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According to the Lex the average sector is 200 light years cubed which equals 8 million cubic light years (could that even be a measurement?).

That's obviously huge but what does that equal in the bizarre world of 40k? How many systems, planets, people would be a realistic average for such a space? I know that could vary wildly but for instance a trillion people? A hundred inhabited worlds?

How about enemies, would a few worlds under Chaos control/contention around a warp storm, an Ork Waaagh and splinters of a Hive Fleet be overkill for a Sector?

Just spit balling as I don't want my fanon Sector to end up being ridiculously cramped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,000:_Dawn_of_War_II

 Jape wrote:
According to the Lex the average sector is 200 light years cubed which equals 8 million cubic light years (could that even be a measurement?).

That's obviously huge but what does that equal in the bizarre world of 40k? How many systems, planets, people would be a realistic average for such a space? I know that could vary wildly but for instance a trillion people? A hundred inhabited worlds?

How about enemies, would a few worlds under Chaos control/contention around a warp storm, an Ork Waaagh and splinters of a Hive Fleet be overkill for a Sector?

Just spit balling as I don't want my fanon Sector to end up being ridiculously cramped.

In the 40k universe, many sectors are simply empty, many may only have one or two small worlds, others may have hundreds of hive worlds, while others may be completely infested by Orks with no Imperial presence at all. That said, the 40k universe is set in our own galaxy, a 200x200x200 space isn't much out of a galaxy 100,000x100,000x1,000 LY in size.

It would really depend on the sector, like Vaktathi said you could have only one or two planets of importance or a few hundred. Not all would necessarily be Imperial either.

So really, it could be whatever you wanted it to be. A sector can be really fething huge, so it isn't improbable for there to be some worlds under the control of a chaos cult, a warp storm, a waaagh, and some Nids all in the same sector.

Don't hold me to this. I once read awhile ago… that sectors don't really have a set size. It would seem this is no rhyme or reason for how sectors are named or layer out.

BFG doesn't specify a set number of worlds but it does say that only a small number of systems in a sector will have worlds and a smaller number yet will be inhabited/inhabitable.

A quick look on Lexicanum shows that the Calixis Sector has over 200 named worlds but Badab has only 14 named worlds. As the other posters have already pointed out, it can literally be as populated or deserted as suits your needs.

 GuardRalph wrote:
Don't hold me to this. I once read awhile ago… that sectors don't really have a set size. It would seem this is no rhyme or reason for how sectors are named or layer out.

I think as far as physical space they are uniform size, so their contents are literally determined by what is in that area.

My take on it:

The gothic sector in BFG was something like a couple hundred inhabited worlds and tens of thousands of other worlds. the FFG stuff seems to go with 'hundreds' or thereabouts.

Some novels have gone as few as 50 inhabited worlds in a sector (13th Legion) whilst others are larger.

Andy Chambers had some quote about there being 'thousands' of sectors back from the BFG era, so depending on how many you figure is 'thousands' you could have anywhere from 500 worlds to 100 worlds per sector, if you put any stock in his informal word.

The one major limitation seems to be one in terms of volume - that is, a sector is basically 200x200x200 light years, and the sector evolves within those approximate boundaries however it can. It will not neccesarily grow 'larger' in terms of territorial volume, inasmuch as the Imperium's arbitrary boundaries are concerned, but it can become more densely populated (more worlds occupied, cretion of orbital faciltiies, etc.)

Other than that, ewll, it will depend on alot of factors. I'd say what will dictate sector size primarily is a.) what resources/assets it has that the Imperium can/would want to exploit, and b.) how the warp routes are laid out. The Imperium is always hungering for resources, and a sector with plenty of large deposits of minerals, metals, promethium, etc. will probably encourage the Imperium to colonize and exploit them as quickly as possible. This in turn means industries to support such efforts (places to build the equipment to harvest, refine, etc. such resources, the agri worlds to support them, etc.)

At the same time, accessibility is going to play a huge factor too. Having all those resources is useless if they can't be easily/quickly transported to where they may be needed, and transporting stuff costs money. So having lots of warp routes, or having especially fast/stable routes, will benefit in terms of contact with the larger Imperium, trade, and general economic/industrial/population development.

Over time (centuries and millenia) the sector will grow and probably change as politics, culture, economics, industry, etc fluctuate. Some regions will become more dominant than others (either becuase of the aforementioned politics, or epic disasters affecting trade/conomy, or they run out of resources, or whatever.) Colonized worlds will become civilised, and will become other worlds (like hive worlds of varying sorts.) You'll get the other factions moving in and establishing their own fiefs (the AdMech, the Inquisition, the Ecclesiarchy, etc.) which adds further flavor as they all vie for dominance in their spheres of influence. As new resources/materials are needed new worlds may be located, colonized, etc. and the sector grows, and the cycle starts anew.

It is important to remember that what links the worlds of a given region of space together, in the Imperium, is not their actual proximity, but the viability of routes through the Warp.

So a given sector might contain a million planets capable of supporting human life... but only 3 of them have stable Warp Routes that permit the Imperium to discover them. All of the rest must be traveled to by sub-light drives, and so it will take many, many hundreds to thousands of years to reach one of these worlds from its nearest, Warp-plotted neighbors.

More, in all of this "wilderness space", there could be ancient human empires or colonies, Xeno worlds, the ruins of long-dead civilizations, and other such things, not to mention all the many hazards of standard travel within realspace, such as asteroid fields, ionizing radiation storms, black holes, and other such things.

just as a frame of reference from our Sun to Haumea (the furthest body in the Sol system) is around 2 light years. the nearest star is Proxima centauri which is a 21 light years from us (these are all rounded up) 200 light years away from us we have earths "twin" KOI-314c (imaginitive i know). between there and here there are an estimated 3,880 stars. lets assume that each star has 3 planets (some may have none some may have 15) thats 11,640 planets. take an average away... lets say 20%? 2,328... those are gas planets and are uninhabitable. this leaves us with 9,312.

Due to terraforming and other technological wonders during the Age of tech we can assume that at least 30% of these have been manipulated/have contained atmospheres which gives us 2,794 inhabited planets.

most planets in 40k have a couple of billion souls living there which is dandy but there are also planets that do not planets that may only have say 500 million or 50 million.

so shall we say 2,794 x 800,000,000? sounds about right?

thats 2,235,200,000,000 civillians in that sector. two trillion two hundred thirty-five billion two hundred million people...

christ...

Anyway lets slim it down taking into account what has been said by other users first off lets take the whole warp travel thang put forward by Psienesis.

so he has said that only 3 out of a million planets (which is boring) so lets say for every 1000 planets there are 300 with warp routes. sounds fair right? so we have 2,794 (3,000 to make it easier) thats 900 planets inhabited. as oppose to 3,000

but wait moons... lets say an average of 0.75 moons per planet (most have none some might have 8 and a bunch will be taken to ship yards and what not)

this gives us 1,575 inhabited bodies. Again more maths.. its not fair to assume that a moon will have 800 millions people living on it. so lets take the moons and say an average of 1.5 million live on each thats 675 x1,500,000 = 1,012,500,000

More maths... 900x800,000,000 =720,000,000,000 + 1,012,500,000 = 721,012,500,000

now i have a headache... so we have 721 billion people living in your sector... now would you like nids crons eldar chaos orks or tau to be harrassing you? or maybe a soon to be exterminated baby race?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
by the way my calcs were done based on a sector near the middle of the galaxy where it is densly populated (not squat stuff)

just a head up the milky way is 100,000x100,000x1000 LY give or take. It's a flat disc (in relative terms) so you would only see 2 sectors above you and 2 below you each f those may only have 1 warp route like i always say its up to you. its your little universe

I haven't checked all of your maths but your initial numbers are a little off.
Haumea is at most about 51 AU from the earth about 0.0008 ly
Proxima centauri is 4.2 ly away
there are estimated to around 14500 stars within 100ly of earth (if earth was at the centre of a sphere 200ly in diameter)
With a cubic sector of sides 200ly, comparison of said sphere to cube would almost double that number of stars
.
I would say that your estimate of the percentage of gaseous planets around a star is wrong as well.
Given the evidence available (our system) the percentage would be at least 50. It is difficult to include what we know about planets orbiting other stars as we are unable to view these systems as a whole.
Given the above and using your average of 3, there would be roughly 83000 planets within a sector centred on our star.
as for those that are habitable, even with advanced technology id estimate this percentage wouldn't be above 20.
That gives roughly 16600 habitable planets.

haha i just had a 5 minute look over the web and fixed it t so it looked about right and as too the whole proxima centauri thing i meant to put Gliese 581 down there but got confused by the 7 tabs i had open and started reading the wrong things..

my point about Proxima centauri was that its only around 4.5 light years away and in that space there isnt actually that much going on. but hey ho

your estimation of 20% with terra forming is that just the forming or does that include man-made atmospheres? enclosed spaces and such? thats where i got the other 10-15% from because at first with terraforming i can to 15-20% but then remembered places like deliverance which have an artificial recycled atmosphere

and 16600? thats not taking away the number of warp routes or including the moons. and my sector went from the sun to KOI both at the farthest extremes again only working on estimates (becuase that it all we can provide)

anyway if we were to take you 16600 and finishe it off with my warp bits we have:

16600 = 5000 with warp routes which is 3,750 moons

so 3750 x 1,500,000 = 5,625,000,000 + (5000 x 800,000,000 =4,000,000,000,000) = 4,005,625,000,000

for those who have issues with numbers and what not thats four trillion five billion six hundred twenty-five million

which is a lot of civillians in onw sector

From the BFG rulebook:

BFG page 45

Less than 1% of systems have planets orbiting a solitary star in the manner of ancient Terra. Even so, there are millions of star systems containing billions of worlds scattered across the galaxy. Most planets are either dsolate, empty, and airless, or surrounded by an atmosphere too noxious to support life. In the Gothic Sector there are over two hundred inhabited worlds and tens of thousands of other planets. Planets often become the focus of space battles as opposing fleets attempt to estalbish forward bases or extend their control throughout a system.

Page 86

This may seem like a formidable armada, but the area they cover is huge and the navy must be ready to perform many varied and difficult tasks. An average sector, perhaps one in the western spiral arms where humanity is most dense, can contain tens of thousands of stars and covers an area of 8,000 cubic light years. within this vast wilderness, only a small fraction of systems will have planets and a small proportion of these will be inhabited, or indeed inhabitable. However the ships of a battlefleet must constantly scour this area for enemies: protecting merchant shipping from pirates and alien attacks, transporting and escorting Imperial Guard armies, not to mention providing exploration fleets and routine patrols.

The Legion of the damned supplement IIRC mentions 'trillions' of people in a sub-sector, and IIRC one of the Space Marine Battle books (Helsreach) mentioned the same. Likewise the Sabbat Worlds spinoff book BL put out years ago mentions the Sabbat Worlds region having 5 trillion people estimated nad 100 worlds, but we don't know whether it is a sector, subsector, or something different (collection of subsectors, maybe.)

Population is going to depend on the sector and the planets themselves. As well as access to food.

Earth, if all arable land was given over to agriculture, could produce enough food for around 12-20 billion people. Depending on the source. That's also only including dry land farming.

Now imagine a planet which has a climate better suited to agriculture than Earth. A planet that is either naturally, or artificially, temperate over most of its surface and has been given wholesale over to food production. You could feed trillions of people on such a planet.

But planets with such amiable climates are probably rare, so you could easily have sectors with many planets with smaller populations simply because they don't have ideal farmland available in large quantities on any nearby planets.

The Sabbat worlds, from memory, seemed like a fairly desolate place with a lot of Feral worlds and the developed worlds there were didn't appear to have fantastic climates.

Of course, it would not really be possible for GW to present an "accurate" picture of all of the worlds in the Imperium. It would require a library to hold the number of books written for even clusters of worlds.

However, they provide enough of a starter idea that you can make up your own little sector or sub-sector, drop it in whatever Segmentum you like, and populate it with however many worlds of whatever variety strikes your fancy.

thats what i was saying. its entirely your choice i just threw numbers around to see what different sizes would bring about

Me, I'm lazy. My current DH campaign takes place on one world, a thousand years after its nuclear holocaust, and is also trapped in a Warp Storm, so they can't even rebuild a ship to fly away into the galaxy any time soon.

The economy is largely barter-based (though bullets are a readily-accepted form of currency) and I don't need to muck about with inter-stellar economies, trade, policies and the like. Every Imperial faction is further broken into sub-factions, all of whom fight one another, and the Orks on the world are just there to be a problem for everyone.

Ouch. My head hurts.
I check on this forum, and it goes "all mathie". I like it in a masochistic way. Like a teenager with a "cutting" issue and a long night alone.

Interesting stuff guys thanks, and in particular Blackedge for the maths, helps put it into perspective.

It's important to remember that holding territory in space is not like holding territory on land, it's like holding territory in the ocean.

Each Star System is an Island, and a Sector can be thought of as an Archipelago. You control the islands, but the empty ocean between those islands cannot be controlled in any meaningful way. The Sector consists of a network of Systems connected by established Warp routes, but between those Systems can lie hundreds of light years worth of space, and countless other Systems can exist in that space and never be discovered.

The way too look at it is that it is entirely up to you. you may have a baren sector with only 3 system and a population of 10 billion equally you may have a sector so dense that the systems are close enough to use sub-light to get between them. a system like that may have tens of thousands of worlds and a couple of trillion souls. it always your choice, if you want to go into depth with all of this and name each planet each system each warp route its probably better to have a smaller sector and build it when you get there just start with 3 stars name them name the planets around them any moons/orbital platforms and just build from there. it keeps it simple and easy, but hey thats just me