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the death korp of krieg clone and use artificial uteri, technically forbidden but they provide lots of quality troops so the high lords have so far looked the other way... servitor stork!

riplikash got it down i think, and that is the best response to this question.

props

As far as I know they have kids at the age of 12 years. join at 13 years of age and then finish their service when they die (so about 14 years old)

a term in IG is a lifetime devoted to the emperor. stupid i know but thats how it is. i think they give out the love juice before they leave for war. 14 year old Cadians in the back alley having intimate sex with a 20 year old single mother, sounds just like where i live....

there are references in a few books (Guants ghosts and a few others) about soldiers settling in liberated planets to raise families. i heard families also travel with the guard in their ships, meaning more of a chance of buns in the ovens.


you know, warp travel becomes a very boring place if you don't have any, ummmm, entertainment

The answer is simple and is qiuted in a number of tomes,

ONLY IN DEATH DOES DUTY END[u]

There's too much speculation here.

The standard life expectancy of a Guardsman is catagorically NOT the same as a standard term in the Guard.

One is 17 hours (in a combat zone and the other is until you reach around 50 years old (give or take, allowances are made for emergency combat zones and so on) - officers, medical staff and those recieving Juvenat treatments are exempt)

The Guard is not as brutal and psychotic as you might think. Soldiers who are not up to scratch are mustered out and sent packing. It doesn't do the Imperium any good to kill those who could assist the cause elsewhere.

As for how they can have families - every single Regiment has a massive support fleet - the 'company strength' in which their artificiers, families, entertainment and general services also travel. It's very common for families to grow up moving from warzone to warzone.

Miraclefish +1. The support ships are mentioned in The Gaunts Ghost Novels, think of a barraks in space.

Your term in the Guard would be dependant on what planet you are from. Each govenor HAS to supply troops for war, and if you are in the Guard and about to retire but your govenor cannot muster up a replacement guess who is SOL.

Also each planet conqured has to get it's diaspora from somewhere so why not the ageing and depleted Guard units? Otherwise your supplying a unit below deployment strength with rations, supplies and other valuable equipment.

Guard serve until they are no longer capable of serving: Either dead or physically unable.

But it's likely they'll never reach home.

As for Cadia, you forget that most military men from Cadia will serve in the PDF, not in the Imperial Guard, IG forces raised to go off-world will only be raised as part of the tithe and thus will not be a huge fraction of the total population.

I'm pretty sure a PDF trooper can still have a family

Use the correct term when describing Cadia's defense force please. It's a pet-peeve, but again:

There is no "PDF" as we know it(decent-ish trained, decent-ish equipped militia), as they have the Interior Guard.
The Interior Guard are full-blooded Cadian Shock Troop regiments stationed on Cadia itself.

So yes, in a sense there is a "planetary defense force", but it's standard Cadian regiments that are just stationed on the planet itself. Most of the Interior Guard regiments supposedly draw upon veterans from Shock regiments that have been decimated on campaigning on other worlds to form their officer corps.

Each govenor HAS to supply troops for war

No they dont. They do require to provide taxation revenues for the Imperium though and those can come in many other shapes then guard regiments, be it wargear and tanks, ammunition, money, space ships etc.
Ecclestarchy planets seldom provide guard regiments and neither do forge worlds or sparsely populated worlds.

As for the serving IG term, look at it from a logical point of view.
The prospect guardsman HAS to be made to join voluntarily since it would be to big of a fuss always having to round up press gangs and morale as well as quality would be impossible to maintain using hordes of slave troops.

This means some sort of carrot must be provided to make people want to join. No matter how you see it humans are social creatured bound by family, friends and to some extent geographical location, to make people (en masse) actually WANT to leave family, friends and place of birth while imposing fear of the unknown and the promise of warfare, brutality and service untill you die with no chance of ever seeing home and the ones you love EVER...well that is a bit naive dont you think?
It will just be impossible.

Thus the only logical conclusion is the prospect guardsman is let known that the service will be terminated by (if not death) a limited time span and a chance to be shipped back home or pay for a home trip if possible or settlement rights on new conquered worlds. Pay is also an issue and the guardsman might know that even if pay is crappy, IF he survives those 18-ish years of contract his saved pay will be enough to buy him a new start.

This is pretty much how the roman legions worked, there too soldiers started out as very young and served like 18 years and IF they survived they were granted back pay and/or land as their own back home or in conquered territories.
And that was enough to actually make people fight for 18-ish grueling years with crap pay and do so as volunteering professionals and they too were brainwashed to think the empires needs are above all else.

Now imagine if they were ordered to serve for ever, never to be able to see family or friends or their birth place any more and the only way out was death. There would be no roman legions if that was the case, only press ganged slaves who would rebel at the closest opportunity.

How long do you serve in the imperial guard? Well I think that there is probably a retirement age (50 is a good starting point), and before that I think there are a few other ways: Get transferred into special duty (In Scourge the Heretic many of the imperial guardsmen are transferred into working for the inquisition), heroic duty (A retired hero looks much better than one cut in half by an ork in the next battle), Severe Injury (imperium is too cheap to repair limbs removed from an average soldier, it is easier to retire them), Desertion (at least until they catch up to you....), and death. They really need better retirement options.

chub wrote:The answer is simple and is qiuted in a number of tomes,

ONLY IN DEATH DOES DUTY END[u]

That is a bit of out of context. I've heard comissar's say things like that and the point is that while you are in the IG you are to do your duty or you are to die by a bullet to the back of the head. That does not specifically state that you are in the IG until death.

in the ultra marine solar system dey al have to be in the miletarie from 6 to 18 ( school is inclodit in training )

Threadomancy!!!!!!!!

dude, this thread is over a month old.

To answer the original question, discharge from the guard is possible, although I don't know how long a term of service is. In Cain's Last Stand, by Sandy Mitchell, Ciaphas Cain meets a decrepit old man who had once been a guardsman.

As to the Cadia question...I don't think it would be that hard for people in the IG to have children. Happens all the time in the real-world military. Just generally not while on active deployment.

I imagine it's for quite a while, probably at least 10 or 15 years (it was 20 in the old Roman army.)

Discharge or mustering out is definitely possible. There was a short story about it in the Eisenhorn Trilogy, and there's lots of fluff about IG veterans in various capacities ('specially Inquisitorial stuff) and I doubt they ALL were inducted while in active duty.

Your best bet in "The Right of Conquest" which actually allows a newly conquered world to be settled by the regiments that conquered it. (The Tanith's only hope but it'll be hard to conquer a planet with one regiment).

Otherwise you serve at the leisure of your Lord General. They don't call these guys Lord Generals for nothing. They have absolute authority over all of their troops. Sometimes if a campaign has ended and they're in a good mood they will just let some of their guys retire.

Ah, good point, I'd forgotten about settlement rights. Yeah, sucks on the Tanith, as every world where they carried the pivotal action responsible for overall victory got credited to someone else!

'course, who'd want to settle on some of those hell-holes they helped liberate?

Gearhead wrote:Ah, good point, I'd forgotten about settlement rights. Yeah, sucks on the Tanith, as every world where they carried the pivotal action responsible for overall victory got credited to someone else!

'course, who'd want to settle on some of those hell-holes they helped liberate?

Ya, well first of all no one has to be living their in the first place. Actually nowadays the First and only do get credit when deserved. They're one of Macaroth's and Van Voyt's favorite regiments I believe. Although i'm hoping for them to pull off some sort of one-regiment world conquering miracle I wouldn't put it past Abnett to just kill every single last one of them. Poor, poor Tanith.

Grey Templar wrote:i think most of cadias population is in the army, but many never leave the planet. Reserves like deployment.

Right. Just because everyone is in the army doesn't mean that 100% of the population is at the front firing a lasgun. Obviously this would be disastrous for the planet after a few lost battles. What it's probably more like is that 10% of the population is on active duty at any time and the rest is all working in munitions factories and laundry facilities and nurseries and the like. You know, other things which are necessary for an army to run/planet to survive.

Corporal Redshirt wrote:Actually its mentioned in some cases that a Regiment serves for ten years becomes an army of conquest and given settling rights to the next planet they takeover pr reclaim.

Right, I've definitely heard this one as well.

The point is that the ministorum only cares about the soldiers who are actively fighting and their support staffs. If there is a big crusade in one particular direction and when it's over the rest of the fighting is far away, they're just as likely to forget about the troops who won the first phase and build a new army as they are to pick up the troops and move them somewhere else.

People get ejected all the time from the imperial guard because it would just be too much of a logistical bother to constantly be keeping the same troops in the front line in battles far apart from each other. Not officially dismissed, perhaps, but effectively dismissed when the ships leave orbit and they stop getting orders.

riplikash wrote:The guard is not the monolithic organization being depicted, and discharge is not always so uncommon. Different planets are free to organize their guard regimens in different ways with different terms of service, and different generals often run their armies very differently.

Right.

The way that I handle this in my fluff is that a Foleran soldier actually has a pretty short term. The deal is that they've worked it out in such a way where so long as Folera provides a certain number of troops, it doesn't matter WHICH troops they supply. As such, the planet keeps up a small private navy so that it can plop down fresh troops and pick up old ones that are done with their service. This is allowed as well because the ships also carry supplies in with their soldiers and carry off combat-ineffective soldiers and machinery that needs to be repaired off-world, and other imperium-related business while they do their troop swapping.

Guard IS monolithic in terms of size, mind you . But it has a lot of variety. In truth, if GW gave as much attention to Guard as they do Marines, we'd see more Guard codices than we do Marine ones because Guard are more varied than Marines are

Melissia wrote:Guard IS monolithic in terms of size, mind you . But it has a lot of variety. In truth, if GW gave as much attention to Guard as they do Marines, we'd see more Guard codices than we do Marine ones because Guard are more varied than Marines are

Codex: Imperial Guard
Codex: Death Korps
Codex: Catachans
Codex: Tallarn
Codex: Steel Legion
Codex: Mordians and Praetorians
Codex: Valhallans

Better than Codex: Purple Marines

And that's not even all of them. Vostroyan Firstborn, anyone? And some more obscure ones, too.

Codex: Necromunda Spiders

Also Elysians. Could be great to see them move from FW to GW. And why not Lost and the Damned? Same as CSM, only Lost and the Damned have enough numbers to actually matter on a galactic scale.

While true that the average guardsman will never see the end of his or her term due to some horrific type of death or another. There is the occasional IG the makes it through their term of service and as far as I can tell that term is set according to the governors or leaders of his or her planet.

Ailaros wrote:
The point is that the ministorum only cares about the soldiers who are actively fighting and their support staffs. If there is a big crusade in one particular direction and when it's over the rest of the fighting is far away, they're just as likely to forget about the troops who won the first phase and build a new army as they are to pick up the troops and move them somewhere else.

People get ejected all the time from the imperial guard because it would just be too much of a logistical bother to constantly be keeping the same troops in the front line in battles far apart from each other. Not officially dismissed, perhaps, but effectively dismissed when the ships leave orbit and they stop getting orders.

I like this

Comm guy: Sir, Fleet is breaking orbit!.
Colonel: Ok men, time to go on R&R, open the colonization supplies. Hopefully they´ll remember us in about two generations

M.

Guards men serve to death only in death is there peace.

Miguelsan: That's actually fairly accurate... they'd not say it in those exact words, but victorious Guard armies quite frequently settle down on the planet they won.

In the book 15 hours it talks about how a person who was in for 50 years got discharged, though i think he won a lottery for it, or something.