Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-64.121.236.162-20140910042956/@comment-70.31.48.206-20150118033610

A couple of things here with regards to all of this.

1. Most marines do not have their progenoids retrieved until after death. It doesn't mean they have to. Marduk in Anthony Reynold's Word Bearers series mentions how his progenoids had been removed long ago and he is still alive and kicking.

2. Just because a gene-seed is corrupted doesn't mean its unusable, at least, not to the traitor legions. The Black Dragons, as well as many of the 21st founding chapters, would be loyalist examples of using corrupted geneseed. While the Imperium would consider such things blasphemy, the Chaos Legions, who are already being mutated by chaos, would probably not give a damn whether their new initiates were mutated due to gene seed corruption seeing as it would only be a matter of time before they were changed anyways. Grahm McNeill's Iron warriors splicing and dicing their organs with that of the Imperial Fists to produce warriors like Honsou would be a demonstration of this.

3. Just because their primarchs are corrupted, doesn't mean they can't be used to produce more geneseed. This goes back to my second argument where they would probably care a lot less about defects in the gene seed.

4. If Fabius Bile in 'The Talon of Horus' can reproduce a full fledge Primarch in pristine condition from the corrupted corpse of Horus, do you think he would have a problem producing extra gene seed to produce regular marines? And if he can do it, why would it be impossible for other chaos apothecaries or Dark Mechanicum adepts to do so as well?

5. Honsou and the Iron Warriors had already developed alternate ways of producing space marines using the powers of Chaos. I forget the novel/short story though it is by Grahm Mcneill and its about his Ultramarine captain when he is exiled into the Eye of Terror for not following the Codex Astartes. There he sees Space Marines being born though there are many mutant offspring that are rejected. Again, if the Iron Warriors can do so, why wouldn't other legions be able to do so as well? Or with alternate methods that involves the powers of Chaos?

6. Time does not flow the same in the Eye of Terror as it does in the material universe. That doesn't just mean that it can go slower or faster, it can loop as well. John French's novel Ahriman:Sorceror demonstates this with librarian Astraeos. Astraeos is a renegade librarian who fled into the Eye after the destruction of his chapter by the Inquistion. There he goes into the service of Ahriman, including being captured by the Inquistion in order to lure them to a specific place at a specific time so that Ahriman can ambush them. After Astraeos escapes, the Inquisitor Izdubar tells the Grey Knight Dreadnaught Cenderion that they were able to identify Astraeos' chapter from DNA samples they had taken from him and that they would purge his chapter for guilt by association. This makes Astraeos the very reason his chapter is purged and he himself is forced to flee to the Eye of Terror. This means that within the Eye, the traitor legions have the potential for an infinite span of time in which to grow and recoup losses if they were to loop time over and over. This is inconsequential with regards to the Horus Heresy but can explain legion and warband retaining strength despite devestating losses in the period after Horus Heresy.

7. It has been suggested (I forget which novel but I think it's 'The First Heretic') that the Emperor actually gained his knowledge of how to create the primarchs from the warp/chaos gods. If such is the case, would it be that difficult for the Chaos Legions/Dark Mechanicum to also secure lesser forms of that knowledge in order to produce Space Marines at an accelerated rate? If Corax, after the Istvaan massacre and before the Alpha Legion sabotaged his labs, was able to produce superior space marines faster than regular, why would the legions of chaos, with the knowledge of the chaos gods/Alpha legion spies, not be able to do the same?

Of course many of my arguments carry the problem of "Well if that's true, why don't the Chaos legions just out produce the loyalist forces and overwhelm them in a tide of Space Marines"? However, they do go a long way to explaining how the Chaos Legions are able to maintain their numbers