When and why did space marines abandon their HH era gear?

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

I get better armor, but is there a reason the BA for example would abandon using the falling star spears?

 

I know the real world answer is they needed new unique models and units to sell for the HH games but hopefully there's some explanation in lore

Edited April 16, 2021 by Inquisitor_Lensoven

[Lord_Ikka]

The general explanation for anything like that (Heresy-era tech going away) is that without the Emperor around the Martian priesthood became much more insular and secretive (much like the rest of the Imperium), with the result being lots of tech details and processes were lost during the Heresy/Scouring era.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

The general explanation for anything like that (Heresy-era tech going away) is that without the Emperor around the Martian priesthood became much more insular and secretive (much like the rest of the Imperium), with the result being lots of tech details and processes were lost during the Heresy/Scouring era.

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

[infyrana]

I don't know the answer, but guesses could includes:  Units using them got wiped out over the centuries leaving their gear on the battlefield.  We all know how they like to say stuff made in time past is impossible to make now, so perhaps they just can't remake more of them or maintain them well enough.  Perhaps the weapons were no longer fit for purpose with the conflicts they fought.  Perhaps there are few left and remain as honoured prizes or artifacts kept locked away.

[Marshal Loss]

A little bit of column A (codex reorganisation, significantly reduced resources as a chapter relative to a legion, veterans spread out among successor chapters), a little bit of column B (deterioration of the Imperium over time).

[Lord_Ikka]

 

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

 

Welcome to the Imperium.

[b1soul]

Wear and tear combined with loss of technology over time

[War Angel]

 

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

 

Welcome to the Imperium.

This is also a side effect of it being written for a time that takes place before the time where it didn’t already exist.

[Closet Skeleton]

Societies change. In the real world we have whole professions dedicated to trying to justify those changes in hindsight and only very rarely do we actually get a simple consensus explanation for anything.

 

10,000 years is a longer time than the real world historical record. If there's 'lazy writing' in 40k its that any first founding chapters are still recognisable at all.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

................

 

The Imperium was at the height of it's power and technology at the start of the great crusade; The attrition was bad enough, then came the horus heresy, which has visited untold loss upon mankind, leaving it a shadow of it's former glory.

It's not "lazy writing", it's the whole theme of the setting. Wondrous technologies, thriving worlds, and the finest heroes were lost to the cause, and still barely managed to secure humanity's survival, which continues to be imperiled ever since; The last XY could be lost in the next battle, expended as a precious, irreplacable commodity to buy a few more years of existence.

 

Welcome to 40K.

the idea that the imperium suddenly lost the ability to make a power spear when power swords, axes, mauls, fists, etc still exist is simply lazy to say 'technology just degenerated' so no more power spears.

[MagicHat]

10,000 years. The secret of roman concrete was lost in 476, and scientist rediscovered how they made it in 2017. And that is because they experimented. Tech-priest will experiment to find if things can be improved, but really rarely reinvent.

 

The other reasons have already been stated. Things gets lost with time, in battle, through decay, sabotage or end up forgotten because someone moved it and any never told anyone. Which especially happens in times of war. How many forge worlds were invaded and lost in this time?

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

Societies change. In the real world we have whole professions dedicated to trying to justify those changes in hindsight and only very rarely do we actually get a simple consensus explanation for anything.

 

10,000 years is a longer time than the real world historical record. If there's 'lazy writing' in 40k its that any first founding chapters are still recognisable at all.

30k had written records, and even video and audio records...

[Brother-Captain Gilead]

 

Societies change. In the real world we have whole professions dedicated to trying to justify those changes in hindsight and only very rarely do we actually get a simple consensus explanation for anything.

 

10,000 years is a longer time than the real world historical record. If there's 'lazy writing' in 40k its that any first founding chapters are still recognisable at all.

30k had written records, and even video and audio records...

 

 

So does our current age, but we would all be surprised how much of what we currently know will simply be gone in a thousand years or so. Let's just start with visual media: the first photographs and films are already decaying away and they are barely a century old. VHS was notoriously short-lived as a format, a tape has a life of a few decades at most. DVD is somewhat better, but they will be non-functional in 30 to a hundred years. An SSD has a lifespan of around 10 years. So yes, there are written records and even video and audio records of our current time, but in a thousand years a ton of that media has been corrupted on such a fundamental level that it simply won't exist anymore, or if it exists, the hardware to play it back doesn't exist anymore.

 

But wait, we have digital solutions, we have streaming services, we have the cloud? Well, first of all they are not nearly as dependable as we want to think even today, and second of all you had the Martian Schism that happened during the Horus Heresy where all of the data networks were corrupted by scrap code and both sides of the Mechanicum unleashing whatever sentient viruses and digital demons they had laying around in their struggle against each other. I don't even want to think what a mess whatever you find in the Martian databases is at this point.

[Azaiel]

The Horus Heresy was a war of apocalyptic scale. I'm reading the siege of Terra books now and the vast scale of just that conflict is pretty well portrayed.

 

Imagine thousands of planets destroyed, including forge worlds, during the heresy, the battle for Beta Garmon saw hundreds of just Titans lost.  And after the Heresy came the great scouring(?) which probably destroyed even more. Mars had to be purged aswell after the Heresy. Basically the entire Imperium got destroyed during the Horus Heresy civil war.

 

I'm sure there were records, plans and blueprints but they got lost during this cataclysmic event. The burning of the Library of Alexandria times a thousand.

[GreenScorpion]

To use a real life example of how things that might still exist might no longer be used, the Egyptian people was only conquered by successive empires, but they never truly vanished, yet the conquerors brought new languages and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are now only partly known and that is mostly because of a stone with the same text in 3 different languages. Having records and being able to understand them are two different things.

In the Imperium, the fact that you have X or Y weapon available doesn't necessarily mean they are usable, simply because they require particular rites to be usable by someone and no one knows what those are. A disabled power sword is just an expensive sword and the same would apply to other weapons and vehicles. Cost of production and maintenance is also an issue but it is obvious that there inconsistencies in the writing on how some rare vehicles and weapons are still relatively wide spread. If you mix the setting with some inconsistencies it becomes understandable.

[jaxom]

 

Societies change. In the real world we have whole professions dedicated to trying to justify those changes in hindsight and only very rarely do we actually get a simple consensus explanation for anything.

 

10,000 years is a longer time than the real world historical record. If there's 'lazy writing' in 40k its that any first founding chapters are still recognisable at all.

30k had written records, and even video and audio records...

 

 

10,000 years of degrading storage mediums, transcription errors, only partial copies being saved from the burning wreckage of a Forge World being overrun by Orks and while its tech-priests refuse to share theiry secrets.... 

[jeremy1391]

A lot of it had to do with the older patterns getting harder to maintain, MKIV was more advanced than MK7 but the MK7 was almost as good and drastically easier to produce. After the heresy when most of the legions had been mauled and were in need of being rearmed it was much easier to make and it was reverse compatible with all the other marks of armor. So it makes sense that the armor from the heresy era was kept as relics/specialist squads.

[Doghouse]

The other less interesting aspect to consider is the real life reason of them being added retroactively when the Heresy was fleshed out by Forge World to create some distinction between Legions.

 

In the origins of the Heresy in 40k however, there were originally no Multi-Meltas or Landspeeders because they were not included in 40k Chaos armies at the time. Andy Chambers was the one that pushed the idea that they should look as if they just stepped out of the Heresy and at the time it helped set the two 40k armies apart rather than just being spiky marines and marines. In terms of equipment 40k armies were actually much more advanced than 30k armies in terms of technology and there was no Imperial Truth, it was basically 40k but with Legions instead of Chapters. It's only since the Black Library took over that it got flipped on it's head.

 

You also had other aspects such as Imperial Army using Land Raiders but due to the Heresy causing issues with manufacturing them it was decreed that only Astartes would use them. I always fondly remember reading as a kid about Sword Company crashing through a market place to engage an enemy titan only to see it later retconned into them being Astartes instead of Army.

 

But as the others have said in lore terms it's time, superstition, stagnation of progress and a host of other aspects as the Imperium basically began to rot from within meaning so much got lost.

[Uberlord Gendo]

That's all true, but it doesn't quite account for the spear thing, particularly since the Imperium can and does make power spears. I think the major factor that sort of change is the much smaller scale of post-heresy legions and the codex reforms which break up specialist units. There's no reason the 40k Blood Angels couldn't deploy that way, but I think the reason they don't is more to do with there just not being much call for power spears outside that specific unit (and jetbike lancers) back in M31 and since the chapters all had to make their own stuff, they focused on the more widely used stuff like swords. The m41 codex reforms are kind of undoing some of that.

[Spinsanity]

That's all true, but it doesn't quite account for the spear thing, particularly since the Imperium can and does make power spears. I think the major factor that sort of change is the much smaller scale of post-heresy legions and the codex reforms which break up specialist units. There's no reason the 40k Blood Angels couldn't deploy that way, but I think the reason they don't is more to do with there just not being much call for power spears outside that specific unit (and jetbike lancers) back in M31 and since the chapters all had to make their own stuff, they focused on the more widely used stuff like swords. The m41 codex reforms are kind of undoing some of that.

The only reason Power Spears are no longer available to marines is simply the lack of models bearing power spears (well, power lances still exist in the Legends pdf)...

[Cruor Vault]

 

The general explanation for anything like that (Heresy-era tech going away) is that without the Emperor around the Martian priesthood became much more insular and secretive (much like the rest of the Imperium), with the result being lots of tech details and processes were lost during the Heresy/Scouring era.

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

 

 

Is it though?  There was an article floating around the 40k communities earlier this year about the US military having to reverse engineer components for the B2 Bombers because they couldn't make replacement parts anymore! 

 

In just a few decades the manufacturing processes were forgotten and the supply of spare parts was used up.  Compound this with the Insular and backwards thinking of the various factions running the Imperium and a span of time measuring in the tens of centuries....  

[War Angel]

 

 

The general explanation for anything like that (Heresy-era tech going away) is that without the Emperor around the Martian priesthood became much more insular and secretive (much like the rest of the Imperium), with the result being lots of tech details and processes were lost during the Heresy/Scouring era.

 

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

 

Is it though?  There was an article floating around the 40k communities earlier this year about the US military having to reverse engineer components for the B2 Bombers because they couldn't make replacement parts anymore! 

 

In just a few decades the manufacturing processes were forgotten and the supply of spare parts was used up.  Compound this with the Insular and backwards thinking of the various factions running the Imperium and a span of time measuring in the tens of centuries....

Dude there’s things on AC that are still active in the US as the ONLY AC that does that job, and they can’t make any more. And that’s one country! Imagine supplying a million worlds!

[DistractionTacMarine]

 

 

 

The general explanation for anything like that (Heresy-era tech going away) is that without the Emperor around the Martian priesthood became much more insular and secretive (much like the rest of the Imperium), with the result being lots of tech details and processes were lost during the Heresy/Scouring era.

thats an unfortunately lame and lazy excuse lol

Is it though? There was an article floating around the 40k communities earlier this year about the US military having to reverse engineer components for the B2 Bombers because they couldn't make replacement parts anymore!

 

In just a few decades the manufacturing processes were forgotten and the supply of spare parts was used up. Compound this with the Insular and backwards thinking of the various factions running the Imperium and a span of time measuring in the tens of centuries....

To add to this, NASA has a massive amount of data and code that is unreadable because the storage format is antiquated and no functional readers for it exist. Thousands of rolls of microfiche records of military service people in WW2 in the US are so badly degraded that they can’t even run them through machines to digitize them properly. Two hundred reels of California Public Health Service data were destroyed in 1990 because no one could figure out what any of the information on them meant.

 

Now granted the world of 30k had more robust data storage systems than we have. But we lose an enormous amount of data every year due to decaying physical media or outdated technology, and that’s without a galaxy-wide civil war that physically destroyed hundreds or thousands of planets, not to mention sabotage and hacking.

[War Angel]

And a lot of this data loss is just happening.... there’s no massive alien invasion that wipes out half the life on the planet to worry about.

[Charlo]

Ten.

Thousand.

Years.

 

Not just that. But.... Ten Thousand Years of unending war.