Quote: (Haarken @ 09 Nov. 2004, 16:18 )
I've been doing so investigating and a little bit of thinking lately about the space marines. I read somewhere, i think it was Captain Sterns website that a group of space marines achieved a 53:1 kill ratio... that means 1000 troops (your space marine chapter) could kill 53,000 before it was wiped out... wow quite a lot or is it? For a start the imperial guard equals probably hundreds of billions (I seem to recall the notion of at least one billion troops on a single front), the highest number of chapters that I have read is a chapter designated 888 which would mean that there were around 888,000 marines. IF all these marines are together at once on a single battlefront then they could with the rather high kill ratio of 53:1 kill 47,064,000... thats forty seven million... even taking the number of 2000 chapters ( a figure I read somewhere else) they could only kill 106,000,000 thats... one hundred million...
Now think about how long it takes for a space marine to be trained and how long it takes for say a tyranid or an ork to be raised to fighting age... Space marine chapters cant afford to lose a single man as it takes so long to replace him whilst the tyranids, orks and lets say imperial guard can afford to absorb that figure of 53:1.
Often you hear of a single company being detached from a chapter to go and guard a planet... 100 men to guard a planet. If we just take our moon which has a surface area of 152 million square kilometers that is still one man to every 1,520,000 square kilometers... thats the equivalent of say 7 men guarding the entireity of the United States. if an entire chapter was guarding a planet then that is still only 70 men and each man would have 152000 km's to guard... (Imagine one soldier in the state of New York) even if we take a chapter guarding the united states each man would have over 9000 square km's to cover. If all 888000 men were in the U.S they would have... 10 sq km's each to cover... even allowing for 2000 chapters instead of 888 the marines would each have 4 sq km to cover...
Ok the point... Space Marines are the most useless and overrated weapon... sure 53:1 sounds good but if a squad of ten men has to patrol 90,000 square kilometers (and thats only if we say that they are guarding the U.S) what possibe chance do they have of bringing that fire superiority to bear?
Ok your trying to compare a futuristic sci-fi game  to a real world  scenario,  so really in response all i ca say is " You wouldnt send the Armies Special Forces to do something the national guard or grunt infantry can do" and thats what your comparing it to.  Relitive force for relitive jobs. and thats what each regemint / force has been trained for and pu in place to do.
Again ...
Fascinating ... 
