Were the Legions Botched?

[Conn Eremon]

Maybe they were botched. The Emperor created the Thunder Warriors to conquer Terra, but he created them so that they would die off following that conquest. He had no further need for them. He created the Space Marines to conquer the Galaxy for him. Maybe he created them so that they would die off following that conquest as well, when he would have no further need for them. The Thunder Warriors are precedent to that. The Emperor had already done that to his armies of post-humans. Maybe he intended to do that again. So all the flaws of the Space Marine Legions were engineered into them. Not as fast as those of the Thunder Warriors, but he needed the Marines longer.

[Adra'Melek]

I've heard it a few times that the Emperor deliberately wanted the Thunder Warriors to die out...why? What's the point of having one set of warriors for conquering the Earth and then set up another to finish it off and conquer the galaxy? Is it not a hell of a lot more plausible that the Thunder Warriors were a step in the process? If they didn't have the flaws they would have just carried on...right? I mean, it seems they may well have been harder than the marines one on one. But that came at a cost. The next lot weren't as individually strong but they were stable. It's a learning curve.

 

Regarding the Legions, I think the Emperor made each Primarch/Legion for a combat role with sligh difference between them genetically. BUT the environmental controls over them were taken out of his hands. Angron was almost certainly 'designed' for close combat. But that should have been shaped and guided by the Emperor. Instead it was shaped by a butch of nutters into blood sports. The Betrayal book talks about the War Hounds and how they're agressive and had brutal training...but that goes to a whole other level when Angron takes over. Regarding the Thousand Sons and the mutations, well since Magnus was almost certainly 'designed' for psychic ability it made them unstable. We have have the other two, which we don't know what happened.

 

Deliberately flawed? I see no reason to think that unless you want it to be true. Much more likely it task was a massive deal and opened to flaws. Messing around with the genetics is pretty complicated even for the Emperor. 20 completely separate made up genetic types, there were bound to be some that didn't function exactly as expected.

 

This is ignoring the real reason in that the original fluff was written ages ago and stuff is trying to fit around it without changing too much. That means inconsistencies and changes.

[Phoebus]

I've heard it a few times that the Emperor deliberately wanted the Thunder Warriors to die out...why? What's the point of having one set of warriors for conquering the Earth and then set up another to finish it off and conquer the galaxy? Is it not a hell of a lot more plausible that the Thunder Warriors were a step in the process?

Why are these two concepts incompatible? Why can't the reason behind the Thunder Warriors die out be the fact that they were just a step in the process?

 

If they didn't have the flaws they would have just carried on...right? I mean, it seems they may well have been harder than the marines one on one. But that came at a cost. The next lot weren't as individually strong but they were stable. It's a learning curve.

My answer to that is that the Thunder Warriors pre-dated the Primarchs. That's why they weren't needed to carry on. They were obsolete compared to the Astartes.

[Adra'Melek]

It just feels like tautology to me.

 

The Thunder Warriors were bigger and stronger than Space Marines. But they had genetic instabilities such as cancers, etc. The improvement to Space Marines was the removal of these flaws. But there seems to be a suggestion that the flaws were deliberate to move on to Space Marines. I'm saying if the flaws were deliberate...don't bother, then you have bigger, stronger and 'better' warriors that don't have the genetic instabilities. You'd need something decent in terms of evidence to convince me it was deliberate.

 

I'm not up there in terms of fluff so there may well be other things to suggest the Thunder Warriors were always meant to die out. Does one of them suggest it in Outcast Dead? I can't remember.

[Kol Saresk]

Yes. The last Thunder Warrior said that their entire purpose was to be the hammer that the Emperor used to bludgeon Terra into submission. After the last battle to unite Terra, the Emperor let them die by no longer keeping them alive because what he needed now was a scalpel instead of a hammer.

[Phoebus]

All we know for certain, though, is that these two specific Thunder Warriors were bigger and stronger than the Space Marines shown in that specific novel.

 

I'm not surprised Arik Taranis and Ghota are as big, strong, and tough as they are shown. It makes sense that those Thunder Warriors who did survive would be prime specimens of their kind. The fact that there is obvious size variation between Taranis and Ghota would imply that there isn't a standard size among Thunder Warriors, though. Space Marines ALSO vary in size and strength. On that basis, I'm hesitant to assume that ALL Thunder Warriors are bigger and stronger than ALL Space Marines.

 

As to whether the flaws were deliberate or not? Let me put it this way. I'm not sure that the Emperor deliberately sabotaged the Thunder Warriors, per se. I think it's more likely that he was unconcerned about "quality control" issues. So, perhaps there is some sort of horrific cancerous issue that pops up when you enhance someone's musculature after a certain amount of years using Method X. The Emperor's primary concern, though, was that this issue (and others like it) didn't pop up in his projections for, say, the first one hundred years (or whatever). The reason for this?

 

1. He knows that the end-game, in terms of making super soldiers, is the Space Marine - who is derived from a Primarch.

2. He can't fully focus on the Primarchs at this point, though, because he also has to achieve the Unification of Terra.

3. As such, he needs an interim solution - the Thunder Warriors.

4. As long as his projections for the Thunder Warriors don't show anything that undoes his plans in the time he needs to achieve Unification, he's fine with the model and techniques used.

 

So it's definitely dangerous technology, and I think it's naive to assume the Emperor didn't think his Thunder Warriors would suffer complications from it. At the end of the day, Arik Taranis certainly felt they were built to fail after a certain amount of time. My take? Without technology specifically driven to make them functionally immortal, was there another conceivable end? Isn't aging the process by which our organs, muscles, and bones, deteriorate and eventually fail? Don't most of us also have to face mental deterioration as we age as well? When combined with muscle and aggression enhancers, wouldn't these normal processes take an altogether more dramatic turn?