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As much as we constantly hear about how the IoM has an inexhaustible supply of manpower, I can't remember reading about a single character with more than one sibling.

How is the IoM not in a population crash? Did I miss a story where anyone with 4 or more siblings, ya know, exists?

I always figured it was one of those things that's just a given and never really focused on. Combine standard human reproduction rates with forcing a huge portion of the population to serve in the military and you get a ton of bodies to throw at the enemy.

Hive cities, planets just full of hive cities

Yes... hive-cities!

Population of a large hive-city: 100 000 000 000 people. (this is only 10 times the population of Earth today)

Lets assume slightly less than half of those the population have a uterus they are willing and able to use during their lifespan, that's 45 000 000 000 effective uteruses.

This is an insecure community with low levels of education and little access to reproductive healthcare. Those settings makes nativity numbers rather high. So each uterus would have give birth to between 3 and 10 siblings, and about every second kid dies before maturity. (source: UNHC-reports from our worlds exploited communities)

So lets assume each such uterus produces 6 kids over 20 years, and 3 of them survive to maturity. 2 of those kids just replace grown up people that die, to keep population numbers at current level. That still leaves 1 of them to joins the army/navy to be able to send some money home or keep the bugs away. So +1 person per uterus.

Average lifespan is tricky, but lets assume 40 years. That means that over 40 years, this hive-city will produce 45 000 000 000 people in excess of those that are needed to just keep population numbers. (this is a simplification, all the kids that die before puberty makes the math trickier, but this will do as an illustration)

So a bit more than 1 000 000 000 excess people per year. From one hive city.

Even if we assume the Astra Militarum recruiters suck at their job and only manage to pick up 5% of these excess people. That is still over 50 000 000 people each year. That's about twice the number of soldiers killed in total during WW2.

So there are plenty of bodies!

Anyone from a more noble/civilised background, which is often the case for main characters of GW litterature, would of course have another background.

On one hand, the Imperium's supply of people is huge. Even the smallest hive world has roughly 10-20 billion people on it. Most have more. And if I remember correctly from the 3rd edition rule book (maybe somewhere else, I'm certain I remember reading it in there though) A hive CITY can fully expect to double its population each century assuming there's no external factors that affect the growth (like that'll happen). So it's easy to understand how the Imperium can just "lol Oh whale" when an army of some 10 million guardsmen gets lost in the warp.

With that said, it's also stated that the Imperium's manpower isn't infinite. It can't afford to fight an all out war of attrition on every front.

Outside the normal route, the imperium planets use clone tech, such as death korps; entire population serve in the arm forces, such as Cadians.

6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

 Trondheim wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

Or Ireland and Russia in the Victorian era.

Lusall wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

Or Ireland and Russia in the Victorian era.

Not just Victorian era, I know people of my parents era who are a part of families that have 14 children. Six was just a warm up back in those days.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
As much as we constantly hear about how the IoM has an inexhaustible supply of manpower, I can't remember reading about a single character with more than one sibling.

How is the IoM not in a population crash? Did I miss a story where anyone with 4 or more siblings, ya know, exists?

Population stability is 2.1 births per female or so. If the average in the IoM is 2.2 births per female, given the size of the galaxy, the IoM would have trillions of soldiers who could be marched off to war every year.

If they have children BEFORE they are marched off to war, good god they could march trillions to their death every DAY and still have positive population growth.

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:

Lusall wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

Or Ireland and Russia in the Victorian era.

Not just Victorian era, I know people of my parents era who are a part of families that have 14 children. Six was just a warm up back in those days.

Shoot, some of the kids from my high school had a couple before they even graduated. They were primed for more.

But yeah, the Imperium is huge-large. Not hard to imagine that they can maintain a large population surplus and growth so long as they're not too insane with their meat grinder approach.

I know it's bad, but this topic makes me laugh.

Overall though, props to Mellon for doing that math/research. I mean holy crap, my guard forces will never run out of troops!

Due to high population and trillions of humans born each day throughout the galaxy it's no joke when the fluff says it's easier to replace a human then a piece of tech. We produce ourselves at little cost to an oppressive empire.

I think they should represent this on the table top. Formation with special rule.

Formation Name: Meat Grinder
Special Rule: Overwhelming Uterus
Each time a soldier dies roll a D6, on a 2+ two more soldiers take his place.

Obviously its an all infantry formation that has outflank when they come on. Just to show how the IoM just throws bodies from every where at problems until there isn't a problem anymore.

 Exergy wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
As much as we constantly hear about how the IoM has an inexhaustible supply of manpower, I can't remember reading about a single character with more than one sibling.

How is the IoM not in a population crash? Did I miss a story where anyone with 4 or more siblings, ya know, exists?

Population stability is 2.1 births per female or so. If the average in the IoM is 2.2 births per female, given the size of the galaxy, the IoM would have trillions of soldiers who could be marched off to war every year.

If they have children BEFORE they are marched off to war, good god they could march trillions to their death every DAY and still have positive population growth.

2.1 per female average.

... but the IoM doesn't punish homosexuality. Some people are born sterile. If any significant percent of the Imperium is half as freedom-loving as our IoM-propagandists like to claim, lots of people are just going to choose not to have kids.

So, who is making up for this? The specific story that made me think about this was out of the 10th HH book- the short story about the world some Space Wolves show up on and kill a bunch of Dark Eldar. The heroic mortal of the book says half of his family (mum and sis) were taken by Dark Eldar, and supposedly the bastards were raiding every 7 years for several centuries. That can't be sustainable.

Can anyone thing of a single character in the whole literature that actually came from one of these big families that supposedly exist on hive worlds across the Imperium? Shouldn't most of our protagonists have at least two siblings?

In 40K, Humanity survives through its numbers and its determination, not through some innate redeeming advantage. The Eldar are objectively better than humans physically and mentally, with faster reflexes, more acute senses, longer lifespans, greater psychic potential, and better memory. Orks are stronger and tougher physically, and mentally they are more resistant to Chaos. And so on...In 40K, the aliens are often just plain better than humans. This may be at odds with modern sensibilities or wish fulfillment fantasy (such as in computer games) where people imagine themselves or their group as the "elite" gloriously mowing down numerous faceless cannon fodder. In 40K, the roles are often reversed and it is the humans that are the cannon fodder being mown down by the alien terror. The Imperium expends regiments the way other armies expend ammunition. People may want themselves and humans to be heroes rather than just "mooks" but that better depicts the faceless and cold nature of the 40K universe, and what makes it a darker place.

actually, if at any time there are more males than females, war tends to break out. there are generally more females than males.

With that said. . . GW based the IOM military tithe on the Roman Republic. Do you think that the Roman Legions were competent soldiery? God No! What made the Legions unbeatable was that the Roman army was able to levy replacements for losses immediately! Very Imperial guard. That wave didn't kill the enemy? That is a damn shame; SEND IN THE NEXT WAVE!!!

I think it's more that it's simply not often mentioned, rather than not happening. If you look at the Necromunda fluff there's multiple siblings - House Helmawr has several mentions of third & forth sons, for example.

 EmpNortonII wrote:

 Exergy wrote:


Population stability is 2.1 births per female or so. If the average in the IoM is 2.2 births per female, given the size of the galaxy, the IoM would have trillions of soldiers who could be marched off to war every year.

If they have children BEFORE they are marched off to war, good god they could march trillions to their death every DAY and still have positive population growth.

2.1 per female average.

... but the IoM doesn't punish homosexuality. Some people are born sterile. If any significant percent of the Imperium is half as freedom-loving as our IoM-propagandists like to claim, lots of people are just going to choose not to have kids.

Why are they going to choose not to have kids? Where in 40k does it show that kids are expensive to raise, or that there is a disincentive to raise them? For most of human existence we have had lots of kids. Only in the past 50 years or so have some parts of the world seen declining births per woman. Even today though, while population in a handful of countries are shrinking, world population is booming.

Not punishing homosexulity doesnt mean that suddenly everyone is going to decide to be homosexual and not have kids. Evidence points to a non trivial amount of people are bisexual, but only a small percent of humans are homosexual to the exclusion of heretosexual contact. 2-3% of the population being gay isn't going to reduce population that much if you are above 2.1 births per woman. Rather 2-3% and sterility are included in the .1.

 EmpNortonII wrote:
So, who is making up for this? The specific story that made me think about this was out of the 10th HH book- the short story about the world some Space Wolves show up on and kill a bunch of Dark Eldar. The heroic mortal of the book says half of his family (mum and sis) were taken by Dark Eldar, and supposedly the bastards were raiding every 7 years for several centuries. That can't be sustainable.

Taking away mum doesnt matter if she has already given birth. Once an adult has kids them living or dying makes no difference to total population growth. In fact having them die means more food and opportunity for those who are left alive, so they are healthier and can reproduce more. The world fertility rate in the decade after World War II was 5. After all those people died in the war, seems a lot of people decided to have kids.

Still maybe it wasn't sustainable. Perhaps that planet had negative population growth due to all the children being taken away before they got a chance to bear children. Makes sense that the Space Wolves would want to show up and stop it. But on one planet of billions in the IoM it makes no difference.

 EmpNortonII wrote:

Can anyone thing of a single character in the whole literature that actually came from one of these big families that supposedly exist on hive worlds across the Imperium? Shouldn't most of our protagonists have at least two siblings?

Average above 2.1 births per female doesnt mean median. Most families could be small, 1-2 children but get weighted above 2.1 by just a few families being very large. This is the same today here on earth. There are more families with 4+ children then there are with exactly 3 children. By far the largest number are famlies with 1-2 children. But that still averages out to be above 2.1.



It is also to emphasize that this is 2.1 per woman in her entire life. She might have 1-2 kids with 1 guy, he might go off to war and die and then she has 1-2 kids with a second guy.

The Imperium has "over a million inhabited worlds." I've no idea what the "average" population is. Heck, the Imperium probably doesn't know. But, making more people is probably not a problem. It would probably be reasonable to assume interstellar transportation limitations (numbers of ships, cargo and passenger space, and distances) are MUCH more restrictive than available military -age population. If we assume an extreme case right here, right now, on Earth, North Korea has 25% of it's population in the active military or militias. Using that as a guide, little ole Hive Primus on Necromunda could have 2.5 billion soldiers! If we scale that back to, say, the Soviet Union's peak during WW2 (11 million under arms out of 170 million), Hive Primus could be sporting a reasonable 675 million soldiers. Or, say the entire planet Earth in the relatively peaceful year of 1995. 6 billion folks with 30 million under arms. Then, Hive Primus clocks in at 50 million soldiers (and sailors, etc.). By the way, Hive Primus is the largest of several hives on Necromunda, some others with populations as large as modern Earth. Transporting 50 million soldiers to a different star system would probably require a lot of assets.

Yes, 40K numbers make no sense. My Ultramarine army with 70 models is kinda small in the over all scheme of things. We could probably assume that many Necromunda IG soldiers are killed each hour by slip-and-fall accidents in the shower.

Empire of a million worlds. Let's assume that the average population is like...3 billion people? That's 3,000,000,000,000,000 people. Or 3 quadrillion. Even if you cut that down to the average being 1 billion. That's a ton of people.

Possible that I boned up the math on that.

 Trondheim wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

Hell in old fashioned working class communities, people coming from such families, 6-12 kids were incredibly common up until the 60's and 70's even in the UK. Obviously some would of been from multiple parents aka half and step siblings which messes with the maths a lil, but using anecdotal experience, each individual from such area's would produce 2.5-5 kids (so for a couple that would be 5-10). So in the imperium where hive cities and the masses are generally uneducated, warm bodies are so far not in short supply, the main issue for the Imperium is feeding, equipping, training and transporting said bodies. We even had an argument on the forums to why the Astra Militarum may not use their troops as meat grinders as often as some people think, my stance is, despite the fact you do see soviet/chinese style human wave tactics, the cost of doing so (not the actual cost of the human lives mind you) would mean the imperium would go bankrupt if they did so in almost every campaign.

Then you have the confusing fact that you have some guard regiments that number in the thousands.... some tens of thousands.... some hundreds of thousands and probably some into the millions.

 Baldeagle91 wrote:

 Trondheim wrote:

usmcmidn wrote:
6 per uterus is a lot of kids....

Have you ever been to places like Romania and gone past a Gypsie camp? Then you would realize that six children are not a insane amount of kids

Hell in old fashioned working class communities, people coming from such families, 6-12 kids were incredibly common up until the 60's and 70's even in the UK. Obviously some would of been from multiple parents aka half and step siblings which messes with the maths a lil, but using anecdotal experience, each individual from such area's would produce 2.5-5 kids (so for a couple that would be 5-10). So in the imperium where hive cities and the masses are generally uneducated, warm bodies are so far not in short supply, the main issue for the Imperium is feeding, equipping, training and transporting said bodies. We even had an argument on the forums to why the Astra Militarum may not use their troops as meat grinders as often as some people think, my stance is, despite the fact you do see soviet/chinese style human wave tactics, the cost of doing so (not the actual cost of the human lives mind you) would mean the imperium would go bankrupt if they did so in almost every campaign.

Then you have the confusing fact that you have some guard regiments that number in the thousands.... some tens of thousands.... some hundreds of thousands and probably some into the millions.

Right. Not just that they would run out of warm bodies (Though that would obviously be a concern) but unless you were just giving them sticks and stones you'd be unable to keep equipping and supplying that many people just for them to get splattered in an hour or so.

Pretty much. A planets PDF however... that's a completely different manner. In the case on an invasion most hive planets wouldn't have enough equipment to mobilise even a tiny minority of their fighting fit population. More earth like planets would lack the numbers to fight a toip tier invasion fluff wise, but could probably do a better job of equipping a high proportion of it's manpower. Agri worlds and the like however would most likely lack the weapons beyond black powder, however forge worlds realistically would be like fighting against the soviet union, almost limitless production, high population due to the need for millions if not billions of workers etc etc. No idea why they seem to fall all the time

The only factions the IoM need to worry about loosing a war of attrition to are the Tyranids (you need to win the field to deny them biomass from dead bodies) and Orks (who just keep breeding via spores). However with the Ork example, the IoM can just drown them with bodies before they gain a foothold and they have done similar things with smaller Tyranid forces before.

I tried some fluff hammering math a few years back on here and came up with this

It is quoted in the BRB (page 170) that Humanity numbers around 1 million worlds. It also states this could be more or less due to the inherent inefficencies of tracking all the worlds so lets take the 1mil mark as a good base.
This is where things get less clear imo though.
Wiki quotes the IoM as having 32,380 Hive worlds. Each world can have 5-20 Hives with populations ranging fro 10 to 100 billion.
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Planets

Personally Im unsure of where these numbers came from but lets try them out to see.

Lets start with the lower end for Hive worlds.

32,380 x 5 (hives) x 10,000,000,000 (10 billion)
= 1.6 to the power of 15 or 1.6,000,000,000,000,000)
or 1.6 quadrillion in short hand.

Things get difficult here however as there are no hard numbers for the other types of IoM worlds, civilised, fuedal, forge, death, agri, death etc.
Sticking with the low end figures fuedal worlds are stated to have a min population of about 10,000,000.

So taking 1,000,000,000 (total worlds) minus 32,380 (the Hives) leaves us with 967,620 worlds.

967,620 x 10,000,000 = 9.6 to the power of 12 or 9.6,000,000,000,000
or 9.6 trillion (note not even a patch on the Nid lowend numbers).

High end IoM then:
High end Hive
32,380 x 20 (hives per world) x 100,000,000,000 (100 billion)
= 6.5 to the power of 15 or 6.5,000,000,000,000,000
or 6.5 quadrillion

Taking the remaining 967,620 worlds and maxing all of them below a Hive worlds cap 99 billion (acknowledged this is wacky and dosent fit with feral, fuedal worlds) gives:
967,620 x 99,000,000,000
= 9.57 to the power of 16 or 950,000,000,000,000,000
or 950 quadrillion
+ Hives = 956 quadrillion.


Finally we can do an extreme IoM and say 1 million worlds by the Hive cap of 100 billion
1 million x 100 billion=
1 to the power of 17
or 1000,000,000,000,000,000
1000 quadrillion.

So basically.....raw numbers

 Ratius wrote:
I tried some fluff hammering math a few years back on here and came up with this

It is quoted in the BRB (page 170) that Humanity numbers around 1 million worlds. It also states this could be more or less due to the inherent inefficencies of tracking all the worlds so lets take the 1mil mark as a good base.
This is where things get less clear imo though.
Wiki quotes the IoM as having 32,380 Hive worlds. Each world can have 5-20 Hives with populations ranging fro 10 to 100 billion.
http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Planets

Personally Im unsure of where these numbers came from but lets try them out to see.

Lets start with the lower end for Hive worlds.

32,380 x 5 (hives) x 10,000,000,000 (10 billion)
= 1.6 to the power of 15 or 1.6,000,000,000,000,000)
or 1.6 quadrillion in short hand.

Things get difficult here however as there are no hard numbers for the other types of IoM worlds, civilised, fuedal, forge, death, agri, death etc.
Sticking with the low end figures fuedal worlds are stated to have a min population of about 10,000,000.

So taking 1,000,000,000 (total worlds) minus 32,380 (the Hives) leaves us with 967,620 worlds.

967,620 x 10,000,000 = 9.6 to the power of 12 or 9.6,000,000,000,000
or 9.6 trillion (note not even a patch on the Nid lowend numbers).

High end IoM then:
High end Hive
32,380 x 20 (hives per world) x 100,000,000,000 (100 billion)
= 6.5 to the power of 15 or 6.5,000,000,000,000,000
or 6.5 quadrillion

Taking the remaining 967,620 worlds and maxing all of them below a Hive worlds cap 99 billion (acknowledged this is wacky and dosent fit with feral, fuedal worlds) gives:
967,620 x 99,000,000,000
= 9.57 to the power of 16 or 950,000,000,000,000,000
or 950 quadrillion
+ Hives = 956 quadrillion.


Finally we can do an extreme IoM and say 1 million worlds by the Hive cap of 100 billion
1 million x 100 billion=
1 to the power of 17
or 1000,000,000,000,000,000
1000 quadrillion.

So basically.....raw numbers

So anything between 9.6 to 1000 quadrillion?

 ILegion wrote:
I think they should represent this on the table top. Formation with special rule.

Formation Name: Meat Grinder
Special Rule: Overwhelming Uterus
Each time a soldier dies roll a D6, on a 2+ two more soldiers take his place.

Obviously its an all infantry formation that has outflank when they come on. Just to show how the IoM just throws bodies from every where at problems until there isn't a problem anymore.

I think they call that "Send In the Next Wave". It's an SR that existed in previous editions.