Brother_Ead

There's really nothing that says the 6th 7th 8th 9th or 10th companies have to be reserve companies. Looks to me like they're all battle companies.

You know what I think is great? The topic of new fluff versus old fluff mirrors exactly the conflict between Kardan Stronos's Clan Raukaan and the rest of the Iron Hands. It's almost like we're the Iron Council.

For list, I say load up on command squads, independent characters, and Dreadnoughts. Take a demi company with a command squad, apothacary, and full unit of venerable dreadnoughts. Take a Strike force command with another chaplain or captain and command squad with apothacary. Take a Reclusiam command squad with another apothacary. Finally, take a librarius and go Biomancy. You'll have 9 models that Will Not Die, and three squads with 4+ Feel No Pain. Outfit your characters to be as ded 'ard as possible.

In my view, not much, except that real Iron Hands do NOT think Ferrus Manus died in vain. Some of us may blame the Salamanders or Raven Guard for weakness at Istvan. We are all deeply concerned that the Imperium isn't strong enough to deal with the threats it faces. In our darkest moments we doubt our own strength as well, but that is why we continuously improve ourselves. I really like the idea that our bionic enhancements are just a continuation of the process of engineering a mortal human into a post-human Astartes. That is excellent. Dealing with emotion is not bad fluff by itself, and overall I found the old Index Astartes fluff a little bit one-dimensional. I like the treatment of the Iron Hands in the Horus Heresy books. I just think there isn't enough of it. So, all I would change is how Iron Hands view the death of their Primarch. We don't have Black Rage the way Blood Angels do, but it's very similar. Of all the first frounding chapters I believe we have the most to prove to ourselves and the biggest chips on our shoulders.

There was a bit about emotion, how the Iron Hands used a neural implant to suppress their's for millenia, and that this fed the Sapphire King. By suppressing emotion, the Iron Hands left no-place else for it to go than into the warp where it fed that greater daemon of Slannesh. We defeated the Sapphire King by turning off the neural implants. Iron Hands that didn't turn them off were turned to chaos spawn. Without the emotion suppressors holding us back we become angrier than the angriest Black Templars. So at that point the Sapphire King was toast. He had his head blown off by the force staff of our Chief Librarian. This bit of fluff is controversial for two reasons 1) some people don't like the emotional angle and prefer the cool, detached killers we used to be. 2) we supposedly got into the emotion suppressing practice because Ferrus's uncontrolled anger is what got him killed. Nobody actually thinks that, least of all an Iron Hand. We take enough crap from the other First Founding chapters for our Primarch's beheading as it is, making it his own fault is just too much.

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Agreed. Very helpful! I need to read those brazen claw short stories then.

I'd actually think the Iron Hands themselves are closely watched by the Inquisition for this reason. The whole hatred of the flesh thing is an aberration among Space Marine chapters in the wider Imperium. If all successor chapters of Iron Hands did have the same compulsion, it would lend evidence to the assumption that it's a problem with the geneseed itself and not just a chapter cult thing. If the geneseed isn't flawed and I followed Autek Mor (who didn't really like Ferrus all that much anyway from what I can tell) I might be all like, "Yeah, you can cut your hands off if you like but..."

There are a couple of Brazen Claws short stories. Anybody read them?

So Iron Hands remove their left hand upon becoming Space Marines. Did this ritual continue unbroken among their successor chapters? If there is no fluff providing the answer, which successor chapter or chapters do you think would have most likely forgotten or left this ritual behind?

Human technology is divinely inspired by the Omnissiah. That's why we say human technology has the machine spirit. Xenos technology is heretical because it isn't divinely inspired by the Omnissiah and therefore lacks the machine spirit. Artificial intelligence is heretical because it is not human and therefore it also lacks the machine spirit. It is not heretical to incorporate living human neural tissue in cogitators that control autonomous machines. Such machines have spirits capable of acting of their own accord, but they are still human, still divinely inspired, and will not betray humankind as AI inevitably does. Out of character, I think of the Cult Mechanicus as techno-Catholicism. The Omnissiah is the Father, the Emperor is Jesus, and the machine spirit that resides in all human technology is the Holy Spirit. It's the 40k equivalent of the Holy trinity. Reading from STC operations manuals is essentially like reading from the Bible, and maintaining STC technology is like prayer at mass.

Good report! But vehicles don't get stealth.