How Tough are the Mechanicus Units fluffwise?

[The Unseen]

This is purely a fluff discussion, I can run the mathhammer myself simply enough on the relative toughness of Mechanicus stuff, but I have read very little about their signature units resiliency in the fluff. For simplicity, how tough is the castellax when compared to a standard space marine dreadnought, thallax vs standard marines, and of course the Thanatar is in a class all its own.

[Kol Saresk]

Fluffwise? It's a rather equally comparison. What usually does in the Mechanicum units is that they have no "independent creativity". So where an Astartes would see a Thallax and immediately know to target the brain casing and thus disable it as fast as possible, the Thallax would simply see another target and attempt to aim for center of mass as its programming dictates. They would use the "proper" weapon as threat assessment dictated, but they would be bound by that dogmatic response.

 

But yeah, they'd be equally tough.

[Reyner]

Thallax wouldn't be that simple though would they? They do have human bits and pieces in them since they are cyborgs and not just programmed like Castellax or Vorax. 

[Kol Saresk]

Thallax wouldn't be that simple though would they? They do have human bits and pieces in them since they are cyborgs and not just programmed like Castellax or Vorax.

As I understand it, they're like well-armed servitors. A brain, possibly spine and some major organs put into a casing. Usually the Skitarii and tech-thralls tend to be the augmented humans that are still allowed to think, although in the background they tend to fluctuate from being "augmented guardsmen"(majority of background) to "Astartes tough"(anything written by Dan Abnett).

 

I would put the difference there that your average tech-thrall/skitarii is just a human with some augmented bits while the Skitarii who serve as footsoldiers for the Titan Legios(which are what Dan Abnett usually writes about) are the bigger, badder cousins of Astartes.

[Sandlemad]

 

Thallax wouldn't be that simple though would they? They do have human bits and pieces in them since they are cyborgs and not just programmed like Castellax or Vorax.

As I understand it, they're like well-armed servitors. A brain, possibly spine and some major organs put into a casing. Usually the Skitarii and tech-thralls tend to be the augmented humans that are still allowed to think, although in the background they tend to fluctuate from being "augmented guardsmen"(majority of background) to "Astartes tough"(anything written by Dan Abnett).

 

I would put the difference there that your average tech-thrall/skitarii is just a human with some augmented bits while the Skitarii who serve as footsoldiers for the Titan Legios(which are what Dan Abnett usually writes about) are the bigger, badder cousins of Astartes.

 

 

Betrayal does call them out as having more independence of thought and action than servitors (until they eventually go mad from the agony their messed-up sensory apparatus causes) though probably not as much as Abnett-style skitarii. I daresay most mechanicum troops are probably a little bit doctrinate and narrow-minded compared to marines, culturally.

 

In terms of toughness, thalaxii plate is roughly equivalent with power armour but their pain sensors have been excised and there's not much meat to hurt anyway, so I'd place them as more survivable than legionaries, one-to-one.

 

Battle-automata are famously resilient, both in design and with the atomantic shielding you get on Castellax and larger units. You see it mentioned most places that discuss their battlefield reputation. The background for the leviathan dreads says that the Mechanicum suspected they were designed to compete with and even destroy Legio Cybernetica forces, which goes to show how tough they were thought to be (besides the imperium's natural distrust of AI-type things).