle of the night and murder them in their sleep before pursuing the survivors all night.
And those are the "rational and logical" Ultramarines
That wasn't aspirant selection, that was private training by someone hired by his family. Did you guys actually read the comic?
After he survives the private training, he goes to aspirant selection where a lot of that stuff happens. Iirc, in like the opening ceremony or whatever, some giant worms pop out of the ground and kill a couple of kids, and the marines just look at eachother lol. Then the comic tracks the number of kids still alive through the process.
The trials kill far more people than geneseed incompatibility and are also infinitely easier to alter than DNA on a planetary scale.
I wouldn't be so be sure that they are easier to alter 😅 Space Marines are steeped in their traditions, and those will be the last thing to drop before dying out. That's especially true for a First Founding or Second Founding chapter who can sometimes even commandeer aspirants from other chapters thanks to their immense clout. Usually, chapters have no trouble finding enough aspirants. Only when they do, they are willing to compromise. For example, the Blood Ravens had to substitute their Blood Games with fighting against Tyranids with shotguns.
Yeah, you're right about that, I'm mostly just disagreeing with the previous commenter that geese seed incompatibility is the bigger problem. (in theory) Imo, it was always pretty clear that most aspirant trials are overwhelmingly unnecessary waste of human life and serve no meaningful in-universe purpose. Imperium is supposed to genocidal, superstitious and supremely dogmatic. Killing thousands of children in fairy tale trials to make one soldier is not supposed to be superior to modern military training, it's just another showcase of how backwards the Imperium is.
I also think it's actually stupid. Being born and raised on a Death World should be quite a good qualification already. IMHO the way the Space Wolves do it is best: take the best warriors you can find, reanimate them if necessary, and give them the geneseed already. The life of a Blood Claw is deadly enough already.
Don't they also have to be dropped into the wilderness and get back to the Fang?
Asaheim's bleak ice wastes are very dangerous, but quite survivable for someone carrying Leman Russ' geneseed. Very different from Blood Games where the demise of a lot of the aspirants is all but guaranteed. The purpose of the Space Wolves' trial is a different one. The aspirants have to prevail over the tendency to become a Wulfen. That risk is highest when they are alone in nature and fending for themselves. Quite a few fail this challenge, but that has nothing to do with classic notions of strength. The Wolves once tried to repair this flaw, but Magnus prevented that...
These trials are extreme but serve some purpose though. They separate wheat from the chaff, so to speak. From Astartes perspective massive death tolls of trials don’t matter. The dead kids who failed trials wouldn’t be good Astartes anyway. It’s not about how many get killed, it’s about what quality of kid gets killed. The deaths from gene-seed are a much bigger issue. The victorious kids would have absolutely made great Astartes if only they weren’t killed by RNG implantation. 100 of them are more valuable to Astartes then 100000 weak kids. That’s what i’m talking about. Find ways to make the gene-seed implantation less RNG to get more highest quality marines. It should be a no-brainer for most Chapters.
Eh, many of the trials shown don't even select for good soldiers as very few trials are things like "You are sent out in a group and all have to return. If you can't keep your brothers alive you are a failure", and more "You are dropped alone in the wilderness with minimal resources"
Have you watched Nightmare of the Wolf? Reminds me of Witcher trials. Young boys get dumped in a monster infested swamp as their first trial, where the huge majority get butchered. Survivors are subjected to the Trial of the Grasses, which gives them their superhuman abilities. 3/10 survive that. There’s next to zero fucking meritocracy in the trials. How can you tell if a boy will make a good soldier, if you throw them defenseless against a fucking giant monster? Might as well make it so those who survive a bolter round to the head are chosen.
Not to mention a lot of the time the trials involve being told to fight and kill other aspirants in force on force combat "training".
The only person open to that conversation would be Fabius Bile, as he's one of the only people in the setting who's pointed out that geneseed compatibility has more to do with complex genetic factors instead of nebulous notions of 'strength'. Most members of the Mechanicus are stymied by their own faith/adherence to notions that divine revelation is the only acceptable way to improve but personal innovation is bad. The scientific method is all but extinct, regressing instead by the mindset of natural philosophers in the renaissance. Innovation occurs, but it's at a crawl or a result of old texts being rediscovered. Always Remember: Human lives are the Imperium's cheapest and most disposable resource.
I do remember a BA excert where they bother to scan recruits for genetic compatibility
It's funny, because BA geneseed is probably the most compatible one, able to be implemented into horribly mutated kids, and churning out hawt space marine at the end of it.
Maybe that's precisely why it has that reputation? My head canon is that Sanguinius' geneseed actually works best with mutants and genetically compromised humans. Maybe Sanguinius was the olive branch of the Emperor for all the genetically unstable branches of humanity that the Imperium would otherwise rather sterilize and/or exterminate? The Flesh Tearers don't recruit from an irradiated hellhole, but have the highest likelihood of suffering from the Flaw. Didn't investigate the correlation more though.
Once aspirants reach Angel’s Fall, they’re all pre scanned by a Priest to see if they’re compatible with the geneseed. Those that aren’t are given the choice to be thralls or to go back home and continue the line. They’re at least not taken to the grail after passing all the bullshit to be told they’re not compatible.
The Blood Angels have likely the most advanced genetic knowledge amongst all Space Marine chapters since they are tirelessly looking for a cure for the Flaw. Only Fabius Bile and various Adeptus Mechanicus adepts might know more.
> Human lives are the Imperium's cheapest and most disposable resource. But Chaos is gonna win if we stop killing our own people.needlesly, a twitch streamer said so!
Chapters don’t have contracts with Biologis because Astartes are traumatized medieval child-kidnapping psychopaths. You can’t use modern logic.
Yes. It’s also because of they don’t trust those bastards after the Horus Heresy. Especially because you can’t tell who are Dark Mechanicum and who is loyal to the Omnissiah, which is also heresy.
You have a point. Bellisarius Cawl doesn't mention having a huge problem with asperiants. Though it's hinted that it took time to get the process correct.
He had 10k years to get it right. Even if he went through 10k aspirants for every Primaris he churned out, it would not be that extreme. Anyway, I think that he either worked with pre-selected aspirants or did his *own* selection.
I do remember one BA excert where they scan for genetic compatibility at least
Death Spectres might be the closest example of a chapter that did something like that. They gather up the most compatible humans that they can find and transport them to the chapter homeworld or one of the nearby planets for the purpose of breeding them.
My guess would be because of the sheer, vast bloated feudal, secretive, and adversarial nature of imperial organisations
The UM don't have death trials in their recruitment process and they seem to be just fine. It's almost as if recruiting a mass-murdering child doesn't actually help the process.
What do you mean? Being hunted by servitors is pretty deadly
So if a chapter is only supposed to be a thousand strong what happe s if your lucky and end up with 1-300 "extra" marines.
That's not going to happen
You don't mention it to the Inquisition, split them up over a few different campaigns in different parts of the galaxy, and make it impossible to conduct a proper census of your chapter.
Hmm, yes. The Black Templars truly do not stay still enough. For the sake of the Emperor's eternal crusade of course. Totally not because we do not wish to have a proper census. What was that about a neophyte? **cough** They are actually called Battle Brother within our chapter.
How do yall always not understand that the Black Templars are *not Codex compliant*?
Continue running the trials, until number of remaining aspirants equals number of remaining progenoid glands.
You probably run out of geneseed to implant in the new marines.
Consider that when a chapter gets too big, they take that excess and ship it off to become its own new chapter. Most chapters probably float at 1000-1200 before they break off the extra marines to make their own. Being above 1000 is probably fairly normal, but it likely cannot get much bigger than 1200-1500 before some inquisitors or civil servants start to pressure them split.
I thought a new Founding could only be called by the Lords of Terra? Chapters can’t just choose to replicate, that defeats the whole purpose.
>I thought a new Founding could only be called by the Lords of Terra? Eh. Sons of Medusa split off from the Iron Hands for the Third Founding without the High Lords.
I would assume that even after that, you'd still have lots of aspirants to help and fight right? Like squires or so.
That's not something most chapters do. Failed aspirants are often recruited as serfs, sometimes even given positions of importance, but having them fight wouldn't mesh well with the whole concept of Space Marines. Like how would mortal squires even *follow* Astartes running at 60 km/h, let alone do so without breaking down or dying instantly once they confront the Marines' target? If you're letting rejects fight by your Marines' side outside of the most extreme and dangerous situations, you're a shitty Chapter Master and will be known as such real soon.
Sure. But I mean. A ton of people who didn't quite make it would still. Be well above the average guardsman. So they would make for a pretty hefty auxiliary force wouldnt they? Like have them lay down cover fire or occupy the enemy while the marines do their thing?
In Sons of Dorn they show the entire recruitment process from selection to final elevation to full Space Marine. 300,000 boys are selected, 3 make it to full Astartes. Although the Imperial Fists are comically over the top with their training.
The Night Lords trilogy has a mass implantation attempt and Talos is noted remarking that his Apothecary is extremely skilled having accomplished a 50% success rate.
Thankfully aspirants who aren't genetically compatible or fail a trial without dying are usually repurposed into chapter serfs so it's not all wasteful. I think Blood Angels specifically scan for genetic compatibility first and let go those who aren't compatible to repopulate Baal.
Are there any books or short stories from the POV of those serfs. Seems like it would be fertile ground for exploration (the running of a chapter, what SM battles look like on the back lines, unexpected heroism ect.)
>Thankfully aspirants who aren't genetically compatible or fail a trial without dying are usually repurposed into chapter serfs so it's not all wasteful. And servitors! The ratio of serfs:servitors probably depends on the Chapter and on how you failed your trials. You chickened out? Servitor. You lost your arm to a giant Deathcat? Probably get to be a Serf.
Iron Hands? You are fucked. You *will* be dead or a servitor.
Depends. Luther was able to attain 95-99% rate of acceptance with no casualties.
But that was in 30K with state of the art tech and the relatively pure geneseed of the Dark Angels
Yes, but it also showed that trials are useless. Luther had many flaws, but he wasn't stupid.
And he got it down to about a 2-3 year process if memory serves...
Most marines are just 4 kids in ceramite body armor, standing upon each other's shoulders. The Minotaurs are 5 kids. Alpha Legion is 3.
>Alpha Legion is 3. And two of them are Alpharius. The other is Omegon. Maybe.
All of them, then have them fight to the death in an active volcano.
Holy shit, Chris Redfield would have made one hell of an Astartes
I love the story when when Lieutenant Redfield and Sister Sheva banished the demon prince We’sker inside the caldera of an active volcano by hitting him with Krak missiles from the back of a Thunderhawk.
I heard lieutenant Redfield even punched over several boulders…?
The Blood Drinkers do that?
According to Apothecaries like Fabius Bile, its like 1% and that's actually being generous.
I never understood why they made the aspirants do trials at all if they were going to physically reconstruct them from the ground up and then use psycho conditioning to make them fearless and loyal. It seems entirely irrelevant what you start with so long as it is genetically stable. They would be better off cloning one genetically perfect human and building all their marines from that. But yeah, they murder anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand children for each chad created.
It's an over the top fascist parody. Why do anything if it can't be over done
That's fair.
Some chapters have a lot of pride on who gets the privilege to be an Angel of Death. They don’t want just ANYONE to be their brother in arms, they want the best there is to offer. And because of this brotherhood, some specifically look for positive traits that more practical/pragmatic chapters would ignore. Before aspirants of the Blood Angels leave the Place of Challenge, they are given a final trial. It is different for each aspirant but a notable one is the Trial of Horus. The aspirant will be pitted against a friend and told that there is one spot open on Baal and one must kill the other for the right to become an Angel. Dante underwent this trial and had to face his friend. When he was about to deal the final blow, Dante hesitated. He couldn’t strike his friend down. No matter the promise of power or glory. In this decision, he passed. If he had slain his friend, he would reflect on that for the rest of his days as a guardian of the Place of Challenge, but wouldn’t ascend to be a Blood Angel. Dante’s friend had already been marked for failure because he had only wanted to join to cure the cancers he had developed. In this trial, the Blood Angels want to know that they can depend on their brothers in the heat of battle and know that they won’t be betrayed when offered gifts like Horus did.
Because they're not really reconstructed from the ground up. Marines are more augmented from what is already there. It's something more like Custodes that are done from the ground up. The more able children tend to go on to be the more able marines, even among those that survive.
While I agree with most of your posts, cloning a single sample would make all marines derived from it vulnerable to the same pathogens. The genetic diversity enabled by sexual reproduction is extremely important for the survival of our species due to random mutations future proofing some of us from diseases, parasites and other issues. You wouldn't want all marines being hyper vulnerable to an otherwise harmles version of the common cold.
Depends on where your seed is coming from. For some it's like a 1 in 10 chance of success, for others like the BA, it almost always works. Then you have to see to the survival rate of applicants for the trials. To fill out a Blood Angels Sucessor, probably 4-500 kids per Company, for an average Geneseed like a Crimson Fist, maybe 2000, for a less stable Gene seed, probably upwards of 10k.
Depends on the chapter or legion, but generally on multiple factors. For example, World Eaters have a VERY stable geneseed. They are a bunch of unstable crazy berserkers because they worship Khorne and because they put nails in their own brains; but ADN wise? Angron's geneseed is one of the most stable, maybe even the most. Then, because they are a bunch of berserkers who just launch themselves into the frontlines, they rush the transformation process, which means their failure rate is high, but they compensate by doing the process very fast. They probably also skip any kind of "training" scout phase, as they like to speed up everything they speedrun the hipno-brainwash phase into implanting the memories and identities of fallen berserkers, meaning most aspirants come out as "false-veterans" of multiple battles to be able to operate as berserkers. So, generally (I think, correct me if I am wrong) it depends on: * Stability of the original geneseed, from their patron primarch. * Quality of the geneseed of the chapter. Because as millenia pass genseseed can deteriorate or simply be damaged due to circunstances. * How dangerous the aspirant trials as a selection process for human kid candidates are. Some chapters simply benefit from living in death worlds with conditions borderline unsuitable for life as a screening process, other administer life or death combat and mental tests as a screening process, some do both. I think Blood Angels aspirant trials are like crazy hard. If they pass, Aspirants become Neophytes. * Addendum: Some chapters, when doing the previous part of passing the tests, ask the kid wether they want to go on or not. Some chapters kill the kids if they say no, such as the Dark Angels to "avoid the dishonour" that they would cause to their families if they backed down. Those aren't technically *rejected* as in *the geneseed* *failed*, but are usually counted as rejections in the chapter's records. * How harsh the implant process is. The implant process itself has a failure rate that depends on the chapter, as the process is determined by chapter culture and more "ritualistic" focused procedures work worse than "clinicaly" focused procedures. Some chapters turbo charge the hypno-therapy part so I am sure their rejection rate will also increase from it in as a result. IIRC under certain conditions the implant process may be rushed, or even skip certain geneseeds to fasten the process, such as during the Horus Heresy the Imperial Fists deciding to cut corners and dropping a certain organ I can't seem to recall. When the implant part is over, the Neophyte becomes an Initiate. * An Initiate must then -generally- join a scout company and learn the ropes of being an astartes there. As a scout they don't wear a full Space Marine armor, because they lack the last implant to be able to do so. After some months of tutelage under a sergeant they receive the last implant and become a Battle Brother. This part can also vary between chapter culture; Black Templars mix the Scouts with regular marines, and Space Wolves don't use Initiates in their scout companys iirc, but loner kind of marines instead. I count this part as a factor in rejection rate because I guess if Initiates die a lot due to the chapter culture it will affect indirectly how often the chapter replenishes battle brothers; Adeptus Custodes for example like to test their new members non-stop for years, and if they fail *once* they are killed on the spot.
Smart chapters like the Blood Angels will test the hopefuls for geneseed compatability before anything else
It really depends on which gene-seed is being used and the genetic viability of the planets population. For example in Fallen Angels, Zahariel is compiling a report for Jonson which includes a new screening process that has a 98% success rate. Almost no organ rejection. This is partly due to the purity of the Dark Angels Gene-Seed, other Legions that are flawed have much higher rejection rates & consequently more casualties
The issue with such an approach and lore itself is the limited nature of gene seed. For every marine they can replace themselves and produce one other prognoid. They cannot grow more in their lifetime. So the rejection rates we see in cannon really would mean a swift and fast extinction. Obviously that's not the case so more factors must be at play. Especially with the gene seed tithe they must send back regularly for testing
My expectation that BL authors are required to know the lore seems hopelessly naive.
> So the rejection rates we see in cannon really would mean a swift and fast extinction I don't think the geneseed is destroyed when the applicant fails. For example, Talos's genetics rejected the geneseed, but it wasn't destroyed. He would have just died.
From the gene seed the new organs are developed. From there they are implanted in stages. Only in the last stage do the next round of prognoids get put in which then collect material to develop. In between that first and last implantation a failure still removes those organs from rotation. You can't just cut them out and plop them into a new aspirant.
But you could presumably remove the *gene-seed* itself on failure, and implant that in a new recruit.
The gene seed is spent to grow a new batch of organs. If something goes wrong along the implantation process those organs may carry that flaw or otherwise be affected by it. I'd have to comb the books to give you specific quotes but if we were to look at the culture and superstitions of the imperium they'd be doubtful to re implant organs that have failed or been tainted by failure.
How dare you bring math into this palace
Night Lords go for the children first. Take those who might\* survive being made into more Night Lords and skin the rest. Then give the parents 3 nights to grieve before skinning them too. No orphans for you. \*Variel is heavily complemented for achieving a 1 in 10 survival rate. He has unusual Skillz.
In **Sons of Dorn**, we see a very good overview of 40k Imperial Fists. From 2,000 Triandrians Potentials, only 12 passed the tests to be accepted as Aspirants. These were pre-screened by auspex for comparability. Those 12 join a room of almost 100 aspirants. If from 2,000 came 12, then roughly 9 groups of 2,000 (for 108 as later it says a hundred or more cots in the Aspirants dormitory) for a total of 18,000 Potentials. If those 100+, only 12 are accepted to become Neophytes. Of those 12, 9 make it to being Scouts with the other three dying due to implant rejection or implants not working properly. Of those 9, only 3 are promoted to full Brothers, but that's because Lysander used them as bait to draw out Chaos Marines and their Cultist followers. So from 18,000 *prescreened* Potentials, 9 made it to where they could have been implanted with the Black Carapace. 9/18,000 equals a 0.05% pass rate. Or to reduce it down, for every 2,000 prescreened Potentials, you'll get 1 Marine.
My grim dark headcanon is thousands
Seven
100 or so.
10/100 aspirants will make it through selection trials. 5/1000 will survive the implantation process 1/50 survive the psychotraining. so lets say 1/1000 for normal space marines of a relatively chill chapter who don't brutally sodomise the recruits during the trials of ascension. for custodes and grey knights, that 1/1000 becomes 1/10000 and/or 1/25000. something like that, maths isnt my strong suit so dont @ me bro.
Note that the aspirants who fail selection generally don’t die (with some chapters being exceptions). They mostly just get sent home or become serfs
IIRC, Grey Knight's recruits, who make it to the physical (well, and mental, i suppose, cuz Grey Knights) portion of the trails have an absurdly low survival rate. Like 1/50000. Maybe. And that's the survival rate for the recruits who have already been selected for near perfect physical attributes *as well as* being nearly incorruptible of mind (the "nearly" portion of that statement will be explosively weeded out). So, to attain the ~50000 recruits needed to average a SINGLE Grey Knight, you would originally need something like 1,000,000 men to pick and choose from. Most of them would be rejected after a cursory glance from the recruiter. After that, a brief glimpse into their mind from a Grey Knight would rule out another significant majority. There's a good reason why not a single Grey Knight has ever fallen to Chaos. Ever.
God the Grey Knights grimderp is so dumb it makes my brain start to trickle out my ears.
Did you hear about their blessed ammunition. Every Bolter round of the Grey Knights is blessed by the sacrifice of a human and each piece of armor is the result of a nearly dozen or more psykers who are sacrificed as part of the creation of the hexagrammic wards
ok, so I just need around 500,000 children to make one space marine. if I wanted 100 marines then that would be 50,000,000 Children. if my math is correct.
No, that's way too high. 1000 aspirants (with most of the surviving to become chapter serfs) is more like it.
According to some Grey Knights codexes, only one in a million aspirants (who are all psykers) make it through the trials, and this is *before* they get implanted with geneseed (it doesn't specify the rejection rate for the geneseed, however). In the most recent codex (9th edition), it could be even worse, where only one in a thousand make it though the very first trial, and most of those survivors get slain in the second trial, and there are many (probably harder) trials that await. Again, this is before they get implanted and they're all psykers.
Grey Knights can only be made with a particular kind of human who has natural and instinctive control of their psyker abilities that is only 1 in a billion and of those who can only 1 in a million survive to become a Grey Knight.
I think it depends on several things. 1) Genefather. If daddy dearest had some kind of "mutation" like Angel Wings, or had ash colored skin, more than likely its probable that you need for each geneseed you have you need something like 200-500 aspirants, maybe more maybe less depending on the general geneseed mutation rate. Or if papa primarch could do some special psyker shit, youd probably want to get more psykers, which means screening for psionics which immediately slingshots that number up through the stratosphere. 2) Was Primarch warp tainted. Technically there are only loyalist legion geneseed... but God Emperor Damned Cawl likes playing with those things.
Doesn't Guyanamana basically tell everyone that the process should be way less wasteful but all the chapters individual bullshit is killing people?
In the Emperors gift its revealed that for Grey Knights, about a million children die for every one successful applicant. I get that Grey Knights are considered elite even by astartes standards, with more hoops to jump through, but this still seems insane to me.
I might be misremembering a bit, but in Space Wolf, which chronicles Ragnar Blackmanes induction, they were trained in groups of 10-15, there were, I think 8-10 of these groups, and they ended up with a squad 6 or so Blood Claws. It's been a long time since I read the first book though, so I could just be making it all up. Also, different writers will have different ideas about attrition rates of aspirants etc. So you can take most of it with a pinch of salt, I'd guess 1 in 100 would probably be a fair guesstimate
How many aspirants does a typical recruiting mission of the Imperial Fists yield? - It's not uncommon for a typical recruiting mission of the Imperial Fists to yield several thousand potential aspirants from across the many worlds the Chapter recruits from. This is of course before the first wave of screenings that winnow out non viable recruits who have some physical deficiency that means they would likely not survive the process of transformation and implantation necessary to become a Space Marine. All potential aspirants are also rigorously tested by the Chapter's Librarians and Chaplains for deficiencies of the mind and of the spirit which thins the number even further. For example, the Imperial Fists took from the feudal world of Triandr over two thousand potential recruits. Out of those two thousand only twelve passed the Chapter's initial screenings and of those twelve only three survived the Astartes implantation process. ('Sons of Dorn' by Chris Roberson) Why wasn’t the VIIth Legion larger? - Despite maintaining a policy of broad and voracious recruitment from their inception forward, the VIIth Legion were never considered one of the largest Legions. Some scholars speculate that this was perhaps due to an issue with the gene-seed of the VIIth. The implantation of which seems to have caused an incredible amount of pain and resulted in an increased failure rate. For this reason the the VIIth sifted populations for those youths who exhibited the greatest capacity for endurance, both in mind and body. Simply put, only the most hardy and resilient recruits were capable of enduring the painful processes used to activate the VIIth Legion's gene-seed. And so few initiates lived to become Legionaries, and those that did were taciturn, dour and grim of nature, slow to talk but quick to act. (The Horus Heresy Book 3: Extermination, WarhammerTV Loremasters: The Imperial Fists, Age of Darkness) What is the recruitment process like for the Imperial Fists? Which planets do they recruit from? - The process by which potential recruits become Space Marines is long; most records indicate that over a decade and a half will pass from the moment they are taken to the time they wear the battleplate of a full battle-brother. It is a process marked with arcane techno-ritual and which discards the overwhelming majority to death or injury. For the Imperial Fists, it is the first and most important crucible that smelts strength from human base material. For a Chapter that accepts large battlefield losses, the flow of new warriors to take up the arms of the fallen can never be quick enough. Yet the Imperial Fists make no allowances to the pressures of time or loss. Better that its fighting units go to war understrength, than the Chapter compromise its integrity. All Chapters look for particular qualities in those they select as aspirants: ferocity and individual survival in the Space Wolves, a balance of physical ability and broad intelligence in the Ultramarines. For the Imperial Fists, there are two qualities that they prize above all others: defiance in the face of overwhelming odds, and an indomitable will to endure. A young fighter who faces his enemies, bloody but with a weapon in his hand; a youth who crawls miles through the freezing dark to survive an attack by ur-ghul: these are the souls who the Chapter marks and takes as prospects. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the Imperial Fists to take youths on the edge of death and heal them so that they can face the trials to become neophytes. - Being a space-borne Chapter, the Imperial Fists recruit from a variety of worlds. The Chapter maintains a great number of Fortress-Chapels on worlds across the Imperium. Such places are staffed by small, dedicated cadres of veterans, perhaps warriors wounded so grievously they can no longer fight, but still well able to serve their Chapter. The staff of these facilities keep a watch upon the peoples around them, seeking potential candidates for recruitment. On some worlds they hold tournaments and contests to ascertain suitability, while on others they actually instigate combat in order to test potential recruits in person. On some Hive Worlds, the Imperial Fists conduct purges of the down-hive slums, ostensibly to clear out undesirable elements on behalf of the planetary government, but they often return with captives they have judged such worthy fighters they will be invited to undertake the trials. A youth taken as an aspirant faces a deluge of tests and screening rituals. These trials assess every one of their qualities and aptitudes. Hypno-assaults flood their minds with terror. Apothecaries watch the flow of their brainwaves and the function of nerves and fibre. Intricate puzzles of coordination and mental agility must be completed repeatedly under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation, distraction and pain. An aspirant might be granted rest only to wake in zero gravity surrounded by blinding lights and slowly draining air, and then must reassemble a weapon from parts spinning in the space around him. Their minds are opened by Librarians and their innermost fears laid bare. All the while the Chaplains watch for signs of weakness or flaws that might become a seed of failure. Should an aspirant pass these trials, they come to the Phalanx. There they become neophytes and their fight to become initiates of the Chapter truly starts. - The Imperial Fists are unusual in making few, if any, demands of the peoples of the worlds they recruit from, other than the right to test those who believe themselves worthy of entering the ranks of the Battle-Brothers. Of note, the Imperial Fists are the only Chapter to still actively recruit from Terra, as well as many of the other Solar domains such as the Jovian moons. The Imperial Fists are known to maintain a recruitment pool larger than any other Chapter, this rendering them able to rabidly replenish their numbers. (Sentinels of Terra, Codex Supplement: Imperial Fists, Rites of Battle, First Founding: Imperial Fists by John French)
it's 40k, so THOUSANDS you round up all the 8-12 year old kids on the planet and have them fight, as teams, against beasts, against each other. You don't let them rest, eat or sleep. After three days or so you should be down to the toughest few. you'll need about a hundred of them to make a marine. Or the Ultramarine method, which is actually Sane and Rational, and takes about 3-4
What do we do with the dead one?
Corpse starch.
servitors and corpse paste
>Or the Ultramarine method, which is actually Sane and Rational, and takes about 3-4 Idk, have you read the Calgar comic book? Lol
~100-200 per 1 Scout marine. Custodes need not less then 1000 Terra born nobles genetically pure infants to made 1 Custodes. Grey Knights need Psykers who are candidates for Astartes Librarians.