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So is the 1000 per Chapter the current #? Why does all of the Horus Heresy novels refer to marines being in such larger numbers? For instance, in Deliverence Lost, Corax notes that he lost 77,000 marines on Istvaan.

Legions were much bigger than chapters are now.

After the heresy one of the first things they did was break up the legions so that they'd never have hundreds of thousands of marines turn traitor at the same time. They also reduced the numbers of marines - immediately after the 2nd founding numbers were WAY lower then during the crusade and they've gradually been allowed to increase since then.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
1,000 marines per Chapter is the stupidest idea in 40k. How do a million Astartes protect a trillion worlds? They don't, of course.

SJ

Yeah, no they don't because Imperium doesn't have trillion worlds, it has a million worlds.

The statement of the Imperium having a million worlds is a stylistic statement at the start of every 40k novel. The Imperium certainly has more planets than this, simply by the amount of sectors of space they control. FFG and other novels put them at billions- but trillions is a bit much. Of course the number changes daily thanks to Administratum rounding errors and Orks.

A Million truly habitable worlds is probably more realistic... There are billions when you include the pseudo-habitable and uninhabitable.

Astartes divisions pre Heresy were Legion > Chapter > Company > Squad > Combat Squad > individual Marine. Terms can be swapped for Great Companies, Maniples, etc., but the general break down was Legion to Chapter to Company to Squad. Post Heresy removed Legions as the largest division.

SJ

There was some fluff a while back that the Grey Knights number roughly 3000. Though this is because they take constant attrition, and are often only a squad or two attached to inquisitorial armies spread throughout the galaxy.

Shame. Would be fun to read about 3000 Grey Knights taking the field at once.

Also, the Salamanders are rumoured to be around only 700-800 strong, as their recruitment processes are much slower and training takes longer. Though their companies tend to be 120 marines strong.

And as someone said - I think it was in the old Templars codex that their numbers were said to be roughly 6000 spread throughout their crusade fleets

Wait a Minute, how many Marines did the big 9 have after the Heresy?

The Grey Knights are 1,000, not 3,000.

 Matthew wrote:
Wait a Minute, how many Marines did the big 9 have after the Heresy?

There were 38 chapters (that we have definite confirmation of) created in the 2nd founding from what was left of the 9 loyal legions.

That would suggest less than 47 thousand marines (approximately 40,000? ).

Some of the original legions were extremely depleted. There were so few Salamanders left that they didn't split them at all, for example.

At the height of the crusade the 18 legions were approx 2 million marines.

 Matthew wrote:
Wait a Minute, how many Marines did the big 9 have after the Heresy?

size amongst the legions varied but most were between 81,000 to 270,000

regarding the black templar size I believe that its number was somewhere between 1200- 3000. this is becouse the black templar section of the deathwatch rpg book describes their organisation as having three main crusade fleets with smaller crusades being lauched from the big three for independent campaigns. there is also fluff regarding how there are only 10 black swords that the emperors champions wield and that they are brought along with every crusade, meaning that there can only really be 10 official crusade fleets at a time. finally the book enternal crusade had High Marshal Helbrecht purposefully exaggerate the size of his forces from 400 marines to 900 in order to gain overall command of the Astartes forces present at Armageddon

 Vandire651 wrote:

 Matthew wrote:
Wait a Minute, how many Marines did the big 9 have after the Heresy?

size amongst the legions varied but most were between 81,000 to 270,000

That would be pre-heresy.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Vandire651 wrote:

 Matthew wrote:
Wait a Minute, how many Marines did the big 9 have after the Heresy?

size amongst the legions varied but most were between 81,000 to 270,000

That would be pre-heresy.

sorry, misread the question.
the Ultramarine numbered at the start above the 270,000 mark and were for the most part stuck in ultramar for the duration of the Horus heresy with there only action being the betrayal at Calth, the shadow crusade and the lifting of the siege of Terra, so it can be reasoned the the Ultramarine would still have a lot of marines at about the 100,000 mark

They did lose something like 100,000 at Calth so that was still a blow.

 Vandire651 wrote:

the Ultramarine numbered at the start above the 270,000 mark and were for the most part stuck in ultramar for the duration of the Horus heresy with there only action being the betrayal at Calth, the shadow crusade and the lifting of the siege of Terra, so it can be reasoned the the Ultramarine would still have a lot of marines at about the 100,000 mark

15 2nd founding chapters (that we know of) were created from the Ultramarines so they were presumably significantly more depleted than that.

 Ashiraya wrote:
They did lose something like 100,000 at Calth so that was still a blow.

Yep, 100K at Calth and then who know how many at Terra.

The siege of Terra was a meat grinder.

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
1,000 marines per Chapter is the stupidest idea in 40k. How do a million Astartes protect a trillion worlds? They don't, of course.

SJ

That's what you have the Guard for, and has been mentioned, it's in the millions of planets. Now, the SMs serve, as has been mentioned, as a spearhead or special ops.

But yeah, their numbers are still way too low.

 ChazSexington wrote:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
1,000 marines per Chapter is the stupidest idea in 40k. How do a million Astartes protect a trillion worlds? They don't, of course.

SJ

That's what you have the Guard for, and has been mentioned, it's in the millions of planets. Now, the SMs serve, as has been mentioned, as a spearhead or special ops.

But yeah, their numbers are still way too low.

Whilst loads of marines is obviously useful you can see why the heresy would make folks a bit nervous about having too many of them around the place...

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Vandire651 wrote:

the Ultramarine numbered at the start above the 270,000 mark and were for the most part stuck in ultramar for the duration of the Horus heresy with there only action being the betrayal at Calth, the shadow crusade and the lifting of the siege of Terra, so it can be reasoned the the Ultramarine would still have a lot of marines at about the 100,000 mark

15 2nd founding chapters (that we know of) were created from the Ultramarines so they were presumably significantly more depleted than that.

 Ashiraya wrote:
They did lose something like 100,000 at Calth so that was still a blow.

Yep, 100K at Calth and then who know how many at Terra.

The siege of Terra was a meat grinder.

I agree that the ultramarine lost 100,000 marines at Calth but they started at the number of 270,000 marines, lowering the new figure to 170,000, still a lot more then 16,000 marines that would fit into the new 15 2nd founding chapters .
as for the siege of terra the Ultramarines weren't there till after it ended with horus being killed by the emperor and the other legions scattering away due to them losing horus as a rallying figure, knowing that the two largest legions, the Ultramarines and the dark angels were about to arrive(the dark angels were also blocked by the Ruinstorm for most of the horus heresy) and due to partially succeeding with there initial goal of killing the emperor.

this meant that to get to the 16,000 number you mentioned they would have to lose 154,000 marines in the shadow crusade, not counting the new recurits.

The thing is, the Ultramarines would stand for 170 new chapters if you use those numbers...

 Matthew wrote:
The thing is, the Ultramarines would stand for 170 new chapters if you use those numbers...

i'm not saying they didn't take causulties after the betrayal of Calth during the shadow crusade and they probably also took loses during the great scouring which was the aftermath of the horus heresy where the loyalist pushed the tratiors out of the imperium propoer and forced them to flee to the eye of terror. I am just saying that there are a lot more ultramarines then 16,000.

also with the size of the imperium i don't really have a problem with there being 50,000 to 100,000 ultramaines left after the horus heresy as they would be so diluted amongst the uncountable number of worlds throughout the galaxy that it wouldn't make much of a difference and they would still be ridiculously outnumbered

If you look at the known Chapters currently in the setting, roughly half are Ultramarine chapters. If all of them sided with Ultramar in a new civil war, it would be approximately 500,000 Ultras versus the fragmented remainder. Just saying.

SJ

 Psienesis wrote:
There's not enough stars in the galaxy to have that many worlds, even if every star in the Milky Way had habitable planets circling them that were all human-owned (which they most certainly are not).

Yeah, their are aroudn 100 billion stars int he milk way. And there are supposed to be around a 'mere' 40 billion habitable worlds. Now, the imperium, if it's as mighty as some would have us believe, defiantly have more than 1M worlds, but nowhere close to the trillions.

 Vandire651 wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Vandire651 wrote:

the Ultramarine numbered at the start above the 270,000 mark and were for the most part stuck in ultramar for the duration of the Horus heresy with there only action being the betrayal at Calth, the shadow crusade and the lifting of the siege of Terra, so it can be reasoned the the Ultramarine would still have a lot of marines at about the 100,000 mark

15 2nd founding chapters (that we know of) were created from the Ultramarines so they were presumably significantly more depleted than that.

 Ashiraya wrote:
They did lose something like 100,000 at Calth so that was still a blow.

Yep, 100K at Calth and then who know how many at Terra.

The siege of Terra was a meat grinder.

I agree that the ultramarine lost 100,000 marines at Calth but they started at the number of 270,000 marines, lowering the new figure to 170,000, still a lot more then 16,000 marines that would fit into the new 15 2nd founding chapters .
as for the siege of terra the Ultramarines weren't there till after it ended with horus being killed by the emperor and the other legions scattering away due to them losing horus as a rallying figure, knowing that the two largest legions, the Ultramarines and the dark angels were about to arrive(the dark angels were also blocked by the Ruinstorm for most of the horus heresy) and due to partially succeeding with there initial goal of killing the emperor.

this meant that to get to the 16,000 number you mentioned they would have to lose 154,000 marines in the shadow crusade, not counting the new recurits.

There a number of possible explanations:

There are lots (100+) of 2nd founding chapters that we've never heard of.
UM's took a whole bunch of causalities during the post-terra mop up actions and the shadow crusade (to be covered in a future HH novel?).
Marneus let the new chapters that he demanded were created grossly violate the rules that he put into place to govern them.
Marneus had (has?) a huge secret army in direct violation of the rules that he put into place to stop people having huge armies.

The second one seems the most likely.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
There's not enough stars in the galaxy to have that many worlds, even if every star in the Milky Way had habitable planets circling them that were all human-owned (which they most certainly are not).

Yeah, their are aroudn 100 billion stars int he milk way. And there are supposed to be around a 'mere' 40 billion habitable worlds. Now, the imperium, if it's as mighty as some would have us believe, defiantly have more than 1M worlds, but nowhere close to the trillions.

How many of those are sufficiently accessible by warp travel to be useful?

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Vandire651 wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 Vandire651 wrote:

the Ultramarine numbered at the start above the 270,000 mark and were for the most part stuck in ultramar for the duration of the Horus heresy with there only action being the betrayal at Calth, the shadow crusade and the lifting of the siege of Terra, so it can be reasoned the the Ultramarine would still have a lot of marines at about the 100,000 mark

15 2nd founding chapters (that we know of) were created from the Ultramarines so they were presumably significantly more depleted than that.

 Ashiraya wrote:
They did lose something like 100,000 at Calth so that was still a blow.

Yep, 100K at Calth and then who know how many at Terra.

The siege of Terra was a meat grinder.

I agree that the ultramarine lost 100,000 marines at Calth but they started at the number of 270,000 marines, lowering the new figure to 170,000, still a lot more then 16,000 marines that would fit into the new 15 2nd founding chapters .
as for the siege of terra the Ultramarines weren't there till after it ended with horus being killed by the emperor and the other legions scattering away due to them losing horus as a rallying figure, knowing that the two largest legions, the Ultramarines and the dark angels were about to arrive(the dark angels were also blocked by the Ruinstorm for most of the horus heresy) and due to partially succeeding with there initial goal of killing the emperor.

this meant that to get to the 16,000 number you mentioned they would have to lose 154,000 marines in the shadow crusade, not counting the new recurits.

There a number of possible explanations:

There are lots (100+) of 2nd founding chapters that we've never heard of.
UM's took a whole bunch of causalities during the post-terra mop up actions and the shadow crusade (to be covered in a future HH novel?).
Marneus let the new chapters that he demanded were created grossly violate the rules that he put into place to govern them.
Marneus had (has?) a huge secret army in direct violation of the rules that he put into place to stop people having huge armies.

The second one seems the most likely.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
There's not enough stars in the galaxy to have that many worlds, even if every star in the Milky Way had habitable planets circling them that were all human-owned (which they most certainly are not).

Yeah, their are aroudn 100 billion stars int he milk way. And there are supposed to be around a 'mere' 40 billion habitable worlds. Now, the imperium, if it's as mighty as some would have us believe, defiantly have more than 1M worlds, but nowhere close to the trillions.

How many of those are sufficiently accessible by warp travel to be useful?

actually I find the 1st option more believable, after all the chapters that we know about are only the ones that games workshop decided to focus on and there are tons of extra chapters we do not know about due to either not needing to know, to allow the creation of home brew chapters or due to the imperiums general incompetence(a tad understandable due to the 2nd founding being 10,000 years ago by this point)

regarding your second point regarding war travel, the imperium has generally expanded to everywhere it reasonably can over it's 10,000 year old history(wiether or not it can keep the worlds it claims is anouther story), if a sector can't keep in contact with a planet then that planet just gains more autonomy.

Most of them I'd assume? I'm not really an expert on warp travel.

The Ultramarines did a lot of the heavy lifting during the Scouring. They were spread across the Imperium and likely took very heavy casualties. So I would not expect 170 Second Founding chapters.

On the flip side, there are only 16 named Ultramarines successors in the second founding, which is probably too low. The Second Founding, in-universe, is steeped in mystery (the way the entire Heresy should have stayed, in my opinion) and definitive names and numbers aren't really available for any chapter. For an example of said vagueness, there's the in-universe Apocrypha of Skaros, an ancient copy of the Codex Astartes that mentions there being at least 23 Ultramarines successors but doesn't name them.

GW, in a display of the sort of occasional wisdom they used to possess with regards to the fluff, kept things vague on purpose to avoid tying players' hands (and also perhaps because the more specific they get, the less their universe tends to make sense).

Anyway, if you want a number, we can work with these two sources. Given the number of named chapters and the number of unnamed chapters in the Apocrypha, depending on how much they overlap, we can say the Ultramarines legion was split into between 17 and 50 chapters, which seems reasonable.

 Vandire651 wrote:


I agree that the ultramarine lost 100,000 marines at Calth but they started at the number of 270,000 marines, lowering the new figure to 170,000, still a lot more then 16,000 marines that would fit into the new 15 2nd founding chapters .
as for the siege of terra the Ultramarines weren't there till after it ended with horus being killed by the emperor and the other legions scattering away due to them losing horus as a rallying figure, knowing that the two largest legions, the Ultramarines and the dark angels were about to arrive(the dark angels were also blocked by the Ruinstorm for most of the horus heresy) and due to partially succeeding with there initial goal of killing the emperor.

this meant that to get to the 16,000 number you mentioned they would have to lose 154,000 marines in the shadow crusade, not counting the new recurits.

This is because in the older fluff legions were much smaller and the number of second founding chapters originate from that era. In the beginning of HH series Black Library decided to multiply the legion sizes by ten, creating this discrepancy.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
The Ultramarines did a lot of the heavy lifting during the Scouring. They were spread across the Imperium and likely took very heavy casualties. So I would not expect 170 Second Founding chapters.

On the flip side, there are only 16 named Ultramarines successors in the second founding, which is probably too low. The Second Founding, in-universe, is steeped in mystery (the way the entire Heresy should have stayed, in my opinion) and definitive names and numbers aren't really available for any chapter. For an example of said vagueness, there's the in-universe Apocrypha of Skaros, an ancient copy of the Codex Astartes that mentions there being at least 23 Ultramarines successors but doesn't name them.

GW, in a display of the sort of occasional wisdom they used to possess with regards to the fluff, kept things vague on purpose to avoid tying players' hands (and also perhaps because the more specific they get, the less their universe tends to make sense).

Anyway, from the number of named chapters and the unnamed number, depending on how much they overlap, we can say the Ultramarines legion was split into between 17 and 50 chapters, which seems reasonable.

like I said before, I never claimed that there where 170 2nd founding ultramarine chapters, i also just saying that there were more then 16 2nd founding ultramaine chapters and definitely more then the 47,000 loyalist marines left after the horus heresy that scott originally implied. I do agree that 50 ultramarine chapters does sound reasonable however

 Vandire651 wrote:

actually I find the 1st option more believable, after all the chapters that we know about are only the ones that games workshop decided to focus on and there are tons of extra chapters we do not know about due to either not needing to know, to allow the creation of home brew chapters or due to the imperiums general incompetence(a tad understandable due to the 2nd founding being 10,000 years ago by this point)

Hopefully when they finally get done with the HH novels we'll have some more insight into the aftermath. We're in an odd limbo state at the moment where the fluff covering the heresy itself is brand-new but the fluff covering the aftermath and 2nd founding is really old.

Of course, it's also quite possible that the answer will be a combination of all four possible explanations..


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Most of them I'd assume? I'm not really an expert on warp travel.

We're never given anything concrete but we know that some places are especially easy to get to, some are difficult and some are impossible.

What the split is like in terms of the total number of systems we don't know.

 aka_mythos wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

 jeffersonian000 wrote:
1,000 marines per Chapter is the stupidest idea in 40k. How do a million Astartes protect a trillion worlds? They don't, of course.

SJ

Yeah, no they don't because Imperium doesn't have trillion worlds, it has a million worlds.

The statement of the Imperium having a million worlds is a stylistic statement at the start of every 40k novel. The Imperium certainly has more planets than this, simply by the amount of sectors of space they control. FFG and other novels put them at billions- but trillions is a bit much. Of course the number changes daily thanks to Administratum rounding errors and Orks.

A Million truly habitable worlds is probably more realistic... There are billions when you include the pseudo-habitable and uninhabitable.

Wat.

The estimate of Earth-Like planets in the Milky Way is forty BILLION. This number actually increases if DAOT humanity teraformed any uninhabitable planets, and we also know from books like Eisenhorn that Imperial civilizations manage to carve out living spaces in things like frozen worlds courtesy of hibernation pods.

Also for the billions of worlds, I'll have to check, but I'm pretty sure it's from Rogue Trader.
EDIT

Heart of Rage makes reference of "billions of hive worlds" alone.

War was fading away in the Imperium of Mankind. The purposes for which the likes of the Adeptus Astartes had been engineered were dying out. They had done their job. Peace prevailed across a billion worlds. Only distant skirmishes and half-hearted wars boiled along the hem of the frontier, most of them the endless campaigns of suppression against the ubiquitous greenskins.

From I am Slaughter.

The Imperium of Man is vast, and amongst billions of inhabited worlds there are countless forge worlds, factories, craftsman, artificers and blacksmiths turning out weapons and armour. As can be imagined this produces a practically limitless variety of makes, patterns and brands. It would be impossible to detail each and every different make of weapon in the Imperium (or even a small fraction of them), so the weapons, armor and equipment represented in this chapter represent the most common designs and designations. You can, of course, create the makes and patterns for your weapons as you see fit; after all, having a Gorgon-Pattern H-12 Widowmaker is far cooler than just having a stub revolver."

DARK HERESY: CORE RULEBOOK

Chapter V, page 127.

Ok, that's yet another example of FFG not knowing what the hell they're doing.

 Crimson wrote:
Ok, that's yet another example of FFG not knowing what the hell they're doing.

Having talked with HMBC, FFG has oversight from GW on what they can and cannot write, and billions already appears in the Black Library.