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Recently read Aaron Allston's "Starfighters of Adumar", my favourite x-wing novel, which could almost be self-contained. Back to 40k and about Space Marine casualties I just read Damocles and the ratio of Space Marine to Crisis Suit is worrisome. Single squad surgical strikes against Tau appear to be almost non-viable. Also the Tau's definition of heavy casualties with ~800 dead irrc when caught in an ambush during a planetary invasion of a Knight world is like  . Still, nothing tops James Shallow and his BA novels.
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Sep 15, 2014 12:09
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Another piece of my personal head canon is that the progenoids regrow about every 10 years or so, allowing periodic harvesting over a marines career. In both the table-top and the fiction there's far to much unrecoverable gene-seed (not to mention the implants don't always take) to allow one marine only ever producing two progenoids to allow long term viablity in replacing losses.
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Sep 15, 2014 12:55
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How do they grow progenoids anyway? Is there some secret lab on terra making raw ones? Each legions is unique isnt it?
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Sep 15, 2014 13:43
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Waroduce posted:How do they grow progenoids anyway? Is there some secret lab on terra making raw ones? Each legions is unique isnt it? I believe one is implanted, and the other grows within the body. After a certain point both can be harvested without harm to the Space Marine. Could be wrong about the 'grows within the body' part.
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Sep 15, 2014 13:46
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VanSandman posted:I believe one is implanted, and the other grows within the body. After a certain point both can be harvested without harm to the Space Marine. Could be wrong about the 'grows within the body' part. It grows within the body, one in the neck and the other in the chest, If I recall correctly. Arquinsiel posted:This comparison makes no sense to me. The Elric books are mostly him just kind of floating through insane situations and coming out on top because the universe wants him to and the problems the knowledge of that causes his psyche. The Darkblade books are a guy way out of his depth getting lucky and saying "I meant to do that" over and over and over and over again. Fair enough, however I think we can summarize it as different flairs of plot armor. but you're correct of course, I was
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Sep 15, 2014 14:14
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VanSandman posted:I believe one is implanted, and the other grows within the body. After a certain point both can be harvested without harm to the Space Marine. Could be wrong about the 'grows within the body' part. One is implanted, the other grows. At some point, you should be able to harvest both, theoretically doubling your chapter potential every so many years. The problem is that usually they only seem to be harvested upon the death of the Marine, and then only if someone can get to the body for extraction. Waroduce posted:How do they grow progenoids anyway? Is there some secret lab on terra making raw ones? Each legions is unique isnt it?
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Sep 15, 2014 14:56
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Throb Robinson posted:Karen Traviss and her hard on for Mandos was way way worse. Ive seen it said she should write 40k but it would be horrible. One of her gears of war books it beat for beat the same book as she wrote for star wars its crazy she got away with it Wasn't one of the Gears of Wars books where she got away with mentioning that COG had rape camps or something like that? Her stuff for the Halo universe isn't much better what according I've heard where certain character do a complete 180 in characterization. Guess it's the fate of all sci-fi universe to go into complete nose dives after a while or something. Despite all the flaws I kinda enjoyed the early Halo books up to Ghosts of Onyx after that it really began going downhill. Traviss does have some really odd fascination in making one particular group of warriors insane special snow flakes to the point that everyone else acts like complete retards to make them seem flawless. I mean she should technically be fine for writing Space Marines (  ) but I wouldn't wish that upon any Marines fans at all to be honest.
Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 19:23
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Karen Traviss is pretty much a real life fascist propagandist.
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Sep 15, 2014 19:31
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This kinds offtopic, but may be overlap, Are any of the halo books worth a read
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Sep 15, 2014 20:22
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Waroduce posted:This kinds offtopic, but may be overlap, The ones written by Eric Nylund are better then they should be. Above average sci-fi for a video game. He is really good at writing a space battle as well. Ive picked up his other work outside halo and its solid too. Greg bear wrote a few million year removed prequels about the forerunners that arnt great but not bad either. Really strong on the hard sci-fi end of things but weak when it comes to talking. A lot of fun if you like reading about structures and alien devices large and powerful like the Halo itself
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Sep 15, 2014 20:57
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Waroduce posted:This kinds offtopic, but may be overlap, The Fall of Reach became the game Halo: Reach. Some nerds got mad because it changed a few things in the "canon" of the novel, but I'd honestly put the canonical status of a multimillion dollar videogame made by the folks who wrote the original story over a licensed novel. There was one called The Flood which was a pretty rote retelling of the game and it might as well have said "Then Master Chief clicked the right stock to zoom in on the grunt's head and pulled the right trigger twice before pressing X to reload" with some slightly interesting but immaterial story inbetween.
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Sep 15, 2014 21:14
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SRM posted:The Fall of Reach became the game Halo: Reach. Some nerds got mad because it changed a few things in the "canon" of the novel, but I'd honestly put the canonical status of a multimillion dollar videogame made by the folks who wrote the original story over a licensed novel. There was one called The Flood which was a pretty rote retelling of the game and it might as well have said "Then Master Chief clicked the right stock to zoom in on the grunt's head and pulled the right trigger twice before pressing X to reload" with some slightly interesting but immaterial story inbetween. The thing about Fall of Reach is that it was a prequel novel to Halo 1 before any other Halo games were made. In my opinion, it's genuinely good military science fiction - the Covenant are weird, mysterious, and absolutely brutal. Then the other Halo games came along years later and retconned almost everything from Fall of Reach. So take it as you will.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:00
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berzerkmonkey posted:
The Mechanicum are the ones who check the geneseed for mutation (on behalf of the High Lords) and have stockpiles of "pure" geneseed that is used to create new Chapters
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Sep 15, 2014 22:10
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Point of order: The Mechanicum was pre-Heresy. The Adeptus Mechanicus is the loyalist 40k faction. Yes a lot of authors get this wrong.
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Sep 15, 2014 22:16
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Cythereal posted:The thing about Fall of Reach is that it was a prequel novel to Halo 1 before any other Halo games were made. In my opinion, it's genuinely good military science fiction - the Covenant are weird, mysterious, and absolutely brutal.
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Sep 15, 2014 23:38
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VanSandman posted:Point of order: The Mechanicum was pre-Heresy. The Adeptus Mechanicus is the loyalist 40k faction.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:00
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Sramaker posted:Warhammer related: The Sisters of Battle novels by James Swallow are they okay? They're not bad - Faith and Fire is a good look inside the Ecclesiarchy and Hammer and Anvil is one of the few books that spends time developing the Necrons as having any depth beyond "killer mummy robots."
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Sep 16, 2014 00:23
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Arquinsiel posted:Point of order: Latin changes poo poo like that constantly. First declension and masculine by the looks of things. Objection! They aren't speaking Latin in the grim darkness of the far future. Latin is just a shorthand for the ancient, semi-dead language that is High Gothic
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Sep 16, 2014 00:27
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Waroduce posted:This kinds offtopic, but may be overlap, What the others said pretty much. The Eric Nylund books are probably the best of the bunch, with Ghosts of Onyx my favourite in particular but Fall of Reach is still good despite technically not being entirely canon anymore. If you've played the first game you can ignore The Flood completely unless you want to read some extra not really important plot lines that have no real relevance to anything else afterwards. The book is as others have mentioned really forgettable. After Onyx I haven't really touched any of the other books but based on what I've heard I haven't really missed much. Wasn't much of a fan that they felt the need to explore the backstory involving the Forerunners as well as I thought it removed some of the mystery about them that I liked but that's just my general opinion on the matter. Not to mention I never liked the turn the series took with 4 anyway so I've generally lost all interest in the franchise as a whole. Might need to check out Nylund's non-Halo stuff at some point actually. Speaking of 40k books I was considering picking up Andy Hoare's Commissar while out shopping today but chose not to. Not really sure if I missed anything noteworthy or not though as I can barely recall reading anything by him anyway.
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Sep 16, 2014 00:28
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VanSandman posted:Objection! They aren't speaking Latin in the grim darkness of the far future. Latin is just a shorthand for the ancient, semi-dead language that is High Gothic 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:28
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Sramaker posted:So i should avoid The Road to Dune? I'm picturing this being a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie. 
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Sep 16, 2014 00:37
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VanSandman posted:Point of order: The Mechanicum was pre-Heresy. The Adeptus Mechanicus is the loyalist 40k faction. With the Imperial tendency to cling obsessively to the relics of the past, why would it raise an eyebrow to see the occasional reference to the "Mechanicum" instead of "Adeptus Mechanicus"? poo poo, OG Legions probably pass the terminology down through the millennia just because they were around when it was the term to use? Pyrolocutus fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 03:21
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Cooked Auto posted:What the others said pretty much. The Eric Nylund books are probably the best of the bunch, with Ghosts of Onyx my favourite in particular but Fall of Reach is still good despite technically not being entirely canon anymore. The one caution I'll offer anyone familiar with Halo about reading Fall of Reach is that Halo 1 was the only game in the series when it was written, so you get retroactively weird stuff like Elites' existence being entirely hypothetical on the part of humans until the battle of Reach and being a dead even match for a Spartan, and races from later games like drones and brutes being completely absent. If you're not a sperg who gets outraged over details and retcons like that, it's pretty good purely as military sci-fi.
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Sep 16, 2014 04:30
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To be fair, I think only myself and maybe 2 BL authors give a drat about the whole Mechanicu(m/s) thing.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:07
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If we are talking video game shoot em up books, y'all need to read Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts. Way better than any franchise fiction tie in has any right to be and supremely creepy as well.
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Sep 16, 2014 06:27
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Is this worth buying http://www.dunenovels.com/novel/road-dune i mean i have a friend who said he might buy it and i want to know if i should encourage him or not.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:36
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Sramaker posted:Is this worth buying http://www.dunenovels.com/novel/road-dune i mean i have a friend who said he might buy it and i want to know if i should encourage him or not. Does it have a name on it that is not Frank Herbert? If yes, it is a bad book and should be avoided at all costs.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:39
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Fried Chicken posted:If we are talking video game shoot em up books, y'all need to read Crysis: Legion by Peter Watts. Way better than any franchise fiction tie in has any right to be and supremely creepy as well. Huh, as i was reading through the thread i was thinking i should mention that. It's a suprisingly good book. The authors got a really nice deadpan laconic tone going and some suprisingly clever interpretation of some of the plot stuff.
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Sep 16, 2014 11:14
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maev posted:Basically this. One book you have Iron Snakes where literally one dude goes to defend a planet from Dark Eldar, then you have hundreds of Sons of Horus in Vengeful Spirit dying to massed fire in trenches. Come on...Priad kills like maybe...30 Dark Eldar, and none of them seem to have heavy weapons, while he is running them down in a Land Speeder. What struck me as more silly was how the locals description of their plight was enough for the Iron Snakes to realize they would only need to send one guy. As for Marines dying in Vengeful Spirit, it was a massive battle, and even Space Marines are going to die in droves in that kind of situation. They still held up way better than normal humans.
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Sep 16, 2014 17:24
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Uroboros posted:As for Marines dying in Vengeful Spirit, it was a massive battle, and even Space Marines are going to die in droves in that kind of situation. They still held up way better than normal humans. Astartes die as easily as any other soldier in the galaxy when facing massive amounts of artillery, heavy weapons, Titans, orbital bombardment and other fancy toys of mass murdering. That's why the Imperial Guard exist in the first place, they are great at dying. The flashy operations are best left to the Marines thanks to their superhuman capabilities, especially their unmatched skill at posing and being fabulous. It's funny, compared to the 41 millennium, how they deployed them in mass and throwing them happily into the meat grinder in the Horus Heresy. How many marines were deployed in Vengeful Spirit? I vaguely recall something like fifty or sixty thousand, in a single battlefield. Horus Hersey is loving crazy.
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Sep 16, 2014 17:51
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Angry Lobster posted:Astartes die as easily as any other soldier in the galaxy when facing massive amounts of artillery, heavy weapons, Titans, orbital bombardment and other fancy toys of mass murdering. That's why the Imperial Guard exist in the first place, they are great at dying. The flashy operations are best left to the Marines thanks to their superhuman capabilities, especially their unmatched skill at posing and being fabulous. Space Marines moved from elite armies capable of crushing entire empires in a matter of months or years to special ops teams, basically. In the 41st millennium crusades can take centuries since they are primarily fought by the imperial guard. See the Sabbat Crusade being several decades in.
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Sep 16, 2014 18:22
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Angry Lobster posted:Astartes die as easily as any other soldier in the galaxy when facing massive amounts of artillery, heavy weapons, Titans, orbital bombardment and other fancy toys of mass murdering. That's why the Imperial Guard exist in the first place, they are great at dying. The flashy operations are best left to the Marines thanks to their superhuman capabilities, especially their unmatched skill at posing and being fabulous. I think the key here is that Vengeful Spirit is a bad book. Demiurge4 posted:Space Marines moved from elite armies capable of crushing entire empires in a matter of months or years to special ops teams, basically. In the 41st millennium crusades can take centuries since they are primarily fought by the imperial guard. See the Sabbat Crusade being several decades in. Yeah the typical 40k-era Space Marine op seems to usually be something like "board alien spaceship and blow it up," "orbital drop into enemy HQ, kill entire leadership," or "teleport into palace, kill everyone" and usually only done by a handful of combat squads with scout support. Only very occasionally they get pulled into bigger or more protracted engagements. In that way, the practice of starting out aspirants as scouts sort of makes sense since their recon role is more frequently used and precedes most of their actual strikes. Also the Imperial Guard itself follows a regimental structure and their fleet transport and other auxiliary elements are constantly shuffled around so it's less likely that a while combined arms force goes renegade at once. For instance, if a regiment goes rogue they're usually stranded because the Imperial Navy handles interstellar transport. This also makes combined armed operations way more difficult and makes for constant politicking and bullshit which slows any crusade. The paranoia behind the self-contained cell structuring of most imperial organizations makes them at once quite resilient but also monstrously inefficient. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Sep 16, 2014 |
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Sep 16, 2014 18:46
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Demiurge4 posted:Space Marines moved from elite armies capable of crushing entire empires in a matter of months or years to special ops teams, basically. In the 41st millennium crusades can take centuries since they are primarily fought by the imperial guard. See the Sabbat Crusade being several decades in. Also, the Legions were very deliberately broken up into far smaller Chapters just so that a betrayal on the scale of the Horus Heresy would theoretically be impossible in the future.
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Sep 16, 2014 18:55
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Deptfordx posted:Huh, as i was reading through the thread i was thinking i should mention that. It's a suprisingly good book. The authors got a really nice deadpan laconic tone going and some suprisingly clever interpretation of some of the plot stuff. I thought it was interesting how he showed two distinct personalities and how they merged as the plot progressed. Alcatraz is much more of your typical bro moto perspective, the suit is a cold cynical killer, and bit by bit they merge into a ruthless but focused poo poo talking cynic thinking circles around the opposition but whose arrogance shuts out possibilities and let's things slip past. Plus the aliens are reframed as a sacred terror, which is interesting and offers some actually plausible explanations for why aliens would go head to head with us militarily.
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Sep 16, 2014 20:03
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I always found it funny that whenever an Eldar Guardian gets killed by an Imperial Guardsmen, that's potentially thousands of years of art and culture gone to a single pewpew from a lasgun.
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Sep 17, 2014 05:36
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amuayse posted:I always found it funny that whenever an Eldar Guardian gets killed by an Imperial Guardsmen, that's potentially thousands of years of art and culture gone to a single pewpew from a lasgun. 'tis fine, they're all dicks anyway
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Sep 17, 2014 07:09
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There's a cool shift of perspective in the way abnett writes marines in the heresy and in 40k. His 40k marines are usually much weirder loners, like in salvations reach and brotherhood of the snake. They have interactions with other characters but more or less they're otherised and wierd. In the heresy they're much much more human and they fight in a more conventional (albeit superhuman) way. I guess the heresy marks the transition between "weaponised humans" and "weapons with human souls"
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Sep 17, 2014 15:26
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lenoon posted:I guess the heresy marks the transition between "weaponised humans" and "weapons with human souls"
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Sep 17, 2014 16:12
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Plus as has been pointed out, it's a fairly nicely done effect of the enforced cell structure of the Imperium in 40K. Those Chapters are forced into isolation from other humans and even other Astartes. Since their only real purpose post heresy is war, that's an entire artificial culture that has spent 10 millenia filtering itself for fighting. There's little or no reason to prepare Marines for art or culture, they are near constantly needed to fight. Likewise the indoctrination element seems to result in millenia old grudges that the institution itself adopts and passes down so Iron Hands born 10 thousand years after Istvaan V (or whichever) will lose their poo poo when they encounter the Emperor's Children. It's like encountering some isolated village in the middle of nowehere that has a fun summer festival where they burn a giant wooden man but kicked up to 11.
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Sep 17, 2014 16:38
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MrNemo posted:Plus as has been pointed out, it's a fairly nicely done effect of the enforced cell structure of the Imperium in 40K. Those Chapters are forced into isolation from other humans and even other Astartes. Since their only real purpose post heresy is war, that's an entire artificial culture that has spent 10 millenia filtering itself for fighting. There's little or no reason to prepare Marines for art or culture, they are near constantly needed to fight. Likewise the indoctrination element seems to result in millenia old grudges that the institution itself adopts and passes down so Iron Hands born 10 thousand years after Istvaan V (or whichever) will lose their poo poo when they encounter the Emperor's Children. It's like encountering some isolated village in the middle of nowehere that has a fun summer festival where they burn a giant wooden man but kicked up to 11. Wait, do some chapter's internal rituals involve bees?
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Sep 17, 2014 18:24
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