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We all know the line "there are fewer space marines than there are planets in the imperium".

How do Knights line up against this? Are they more common, rarer or roughly on par to space marines in terms of numbers?

Do the small ones count? Support troops?

There are ~1 million marines total (1000x1000) plus primaris minus all the deaths being reinforced.

I could see all the men under arms of all knight households of all the forge worlds and various other planets belonging to specific households being higher. With armigers and knights alone... Eh. I'd almost think there would have to be more than a million across the entire galaxy.

There are probably more than a million Imperial Knights. Across the entire Galaxy that isn't very many at all actually. But they operate much more spread out then even Space marines do.

Voss wrote:
Do the small ones count? Support troops?

There are ~1 million marines total (1000x1000) plus primaris minus all the deaths being reinforced.

I could see all the men under arms of all knight households of all the forge worlds and various other planets belonging to specific households being higher. With armigers and knights alone... Eh. I'd almost think there would have to be more than a million across the entire galaxy.

The Million Marine thing is pure myth. Even if you ignore the fact that a chapter has roughly 1400 Marines per the Codex Astartes, there's no reason to think that there are only 1000 chapters other than a single line of unreliable narrator.

There were at one point a thousand chapters, I’m sure.

But with continual foundings and then wiping out others, the fluctuation will have changed it, but definitely to more than a thousand by now.

That line isn’t in more recent codexes or rulebooks is it?

I would have to say the Imperial Knights are more numerous than the space marines because there are only 1000 marine chapter and an unlimited number of IK houses so got to be over a million knights.

I'm not sure there can be more than a million knights. These are very powerful rare and ancient machines. There is probably only few tens of thousand of them active in the Imperium.

I would expect knights to be outnumbered by Space Marine in a ratio of a 100 to 1.

Now the 1000 Space Marines is a gross estimate with most full strength Chapters significantly bigger then that. In the same fashion, a 1000 Chapter is very gross estimate too. We only know that Space Marines are very rare. There is probably only a few millions of them in the Imperium at most. So a few tens of thousand knights would be my best guess.

Knights are all DAoT era weapons that survived until 'now' despite frequent use in battle, being a really big target for everything and probably about seven melennia of people having no idea how to maintain them.

It's not unreasonable to assume Space Marines out number Knights.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, I feel like this is an important fact to consider when taking about Space Marines and numbers.

Warhammer community 500 facts for 500 stores wrote:50. There are (roughly) 1,000 chapters of Space Marines, each comprised of (roughly) 1,000 battle-brothers. Between the Great Rift, endless war and flagrant Codex non-compliance, actually counting them is pretty tricky.

epronovost wrote:
I'm not sure there can be more than a million knights. These are very powerful rare and ancient machines. There is probably only few tens of thousand of them active in the Imperium.

I would expect knights to be outnumbered by Space Marine in a ratio of a 100 to 1.

Now the 1000 Space Marines is a gross estimate with most full strength Chapters significantly bigger then that. In the same fashion, a 1000 Chapter is very gross estimate too. We only know that Space Marines are very rare. There is probably only a few millions of them in the Imperium at most. So a few tens of thousand knights would be my best guess.

In terms of combat strength it isn't a gross estimate nor are most chapters significantly bigger than that (in marines, servitors and attached thralls/minions/soldiers/ship crews is another story).
We know this because full TOEs have been consistently produced for major chapters repeatedly, breaking chapters down to the squad level, with a few Techmarines/Chaplains/Librarians (each of the latter around 20 or so at most), and a motor pool that frankly isn't huge.
Even including the specialists outside the company structures, most chapters don't break 1100 marines.

Until recently, chapter extinction (or corruption) happened far more often than Foundings. And while the Primaris and other new chapter foundings shot the numbers up significantly, the whole gigantic chaos incursion also dropped them significantly. We know for a fact that quite quite a few BA successors were utterly trashed in Devastation of Baal, and some completely eliminated. Are there precisely 1000 Chapters? Probably not. But the margin of error could go either way.