Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-4851119-20140118095944/@comment-3258762-20140119195758

74.128.152.190 wrote: I don't remember reading anything about Space Marine implants that states upon implantation the initiate takes on a cloned appearance of their parent Primarch. Obviously due to variations they take on certain traits, such as the pale skin of the RG, but by no means does it make them appear exactly like their Primarch.

You have to remember that these were ordinary human beings (with traits from their bilogical father AND mother) that received genetic material to turn them into Astartes from a single XY genetic source.

Unless they were vat grown from scratch each Astartes regardless of their parent Primarch will look different in some way, some differences, obviously, will be more subtle then others.

That being said, if the Emperor wanted the Ultramarines to take on the remaining members of the forgotten legions Guilliman, of ALL the Primarchs, wouldn't refuse him. Your body doesn't stop growing until you're 25. At around 16-18, your bones stop growing. Around this time, your bones can undergo massive changes making you look very different from when you were 5, as it should be.

The progenitor glands, or Gene-Seed, implant the body with DNA of a Primarch, going back to the former blogs constant mention of "superior geneset". Here's some basic biology. You have your mother and your father, and each of these have genes where some are superior to the other parts, which means if you have, say, 70-30 ratio of dominant genes from your mother, you will look more like your mother than your father when you're finished growing. This growth is going on until you turn 16-18 for the bones to set into any final pattern, and when you're 18 or 19, you'll look as you will always look, bone and muscle positioning wise. The muscles and skin can start to sag, which gives you wrinkles and makes you look different, but your bones remain the same. These bones are set in the way they are because of the superior geneset that has been put into your body at birth.

Now, here comes the fun part. You have your mothers DNA, and you have your fathers DNA, both normal humans. These two will be overriding each other in places because your fathers eye-genes are dominant whilst your mothers ear-positioning genes are dominant. Suddenly, you introduce into your DNA the DNA code of a Primarch, a superior being, and whoa nelly, suddenly the body hits the jackpot. It's been trying to find the best genes here and suddenly here comes this demigod along! What does your body do? It starts to pick up on these changes. It re-molds your bones (With the help of the Ossmodula which gives the body a boost with help of growth hormones) because it wants you to be perfect, your body recognizes and adapts to the, you guessed it, superior geneset.

So, you say there's no Implant that changes an Astartes face? I say all Implants change the Astartes face. It's why families of an Astartes rarely recognize them anymore, because their bodies are not a mix between father and mother genes, it is about 60-40 Primarch genes and parental genes, since the body cannot completely copy a Primarchs geneset.

And why, oh why, would the Emperor, who has no problems with creating Space Marines, who is willing to smack down hard on legions, why would he order Guilliman to accept any legionnaires? Why would he not tell Leman Russ to kill them off. He killed off the Thunder Warriors, and I highly doubt he holds Space Marines in much higher regard. His Primarchs, sure, but not his Astartes. It doesn't make sense for him to tell Guilliman to add them to his legion, especially not when he would more likely have asked Horus to do it, and it's even less likely that Guilliman went behind his fathers back and absorbed them.