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 Psienesis wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

That's just Codex Compliant. There's still the Space Wolves, Black Dragons, Black Templar, and any additional unknown non-codex compliant Chapters out there.

Yes, but then you have those Chapters that are down to like 10 guys because of massive casualties sustained in recent engagements.

However you crunch the numbers, it comes out to one million Space Marines, one for every planet the Imperium holds. They are, to the vast majority of the Imperium's population, more mythical than unicorns. As in, you might hear stories about them, but you'll never, ever see one.

Not even that, the IOM likely has far more planets than a million, million likely only means hive worlds.

The quote, regarding the God-Emperor of Mankind is, "He is the master of a million worlds".

Pretty sure they aren't counting only Hive Worlds.

'The master of a million worlds' is probably more intended as a poetic phrase or an impressive sounding title than as an exact indication of the number of Imperial worlds.

 Perfect Organism wrote:
The Imperium is spread across the galaxy, but it's far from in control of every single system within it's borders. Imperial worlds tend to be clustered in sectors with huge areas of 'wilderness space' between them.

An Imperial world needs to not only be Earth-sized, but also situated the right distance from it's star and to have an atmosphere which will support human life. That's far more specific than merely a matter of size.

It also needs to be reachable from other imperial worlds. A hive world can't sustain itself without importing food and materials from agri worlds, while agri worlds can't maintain their economies without manufactured goods from hive worlds. Even worlds which are more or less self-sufficient need to be reachable by military forces in the event of an invasion or rebellion. That limits the Imperium to occupying worlds which are able to be reached by somewhat reliable warp routes.

Add those factors together and you only have a relatively tiny number of planets suitable for imperial occupation.

Also the 5th edition rulebook explicitly said that there were 32,380 hive worlds in the Imperium.

Except this isn't just limited to worlds the Imperium can inhabit. The Imperium needs ore and it doesn't purely get it from the worlds it inhabits. Only worlds slated to be inhabited or argi worlds need earth-like conditions, and to some degree, Forgeworlds, although they're so toxic I doubt they would qualify as earth-like, anymore. But given the size of the IOM and the size of its military force, it likely controls far, faaaar more galactic space for mining and outposts.

Many hiveworlds are not "inhabitable" by modern definitions of the term. You'd die if you left the hive.

Indeed, although the Hive itself isn't always a walk in the park.

And many Hive Worlds have relatively idyllic ecosystems, or at least passable ones, outside the hives.

An Imperial world needs to not only be Earth-sized, but also situated the right distance from it's star and to have an atmosphere which will support human life.

And actually, an Imperial World does NOT need to be Earth-like. Only if you want a normal ecosystem. Many Imperial worlds will have the inhabitants living in sealed environments underground or in sealed cities.

Calth is like that, although before the heresy it was a verdant earth-like planet. They live in the massive underground cities that currently inhabit the planet. That means the Imperium has the technology to colonize a wider range of planets than just planets that are in the habitable zone of a star.

But for each planet which isn't suitable for wandering around in your shirtsleeves outside, you are going to need a few which are to provide it with food and organic materials.

A hive world probably needs dozens of low-population, high-crop-yield worlds to support it's population. Mining colonies don't need as much food, but the number of viable mining colonies is limited by the number of hive worlds they can ship their raw materials to and that number is restricted by the number of food producing worlds.

A single planet with identical arable land and ocean mass to Earth could feed a dozen or so Hive worlds if it was farmed at even 50% efficiency. Let alone any technology which could allow for growing crops in non-arable land.

Hive Worlds have lots of people on them, but nothing even approaching what Earth could feed.

Yeah, we're really inefficient when it comes to food production here. A lot of our best farmland is used as residential.

That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

So hypothetically in the 41st millennium there are 1,000,000ish marines in circulation.

Do we have an estimate on how many were around at the end of the great crusade before the heresy for obvious reasons depleted their ranks?

 Grey Templar wrote:
That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

Really? Because my googling shows that there are only a few billion hectares of 'potentially arable' land on earth. Getting enough food to feed hundreds of people from each hectare seems wildly optimistic.

Then you have to account for wastage. You need to process a lot of the food you produce into more nutritionally dense forms before you ship it. The simplest way to do that is to feed crops to animals and then send the meat. But that means you only get a fraction of the calories you would from pure crops.

Even with high-density foodstuff, you still need to be lifting an absolutely colossal amount into orbit. I can just about believe an agri world could lift a few million of tons of food into space every day. Hundreds of millions of tons seems extremely unlikely though. That's millions of large ground-to-space cargo carriers, many times more than the number of equivalent cargo carrying airplanes in our world.

Absolute best case scenario in my mind is one highly efficient agri-world per (minor) hive world. Only a tiny fraction of planets are going to make agri-worlds that good though. Only a tiny fraction of those are going to be located in an area where warp transport can reliably reach them from nearby worlds. Only a tiny fraction of those are going to have a nearby world which actually has the potential to be a hive world.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Zuul wrote:
So hypothetically in the 41st millennium there are 1,000,000ish marines in circulation.

Do we have an estimate on how many were around at the end of the great crusade before the heresy for obvious reasons depleted their ranks?

There's a list of the ones we have information about here:

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Space_Marine_Legion

Looks like the average was around 100,000 marines per legion, so I guess around two million total.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

That's just Codex Compliant. There's still the Space Wolves, Black Dragons, Black Templar, and any additional unknown non-codex compliant Chapters out there.

Yes, but then you have those Chapters that are down to like 10 guys because of massive casualties sustained in recent engagements.

However you crunch the numbers, it comes out to one million Space Marines, one for every planet the Imperium holds. They are, to the vast majority of the Imperium's population, more mythical than unicorns. As in, you might hear stories about them, but you'll never, ever see one.

Not even that, the IOM likely has far more planets than a million, million likely only means hive worlds.

The quote, regarding the God-Emperor of Mankind is, "He is the master of a million worlds".

Pretty sure they aren't counting only Hive Worlds.

'The master of a million worlds' is probably more intended as a poetic phrase or an impressive sounding title than as an exact indication of the number of Imperial worlds.

It's repeated again in "In an Imperium of a million worlds, what is the death of one world in the cause of purity?" as another example.

The "one million worlds" shows up time and time again in quotes and references throughout the fluff. While the actual number of Imperial worlds may vary somewhat, like having, say, 1.35 million worlds, there's definitely not something like 10 million, or even 5 million, worlds in the Imperium.

The Imperium simply claims to possess the entire galaxy (save for the EoT). However, it's not contiguous, uncontested Human worlds from Terra to Ultramar or anything like that. Not even close. Every world of the Imperium is like a tiny island on a vast, dark sea, and there might be a dozen light-years (or more!) between one world and its closest human-inhabited neighbor. What links the worlds of the Imperium together is not proximity, but stable routes through the Warp. So you have Agri-World A and its closest neighbor, Hive World B. There's ten light-years that separate these two, and they're in the Segmentum Solar. There's a stable Warp route linking World A to World B, and so the Agri-World feeds the Hive world, which produces goods for the Agri-World.

In between these two worlds, in that ten LY spread, there's a Xeno empire consisting of three connected star-systems that Mankind has *never* encountered, because there is no Warp Route to go there, and the Xenos don't possess the means to traverse the Warp. The borders of every sector edge up against "Wilderness Space", which can be populated by who-the-feth-knows what. If a Warp Route can't get you there, you gotta slow-boat it into such areas, which takes *forever*... and space is really, really, really, REALLY big. There's a whole lotta risk, a whole lotta trouble and a very, very small chance for profit in slow-boating it into Wilderness Space.

 Psienesis wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

That's just Codex Compliant. There's still the Space Wolves, Black Dragons, Black Templar, and any additional unknown non-codex compliant Chapters out there.

Yes, but then you have those Chapters that are down to like 10 guys because of massive casualties sustained in recent engagements.

However you crunch the numbers, it comes out to one million Space Marines, one for every planet the Imperium holds. They are, to the vast majority of the Imperium's population, more mythical than unicorns. As in, you might hear stories about them, but you'll never, ever see one.

Not even that, the IOM likely has far more planets than a million, million likely only means hive worlds.

The quote, regarding the God-Emperor of Mankind is, "He is the master of a million worlds".

Pretty sure they aren't counting only Hive Worlds.

I have a theory that the IOM can't actually count.
Million worlds on the dot? Almost certainly not.
Tagline from the 80's? Yes.
Black Templars crusading for more planets?Yes.

 Perfect Organism wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

Really? Because my googling shows that there are only a few billion hectares of 'potentially arable' land on earth. Getting enough food to feed hundreds of people from each hectare seems wildly optimistic.

Then you have to account for wastage. You need to process a lot of the food you produce into more nutritionally dense forms before you ship it. The simplest way to do that is to feed crops to animals and then send the meat. But that means you only get a fraction of the calories you would from pure crops.

Even with high-density foodstuff, you still need to be lifting an absolutely colossal amount into orbit. I can just about believe an agri world could lift a few million of tons of food into space every day. Hundreds of millions of tons seems extremely unlikely though. That's millions of large ground-to-space cargo carriers, many times more than the number of equivalent cargo carrying airplanes in our world.

Absolute best case scenario in my mind is one highly efficient agri-world per (minor) hive world. Only a tiny fraction of planets are going to make agri-worlds that good though. Only a tiny fraction of those are going to be located in an area where warp transport can reliably reach them from nearby worlds. Only a tiny fraction of those are going to have a nearby world which actually has the potential to be a hive world.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Zuul wrote:
So hypothetically in the 41st millennium there are 1,000,000ish marines in circulation.

Do we have an estimate on how many were around at the end of the great crusade before the heresy for obvious reasons depleted their ranks?

There's a list of the ones we have information about here:

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Space_Marine_Legion

Looks like the average was around 100,000 marines per legion, so I guess around two million total.

Smallest being raven guard at 80k, largest being ultras at around 500k (possibly more), word bearers 320k if I remember from the hh forge world books, blood angels next largest around 300k, the rest we have been told about are around 130-170k, so average I'd say is about 150-200k based on legion numbers in the forge world books, know no fear, decent of angels, the betrayer.

 Grey Templar wrote:
That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

Also, if we stopped eating meat, that would greatly increase the number we could feed. More land for crops and meat uses more energy than it produces
(10x IIRC).

Doesn't the imperum have "agri-worlds" which the entire world is farmland?

Yes, it does. Though they do have ranching on some worlds, too, the meat is a luxury item.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Really, its not a lack of candidates which limits marine numbers. Its the semi-honor system the Codex presents and the chapter's supply of geneseed.

And the supply of arms, armor, and hold them. And verteran marines to train them.

 Exergy wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Really, its not a lack of candidates which limits marine numbers. Its the semi-honor system the Codex presents and the chapter's supply of geneseed.

And the supply of arms, armor, and hold them. And verteran marines to train them.

And the fact that they have tons of arbitrarily limits on the kinds of candidates that they will accept.

To be fair, the Imperium is pretty arbitrary as-is.

Eh, depends. Plenty of things make sense in-universe. Not everything though, some thing are just "tradition", which is a pretty gakky reason to do things but not uncommon.

I tried some guestimations on population a while back

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/539436.page

As far as the "Eliteness" of a Space Marine is concerned I'm generally of the mindset that they're simply better than most. Their physiology combined with some of their preferred methods of engagement give them a massive edge over most conventional foes but in most situations they don't actually *need* a ton of numbers. They're not really an occupational force.

Also keep in mind that not every planet in the Imperium is under threat of Tyranid Invasion, Chaotic Uprising, Tau Influence, or some other ruinous fate. I'm sure there's plenty of worlds which are just normal places with normal people. Agri-Worlds, the rank and file worlds of the Imperium, etc... they might be counted in the overall population of the Imperium, if it's possible to count such a fluid and subjective statistic, but they might never even have a Marine vessel pass through their system.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

Also, if we stopped eating meat, that would greatly increase the number we could feed. More land for crops and meat uses more energy than it produces
(10x IIRC).

Doesn't the imperum have "agri-worlds" which the entire world is farmland?

Nope, we'd still be able to eat meat. And we actually need meat to meet protein requirements. Vegetarian protein sources would not be able to meet nutrition requirements for the entire world.

Arable land only counts land which can be used for crops. It doesn't count land which can only be used for grazing. And we've got a ton of land which can only be grazed. Hills which only support grass, arid rocky land, etc...

In that sense, meat only uses a lot of water. energy isn't a huge concern because its solar energy that is referring to, and we've got unlimited amounts of that. And again, we've got plenty of water, just not always where we need it.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
That, and we aren't even using all the land we possibly could. Lots of it is undeveloped.

And that's totally disregarding any land alteration such as irrigating areas that normally don't get water, leveling rocky areas, etc...

The idea of overpopulation because we can't feed people is totally bogus. We could feed 100 times Earth's current population all they could desire with agricultural techniques that are a century out of date given the available land.

Also, if we stopped eating meat, that would greatly increase the number we could feed. More land for crops and meat uses more energy than it produces
(10x IIRC).

Doesn't the imperum have "agri-worlds" which the entire world is farmland?

Nope, we'd still be able to eat meat. And we actually need meat to meet protein requirements. Vegetarian protein sources would not be able to meet nutrition requirements for the entire world.

Arable land only counts land which can be used for crops. It doesn't count land which can only be used for grazing. And we've got a ton of land which can only be grazed. Hills which only support grass, arid rocky land, etc...

In that sense, meat only uses a lot of water. energy isn't a huge concern because its solar energy that is referring to, and we've got unlimited amounts of that. And again, we've got plenty of water, just not always where we need it.

So the real solution becomes, "how do we get water everywhere?".

After that all you need is numbers.

Basically, yeah!

The Imperium does in fact graze cattle, albeit not cattle like we know them (they're saurian cattle, IIRC), but still, cattle.

There are probably real Earth cows somewhere. They just likely have a narrower habitat band and are thus reserved for the elite of the elite.

True, they probably do. OR some equivalent anyway.

I'm pretty sure that Aurochs have been mentioned in some of the Dan Abnett novels at least, as well as the more common Grox.

So, it seems that neither overpopulation or food production do much to limit the population of Hive Worlds. That still leaves the bottleneck of shipping stuff off the agri-world.

We know that Imperial ships mass somewhere in the millions of tons range from the FF Rogue Trader books (I'm guessing that's empty weight and a lot of their volume is taken up by reaction mass, because the density seems very low). So that probably means they can carry a few million tons of food each at most. One ton of food would feed maybe a couple of thousand people for a day, so a world with tens of billions of people would need dozens of ships arriving every day. That seems quite reasonable for a hive world, but kind of weird for an agri-world.

There's no shortage of parking space in orbit, but how are they getting the supplies up to them? A Thunderhawk transporter is a large atmospheric craft by Imperial standards and it has a lift capacity of only about 80 tons or so. An unarmoured civilian version could probably carry a lot more, but we're still talking a few hundred tons at once. So it takes hundreds of thousands of trans-atmospheric flights every day to load up enough ships to feed a hive world. Assuming each flight only takes a few hours, we still need tens of thousands of planetary cargo transporters.

Most agri-worlds seem to have a population far less than modern earth and a rather low level of technology. Even with magical anti-grav shuttles which can fly to space as easily as a modern aircraft can fly across a country that's a massive number of advanced vehicles for a low-population world to support.

 Perfect Organism wrote:
So, it seems that neither overpopulation or food production do much to limit the population of Hive Worlds. That still leaves the bottleneck of shipping stuff off the agri-world.

Which is a known issue. Hives must stock up on non-perishables or they'll get starved out without supplies from the outside, even when their world is suitable for farming.

 Perfect Organism wrote:
We know that Imperial ships mass somewhere in the millions of tons range from the FF Rogue Trader books

Or much larger, if you look at the Battle Fleet Gothic numbers.

The crew count can get in the millions for some BF:G ships, and they fire city-sized projectiles.

The cow, being from Holy Terra as it is, must clearly be a sacred beast.

 Perfect Organism wrote:
The Imperium is spread across the galaxy, but it's far from in control of every single system within it's borders. Imperial worlds tend to be clustered in sectors with huge areas of 'wilderness space' between them.

An Imperial world needs to not only be Earth-sized, but also situated the right distance from it's star and to have an atmosphere which will support human life. That's far more specific than merely a matter of size.

It also needs to be reachable from other imperial worlds. A hive world can't sustain itself without importing food and materials from agri worlds, while agri worlds can't maintain their economies without manufactured goods from hive worlds. Even worlds which are more or less self-sufficient need to be reachable by military forces in the event of an invasion or rebellion. That limits the Imperium to occupying worlds which are able to be reached by somewhat reliable warp routes.

Add those factors together and you only have a relatively tiny number of planets suitable for imperial occupation.

Also the 5th edition rulebook explicitly said that there were 32,380 hive worlds in the Imperium.

Basic conditions are water, atmosphere, pressure, temperature and gravity.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Melissia wrote:
Many hiveworlds are not "inhabitable" by modern definitions of the term. You'd die if you left the hive.

So what happened when the Orks blew holes in Armageddon's hives?