"Children in the bodies of gods."

[Iron Father Ferrum]

I'd like to point out that all this talk of deficiencies and autistic behavior in Space Marines is not innate to their trans-human genome, and can be overcome. If you read Know No Fear, it is stated in there quite clearly that Guilliman was setting up his Ultramarines to be governors of the Imperium when the Great Crusade reached its conclusion. They were being trained in economics, political theory, etc so that they would be effective leaders in a post-Crusade civilian government of the galaxy. They were bred from the start to be the primary hammer of the Emperor in the reunion of mankind, but unlike Guilliman, Horus was unable to see that their superior (compared to normal humans) mental faculties also qualified them as governing figures. It's only been since the Heresy and the true explosion of Chaos as a threat that the Astartes' destiny changed from one of governance to one of eternal war. The admission that 100% compliant peace across the Imperium of Man by Guilliman was, in my mind, the fundamental reasoning behind him writing the Codex; there's no need to codify military doctrine if your warriors are going to be statesmen, after all.

 

My point is that this autistic behavior can be overcome, that a Space Marine can function like a reasonable, rational, and normal human if they are given the opportunity. Unfortunately for us, we need all of them on the front line killing stuff, leaving no time for classroom instruction in philosophy.

[The_son_of_Dorn]

Thing is tho, space marines no matter what the changes still have a human soul. The Emperor believes that naked force will answer all the Imperiums problems, but instead it will not. The Emperor is powerful but he is not a God and thus has his own limitations.

 

With respect to the nature of Astarees it is true, once war is resolved they have no purpose and are inclined to act in the nature they have become accustomed to simply because their true strength is also their weakness, they have no families or loved ones to protect so theycan become distant and detached from what it is they do, sure they have their comrades but its hard to find loving sympathy from a biologically engineered killing machine.

 

The issue with astartees is they are taught what to do, but not why it is they are doing it.

[voi shet magir]

Imagine if, instead of designing the Space Marines exclusively as warriors and conquerers, he'd designed them as diplomats and communicators: super human intelligences with the ability to empathise and understand the cultures they came across throughout the galaxy. Would there still be war and conflict? Certainly; such is inevitable when two disparate cultures come into contact.

 

This premise has a timeline problem. Find below quotes from Realms of Chaos: the Lost and the Damned

 

The development of genetic tissue took many centuries of work. This research was itself a spin- off from the aborted Primarch project, which was an early attempt at genetic re-structuring with the aim of creating god-like creatures called Primarchs....

 

The Emperor had lost the Primarchs and the first action of his renewed war against the Chaos Powers. The Primarchs could not be recreated and even if this were possible there was not time to do it. The birth pangs of Slaanesh grew louder and louder as the time of his waking grew near. The Emperor evolved another plan. Using genetic material which had been imprinted from the Primarchs into laboratory gholems, some of their qualities could be reproduced as discrete biological organs. By implanting these organs into a young growing body a person with some of the qualities of the Primarchs could be created, in this way the first Space Marine Chapters were founded.

 

Space Marines were an improvisation; the Primarchs seem to have been created with no intention of making space marines afterward. Collected Visions and the Thousand Sons novel indicate Magnus was meant to take over the Astronomican. This is not a job for the general of a private army. The same source describes the Primarchs as exemplars and guides "like the shamans of old:"

 

The Primarchs were to be shining examples of humans free from the taint of corruption. The energy of the uncorrupted warp would flow through them as it flowed through the Emperor himself, invigorating them and conferring special powers such as were possessed by the shamans of old.

 

It is easy to imagine that all the Primarchs were meant to be cabinet-level innovators for the whole Imperium. Sanguinius may have been a source of transcendence and salvation, Kurze may have been a Cassandra foretelling evil fates, and while Corax ended up as a guerilla leader, he would have been a good voice for the oppressed, since his first role was essentially as a labor organizer. See, I've already written three without mentioning the obvious administrative and intelligence-gathering skills of Guilliman and Alpahrius.

 

Human society could have reached amazing growth if it had been influenced all at once by the erstwhile leaders of Prospero, Macragge, and the Phalanx. There would have been no space marines needed. However, the Primarchs were misplaced, and the Emperor had to track them down before something worse happened to the project.

 

Brutal conquest by trans-humans was the way to get the Primarchs back. This is not just to power rapid expansion, the Emperor might have used anything for that, thunder warriors or no. The primarchs all arrived on planets extremely suited to their characters. The sorceror found a planet of sorcerors; it was not just a cultural thing. The fact that they wound up on populated planets at all also indicates that the warp delivers travelers to places of sympathetic destiny: they arrived at the place most like themselves.

 

The Emperor had to build an enormous amount of people completely bound and subservient to the Primarchs, just so that he could force the warp to facilitate their reunion. Even if he could have successfully cloned the primarchs, that may not have worked because the clones would be equal to and autonomous from their templates. Gene-seed was the way to take humans that started off with characters somewhat similar to the respective primarchs and then bind up their characters to be like missing parts of the primarchs. The legions were really just magnets drawing the Emperor and Primarchs back together.

 

 

The Emperor believes that naked force will answer all the Imperiums problems, but instead it will not. The Emperor is powerful but he is not a God and thus has his own limitations.

 

This I am not too hot on. He made Lorgar to be a general, really? I think he made Lorgar to be a propagandist or a mystic, not a military officer. It just turned out that he had to make a legion of warriors genetically bound to Lorgar, so that is just the way it shook out.

[Kol Saresk]

Imagine if, instead of designing the Space Marines exclusively as warriors and conquerers, he'd designed them as diplomats and communicators: super human intelligences with the ability to empathise and understand the cultures they came across throughout the galaxy. Would there still be war and conflict? Certainly; such is inevitable when two disparate cultures come into contact.

 

This premise has a timeline problem. Find below quotes from Realms of Chaos: the Lost and the Damned

 

The development of genetic tissue took many centuries of work. This research was itself a spin- off from the aborted Primarch project, which was an early attempt at genetic re-structuring with the aim of creating god-like creatures called Primarchs....

 

The Emperor had lost the Primarchs and the first action of his renewed war against the Chaos Powers. The Primarchs could not be recreated and even if this were possible there was not time to do it. The birth pangs of Slaanesh grew louder and louder as the time of his waking grew near. The Emperor evolved another plan. Using genetic material which had been imprinted from the Primarchs into laboratory gholems, some of their qualities could be reproduced as discrete biological organs. By implanting these organs into a young growing body a person with some of the qualities of the Primarchs could be created, in this way the first Space Marine Chapters were founded.

 

Space Marines were an improvisation; the Primarchs seem to have been created with no intention of making space marines afterward. Collected Visions and the Thousand Sons novel indicate Magnus was meant to take over the Astronomican. This is not a job for the general of a private army. The same source describes the Primarchs as exemplars and guides "like the shamans of old:"

 

The Primarchs were to be shining examples of humans free from the taint of corruption. The energy of the uncorrupted warp would flow through them as it flowed through the Emperor himself, invigorating them and conferring special powers such as were possessed by the shamans of old.

 

It is easy to imagine that all the Primarchs were meant to be cabinet-level innovators for the whole Imperium. Sanguinius may have been a source of transcendence and salvation, Kurze may have been a Cassandra foretelling evil fates, and while Corax ended up as a guerilla leader, he would have been a good voice for the oppressed, since his first role was essentially as a labor organizer. See, I've already written three without mentioning the obvious administrative and intelligence-gathering skills of Guilliman and Alpahrius.

 

Human society could have reached amazing growth if it had been influenced all at once by the erstwhile leaders of Prospero, Macragge, and the Phalanx. There would have been no space marines needed. However, the Primarchs were misplaced, and the Emperor had to track them down before something worse happened to the project.

 

Brutal conquest by trans-humans was the way to get the Primarchs back. This is not just to power rapid expansion, the Emperor might have used anything for that, thunder warriors or no. The primarchs all arrived on planets extremely suited to their characters. The sorceror found a planet of sorcerors; it was not just a cultural thing. The fact that they wound up on populated planets at all also indicates that the warp delivers travelers to places of sympathetic destiny: they arrived at the place most like themselves.

 

The Emperor had to build an enormous amount of people completely bound and subservient to the Primarchs, just so that he could force the warp to facilitate their reunion. Even if he could have successfully cloned the primarchs, that may not have worked because the clones would be equal to and autonomous from their templates. Gene-seed was the way to take humans that started off with characters somewhat similar to the respective primarchs and then bind up their characters to be like missing parts of the primarchs. The legions were really just magnets drawing the Emperor and Primarchs back together.

It might just be me, but I think both of you just said the same thing. All Dammeroth said that was different was that when two different cultures come into contact, some form of conflict is inevitable, especially among humans. Just look at the Opium Wars, forays of the Portuguese into Africa, the exploration and colonization of the Americas and the list goes on. So I'm not really sure why the premise has fluff/timeline issues when the presented fluff is fitting in with what Dammeron said. The Space Marines were given the qualities of the Primarchs pertaining to warfare, not diplomacy. The Primarchs were meant to excel at everything, to try and bring Humanity together.

 

The Emperor believes that naked force will answer all the Imperiums problems, but instead it will not. The Emperor is powerful but he is not a God and thus has his own limitations.

 

This I am not too hot on. He made Lorgar to be a general, really? I think he made Lorgar to be a propagandist or a mystic, not a military officer. It just turned out that he had to make a legion of warriors genetically bound to Lorgar, so that is just the way it shook out.

Okay, as pointed out, the Emperor did not make Lorgar to be a general. But let's look at the Emepror's personal history.

 

The Unification Wars. Advanced genetic technology seemed to be very common in this era. We here about entire armies being vat-grown. The Emperor simply took it a step further in the Thunder Warriors. He made soldiers who were genetically designed to keep growing stronger, faster and smarter, with no true limitations. Except for one: An extremely and remarkably short life span. But for some reason, whether it be some sort of side effect from the genetic alterations or if it was intentional training, the Thunder Warriors were barbaric enough to give the Orks a run for their money. The Unification Wars were one of the bloodiest events in all of Human history on Terra. But for some reason the sheer brutality of the Unification Wars is covered up and the only people who remember it are the Emperor and any survivors, i.e. John Grammaticus and Babu Dhakal, better known as Arik Taranis, known as the Lightning Bearer, Victor Gaduare, the Last Rider, the Butcher of Scandia and the Throne-slayer.

 

The Space Marines and the Great Crusade. We know that the Primarchs were created and that their first role was not to be generals, at least not originally. Now, using that template, the Emperor could have created anything he wanted to. He created warriors, who while not on par with the Thunder Warriors in terms of sheer ability, the Space Marines could at least conquer galaxies and not just one world. So, why would the Emperor create warriors without peer? He could have created diplomats and scholars who would have given the remembrancers a run for their money. But instead he created the Legiones Astartes. I believe John Grammaticus is quoted as having called them "the ultimate killing machine". So when left with a hole in his plans, he turned to naked force. Then the Primarchs started to be found and the Emperor said "Hey![cue lightbulb over head] I have twenty beings who transcend humanity on every level, twenty true Übermensch. So I'm going to make them killers without peer." And well, the Great Crusade, the Heresy and the Scouring show that he did just that.

[Excessus]

Deliverance Lost shows that the big E had plans for the primarchs and legions after the crusades, why else would he build mountain villas for them? :devil:

[Kol Saresk]

Oh yeah. No one knows those roles though, except for Magnus and that is because it was needed to be known for the story to have "drama". But when stuck in the grinder and having that one micro-second brain fart, the Emperor went from using sons only for their original purposes, to using them as generals.

[Xin Ceithan]

Especially when looking at the older fluff there is one major drawback to all our thoughts:

The Emperor seems to have a plan for humanizy. GW didn´t. :)

I´d guess when Rogue Treder came out there were some thoughts on what forces would be in it and some rough background was established. I doubt there was any great "metaplot" established that early on.

We have all seen the changes in fluff over the years. I actually like that the fact that the HH series seems to make an effort to make a more connected and flashed out background and even out some of the many plot holes. Heck, have you seen the article in WD that the whole heresy marine vs marine stuff basically developed from the fact that gw had a blue astartes sprue and couldn`t afford an orc sprue? So they made a red one and went with civil war.

It´s really fun to speculate on those ideas but we need to remember the limitations of our fluff here also.

 

Oh, and in the original short stoy on the final battle between Horus and the Emperor it quotes the Emperor upon embarking on his final boarding mission that "This is the point beyond which I have not been able to see". The current HH series doesn`t quite convey that level of precognition.