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[TempAcc]

Plus, the Tau aren't too keen on empowering their slaves"cooperators" beyond whats necessary to make reasonably effective at whatever task they're assigned to. Even in regards to equipment, most of what they give them is pulse guns similar to their own and maaaybe some sort of armor and facilities. They're already too scared of having their pawns outnumber them, even more so of them being overly powerful individually, specially after Commander Farsight saw the truth and gave the ethereals a huge middle finger.

[Tack]

Because geneseed is empratech and empra it's a xenophobic fuck and probably designed it to only work on humans. (And only male humans, at that.)

-snip-

Ack. Any particular reason you had to start the Female Space Marine discussion? I mean... Wow. Defensive much?
I mean, that wasn't even what Egan was getting at and you still went full-GW-apologist.

[Kot]

Because geneseed is empratech and empra it's a xenophobic fuck and probably designed it to only work on humans. (And only male humans, at that.)

-snip-

Ack. Any particular reason you had to start the Female Space Marine discussion? I mean... Wow. Defensive much?
I mean, that wasn't even what Egan was getting at and you still went full-GW-apologist.

...except he mentioned it? I just calmly explained why it wouldn't proably work. I mean, okay, the GW could make the female Space Marines but why even care when you have Nuns with Guns that are so much better because they do amazign shit with only their regular humanity and superior faith.
Also, nah, no. I'm not GW-apologist. If I were I would enjoy things such as Ultrasmurfs, Grey Sues or Sigmarines... if anything I'm Emperor-apologist.

[Egan_BW]

To be fully honest, a small cannon perched on my head states that female humans can become Spess Mahreens, but become male in the process.
That cannon is probably weird though.

[Dorsidwarf]

On Taros I don't recall properly (even when I recently read the book again). But if I recall correctly the thing was that they couldn't bring enough troops, and lost at least an entire regiment on space to the new Tau ships. Also they didn't knew how much Tau troops where there, and I think the 9K number was of Tau alone, plus a few thousands of miner gangs and whatnot.

It's still horrendously low.

It is, however I cut them some slack because the pop on the planet was really low too, and it had only one city.

Let get some numbers from Lexicaum and warhammer40k.wikia. According to them Taros had a population of around 12 million people.
The PDF who I guess where all traitors numbered around 8000, the 100 hundred Hunter Cadres (around a SM company in size) put the number of Tau soldiers around 8000~9000, plus around 5000 kroot auxiliaries.

If we round up the numbers we get around 21~22 thousand troops, to this you have to add up the mining gangs, which I expect to be in higher numbers on a freaking mining planet. Also ogryns where on this bands, which would give them an extra edge. Let's say they where a mere 8000 (same as pdf, one worker per every soldier, but logic dictates it would be higher, yet not all workers would be also fighters), this would give the defenders a body strength around 30.000~40.000 (if you allow more than one gang fighter per PDF soldier). For a planet of mere 12 million people it seems all right in fact, given that they where all concentrated mostly in one spot.

The number on the IG side escapes me, but 12 regiments sounds like something around the park of 100K troops. Yes I now some regiments where small, but let's count the ones that are not and also some other personnel. Which seems reasonable, it would outnumber the potential defenders and seems more than enough to quench 12 million people, specially with the help of SM and a fleet above their heads.

As for casualties, you seem to recall only the death, but casualty not only counts the KIA (10k of them), it also encompass the WIA and MIA, which where respectively 15000 and around 20000, which add up to a total of around 45000 lost combatants, or roughly half the army, not counting that one regiment got completely wiped out before setting any foot and some even didn't got to show up.

I think the numbers aren't as crazy as you might think. Of course that's only my opinion.

Regiments of the IG are canonically 750 - 250,000 men each, because of how the Tithe works. If we take a 50% average, that's an average 120,000 men per regiment. Assuming these are extremes, we could say 100,000 per regiment. That puts the IG presence on taros at average 1,200,000 men, max 3,000,000 , bottom floor minimum 9000 men.

[miauw62]

If we got female space marines GW would probably have to retcon the Sisters of Battle out, too.

To be fully honest, a small cannon perched on my head states that female humans can become Spess Mahreens, but become male in the process.
That cannon is probably weird though.

This is also a solution, I guess.

[nenjin]

I bought the second Blood Angels Omnibus by James Swallow. I didn't even really like the first Omnibus, he's a middling BL Author at best. But since he's the source of all official BA fiction, I gots no choice.

[GiglameshDespair]

Regiments of the IG are canonically 750 - 250,000 men each, because of how the Tithe works. If we take a 50% average, that's an average 120,000 men per regiment. Assuming these are extremes, we could say 100,000 per regiment. That puts the IG presence on taros at average 1,200,000 men, max 3,000,000 , bottom floor minimum 9000 men.

"How many men should be send to conquer this planet?"
"Eh. Squad or two, that'll do it."

[Tack]

Well, crunchwise, a squad is only ever 10, and a platoon is 50 men plus support troops and/or conscripts.
So a regiment of 250000 would have to be a lot of very large companies.

[Rolepgeek]

If we got female space marines GW would probably have to retcon the Sisters of Battle out, too.

To be fully honest, a small cannon perched on my head states that female humans can become Spess Mahreens, but become male in the process.
That cannon is probably weird though.

This is also a solution, I guess.

Sigmarines can be women.

Or, what I think would be most hilarious and awesome, transgender marines. Entirely made of transgendered women. Probably from a planet where it's very unwelcome, and very violently so, so only the strongest survive that. Or something.

Honestly, though, the explanation given for why there can't be basically heavily implied the testicles get turned into one of the organs, since it says it requires male hormones and tissues. Hormone therapy is a thing, so that's not really the issue, but considering that puberty is about when they want to get you inducted...well, steroids'll do that to you. It also fits in with the part of Space Marines being extremely violent monks, in a fashion. Eunuchs and all. Other than that, biologically speaking it's an awful justification. As far as I know/figure/care, the Emperor did it on purpose because he didn't want there to be the off-chance of Space Marines reproducing and becoming the rulers of mankind rather than it's servants.

And Dorsidwarf, that's not actually true. They requested 12 regiments. They did not get twelve regiments. Moreover, it's likely very few of them were at full strength, Tithe or no. Don't get me wrong, the numbers are still bullshit because they lost several full regiments, and yet the 'killed' lists 10,000, and prisoners as only 20,000 (and the end of the campaign was basically a full scale rout with the Tau taking prisoners like nobody's business). And only eight out of the twelve regiments they did get were able to get to Taros. So, if it's 100,000 per regiment, or hell, 80,000 even, that's 640-800,000. And the Imperial Guard does not rout after a measly 1.25% casualties. There's simply no way.

As for TempAcc...all I can do is roll my eyes, sigh, and say that some people just don't get the Tau. I say this to other people who play it, too; I find these discussions hilarious in part because in comparison to a lot of the Tau fanbase on sites like Advanced Tau Tactica, I'm actually one of the more cynical ones. I like the Tau in part because of their flaws. I still think they're the most naive/most idealistic /'nicest' faction in 40k, but that's really not saying that much, if you think about it.


Also Krootmarines

[Egan_BW]

Geneseed are Space Marine testes. After being implanted into the initiate, they begin producing genemodded sperm that then impregnate each individual cell in their body with Emperor patented genes. This includes the Y for some reason.
prove me wrong

[Knit tie]

Ah, the old "why geneseed can't work on women" debate? My personal theory is that there's no fundamental reason for it to be incompatible with female physiology, it's just that the Emperor simply never bothered to design a geneseed for women because men make for better supersoldier stock due to being, on average, bigger and stronger.

[Rolepgeek]

Ah, the old "why geneseed can't work on women" debate? My personal theory is that there's no fundamental reason for it to be incompatible with female physiology, it's just that the Emperor simply never bothered to design a geneseed for women because men make for better supersoldier stock due to being, on average, bigger and stronger.

Once you make someone a super soldier, I really doubt the differences, at that point rather slight, would be enough to change much, on a large scale level. And even so, would you rather have a hundred great soldiers, or a hundred great soldiers and a hundred good ones?

[Knit tie]

Ah, the old "why geneseed can't work on women" debate? My personal theory is that there's no fundamental reason for it to be incompatible with female physiology, it's just that the Emperor simply never bothered to design a geneseed for women because men make for better supersoldier stock due to being, on average, bigger and stronger.

Once you make someone a super soldier, I really doubt the differences, at that point rather slight, would be enough to change much, on a large scale level. And even so, would you rather have a hundred great soldiers, or a hundred great soldiers and a hundred good ones?

Considering how ridiculously overkill the space marine recruitment process is, I'd say the whole point of space marines is to have 50 best soldiers instead of a hundred great ones or a thousand good ones. And since small changes in mean result in huge changes in the probability of outliers (and space marines are recruited exclusively from outliers) for any normally distributed value (and most quantifiable values associated with human physiology and performance are normally distributed), it is much more efficient to recruit space marines from the group (in our case we have two groups, males and females) that has the highest mean value regardless of how small the difference between the means of different groups is.

Allow me to elaborate: By using this helpful calculator, let's compare how many men and women from a hypothetical death world that has 10,000,000 of both young men and young women  living on it we can possibly turn into space marines if women are slightly inferior to men in strength and size. Let's assume that we are judging our potential recruits by the number of man-eating mutant death woodpeckers that they can kill in a single night. Since we are recruiting from a death world, let's put the mean killcount for men at 40 and for women at 39 due to the average man being slightly stronger and bigger than the average woman simply because that's how our species works (unfair, I know), the standard deviation at 2, and the number of kills that the potential recruit needs to meet or exceed in order to be considered for implantation at 46. By putting the numbers in the calculator, we discover that the probability of a male death worlder killing 46 woodpeckers in a single night is 0.0013, which means that only 13 in 10000 males on that death world can be even considered for recruitment. That gives us a grand total of 13,000 potential male recruits. For females, the probability of an aspirant's nightly killing spree ending with 46 dead woodpeckers is 0.0002, which means that only 1 in 5000 females can pass the trial and be considered for space marineship and that, consecutively, the grand total of potential female recruits we can possibly get our hands on is 2000. 13,000 and 2000 - quite the difference, isn't it? And all from a single dead woodpecker less on average.

[Rolepgeek]

Hm?

I was actually talking about peak performance in athletes, the differences between men and women. Not mean values.

You know, before power armor gets added on, which makes some of that redundant. And the boltguns, which don't need strength or an extra inch or three of height to use. Or the Predator tanks. Plus, a lot of that difference is actually the result of different metabolic processes, or rather, not different per se, but the way a female human body and a male human body processes stuff, there's more fat on the woman, even at peak performance levels (like 8% versus 4% or something, I'm guessing a decent amount of that is fat around the breasts and hips). With Space Marines, considering they're already being turned into eunuchs or something (I believe I read that their sex drive is reduced significantly), it just doesn't seem like that would remain a factor. Plus, like I said, hormone treatments.

Plus, if Sisters of Battle are getting power armor, then I find it hard to believe it's solely about cost of outfitting and training them. I figure it's a combination of the Emperor being a dude and wanting dude-bros to go crusading with(probably resentful of woman after having watched anyone he ever formed a love life with die as he never aged, and presumably he wasn't gay though I could believe it with those luscious locks), human women being more valuable for making more humans, according to the opinion of some in-universe characters(Krieg, for example, although I question what they do with all the sterile women if they just decide not to have them be soldiers(fuckin' idiots)), and the Emperor had a hard enough time making it work for one gender(besides the whole 'I don't want a race of super soldiers to replace humans' thing), so he probably figured 'eh, good enough, I'm bored, let's go KILL THINGS YEAH!'

...yes I am heretek