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 PhillyT wrote:
Strangely, the normal 10 company codex chapter includes 100 scouts as the tenth company, which makes that claim sort of weird.

Ten companies of a hundred marines is the general soundbite, but most sources (notably Codex: Ultramarines, Insignium Astartes) when detailing the scout company don't assign it a formal size.

I believe this would only really happen to someone suffering from chronic bad luck, like the Lamenters. Space Marines are much more difficult to kill than humans, so they can recover from much more grievous wounds. Furthermore, Space Marines aren't used for high casualty-missions. The IG are much better at dying in droves!

 Nicky86 wrote:
Think about this:

Space marine chapters are only 1000 marines strong. Now I understand that they are highly elite super solders, but when you consider that they are fighting major battles all over the galaxy, they must have high casualties. Lets say the Ultra marines lost 200 marines in a battle, how would they go about replacing them? from my understanding finding people worthy enough to become space marines is a long hard process. Your thoughts?

It's called a recruiting pipeline. Same way that current militaries do.

The Chapter's Most Esteemed Logistician runneth the numbers through his Holy Cogitator, which determined the average casualty rate. Henceforth the Chapter recruits new Marines at a rate capable of sustaining that number, ensuring that there are sufficient recruits at every stage of the process (remember, it takes about ten years to make a new Marine and he only spends the last few as a Scout. So you can have Marines at 1, 2, 3 years along at any given time.


And no, it isn't hard for a Chapter to "break even" on geneseed unless they suffer catastrophic total losses. A 24th Founding Chapter would have over 3,000 spare sets of geneseed in storage assuming a 10% ADMech tithe and a 50% loss rate on the second set of the remaining balance. Even with a 50% loss on new recruits, that's still a Chapter and a half's worth of potential Marines.

The idea of a chapter "on the brink of extinction" is a narrative hook for authors who never did the math.

iirc it takes like 55 years to rebuild an entire chapter from one gene seed which is nothing in historical terms. Plus chapters do "cheat" a bit and tend to have more than a thousand Astartes around.

A couple codexes ago, the Ultramarines entire roster was listed. It was roughly 1500 Marines and an undetermined number of Scouts.

The whole "1000 Marines" thing refers to ten companies of ten ten man squads. It doesn't count Command staff (including their retinues), support staff (like librarians and chaplains), specialists (like techmarines, apothecarys, dedicated pilots), or dreadnoughts.

Even then, the whole "ten companies of one hundred men" is just a summary, as pointed out, Scout companies have no codification on sizes.

That being said, that whole organization is just appeasement to the High Lords of Terra so they don't look like the old Legions, which was all Guilliman was asking them to do post-Scourging. The Dark Angels are split in name only, Azrael commands all of their successors. The Space Wolves only split once, and that was a disaster, so they've stopped bothering and are still basically a Legion. Chapters currently involved in a crusade or active war zone are exempt from any limitations (this is how the Black Templars get around it, they say they are always on a crusade). etc.

locarno24 wrote:
For that matter, the scout company has been known to swell beyond its normal 'book' size from time to time.

The idea is probably that if there are only a few regular marines in a chapter, say 200, then the scout company can become big enough to make up the numbers to 1000, in this case 800 scouts. This is the math I get from the timing of swollen scout companies ("times of war"), the various limits on sizes, and the way that new and recovering chapters would want large pools of scouts from which to promote instead of just using anybody whose organ implantation is complete. You wouldn't necessarily say they recruit enough to get all the way up to 1000, but if the chapter is down to only a few companies it would want something like 500 scouts to make sure they only promote marines that are ready.

 DarknessEternal wrote:
A couple codexes ago, the Ultramarines entire roster was listed. It was roughly 1500 Marines and an undetermined number of Scouts.

Well, it wasn't explicit.

What it said was that all vehicles came with crews, and when you added up the number of Marines it would take to crew all of the listed vehicles, you got just over 400 Marines. Then you added the various supernumeraries like HQ, Command Squads, Chaplains, Librarians, Techmarines, and Apothecaries and the number came out to over 1500.

 Quickjager wrote:
IIRC the Dark Angels lost 200 in the Siege of Vraks gonna go check that.

Yeah, and its a relatively minor engagement, numerically speaking at least. Especially at this part of the conflict

I thought it was more than that actually. More like 400.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:

 Nicky86 wrote:
Think about this:

Space marine chapters are only 1000 marines strong. Now I understand that they are highly elite super solders, but when you consider that they are fighting major battles all over the galaxy, they must have high casualties. Lets say the Ultra marines lost 200 marines in a battle, how would they go about replacing them? from my understanding finding people worthy enough to become space marines is a long hard process. Your thoughts?

It's called a recruiting pipeline. Same way that current militaries do.

The Chapter's Most Esteemed Logistician runneth the numbers through his Holy Cogitator, which determined the average casualty rate. Henceforth the Chapter recruits new Marines at a rate capable of sustaining that number, ensuring that there are sufficient recruits at every stage of the process (remember, it takes about ten years to make a new Marine and he only spends the last few as a Scout. So you can have Marines at 1, 2, 3 years along at any given time.


And no, it isn't hard for a Chapter to "break even" on geneseed unless they suffer catastrophic total losses. A 24th Founding Chapter would have over 3,000 spare sets of geneseed in storage assuming a 10% ADMech tithe and a 50% loss rate on the second set of the remaining balance. Even with a 50% loss on new recruits, that's still a Chapter and a half's worth of potential Marines.

The idea of a chapter "on the brink of extinction" is a narrative hook for authors who never did the math.

That assumes that geneseed doesn't have a shelf life and that all collected geneseed is usable, many marines pass on before their seed can be harvested, and not all seed is suitable for re-use due to mutation, etc.

Also, not every host for the new geneseed survives, in fact its made pretty clear that most dont, meaning that there is a lot of wastage as a result.

It wouldn't be much of a problem if they were did it like the spaces wolves or black templars.

Stop using scouts as a training company were it takes ten years and were there's only a 100 scouts at a given time.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:

...a narrative hook for authors who never did the math.

This sums up quite a number of problems with GW fluff.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:

...a narrative hook for authors who never did the math.

This sums up quite a number of problems with GW fluff.

Then again, while the basic math is easy the fluff doesn't tell us the modifiers. We know that not all recruits survive the implantation process, but aren't given any hard numbers on what an average fail percentage is. And we have no idea how much time the apothecaries have to recover the geneseed of the fallen. Is it a few minutes, a few hours or a few days before the tissue decays too much to be useful?

chaos0xomega wrote:

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:

 Nicky86 wrote:
Think about this:

Space marine chapters are only 1000 marines strong. Now I understand that they are highly elite super solders, but when you consider that they are fighting major battles all over the galaxy, they must have high casualties. Lets say the Ultra marines lost 200 marines in a battle, how would they go about replacing them? from my understanding finding people worthy enough to become space marines is a long hard process. Your thoughts?

It's called a recruiting pipeline. Same way that current militaries do.

The Chapter's Most Esteemed Logistician runneth the numbers through his Holy Cogitator, which determined the average casualty rate. Henceforth the Chapter recruits new Marines at a rate capable of sustaining that number, ensuring that there are sufficient recruits at every stage of the process (remember, it takes about ten years to make a new Marine and he only spends the last few as a Scout. So you can have Marines at 1, 2, 3 years along at any given time.


And no, it isn't hard for a Chapter to "break even" on geneseed unless they suffer catastrophic total losses. A 24th Founding Chapter would have over 3,000 spare sets of geneseed in storage assuming a 10% ADMech tithe and a 50% loss rate on the second set of the remaining balance. Even with a 50% loss on new recruits, that's still a Chapter and a half's worth of potential Marines.

The idea of a chapter "on the brink of extinction" is a narrative hook for authors who never did the math.

That assumes that geneseed doesn't have a shelf life and that all collected geneseed is usable, many marines pass on before their seed can be harvested, and not all seed is suitable for re-use due to mutation, etc.

Also, not every host for the new geneseed survives, in fact its made pretty clear that most dont, meaning that there is a lot of wastage as a result.

I accounted a 50% combat loss and a 50% recruit failure, and it still led to over 1500 spare sets for a 24th Founding Chapter. And that's assuming an average of a 400 year life span for a Marine which makes it a low estimate. If the Marines die off faster, the number of extra geneseed sets actually increases, as the biggest limiting factor is that to get 2 Marines out of 1, the donor has to die, lol.

And your idea that "most" recruits don't survive isn't substantiated by the fluff. That's just a player-created myth. There's a difference between an "Aspirant" (no implants) and a Neophyte (has actually begun/completed the implantation process). it isn't like they just start plugging in geneseed and hoping for the best. Which is why it takes a decade to make a Space Marine.

As far as shelf life, this is a universe where stasis storage isn't extremely rare. It isn't like this stuff is being stuck in the fridge.

More or less variations of what other people have said I'll try to consolidate/expand on it (with a few quotes).

First, consider that Space Marines are harder to replace (and take longer to do so) than a Guardsman. Second, consider as well that there is no way for them to reliabily predict losses or recruitment rates (especially given the uncertanties/mortality rates built into the recruitment and implantation process to begin with.) which means that the 'recruitment' rate for the Space Marines is probably nowhere fixed. And since its unlikely they're just going to kill a Space Marine off to adhere to a number (although this being 40K, its not impossible ither), that probably means that both recruitment and losses mean the numbers can fluctate unpredictably above/below that 1000 limit.

Now some quotes, one from a very old Epic source, and one from a less old source:


Armies of the Imperium:

A typical Space Marine Chapter has ten companies - although more companies will be created and maintained in times of prolonged war.
...
A Chapter also has at least one Scout Company, made up of young Space Marines who have yet to complete the final stages of their training and bio-chemical enhancement. Until they are ready to join the brother-warriors of the Space Marines they fight as scouts.

Codex Space Marines 5th:

Though Chapters have often exceeded their basic fighting strength of one thousand souls during times of prolonged war, the desired effect was achieved.

And more 5th:

The Codex Astartes dictates no formal size for a Scout Company as the rate of recruitment is not a fixed amount.

Incidentally, 5th edition mentions the 'exorcists' chapter as having 2 additional Scout companies.


So again as others have said, the true 'size' of a Chapter is not fixed (the same way the number of Chapters is not known/fixed, for similar reasons.) 1000 is more a benchmark than anything (they probably don't worry too much if a Chapter is a few hundred above 'limit' at times, but a couple thousand like the Astral Claws, or a consistent pattern of staying very far above that limit, probably would cause problems. Assuming they were even aware of it, as Astartes are not prone to being open about their activities/history.) This probably gets justified as above in 'needs of warfare' - which givne the Imperium and Space MArines are constnatly 'at war' can easily be 'justified' if not believed.

It also has to be noted that there are positions in the Chapter that are outside the 10-company structure for Codex Chapters (Space Marines attached to fleets, which if I remember my BFG stuff correctly can get to be as large as a company itself with detachments and Techmarines spread across ships, which may also explain the 1000 battle brothers when 1 company is a scout company.) Detachments to cover debts/pacts/obligations (Like in the old Wolfblade fluff, or Space Marines stationed on recruiting worlds like the Dark Angels and Piscina) probably could fall into this category as well.

The Scout company is the second 'loophole' as I think of it (aside from unpredictability and needs of warfare) to get around the 1000-man limit. With no fixed 'size' on a company (and in some cases even, number of companies) one could imagine that a scout company can become quite full of 'ready to be assigned', fully implanted Marines who are not yet promoted to Battle Brother status (which may be one source of Veteran Sergeants...) probably remain in the scouts until a time as a slot actually opens (We might therefore figure on the scout 'companies' as a queue/reserve of sorts - It can encompass 'fully implanted but not yet elevated to battle brother status' marines as well as those who are still in the process of training/implantation, and the 'fully implanted' Scouts simply keep training and waiting until they are called up.)

An interesting implication of this is that its possible that there is a limit to how many suits of power armour a 'typical' Space Marine Chapter can field or maintain, and that is a factor in why there are only 1000 marines (it could be they can have a surplus of fully implanted Marines, but simply nowhere near enough power armor on hand to field them all. This does depend on their actual supply lines, but it could be another way the Adeptus Terra attempts ot 'control' Marine numbers - at least amongst those Chapters that do not have significant industrial capacities of their own.)

I suspect even if power armor numbers aren't an issue they probably don't assign it until its needed (either in replacing losses to a company, or as in wartime in line with the 'exceed Chapter Strength' as above) but regardless they'd probably keep the hypothetical 'reserve' stationed on the Chapter Homeworld (or in the case of the Templars, whichever fortress monasteries they are actively maintaining) and Companies that return home for resupply/refit are provided fresh troops (not unlike what happened with Ragnar in the Bill King Space Wolf novels, really.) Such a 'reserve' can also act to defend the planet in case of attack (and at least technically would not represent a 'threat' as they are purely defensive in nature, but this is again probably semantics.)

Its likely that the Black Templars are an end result of what happens when the above process of recruitment/implantation to keep up with a perpetual 'war footing', especially across the galaxy like the Black Templars operate, gets out of hand and shows how hard to predict/control it can be. Other Chapters, I would guess, probably fission off excess numbers if they haven't been whittled down by attrition (forming the basis of a new Chapter, possibly. I'd guess if Terra agrees they can spend time to amass the resources and implant/train more recruits to 'fill out the ranks' and it would take less time than the 55 years if they do so.) or they find some other purpose that effectively leads to their eventual culling (sending them off on some crazy, suicidal crusade, or something, like the sorts of penance some chapters like the Mantis Warriors and Lamenters have faced, only on a more limited scale.)

Of course, I woudln't be surprised if some Imperial dude (like an Inquisitor) were crazy/dumb enough to demand that Space Marines cull excess numbers to stay within the letter of the 1000 man limit, either. Such being the nature of the Imperium.

Realistically, very little about the Space Marines would really work.

Some chapters are described as only recruiting once every ten years and only taking a few dozen at a time, other constantly, etc. It takes years to turn raw recruits into Space Marines. Space Marine chapters are supposed to constantly be at war, always fighting or en-route to a new battle. In general, even assuming an absurdly low permanent casualty rate of 5% a year, for chapters that only recruit once a decade, after a decade a chapter would be down to 630 marines. At that point they're running out of specialists and marines are having to perform multiple different roles, and that's about the strength level at which most conventional military formations would be considered "broken" and no longer combat effective, in imminent need of withdrawal.

Really, Space Marines work because GW hand-waves away functional necessities because 40k is a Fantasy universe in a space setting, not hard Scifi.

In reality, the Space Marines wouldn't work, their sum total military value would be equal to a few hours worth of daily Imperial Guard recruiting. But that doesn't make for good storytelling or selling of models.

Though even Blood of Asaheim shows that Marines cannot be constantly engaged. Even they need R&R and time to perform in-depth repair of vehicles and wargear, rather than the patch-jobs they can do flying from one warzone to another.

And this was the Space Wolves saying "another deployment?! Give it a rest!"

 Nicky86 wrote:
Think about this:

Space marine chapters are only 1000 marines strong. Now I understand that they are highly elite super solders, but when you consider that they are fighting major battles all over the galaxy, they must have high casualties. Lets say the Ultra marines lost 200 marines in a battle, how would they go about replacing them? from my understanding finding people worthy enough to become space marines is a long hard process. Your thoughts?

The vast bulk of engagements marines are involved in will result in no casualties or only minor injury. But when you are on a war footing in perpetuity you will eventually have casualties.

Battles where more than a couple dozen marines are involved are incredibly rare. battles where they die in quantities are even rarer. But when marines gather in numbers, &$%# is going down.

And even though maybe only one in a thousand is fit to become a marine, they do have countless trillions of people to pick from. Number of potential recruits isn't a problem for marines. The population could support hundreds of times the current marine population. Other factors are what limits them.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Space Marine chapters are supposed to constantly be at war, always fighting or en-route to a new battle.

Supposed out of character or in character? It seems to me like chapters can do whatever they want.

Connor MacLeod:

"Usually, one of the Chapter's Captain will be appointed Master of the Fleet with overall responsibility for the Chapter's entire fleet... the Master of the Fleet also has a number of Space Marines under his command, who act as high-ranking officers aboard the fleet's vessels, providing captains for individual vessels, leading specialised boarding parties.

"The exact organization of those Space Marines tasked with crewing the fleet varies from Chapter to Chapter. In some cases, it will be the Master of the Fleet's own company who provide these Marines, with each of his veteran captains acting as captain to a different vessel within the fleet while their own squad members each man a different vital area within that same vessel. In other cases, squads from different companies within the Chapter may be charged with manning the fleet, serving under the command of the Master of the Fleet in just the same way as a Space Marine battleforce may be made up of squads drawn from several companies across the Chapter under the battle-command of a single, nominated force commander.

"At an absolute minimum, a Master of the Fleet typically needs eighty to a hundred Marines to properly crew the fleet, its Thunderhawks and its landing craft, and most Chapters have measures in place to ensure that a a standing force of this size is permanently available to the Master of the Fleet, be it his own company in its entirety, or squads from across the Chapter left permanently at his disposal." (Fanatic Magazine 6, p. 55)