Apologies if this has been dealt with already but I could not find it with a forum search.

Why do all chaos marines seem to wear ‘modern’ power armour. Every fluff piece seems to underline the fact that most chaos space marines are the original traitors and have lived for 10,000 years fighting the ‘long war’.

Yet to look at them, they look like brand spanking new space marines with an overindulgence for spiky bits.

So how come they aren’t wearing Heresy Armour (Mk V power armour)? Or even older stuff? Or maybe just pieces of new armour? The BC, DW and Rites of Battle books clearly state the importance of armour to a space marine so they wouldn’t give up their original armour unless it was no longer serviceable. So why don’t they have the stats of a Heresy power armour?
 

 For the exact same reason that deathwatch only had MkVII armour at release - space in the book.

You can use whatever story or campaign-based reasoning you want but untill the 'players handbook' comes out that is all that is published.

Kasatka said:

Thanks for your answer but it doesn't make much sense to me. For DW, the default space marine is a veteran marine who'd have been issued a Mk VIII Aquila power armour suit a couple of centuries ago at best. But AFIK, the default chaos space marine is a 10,000 year old traitor legionnaire. So he'd been issued the Mk V (or perhaps even an older type as they were still quite numerous). It wouldn't have taken up much inches in the book, perhaps just a line in the armour tables...Or they could have foregone the entire modern legion power armour and just used the Mk V stats.

Its a minor thing but having the old Traitor Legionnaires use weapons & armour from 10,000 year ago instead of being spiky mirror images of contemporary space marines would have added a layer of detail to the setting.

First of all, while the 40k miniature game fluff makes a point about there being a lot of original traitors amongst Chaos marines, BC does not presume the the thousand year old marine is the default. The marine archetype is intentionally generic, so as to allow you to play not only a member of any particular Legion, but also recent traitors from Loyalist Chapters, one off experiments fresh out of the tube, new recruits lucky enough to survive and any other plethora of permutations of the Space Marine concept.

And on that basis, which makes more sense:

That the ancient PC marines who have fought constant war for ten thousand years have lost their original armor due to damage, inadequate maintenance or any other interesting war story of your choice, and thus been forced to salvage/steal new armor in the field, from the corpses of their fallen loyalist enemies?

Or that every single marine born or turned traitor since the Horus Heresy somehow gets their hand on ancient, no longer in production Heresy-era Power Armor in fully functional condition?

Lastly, the power armor listed in the BC book is not meant to be any specific make or model of Power Armor. It's merely a more generic, streamlined statline meant to represent the fact that, regardless of origin and model, Chaos worn Power Armor is in such a abused, disrepaired and scavenged state that any individual quirks of their original design has long since been removed or subsumed by it's new, piece-meal nature.

Reverend mort said:

This.

Later supplements will undoubtedly increase the armour options available, if nothing else we need some fleshed out mechanics for restoring other sub-systems and doing custom modifications.

Modern? Mark VII was developed during the Heresy and if I recall correctly, the Horus Heresy novels covered your concern by saying that the initial production of the new armors were directed by Horus aligned forges to the traitor legions in the build up to Istvaan.

The main difference between VII and VIII is just the higher collar/gorget and some additional plating as far as I know.

CorpseGod said:

And barely no one has Mark VIII armours except for some higher ranking marines, and in most cases that's just parts of Mark VIII - not whole actual armours.

 I would say that there is definitely evidence which suggests that marines arent all from the heresy. some have been made by their legion during the long war, some have turned in the 10000 years since. This is the reason that the long war vet talent exists, to differentiate your chaos marine as someone who was alive at the time of the heresy.

If you want my opinion the reason that 40k fluff suggests that practically every CSM is from the Heresy is for the same reason that it suggests that practically every space marine who ever turns up to do anything famous is from the 5 or 6 main chapters. Because people like reading and writing about the coolest characters, and the coolest characters are the ones with the most interesting back story, and unfortunately the Emperors Star Dragons chapter has no back story. the same goes for Generic Jim who was a member of the Emperors Star Dragons, but then he turned to Chaos.

CorpseGod said:

of all the mentions of armor that I have seen in referring to the HH series....that was when the legions were getting the "new" maximus pattern MK IV stuff.

As I read into the most recent book "Deliverance Lost" they talk about due to lack of material riveting he armor plates on...IE- Heresy pattern MK V armor.

Also in a few places they talk about recently receiving the new tactical dreadnought armor IE- Termi armor.... but I honestly do not remember where they make ANY mention of MK VI corvus or MKVII Aquilla pattern stuff even being manufactured let alone on the drawing board.

could you toss me a suspected book title and I will research that? That could be a good story hook too.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Power_armour#.TwQ8WDUZcpk

This explains the various patterns of armour and any further discussion is merely speculation without source quotation.

Now the question to be asked is 'when did a heretic become a heretic?'. If using the Ancient Warrior talent the chaos marine could be as old as the HH itself. There are countless hundreds of characters in the fiction that were merely marines at the time of the HH but have since risen to places of power in their chapters and legions, and these would clearly have to use the Ancient Warrior talent to represent this. Armour wise, i believe a character who takes Ancient Warrior would reasonably have been issued with marks IV through VII because whilst any marine can live for many centuries the vagaries of warp travel can accentuate their longevity.

I personally don't buy into this "i was on my way to the horus heresy when i got tossed about in a warp storm and now it's 10,000 years later but i'm only a month older than i was at the outset of the HH!" malarky that seems to be being thrown around a lot lately. If you want to play it that way, you wouldn't get access to Ancient Warrior or the other talent that allows an Infamy point expenditure for GM guidance (something like Wisdom of the Ancients?).

Any chaos marine not taking Ancient Warrior would thus in my mind have had access to marks VI through VIII depending on how recently they fell from grace and which chapter they were part of.

One of the problems of trying to come up with a single mechanic to determine which marks each character can start with is there are some glaringly obvious exceptions. For example in Deathwatch, Rites of Battle adds a table to roll to determine starting mark, but the Consecrators chapter (Dark angels founding that have lots of ancient relics) have no modifiers to the table, despite not using any newer marks of armour. Similarly in First Founding the Raven Guard do not automatically get Mk VI armour.

I'd hope that ultimately when we get the 'players handbook' for Black Crusade that it'll feature as full a section on armour as Rites of Battle did for Deathwatch and that most GMs use their imagination and common sense in doling out power marks of armour to their players

 In the CSM codex for 40k it's stated that even among the original traitors few original armours remain whole. Parts get damaged and need to be replaced, usually salvaged from slain foes, ad-hoc repairs if possible or raiding installations storing or producing them. Yes, the chaos legions have their own forges but they're not capable nor going to supply every traitor marine there is. 

And some get killed from time to time, the numbers have to be replenished from somewhere and that's newly turned traitors.

In the novels Soul Hunter and Blood Reaver, whenever the Night Lord characters fight other space marines (loyalist or traitor) they loot fallen bodies for pieces of armour. The protaganist actually has a think about the battles where the different bits of his suit came from. The machine spirit of the armour is apparently a raging, conflicted thing with so many different parts.

Even if the CSM is from the days of the Horus Heresy, there's no certainty that his armour has survived that long. He might be on his Nth suit of power armour by that point. I know that in play my group tends to go through gear fairly quickly.

 Black Crusade is also set in the screaming vortex, quite far removed from the eye of terror where most of the heresy-era legions reside. 
Therefore the majority of CSM there would either be renegades form chapters or offshoots of the legions so most of the CSM armour would be non-legion.

 The advanced archetypes (Alpha Legion Infiltrator, Thousand Sons Sorcerer) represent CSMs from around the Heresy. While the base archetypes are generic, the assumption is that you aren't that old and are using either the armor you ran away with, or scavenged stuff (unless you have Veteran of the Long War).