Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-8881468-20160114090952/@comment-90.201.209.23-20160228231230

In the instance described in the first thread's OP, we really must consider the time and resource costs involved in the creation of a space marine and how they weigh against the viability of an untested, unreliable process.

Given much of the above posts I'm going to disregard discussion of the Imperium's technical stagnation as a factor. Neither am I going to even attempt to address questions about the details of fictional future biosciences other than to accept the consensus regarding canon info. Rather I shall stick to addressing that OP regarding the potential actions and motivations of a desperate chapter facing heavy combat losses and their potential use of female recruits

Underlying this, then, will be three simple premises:

1) Gene seed is an incredibly valuable resourse which a chapter will not risk damaging or misusing in all but the most severe circumstances

2) The process of creating female space marines is an unknown, untested and likely dangerous process with unknown consequences for the persons/gene seed involved.

3) Marine recruitment and creation is a long term investment, in the order of many years from initial contact to fielding a viable, yet inexperienced battle brother/sister?

Simply from the above the outline of my case should be pretty obvious but let's look at some possible scenarios for how this may work in practise.

A chapter facing severe losses due to prolonged arduous campaigning or recent disaster typically follows one of a number of paths towards full capacity, they may remove themselves from active service to recoup their losses, they may request temporary reinforcements from related chapters or they may ultimately be subsumed (either temporarily or permanantly) by said chapters. Although a legion and not a chapter in the modern sense the early Emperor's Children spring to mind.

The scenarios were a chapter truly must remain actively engaged with its full strength in open warfare are unlikely but include the likes of an existential threat to the chapter or being beyond the reach of reinforcements in some strategically vital arena. It must be borne in mind, however that both chapter masters and the wider imperial structure would both view such a situation as one to avoid at virtually any cost, given the astronomical value of the chapter as an asset and the sheer unmitigated losses incurred should the whole chapter and their geneseed be lost whole sale. In virtually any instance of a chapter facing extinction every effort would be made to remove them from the campaign in favour of newer, fresher forces. An example might be the Fire Angels during the Badab War.

Nonetheless there remain two broad sets of scenarios where a chapter might face massive losses and require drastic rebuilding:

1) the chapter is removed from active service and allowed to recover using standard methods, potentially with outside support

2) the chapter remains active in dire straits and faces potential extinction

In the first instance the chapter has a limited amount of gene seed to work with and, as already noted, this is a precious resource they can ill afford to waste. To risk it on an untested, potentially disastrous process would require that the payoff from that process was relaistically massive. This is simply not the case with recruiting female marines. Given that the codex sets an upper limit of 1,000 active battle brothers the problem isn't the numerical scale of the demand. The astartes require quality, not quantity.

Nor is the main obstacle to rapid recruitment of marines a lack of potential talent. Even creaming off the top fraction of a per cent of a planet's male population could easily meet the demands of an under represented chapter in theory at least (although doing so in one fell swoop would be certainly an unmanageable prospect on a practical level), especially if that world was a hive world with a population numbering in the hundreds of billions.

The main factor slowing recruitment is the sheer time scales involved. Creation of one marine or a hundred, the fact remains that this will take years, hence the prolonged periods chapters spend attempting to rebuild. Doubling the potential pool of recruits would do nothing to alleviate this problem as the time scales involved would remain the same without significantly altering the quality of the potential recruits.

Similarly in the second instance the key factor is time. Where the closing stages of a campaign may typically be measured in months, the creation of marines takes much longer. Given that we are talking here about a very limited set of scenarios wherein the chapter may be facing total extinction the virtual certainty is that fighting strength will have dropped past the point of no return long before the slow trickle of new, untested, inexperienced recruits begin to appear. Further to this the very fact of that scenario may well preclude the availability of even basic equipment for those recruits. Put simply marine recruitment is a long term process intended to build/rebuild a chapter, not replace losses real time during active service. Regardless of the pool of available recruits it would be too little, too late. Including females in that pool to double the number of potential recruits would make no difference to this.

Given the above and in the context of the likely failure rate it seems that a desperate chapter, anxious to rebuild would be the last group to consider recruiting female marines, they simply couldn't afford the likely wastage of time, corrupted/damaged gene seed and many many other resources invested. Rather they would be acutely conscious of the need to protect those resources until they were viable again as a fighting force, either independently or in concert with other, supportive chapters.

In view of this case the very fact of their desperation would from a rational standpoint make them less likely to consider female recruits than other, more stable chapters. Chapters with an abundance of resources available may consider the experiment worthwhile (again - I'm disregarding for the sake of argument the enforced technical stagnation and religious fervour of the setting and considering this purely from the standpoint of a rational agent) as the potential losses incurred might be borne more readily by such a chapter. However as the canon has stated already that such a process is borderline, if not outright, impossible given genetic factors involved, it seems likely that even with a dramatic paradigm shift throughout Imperial dogma female space marines are a non starter.

Note that this has nothing to do with sexism, either IRL or in universe. Despite it's many flaws and truly mind boggling attitudes towards human rights, the Imperium seems surprisingly lacking in sexism, even actively valuing sexual equality in a twisted way. Everyone gets their fair chance to die for the Emperor. They are all equally worthless.