"Instead, a compromise was reached which limited the Space Marines to vessels whose primary role was that of transport, delivery and suppression designed to facilitate planetary assault. Only the smallest of vessels would be permitted to act exclusively as gunships, with the larger battlebarges and strike cruisers remaining predominantly as aids to invasion, ensuring the Space Marines would never present a threat to the Imperial Navy proper. Inevitably, the wrangling over interpretation of a ship’s ‘primary role’ leads to some chapters possessing rather more versatile fleets than the Imperial Navy is entirely comfortable with."
battlebarge:
+1 planetary assault
3+ exterminatus weapons
thunderhawk gunships
boarding torpedoes
bombardment cannons
ie. transport, delivery, and suppression.
strike cruiser:
+1 planetary assault
thunderhawks
bombardment cannons
trnasport, delivery and suppression.
Escorts:
gunboats, some of them more questionable than others. WB aid suppression, boarding torpedoes for overwhelming defences, and the lance on the nova... not really something you can use to give massive covering fire to ground troops with, is it?
with a lance, the SC loses the whole suppresion thing, and its role arguably becomes anti-ship. THIS is against fluff.
admittedly it also states some fleets are more flexible than the navy would like. this is a result of the BC being rather handy when used cleverly, and access to regular torpedoes. this may also apply to the nova.
i dont see anything here that screams 'SCs should have lances' and in the end if no side can present an overwhelming argument, things stay as they are.
creative use of BL fluff: i can probably find a bit of fluff somewhere that mentions a squad of marines destroying an entire ship single handedly. so why is the boarding modifier only +2? it should be +6! deathwatch marines have been known to use xenos technology to further their cause - so why not a holofield option for SCs? for every bit of fluff there is counter fluff. this is the law of fluff.
I don't have to go to BL fluff when I can use a Games Workshop rulebook that says the same thing, aka Planetstrike. Last I checked Rulebook trumps BL AND earlier rulebooks.
As far as the BC goes: that's like suggesting that a thermonuclear weapon is ideal for close support. The area that it does damage in is too great. Softening up defenses to enable landing, it's good. Close support for marines on the ground, or against hardened targets, it sucks. It takes several hits to take out the hardened bunker with a BC in
Nightbringer (leveling a kilometer sized area in the process despite the marines reducing the payload to try and minimize damage), it takes one shot from a lance to take out a similar bunker in
Cain's Last Stand with relatively little damage to the surrounding area (broken windows and debris falling).
Even in Epic, the scale of the template makes the blast several hundred meters to a kilometer across.
Somehow I doubt that they mean the commanders are clever when they talk about some fleets being more flexible then others, since they also state that some chapters claim that their ships role is planetary support, not a gunboat, no matter what it might be armed with. Reading through the fluff given on fighting space marines in Armada, the IN seems to actually expect that any marine commander will be clever any only fight on favorable terms.
Heck, the pro-lancers need to come with evidence!!! Not the anti-lancers.
Horizon, the basis of your argument, at the beginning of all this, was that lances and strike cruisers were mutually exclusive due to the fluff saying so in your opinion. The pro-lance faction has brought forward fluff evidence that this is not the case. From Games Workshop rulebooks, no less, and not that were in any way open to interpretation, despite some allegations that that the Inquisition had to be mistaken in their records of something they were on hand for, and that would never ever have been made public, or that starships must have some other weapon that is also called a lance that just has never appeared in any book anywhere.
Since this evidence has been brought forward, the anti-lance faction has switched to demands that a in game 'need' must be proven, even though previously they acknowledged that the str 2 lance would be balanced. Which is what led to the DM debate.
Let me use your own numbers:
2 thawks against 1 DM = 33% chance of a kill, currently.
Previously it was 50%
That's a loss of effectiveness of nearly half.
Admittedly, this is an extreme case, as the DM has more turrets and less maneuverability and speed then other escorts. Most escort squadrons would just turn 90 and AAF to a safe range and then turn and try to kill the ac with guns or ord next turn. The SC itself is likely to never have a combined fp greater then 2 against them.
On the DM v SC debate:
eh.
I'd position all waves (3) within 5cm of you. That is possible.
2 T-Hawks in contact with 1 (s)DM 
during movement.
2 turrets = per average 1 death T-Hawk.
T-Hawk on a 3+ = 66% hit chance
BFI = 50%
(s)DM has a chance of being destroyed by 2 t-hawks : 33%.
even if failed attack, squadron (s)DM on BFI = good for Marines & other t-hawk waves.
Horizon, you can't move a thawk more then 20 cm in one ord phase to put one more then 5 degrees past my center line, though you can bring all of them to 5cm (in this case to my right, for purposes of visualization) however, again, since you're coming from the right, there's nothing that says I can't turn left 10 or 15 degrees and not come into base contact. Against a cruiser, yes, this would work. Against an escort, it doesn't since there's no minimum forward distance I have to travel to turn.
Ah, Nate, at last.
Hi everyone! I'm sorry I've dropped off the planet for a bit, but we've had a blizzard and all, and I'm trying to get the 2010 FAQ pushed out the door while it's still 2010! However, due to the small flurry of personal e-mails I have received on the subject concerning Space Marine strike cruisers and lances, I thought I should address the subject.
In ten years, SM strike cruisers did NOT have access to lances. As the Space Marine fleet hasn't suffered in popularity due to this shortcoming, it is doubtful the absence of this weapon has been a big game-changer for this fleet. It was the game designer's intent that lances (a fleet-engagement weapon with little utility concerning saturation planetary bombardment) be rare for the Space Marines, as both a fluff-based pserspective and as an intended character flaw the fleet has that must be worked around by the use of tactics. Rare by no means is the same thing as absent; the Nova escort is the only escort in the entire game with a L/F/R lance!
Yes, it's true we at one time investigated this as an option. The fault is entirely mine- I thought it would be a characterful upgrade. I then discovered in a min-max (read:munchkinized) playtest, adding lances to this fleet completely negated much of the character built into the fleet by NOT giving them lances in the first place unless we restricted this to the point of absurdity. However, it is true that some insular Chapters revel in "giving it to the Man" to an extent when the greater Imperium is concerned, and it is entirely plausible that an un-salvagable Nova's L/F/R lance might be refitted to the occassional SC. To emphasize occassional, we made the refit expensive, which means fleets that want it for character can have it, but it is self-restricting by its point cost. If a player REALLY want's to have lances (and 60cm ones to boot!), keep in mind that a Space Marine fleet can take any Imperial or Chaos battleship in the game as a venerable battlebarge, and even when adding +35 points these ships are in every case except one cheaper than SM battlebarges as well.
Aside from all of this, I am failing to understand how a popular fleet that has needed only minor tweaks in the last ten years is suddenly creating such uproar over not being given a weapon system it never had in the first place! The Space Marines are a great fleet, even if its capital ships don't have lances. There isn't anything preventing players from cooking homebrew rules and fleet lists that allow strike cruisers and even SM batlle barges from taking lances. Heck, feel free to use the old abominable Seddition Oppimiere profile if you want and your opponent lets you! However, we aren't going to be making it official.
Smile, game on and enjoy!
- Nate
Nate, the problem is three fold. The first is that, for ten years, thawks have been a very nearly sure kill weapon against escorts, and for ten years, the wolfpack list was not official. This has changed and is no longer true. Since the BC uses the gunnery table, under most normal circumstances, the SC now has pitiful amounts of firepower against escorts. As Horizon helpfully pointed out earlier, the odds of two thawks killing one DM is now only 33%.
The second is that you tested it with a minmaxed fleet against a balanced fleet, I'm guessing. I'll point out that ANY minmaxed fleet is going to do well against a balanced fleet. I hold up the 'all nightshades' fleet as an example of this, or your own tests with massed NC fire.
The third is that in the last ten years, GW has changed the fluff for Space Marines. (and not just the Lamentors suddenly now being subject to the curse of Sanguinus) Andy Chambers has been replaced by Andy Hoare, who's been putting lances on just about every Strike Cruiser he comes across, even those in official rulebooks such as Planetstrike and the various Deathwatch rulebooks.
