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Thought I might ask people who are more versed in the lore than me...
What does a pdf on a impreso world look like in terms of equipment, vehicles and man power.
Thanks

Well normally it's Adobe products, although Foxit have a good alternative set.

A PDF's equipment will be directly related to the worlds position and importance. Is it a bustling trade hub world on a stable warp-spacelane? They will get equal to or better than Guardsman equipment (Flak Jackets, Lasguns, all that good stuff) but if it's a backwater planet that has to deal with some knife-eared sexgoblins once a generation it'll probably be Autoguns and t-shirts.

Unless it's somewhere like Cadia or Catachan, where the PDF are Guardsmen in all but name.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Well normally it's Adobe products, although Foxit have a good alternative set.

Hahah
On a world between a hive world and a ferral one, say a civilized world. What about heavier equipment ie; Russes or the like?

Emperors will wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Well normally it's Adobe products, although Foxit have a good alternative set.

Hahah
On a world between a hive world and a ferral one, say a civilized world. What about heavier equipment ie; Russes or the like?

Autoguns mostly because the world can actually supply chain the ammo, no russes unless they’re a forgeworld, usually they may have the old tanks like the Malcador pattern and chassis ones, Elysian tauros have been mention commonly being used in fringe worlds, I would also suggest using gsc vehicles for pdf.

I doubt a PDF would have any actual mainline tanks. They might have some APCs though.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
I doubt a PDF would have any actual mainline tanks. They might have some APCs though.

The Imperial Guard levies regiments from planet as tithe. If the Imperial Guard has a superheavy regiment filled with baneblade, it means it was levied from a planet that could afford such a thing. The same goes for main battle tank like Leman Russes. If the Imperial Guard has it, a PDF also has it. The only difference, is that guardsmen are usually elite soldiers from their homeworld. PDF soldiers will have similar equipment, but are rarely blooded or had as much training. Of course, if a world is close to a war zone, a world will be tithed more extansively and thus send pretty much all its military as tithe and then some. In a PDF regiment, expect lasguns, flak armors, a certain amount of heavy weapons with grenade launchers, rocket launchers, flamers and lascannons as the most common ones thanks to their low tech and ease to produce and keep ammunition. You can also expect Leman Russes, Chimera, Taurox and artillery (probably fixed ones in addition to the mobile one of the Imperial Guard), but probably not the heavy concentration of heavy and special weapons you can see in the Guard and neither a high level of armor and artillery concentration. Of course, the PDF of a Forteress or even a Hive World and to some extand Civilised World will be impossible to distinguish from the Imperial Guard. Even then, one Imperial Guard battleforce might be very different from another depending on which world fuel it in troops and equipment.

That's like saying because the US Air Force has nukes, so does the National Guard.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
That's like saying because the US Air Force has nukes, so does the National Guard.

That's a false equivalence. The Imperial Guard isn't an army corp. or even an army. It's a structure that has more in common with feudal army than the structure of a modern military. The Imperial Guard is the amalgame of various PDF forces who send a portion of their troop to serve in a single armed group in given battle zone before being demobilised at the end of the conflict (unless they can be deployed to another nearby conflict in need of reinforcement). If modern Earth was to be tithed and send troops in the Imperial Guard, we would probably send a few regiments from all around the world. So , for example, a few regiments of US marines, a bunch of Chinese tank divisions, Nepalese light infantry, a couple of French gendarme as military police, air force regiments, artillery regiments from Russia and a bunch of light infantry/guerrilla warfare specialists from ISIS. If they required so, we could be forced to send them planes and missiles with nuclear warheads (or other similar weapons of mass destruction) if need be and the personnel to man those. They might also decide that all our infantry is bad, but they really love our air forces and request only pilots and mechanics with associate aircrafts as tithe. It would be more accurate it to compare it by saying that several countries on Earth have the full galore of weapons and soldier types while other don't even have a military or barely have anything else than a few regiment of mechanised infantry with a few planes and light artillery. The Imperial Guard is Earth military while the PDF is that of a single country.

Arch Warhammer currently runs a nice series about the Siege of Vraks.
He goes into detail about the equipment on PDFs and the Krieg Siege army sent to retake the planet.

Basically, PDFs will have inferior training and equipment to a standard Guard regiment for the sole reason to be easier to take down in case of rebellion.
Autoguns instead of Las Guns, bad communication equipment (sometimes not even vox casters), no heavy vehicles for the most part, inferior training.

epronovost wrote:
That's a false equivalence. The Imperial Guard isn't an army corp. or even an army. It's a structure that has more in common with feudal army than the structure of a modern military. The Imperial Guard is the amalgame of various PDF forces who send a portion of their troop to serve in a single armed group in given battle zone before being demobilised at the end of the conflict (unless they can be deployed to another nearby conflict in need of reinforcement). If modern Earth was to be tithed and send troops in the Imperial Guard, we would probably send a few regiments from all around the world. So , for example, a few regiments of US marines, a bunch of Chinese tank divisions, Nepalese light infantry, a couple of French gendarme as military police, air force regiments, artillery regiments from Russia and a bunch of light infantry/guerrilla warfare specialists from ISIS. If they required so, we could be forced to send them planes and missiles with nuclear warheads (or other similar weapons of mass destruction) if need be and the personnel to man those. They might also decide that all our infantry is bad, but they really love our air forces and request only pilots and mechanics with associate aircrafts as tithe. It would be more accurate it to compare it by saying that several countries on Earth have the full galore of weapons and soldier types while other don't even have a military or barely have anything else than a few regiment of mechanised infantry with a few planes and light artillery. The Imperial Guard is Earth military while the PDF is that of a single country.

While this explanation is substantially correct I do have a couple of quibbles.

The Imperial Guard regiments in question are not necessarily demobilized at the end of whatever conflict required their mobilization. There may not even be a conflict and the guard regiment in question may never be involved in a battle, simply tithed to sit around or garrison a base somewhere. It is more like if each U.S. state had a "state" military that was responsible for protecting its own borders, and permanently and irrevocably forwarded its best units to the federal government for use however they saw fit, whether that be for a foreign conflict, or a defense of the nation, or simply to sit around twiddling their thumbs. How the regiments are resupplied varies... some regiments are resupplied and reinforced directly from their homeworld (IE Vostroyans), while others are provisioned by the departmento munitorum itself and are folded into composite regiments or scratch companies in the event of casualties reducing them to below operating effectiveness. The details of such arrangements are probably laid out in the tithe requirements. The departmento munitorum decides when and if Imperial Guard regiments are to be demobilized, or when individual soldiers are to be mustered out and allowed to return home or to a nearby planet and start living life as a civilian citizen again.

As for the state of PDF equipment, it varies. The PDF of a world can be anything from hillbillies with shotguns, to a professional military with equipment and training to rival the cadians, including things like tanks, artillery, or even scary stuff like deathstrikes and baneblades. It really just depends on how much the world in question wants to shell out in terms of money to equip their troops.

 Thairne wrote:
Basically, PDFs will have inferior training and equipment to a standard Guard regiment for the sole reason to be easier to take down in case of rebellion.
Autoguns instead of Las Guns, bad communication equipment (sometimes not even vox casters), no heavy vehicles for the most part, inferior training.

I find this to be pretty self defeating. If a world gets attacked and the PDF is able to hold of the threat on its own, that stops the guard from being involved and saves the Imperium a lot in terms of resources and manpower. Purposely hobbling PDF regiments may very well mean that the PDF might lose a planetary conflict they might have otherwise won. Likewise, if a world rebels, the guard is getting called in anyway... if the rebel PDF is well equipped, well that just means you need to muster a few more regiments to ensure victory. But that rebellion is getting crushed either way and the rebel PDF having decent equipment isn't going to change that.

well you can claim many things about the Imperium of Man, but the fear of treachery and chaos outweighs many a thing. And calling the IoM "efficient" and "rational" is... not something anyone would do.
The job of a PDF is to hold till the Guard arrives. That is in itself a huge problem since the Guard can take anywhere from months to centuries to muster a response... timeframes in which a badly trained and equipped PDF can be utterly annihilated and a reinforcement mission turns into a siege.

Just look at Vraks and how long it took to reconquer a well fortified, well equipped world where the PDF got access to fortifications and tools. There is some merrit to this strategy.

 Thairne wrote:
well you can claim many things about the Imperium of Man, but the fear of treachery and chaos outweighs many a thing. And calling the IoM "efficient" and "rational" is... not something anyone would do.
The job of a PDF is to hold till the Guard arrives. That is in itself a huge problem since the Guard can take anywhere from months to centuries to muster a response... timeframes in which a badly trained and equipped PDF can be utterly annihilated and a reinforcement mission turns into a siege.

Just look at Vraks and how long it took to reconquer a well fortified, well equipped world where the PDF got access to fortifications and tools. There is some merrit to this strategy.

Vrak isn't all though. There's all sort of levels in PDF. From bunch of barbarian rags to tough professionals with good gear.

It depends entirely on the world. On the burial world the Excoriators fight on in "Legion of the Damned" the PDF are ceremonial with no combat experience and are carrying Lasfusils (the las equivalent to a bolt action rifle).

Depends entirely on the world the pdf stems from.

F.e. Vraks militia was on a arsenal world with a lot of decommissioned equipement such as stubbers, autoguns, malcadors, etc. therefore they use that in addition to everything else.

Garrisonworlds on the otherhand are basically just IG regiments sticking around on a important world.

Hive worlds, depend on what they do and how rich they are.

Death worlds, (kinda don't need a PDF since no ones stupid enough to attack them generally)

Generally, they are more defensively equipped, and mostly trained for defensive operations and peacekeeping, until the propper guard shows up to bail em out

The best example in the miniatures range is probably the Armageddon Steel Legion - when they were introduced in 3rd edition's Codex: Armageddon, they were there as the Armageddon PDF, not another Imperial Guard regiment that may have been re-equipped en route to a warzone. They have the full range of weaponry - melta and plasma weapons, lascannon, etc. They're equipped with Chimeras and armoured Sentinels.

The only things I'm not sure about would be super-heavy tanks and very specialised equipment like deathstrike missile launchers; I could see those being built "to order" and allocated to a tithed armour or artillery regiment after they're taken from their homeworld, with training being provided en route.

The quality of individual workds' PDF will obviously vary, but deliberately skimping on their upkeep is the sort of thing that gets planetary governors removed.

What always baffled me is that people tend to see a rag-tag bunch of gung-ho bunglers as the norm for the PDF forces. This may be the case on SOME worlds as the PDF usually depends on what the governor may and does provide.
A (somewhat)reasonable governor wants their PDF to be at least somewhat effective fighting force and since civilised worlds are the most numerous (daring assumption) throughout the imperium, they should be able to provide them some variety of equipment that COULD match those who are issued to the Guard forces by the Munitorum, but in limited numbers, including both light and heavy vehicles, perhaps locally produced.

(tl;dr - An average PDF soldier would be comparable to a regular guardsman, lacking only in numbers of specialised equipment, and training. Their training would be just basic or lightly specialised.)

It may wary, of course. Feudal world may have PDF consisted bowmen or musketmen marching in a close formations to the whistles and drums, Cardinal world may have PDF of fanatics comparable to Taliban while some rich Industrial world may have PDF trained and equipped better than the actual Guardsmen, but the norm (the average) is not that bad as usually presented, in my opinion. Not too advanced to posses a major threat, but still effective enough to overcome a rebellion or hold back a "small" invasions and raids.

 Hawky wrote:
What always baffled me is that people tend to see a rag-tag bunch of gung-ho bunglers as the norm for the PDF forces.

That's how many Imperial Guard Regiments see any PDF, even if they too were raised from the PDF on their own planet. They're better since they were selected to join the guard!

Still, it's the Imperial Governor who is responsible for recruiting and equipping his PDF. He'll use anything locally produced, ofc, and if the world is at all civilized that's basic lasguns and flak armor at the very least. And many Forge/Hive worlds produce stupendous amounts of weapons, vehicles and other gear both as tithes and to sell off to approved buyers. The governor of a world that can't produce anything too exotic might still be able to buy stuff from off-world. If he can afford better equipment - and sees a possible need for it - he will invest in such for at least the best of his forces. He's the one responsible for holding his world in working order, after all, and he will want to make sure no one can blame him for not doing enough to keep down insurrection or fighting off xeno raids etc.

The answer is really 'it depends' though typically its not as good as a full on Guard Regt. But some worlds may get close, if they can produce or afford it, where others may not even come remotely close as their tech level and finances aren't up to snuff.

Their main strength isn't their gear though really, its their sheer numbers. On Earth today* there's roughly 80 million military personnel (active military + reserves + paramilitary + misc other) for our only 7 billion* (ish) people. If a hive world has a population of 200 billion, even if the rate is consistent (which it probably isn't, but I've no data on conscription rates on imperial hive worlds) that gives you a conservative estimate of troops in the 2.3 billion mark. That's a lot of bodies to throw at the enemy; some of them might even kill an enemy or two before being shot/chopped up/eaten/etc.






*Well ok, not today, its 2009 data, as that's all I could find; but close enough.

40k worlds are usually much more militarised than our counties.

In europe, there is about 3 active serving soldiers for 1000 citizens.
In USA, it's 4.
In South Korea, it's 12.
In Israel, it's 21.
In North Korea, it's 50.

I think the number could be 2-4 times larger than 2.3 billion, which is... a lot.

 Hawky wrote:
40k worlds are usually much more militarised than our counties.

In europe, there is about 3 active serving soldiers for 1000 citizens.
In USA, it's 4.
In South Korea, it's 12.
In Israel, it's 21.
In North Korea, it's 50.

I think the number could be 2-4 times larger than 2.3 billion, which is... a lot.

Yeah my estimate was conservative, probably extremely so; but that's a large 'wall of martyrs' to slow things down till the Guard turn up either way. Which also makes me think if they have reserve forces like we do, citizens trained but not actively on duty ready to get called up at a moment notice.
Or is it more a case of: "well we're under attack, right you are all conscripted, here's a gun, that end points to the enemy, lets have your names for the list of martyrs, off you go, front is that way."

Though again, I suppose it depends on the planet again; a feral/feudal world is probably much less militarized than a hive/forge world is likely to be.

 Thairne wrote:
The job of a PDF is to hold till the Guard arrives.

No, the job of the PDF is to fight battles so that the guard doesn't have to be called in except in the most dire of circumstances. If the guard were bogged down in every single planetary scale conflict in the entire galaxy, they would have no resources for the larger scale conflicts that actually matter, like the damocles gulf crusade or the defense of Macragge.

You do realize that the vast majority of the men at arms in the entire galaxy are PDF right? Only about 10% of PDF troopers get transferred to the guard. PDF do the majority of the fighting, the guard only get called in when a world is overwhelmed and gak hits the fan.

w1zard wrote:

 Thairne wrote:
The job of a PDF is to hold till the Guard arrives.

No, the job of the PDF is to fight battles so that the guard doesn't have to be called in except in the most dire of circumstances. If the guard were bogged down in every single planetary scale conflict in the entire galaxy, they would have no resources for the larger scale conflicts that actually matter, like the damocles gulf crusade or the defense of Macragge.

You do realize that the vast majority of the men at arms in the entire galaxy are PDF right? Only about 10% of PDF troopers get transferred to the guard. PDF do the majority of the fighting, the guard only get called in when a world is overwhelmed and gak hits the fan.

Your headcannon is as fine as mine is, mate.
My version makes sense to me considering the threat of heresy and the division of guard regiments by types to deny a single regiment the use of combined arms tactics. I also choose to trust in Arch Warhammer as my supreme lore buff
The thing for me is also - no single planet can hold of any significant enough invasion force, be it CSM, Orks, Tyranics, Tau... whatever. A single planet cannot stand that. If the PDF can handle it - no call for help. But most of the time if the major players decide to strike, the PDF just isn't enough.

Whatever floats your boat, we both are right, noone is wrong.

 Thairne wrote:

My version makes sense to me considering the threat of heresy and the division of guard regiments by types to deny a single regiment the use of combined arms tactics.

That's got nothing to do with the organisation of a planet's PDF, though. It's individual regiments that are restricted to a certain type, not an entire planet's military.

But the same logic applies and feeds into the "regiments from planet x do y, regiments from planet z do something else entirely different".
If you're afraid of regiments turning traitor, having a planetary governour stage a coup is an entirely plausible threat. Happens on kinda a daily basis...

That system goes back to the division of the legions into chapters and the current organisation of the high lords of Terra... The Guard is reliant on the Navy to get from A to B and do not share anything regarding command.
I seriously cannot fathom that PDF's, the probably least controlled part of the armed forces in the Imperium, are exempt from that doctrine.

One of the few planets allowed to have all types of weaponry is Krieg due to their... special history.

Titanicus by Dan Abnett does a good job of portraying the PDF as civilians in uniform - decently equipped, but very much "weekend warriors".

That said, he was describing the tertiary reserve, so regular line troopers would likely be better trained and motivated

As others have already said, the PDF equipment can vary massively from world to world. Those PDFs from hive worlds/ forgeworlds will be well armed with vast reserves of manpower, A good example of this is the Armageddon Steel Legion or the Cadian Interior Guard (RIP), But those from primitive worlds or small outlying colonies are going to be sparsely equipped, just lasguns/autoguns.

However, those are extreme examples and most worlds in the Imperium could be compared to a smaller modern day earth i.e. several large cities, population in the high millions/low billions with a decently developed industrial sector. Now on these worlds the PDF will be fairly well developed. Will they have the full capabilities of an Imperial Guard Battle Group? No, But they will have a decent sized fighting force with decent levels of equipment.

There is a misconception that the PDF is just there to hold the line until the IG arrive. Whilst this is true if the planet is facing a dire threat, such as a Hive Fleet Splinter, the reality is that the Guard are not called in every time a world in invaded. It is stated in nearly every Guard Codex that an Imperial Planetary Governor is responsible for the safety of his world and if he fails in that duty then he is more than likely to be executed and his family purged for incompetence. The PDF have to be strong enough to deal with minor uprisings, pirate/xenos raids and medium sized invasions.

This allows for the Imperial Guard to concentrate on either reacting to major invasions into imperial space, like an ork waaagh, or for the Imperium to launch its own offensive actions, like the Sabat World Crusade.

The reason why Imperial Guardsmen look down on their PDF Brothers is mostly due to a lack of combat experience, not lack of equipment. Most Guard units have a wealth of combat experience fighting large scale war vs xenos and chaos. The PDF by contrast only really have experience fighting other humans, rebels or pirates, and only a few of them will have ever seen an alien. This means that in the face of a major invasion from an alien foe, the PDF is going to take a real beating and learn some harsh lessons in the opening stages of the invasion. Its not that the PDF are under equipped to deal with the threat, it just that their standard tactics might be woefully inadequate. A good real world parallel to draw would be the French army at the start of WW1. They had plenty of men and decent equipment, but they had never fought a modern war and so had no tactics for facing machine guns and as a result they just got mowed down.

A good example in universe of this is the Gravalax PDF from the book For The Emperor. In this book the PDF Troopers are armed with lasguns and Flak Armour (just like normal Guard) but they were very inexperienced when it came to dealing with the Tau (One of their Platoon Commanders had his rank clearly displayed on the front of his helmet which the protagonist points out as a rookie PDF mistake as it means the enemy can easily identify him and pick him off). In another of the Ciaphas Cain books, Cain leads a platoon of PDF on a raid vs a suspect chaos cult hideout. They raid the place using Chimeras and again all the Troopers have Lasguns and Flak Armour, but they are woefully unprepared for chaos threat they come across (no spoilers).

Hope this helps and apologies for the wall of text!

Thanks for all the replies all

 Thairne wrote:

w1zard wrote:

 Thairne wrote:
The job of a PDF is to hold till the Guard arrives.

No, the job of the PDF is to fight battles so that the guard doesn't have to be called in except in the most dire of circumstances. If the guard were bogged down in every single planetary scale conflict in the entire galaxy, they would have no resources for the larger scale conflicts that actually matter, like the damocles gulf crusade or the defense of Macragge.

You do realize that the vast majority of the men at arms in the entire galaxy are PDF right? Only about 10% of PDF troopers get transferred to the guard. PDF do the majority of the fighting, the guard only get called in when a world is overwhelmed and gak hits the fan.

Your headcannon is as fine as mine is, mate.

Except that mine isn't "headcanon" it is explicitly stated in the lore, namely the imperial guard codices.

Also, single worlds produce all kinds of different regiments, for example in the Cain novels the Valhallans had armored regiments, artillery regiments, and infantry regiments (both light and mechanized).

Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novels also portray this.

 FatBoyNoSlim wrote:
There is a misconception that the PDF is just there to hold the line until the IG arrive. Whilst this is true if the planet is facing a dire threat, such as a Hive Fleet Splinter, the reality is that the Guard are not called in every time a world in invaded. It is stated in nearly every Guard Codex that an Imperial Planetary Governor is responsible for the safety of his world and if he fails in that duty then he is more than likely to be executed and his family purged for incompetence. The PDF have to be strong enough to deal with minor uprisings, pirate/xenos raids and medium sized invasions.

This allows for the Imperial Guard to concentrate on either reacting to major invasions into imperial space, like an ork waaagh, or for the Imperium to launch its own offensive actions, like the Sabat World Crusade.

^This.

 Thairne wrote:
But the same logic applies and feeds into the "regiments from planet x do y, regiments from planet z do something else entirely different".
If you're afraid of regiments turning traitor, having a planetary governour stage a coup is an entirely plausible threat. Happens on kinda a daily basis...

That system goes back to the division of the legions into chapters and the current organisation of the high lords of Terra... The Guard is reliant on the Navy to get from A to B and do not share anything regarding command.
I seriously cannot fathom that PDF's, the probably least controlled part of the armed forces in the Imperium, are exempt from that doctrine.

One of the few planets allowed to have all types of weaponry is Krieg due to their... special history.

What a planetary governor doesn't get is warp-capable starships. So, like the guard, he can turn heretic but can't go anywhere until the inquisition and navy get around to dropping an army on him.

Regiments from planets do many things - we've seen canon cadian mech infantry and cadian armoured and cadian airbourne, for example. It's one single regiment which is never combined arms.
We have seen 'locally made tank patterns' - both in gaunts ghosts and bastion wars - in (traitor) pdf hands.

I skimmed through this thread and feel like most stuff has been covered. There’s a few details I’d like to add though.

*the guard has a much closer relationship to the department munitorum then the pdf, hence the difference in equipment.

*guardsmen can often receive a great deal of their combat training en route to a battle zone. Months or even years are commonly spent training on ships in the warp.

*common duties of the pdf is to keep local ork colonies in check. It’s not uncommon for orks (and certain tyranid organisms, namely gaunts) to have infested planets and be surprisingly difficult to exterminate.

*Pdf are known for being less competent then the guard but are also known to have higher morale. This is usually attributed to the fact that they’re fighting for and on their home world.

*Pdf are responsible for the surrounding systems and space station (depending on number of inhabited worlds, organization owning a space station etc). The imperial navy and the adeptus mechanic have their own soldiers but when it comes to space facilities owned by a planetary governor it’s the pdf job to keep them safe.

Not really an answer to the original question but a bit of trivia knowledge concerning the pdf. I hope it proves usefull for the op.