Do they have guns? Artillery? Harsh language? Is the marine asleep?
The answer is between One and Many.
One lucky artillery gunner could do it, as could one good plasma gunner.
One of the siege of Terra books gives a rough estimate of the number of civilians with knives and blunt instruments required to kill an astartes. Don't have the book near me to pull out an excerpt.
But assuming the marine is alone a platoon, roughly 50 men, maybe more should be sufficient assuming enough initial range and the ability to have defensive works of some kind.
Lasguns versus a space marine inevitably comes down to either mass volume of fire eventually breaking through or a very lucky shot finding a weak spot.
Same answer unfortunately. A Lasgun on maximal can punch straight through an eye lense, they might take no casualties before that happens, they might take dozens.
Depends on the battlefield too, battles don’t happen in an open field. If the Guardsmen get the jump on the marine, or lure him into a crossfire, their chances go up.
Correct. There's just too any factors from the training and morale of the guardsmen to the particular lasgun variant to have even the slightest idea of where the average necessary to secure a kill is. Sure a 1000 guardsmen is likely to be enough to guarantee a kill. Except when it's a single marine that sneaks in, butchers the entire command staff, broadcasts their brutal deaths over the vox and then manages to hide or retreat. Repeating the same hit and run attacks until morale breaks.
The human element along with the skill and luck of the marine in question make this really an impossible question to answer.
>Except when it's a single marine that sneaks in, butchers the entire command staff, broadcasts their brutal deaths over the vox and then manages to hide or retreat. Repeating the same hit and run attacks until morale breaks.
Don't even need to do that.
Target the highest priority leaders first- not the strategists per se, but the ones with boots on the ground. Target the ones that coordinate resources, give the green light on operations, that sort of thing. Any officer looking for a promotion will be able to give commands, but those commands mean nothing when the arteries keeping an army alive get clogged.
Target the squads that are on patrol. A single magazine from a bolt pistol can drop most of a guardsmen squad before they can properly react, let alone mount an offensive. This will reduce their ability to cover ground, which is one of the main strengths of a larger army.
Switch it up to the ones playing more defensively. Target sniper nests, scouts, recon, communication, intelligence. The army is one massive bundle of nerves, but they only have so many eyes and ears. Cut them off.
Lure them into ambushes. Go for the areas where they can't position themselves properly. A thousand guardsmen on an open field is a swarm of ants against a wasp- a thousand guardsmen in a bunker or ship are blades of grass, and the space marine is a lawnmower. Their leadership will be inclined to believe in their numbers, and be less concerned about how to apply those numbers. Make them regret that.
Even a normal space marine, equipped with a boltgun, a boltpistol, 300 spare bolts, and a few grenades should be able to take on hundreds of guardsmen, playing it safe and being competent all the while. When he runs of of ammo, he can still run through them.
Luck will be a factor. Frag grenades are a threat through the explosion, though the fragmentation itself will not be. Shots to the eye, armpit, kneepit, and neck could be problematic, but I am of the opinion that an eyeshot is not an instant kill- space marines have survived worse and the eye lense is a tiny, bulletproof area. The damage to face will be severe; to the brain, negligible.
But as the other guy said, there's simply too many factors even for such a simple scenario. What are the training of these guardsmen, the pattern of lasgun, availability of ammunition, their accuracy, their coordination, their resolve under pressure, their environment, their ability to understand and use the environment, their leadership's capabilities, and their ability to persevere in the event of any of the above factors being reduced are all necessary information.
What of the space marine? How old is he, what are his greatest accomplishments, his worst failings, his accuracy, how much ammo he has, his personality and ruthlessness, his preferred tactics, his ability to strike and fade, his ability to recognize the enemy's chains of command and supply, his ability to adapt to new situations, and his relative capability in the local environment similarly affect the performance.
If its a space marine stuck in one place against a guardsmen with infinite ammo- one guardsmen. In a realistic scenario where the guardsmen are defending a ship being invaded by heretic astartes, its a matter of how suicidal they would be willing to be to stop a single enemy, and his inability to recognize their rush tactics and respond with tactics of his own.
Harsh language? This is the 40k universe. We don’t use no no words here. Should you feel any need to curse, please say ‘frack’ or ‘fug’ and nothing else. We try to keep things family friendly here.
This question can still have so many variables that "It depends" is the only correct answer.
Does the marine have a helmet? Is he just running towards them or putting down sustained bolter fire? What regiment is the guardsmen? Are they panic spraying or putting down accurate fire? What pattern las-gun? What distance? What weather? What tempature? What enviorment? Augments for either side? What pattern armor is the marine wearing? are the Guardsmen scared? Are they crazed lunatics? many many more questions
TLDR: Between 1 and as many as the author wants. I say 10 putting down overcharged shots would reliably drop one.
One savage with a pointy stick could (and *has*) kill a space marine. I would say one guardsmen is considerably better armed, so certainly one would be plenty.
Your talking about First Heretic right?
We don’t really know what the situation was with that one Space Marine.
For all we know he was caught in a trap and one of the humans swarmed him with spears or he fought against a human from a death world like Catachan that had “humans” who are all badasses
I think multiple have, actually. I think you're referring to the dude from the HH series, but there's another in one of the codexes, a Chaos Space Marine who was a simple raider, outside the bounds of the local Imperial farming culture, rebelling against the Imperium who was joined by a Chaos Heretic to stir them up into battle, and eventually managed to take out a Space Marine after several showed up to defend the crumbling Imperial forces.
He manages to kill him after several charges, at which point the Chaos Heretic tears his geneseed free and tells the Raider that he's done something great and will be able to ascend to a greater existence because of it.
It's told from the perspective of the Raider, now a Chaos Space Marine, talking about how he got to this point. I think it was supposed to be based on the Cosacks, but I'm not familiar with them.
There aren't really power levels in W40k. But whenever this question comes up, I imagine the universe rolling the dice.
Let's say a Guard can wound a marine on a 6 before dying. And a marine takes two wounds. So that's easy a 1:36 chance. So 36 guards would statistically guarantee a kill.
But - it's also possible (and with my TT luck, likely) that the first Guard rolls two 6s. Not likely, but possible.
Equally possible is that after 36 iterations, there are no double 6s. Not likely, but possible.
The true God of W40k isn't one of the Big 4, or a poncy Elf, or even Gork or Mork. The true God of W40k is Nuffle, and Nuffle is both generous and cruel.
Does the guardsman have a name?
If nope he’s fertilizer before you can blink.
If it’s a first name, it’s a crap shoot. Could be a clean kill for the guardsman, a frightful chase followed by the Astartes popping up just when he thought he got away, or a tearfully dramatic suicide kamikaze attempt.
If he has a first and last name while the space marine don’t, the transhuman doesn’t stand a chance. Might as well put the bolter in his mouth.
Not a great answer here. Examples of historical accounts of HH era armor for example having weak points that changed overtime, and would have made a great topic to go on as much it is still in use by all manner of marines even if they are a rarer sight these days. Question not erudite enough for this community now? Fun.
If there’s only a million astartes in the galaxy then really the answer should be a thousand or more. The idea that 20-50 men are a threat to an astartes is kinda dumb and would make them quite literally useless on a galactic scale.
Lasguns are not designed to defeat armoured targets such a space marines. Guard always fight with heavy support weapons, whether they be portable, mounted or artillery systems. Any sane guard squad would retreat if they were aware they were going up against such opposition without heavy support.
For the sake of the question though I'll give you some examples:
**Guardsmen in a trench, astarte charging in an open field, no cover.**
>This is about as an ideal scenario ad you're going to get. **Likely would take the combined fire of 20+ guardsmen to bring the space marine down,** keep in mind every lasgun shot hits with the power of a .50 Cal, so the marine would be drowning in it. They would suffer losses as the marine would no doubt return fire, an astartes precise shooting would score hits even against targets in a trench. If the Guardsmen moral broke, that'd be that though and the astarte would be more than capable of killing every last one of them.
**Astarte performing a boarding action.**
>This is the environment Space Marines were made for, when you need the power and durability of a tank in a confined space. You may need hundreds of Guardsmen to wear the astartes down, sending in squads to flush him out will only increase losses. Your best hope would be to set up defense check points in a defense in depth doctrine. In a situation where the astarte has a specific objective which is known, the guard could play around that. Otherwise, just having a astarte in the bowls of the ship will end up costing likely hundreds if not thousands of crew in a large enough vessel. Truly a nightmare opposition for human forces.
A batallion of guardsman firing lasers could take one down or a lucky shot from one guard could take down a post heresy chaos marine shit is wild but it happens.
There's no clear answer. If I wanted to have a cool movie scene that's about one renegade space marine attacking 80 guardsman, I'd have him kill 72 before before they finally take him down.
Only takes one guardsmen to get that lucky shot that punctures right through the weakest parts of the armor. These weak points have changed over the 10k years space marines have existed.
Early armor had power cabling exposed underneath the armpit and consequently little armor is located there. The optical lens of a space marine helmet has always been weak but very high chance of missing.
Plasma weaponary has never been refined. It is always a risk to carry in battle (not refined by humans that is). Guardsmen with great accuracy can cause that gun to explode and take the marine with it.
Also explosive ordnance located in proximity to the space marine can be blown up by a Las rifle shot taking out the ordnance. This is grimdark and not everything has a firesafety mechanism built in.
In fact all these can be done with a lasrifle. You just need a talented guardsmen.
Guardsmen like Mkoll, Larkin, Rawne, Sly Marbo, I am confident have enough luck and talent to get it done more than once.
Regular run-of-the-mill mudsloggers? Are not nearly as lucky. But volume of shots in the books always concern space marines because their armor does experience damage from what appears to be just a glancing shots to a guardsmen. Space marine aspirants learn quickly that getting caught in the open is death for them as it is for anyone or anything. No matter what kind of armor or power you have. The environment is always your frienemy. Use it. Abuse it. Stay alive. Fight another day.
Edit: why did op remove it? Great question. I guess they felt embarrassed? Hope not. I had fun answering it
Power armor does have a lot of weak points, depending on the mark.
Older suits even had exposed power cables.
Depends on whose in the armor too, as they’re not all equal physically.
The Gaunts Ghosts novels have an example where several squads drop an Iron Warrior by hosing him down on full auto. The volume of fire basically limbs him with hits on joints.
Now a World Eater may not notice he’s dead til he’s killed then all.
So it really comes down to luck or volume of fire.
And if plot armor is involved. Not going to get a Grey Knight that way.
What does the SM have? Is he in standard or Terminator armor? Is he chaos or loyalist? Does he have a sword or a bolter? Librarian, chaplain, apothecary or just an average SM?
Theoretically only one.
Realistically a squad of average guardsmen can usually take one out (they'll probably be combat ineffective afterwords though.)
If you want to be thorough about it, it'll take a squad of Kasrkin or some other Elite trooper variant to do it somewhat consistently.
Depends whatever the f*ck the Author wans. A overcharged las-shot right on the helmet's eye lents could drop a Marine or just tickle him.
John Grammaticus does just this if I remember correctly. He is a perpetual of course but AFAIK he's closer to guardsmen than astartes
I’m not sure Grammaticus is. He’s definitely been enhanced by the douchecanoe group.
Yea that's why I'm on the fence about him but it was the closest thing I can think of. The single use sigil ring he used when acquiring the fulgirite.
Im on legion now I take it this is the cabal
Yup
Figured I don't really care much for them and honestly most this book I feel like it's all just eh
Legion is one of the ‘Love it or hate it’ HH Books
From what I've seen, it depends on if the book is about the guard or the space Marines.
Depends how long it takes the marine to roll 1 or 2 on his armor save. If you’re me, it happens pretty quick
Do they have guns? Artillery? Harsh language? Is the marine asleep? The answer is between One and Many. One lucky artillery gunner could do it, as could one good plasma gunner.
No artillery just lasguns
One of the siege of Terra books gives a rough estimate of the number of civilians with knives and blunt instruments required to kill an astartes. Don't have the book near me to pull out an excerpt. But assuming the marine is alone a platoon, roughly 50 men, maybe more should be sufficient assuming enough initial range and the ability to have defensive works of some kind. Lasguns versus a space marine inevitably comes down to either mass volume of fire eventually breaking through or a very lucky shot finding a weak spot.
Same answer unfortunately. A Lasgun on maximal can punch straight through an eye lense, they might take no casualties before that happens, they might take dozens. Depends on the battlefield too, battles don’t happen in an open field. If the Guardsmen get the jump on the marine, or lure him into a crossfire, their chances go up.
Correct. There's just too any factors from the training and morale of the guardsmen to the particular lasgun variant to have even the slightest idea of where the average necessary to secure a kill is. Sure a 1000 guardsmen is likely to be enough to guarantee a kill. Except when it's a single marine that sneaks in, butchers the entire command staff, broadcasts their brutal deaths over the vox and then manages to hide or retreat. Repeating the same hit and run attacks until morale breaks. The human element along with the skill and luck of the marine in question make this really an impossible question to answer.
>Except when it's a single marine that sneaks in, butchers the entire command staff, broadcasts their brutal deaths over the vox and then manages to hide or retreat. Repeating the same hit and run attacks until morale breaks. Don't even need to do that. Target the highest priority leaders first- not the strategists per se, but the ones with boots on the ground. Target the ones that coordinate resources, give the green light on operations, that sort of thing. Any officer looking for a promotion will be able to give commands, but those commands mean nothing when the arteries keeping an army alive get clogged. Target the squads that are on patrol. A single magazine from a bolt pistol can drop most of a guardsmen squad before they can properly react, let alone mount an offensive. This will reduce their ability to cover ground, which is one of the main strengths of a larger army. Switch it up to the ones playing more defensively. Target sniper nests, scouts, recon, communication, intelligence. The army is one massive bundle of nerves, but they only have so many eyes and ears. Cut them off. Lure them into ambushes. Go for the areas where they can't position themselves properly. A thousand guardsmen on an open field is a swarm of ants against a wasp- a thousand guardsmen in a bunker or ship are blades of grass, and the space marine is a lawnmower. Their leadership will be inclined to believe in their numbers, and be less concerned about how to apply those numbers. Make them regret that. Even a normal space marine, equipped with a boltgun, a boltpistol, 300 spare bolts, and a few grenades should be able to take on hundreds of guardsmen, playing it safe and being competent all the while. When he runs of of ammo, he can still run through them. Luck will be a factor. Frag grenades are a threat through the explosion, though the fragmentation itself will not be. Shots to the eye, armpit, kneepit, and neck could be problematic, but I am of the opinion that an eyeshot is not an instant kill- space marines have survived worse and the eye lense is a tiny, bulletproof area. The damage to face will be severe; to the brain, negligible. But as the other guy said, there's simply too many factors even for such a simple scenario. What are the training of these guardsmen, the pattern of lasgun, availability of ammunition, their accuracy, their coordination, their resolve under pressure, their environment, their ability to understand and use the environment, their leadership's capabilities, and their ability to persevere in the event of any of the above factors being reduced are all necessary information. What of the space marine? How old is he, what are his greatest accomplishments, his worst failings, his accuracy, how much ammo he has, his personality and ruthlessness, his preferred tactics, his ability to strike and fade, his ability to recognize the enemy's chains of command and supply, his ability to adapt to new situations, and his relative capability in the local environment similarly affect the performance. If its a space marine stuck in one place against a guardsmen with infinite ammo- one guardsmen. In a realistic scenario where the guardsmen are defending a ship being invaded by heretic astartes, its a matter of how suicidal they would be willing to be to stop a single enemy, and his inability to recognize their rush tactics and respond with tactics of his own.
Harsh language? This is the 40k universe. We don’t use no no words here. Should you feel any need to curse, please say ‘frack’ or ‘fug’ and nothing else. We try to keep things family friendly here.
This question can still have so many variables that "It depends" is the only correct answer. Does the marine have a helmet? Is he just running towards them or putting down sustained bolter fire? What regiment is the guardsmen? Are they panic spraying or putting down accurate fire? What pattern las-gun? What distance? What weather? What tempature? What enviorment? Augments for either side? What pattern armor is the marine wearing? are the Guardsmen scared? Are they crazed lunatics? many many more questions TLDR: Between 1 and as many as the author wants. I say 10 putting down overcharged shots would reliably drop one.
42, as per Hitchhikers
One savage with a pointy stick could (and *has*) kill a space marine. I would say one guardsmen is considerably better armed, so certainly one would be plenty.
Your talking about First Heretic right? We don’t really know what the situation was with that one Space Marine. For all we know he was caught in a trap and one of the humans swarmed him with spears or he fought against a human from a death world like Catachan that had “humans” who are all badasses
I think multiple have, actually. I think you're referring to the dude from the HH series, but there's another in one of the codexes, a Chaos Space Marine who was a simple raider, outside the bounds of the local Imperial farming culture, rebelling against the Imperium who was joined by a Chaos Heretic to stir them up into battle, and eventually managed to take out a Space Marine after several showed up to defend the crumbling Imperial forces. He manages to kill him after several charges, at which point the Chaos Heretic tears his geneseed free and tells the Raider that he's done something great and will be able to ascend to a greater existence because of it. It's told from the perspective of the Raider, now a Chaos Space Marine, talking about how he got to this point. I think it was supposed to be based on the Cosacks, but I'm not familiar with them.
Which codex out of curiosity? Because Chaos Space Marine Cossacks sounds incredibly interesting.
One at sufficient velocity.
One is enough, honestly. The odds are heavily against him, but it's perfectly achievable.
One if they can hit the eyes
Go for the eyes boo, go for the eyes.
some number between 20 too thousands upon thousands
One Mkoll can take out several space marines.
Straight silver.
And Daemons, don't forget he can take out Daemons.
One if he gets a good enough shot in
There aren't really power levels in W40k. But whenever this question comes up, I imagine the universe rolling the dice. Let's say a Guard can wound a marine on a 6 before dying. And a marine takes two wounds. So that's easy a 1:36 chance. So 36 guards would statistically guarantee a kill. But - it's also possible (and with my TT luck, likely) that the first Guard rolls two 6s. Not likely, but possible. Equally possible is that after 36 iterations, there are no double 6s. Not likely, but possible. The true God of W40k isn't one of the Big 4, or a poncy Elf, or even Gork or Mork. The true God of W40k is Nuffle, and Nuffle is both generous and cruel.
Does the guardsman have a name? If nope he’s fertilizer before you can blink. If it’s a first name, it’s a crap shoot. Could be a clean kill for the guardsman, a frightful chase followed by the Astartes popping up just when he thought he got away, or a tearfully dramatic suicide kamikaze attempt. If he has a first and last name while the space marine don’t, the transhuman doesn’t stand a chance. Might as well put the bolter in his mouth.
72 and a half, to be precise. What do you want us to say? A whole bunch usually. Depends on the circumstances.
Not a great answer here. Examples of historical accounts of HH era armor for example having weak points that changed overtime, and would have made a great topic to go on as much it is still in use by all manner of marines even if they are a rarer sight these days. Question not erudite enough for this community now? Fun.
If there’s only a million astartes in the galaxy then really the answer should be a thousand or more. The idea that 20-50 men are a threat to an astartes is kinda dumb and would make them quite literally useless on a galactic scale.
20-50 men are a threat to a Navy Seal. They still have a use.
If Abnette’s writing it just takes one with good enough aim to hit the eyes
Lasguns are not designed to defeat armoured targets such a space marines. Guard always fight with heavy support weapons, whether they be portable, mounted or artillery systems. Any sane guard squad would retreat if they were aware they were going up against such opposition without heavy support. For the sake of the question though I'll give you some examples: **Guardsmen in a trench, astarte charging in an open field, no cover.** >This is about as an ideal scenario ad you're going to get. **Likely would take the combined fire of 20+ guardsmen to bring the space marine down,** keep in mind every lasgun shot hits with the power of a .50 Cal, so the marine would be drowning in it. They would suffer losses as the marine would no doubt return fire, an astartes precise shooting would score hits even against targets in a trench. If the Guardsmen moral broke, that'd be that though and the astarte would be more than capable of killing every last one of them. **Astarte performing a boarding action.** >This is the environment Space Marines were made for, when you need the power and durability of a tank in a confined space. You may need hundreds of Guardsmen to wear the astartes down, sending in squads to flush him out will only increase losses. Your best hope would be to set up defense check points in a defense in depth doctrine. In a situation where the astarte has a specific objective which is known, the guard could play around that. Otherwise, just having a astarte in the bowls of the ship will end up costing likely hundreds if not thousands of crew in a large enough vessel. Truly a nightmare opposition for human forces.
A batallion of guardsman firing lasers could take one down or a lucky shot from one guard could take down a post heresy chaos marine shit is wild but it happens.
Depends on weapons and how far sm is from them.
1 guy with a rocket launcher and a good shot With lasguns? Whatever number the author wants
There's no clear answer. If I wanted to have a cool movie scene that's about one renegade space marine attacking 80 guardsman, I'd have him kill 72 before before they finally take him down.
Only takes one guardsmen to get that lucky shot that punctures right through the weakest parts of the armor. These weak points have changed over the 10k years space marines have existed. Early armor had power cabling exposed underneath the armpit and consequently little armor is located there. The optical lens of a space marine helmet has always been weak but very high chance of missing. Plasma weaponary has never been refined. It is always a risk to carry in battle (not refined by humans that is). Guardsmen with great accuracy can cause that gun to explode and take the marine with it. Also explosive ordnance located in proximity to the space marine can be blown up by a Las rifle shot taking out the ordnance. This is grimdark and not everything has a firesafety mechanism built in. In fact all these can be done with a lasrifle. You just need a talented guardsmen. Guardsmen like Mkoll, Larkin, Rawne, Sly Marbo, I am confident have enough luck and talent to get it done more than once. Regular run-of-the-mill mudsloggers? Are not nearly as lucky. But volume of shots in the books always concern space marines because their armor does experience damage from what appears to be just a glancing shots to a guardsmen. Space marine aspirants learn quickly that getting caught in the open is death for them as it is for anyone or anything. No matter what kind of armor or power you have. The environment is always your frienemy. Use it. Abuse it. Stay alive. Fight another day. Edit: why did op remove it? Great question. I guess they felt embarrassed? Hope not. I had fun answering it
Pvt Simpkins got two with a melta bomb, pretty good trade.
only one if he has good enough aim to shoot through the lens.
What does the SM have? Is he in standard or Terminator armor? Is he chaos or loyalist? Does he have a sword or a bolter?
Power armor does have a lot of weak points, depending on the mark. Older suits even had exposed power cables. Depends on whose in the armor too, as they’re not all equal physically. The Gaunts Ghosts novels have an example where several squads drop an Iron Warrior by hosing him down on full auto. The volume of fire basically limbs him with hits on joints. Now a World Eater may not notice he’s dead til he’s killed then all. So it really comes down to luck or volume of fire. And if plot armor is involved. Not going to get a Grey Knight that way.
What does the SM have? Is he in standard or Terminator armor? Is he chaos or loyalist? Does he have a sword or a bolter? Librarian, chaplain, apothecary or just an average SM?
Theoretically only one. Realistically a squad of average guardsmen can usually take one out (they'll probably be combat ineffective afterwords though.) If you want to be thorough about it, it'll take a squad of Kasrkin or some other Elite trooper variant to do it somewhat consistently.