How many would it take? Our world vs 40k

[Denzark]

Amen to that. Thing is in the 21st Century they couldn't just use a life eater on our moon colony and then sit back and ask for compliance or else.

[Haighus]

I wasn't saying we couldn't kill Space Marines, just that it would be really difficult and largely require anti-tank weapons (probably more than an RPG too, seeing as Power armour includes ceramite layers, which probably gives similar protection to RPG-proof Dorchester armour). Space Marines cannot hold a planet by themselves, but they can force the planet to surrender by simply taking out whatever the hell they choose until the governments either give in, or are destroyed. I don't think they need to physically hold ground when they can just send calls for surrender down from their strike cruiser and Thunderhawk/Drop pod in at their hearts desire to obliterate points of resistance.

I think Marines would be most devastating in urban environments, because they would find it much easier to get up close and personal, and I can't see many soldiers standing and fighting when they've seen their comrades literally sawn apart...

Also, an auto-weapon is not directly analogous, true auto-weapons are more sophisticated. There are some examples of fluff describing them as using caseless ammunition and the like. Stub weaponry is more analogous to modern day weapons. The weapons used by the Imperial Guard infantry are far superior to Earths.

[Psychosplodge]

In the fluff you don't hold ground with a space marines - not an entire planet anyway. But there are also references to planetary unrest being quelled by the appearance of as little as a squad of marines.
Whatever action space marines are take it would be that brutal whether or not we can kill individual marines isn't the real question - if we had the will to take the casualties to do so is the real question.
I think any target they were determined to destroy they would manage.

[grimmas]

It would probably only take a 10-20 Space Marine to beat us all to be honest. They would have the ability to strike anywhere and take out whatever they liked. Yes maybe anti tank missles/tank guns could take them out but that isn't going to work against a Space Marine dropped into the Pentagon/White House/Kremlin. They'd take out the command infrastructure of our resistance very very easily. They aren't going to fight a battle against our Armies it'll be a surgical strike against our leaders and ability to respond and we won't be able to stop it.

I go into a bit of detail on weapon comparisons with real world weapons in my Lasgun thread and even the humble Lasgun is more powerful than any handheld weapons we possess (it basically a rifle sized .50 Cal HMG)and that's pretty much the weakest of 40K weapons. Also marines big as they are, are a lot smaller than tanks and whole lot more maneuvrable. Unless one stands stock still in the open I doubt we'd be able to hit it with any of the currently available weapons that could actually hurt it. Also by the time we'd been able to react to a strike with our planes/helicopters/tanks they'd have completed their strike and be on the way to somewhere else.

They also produce something they call Transhuman shock where by human troops are rendered physiologically unable to respond to an Astartes attack because of the sheer brutality of it a bit like shell and tanks shock combined.

It only took about 2 million of them to conquer the Galaxy and that was against much more sophisticated opposition than 21st Century Earth.

[Morgrim]

...why is this thread in the Age of Sigmar section anyway?

[Kharns bloody pants]

Who is to say the Genestealer Cult isn't already here.... Gribble gribble

[Path Walker]

I can't think of a single army from 40K that even at an apocalypse game sized army wouldn't stand a reasonable chance of doing massive damage to us, to the point of defeat.

Almost every army in the Galaxy is capable of striking anywhere on our planet very quickly and we have no real way of stopping them (except possibly an Astra Militarum landing ship which might be slow enough for us to nuke, if we could get the country closest to agree to fire one of their nukes in time and to get all the other countries to agree not to retaliate for that one launching a nuke.)