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Regarding the numbers of the orders minoris and the non-militant orders: we don't know.

 Melissia wrote:
Regarding the numbers of the orders minoris and the non-militant orders: we don't know.

Lexicanum doesn't mention it, you're right, but I do have a vague recollection of lore stating similar.

Sometimes I wish Lexicanum were more detailed than it is...

 Mr Morden wrote:
Dont the non militant orders outnumber the Militant ones by a huge amount.

If they are anything like any other organization, that would be true. If you look at any military organization, the support tail easily outnumbers the fighting tooth by a considerable margin. Having non-militant orders would only skew that ratio even further. Particularly in a Gothic universe, where lives are as cheap as in Medieval times.

But GW is crap with numbers and such, so anybody's guess would be fine.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Dont the non militant orders outnumber the Militant ones by a huge amount.

If they are anything like any other organization, that would be true. If you look at any military organization, the support tail easily outnumbers the fighting tooth by a considerable margin. Having non-militant orders would only skew that ratio even further. Particularly in a Gothic universe, where lives are as cheap as in Medieval times.

But GW is crap with numbers and such, so anybody's guess would be fine.

Life in the 40k universe might even be cheaper than it was in Medieval times.

I mean, if the Imperum lost half of its population, it would still have 10 quadrillion people, more than enough to feed every branch of their military to its fullest.

I should point out that Potential Sisters recruits are taken from the Schola Progenium, which manages the Imperium's orphans.

Given just how much war happens in the imperium, there are a lot of orphans out there.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
I should point out that Potential Sisters recruits are taken from the Schola Progenium, which manages the Imperium's orphans.

Given just how much war happens in the imperium, there are a lot of orphans out there.

1 in 50 Imperial citizens dying to war would be really, REALLY high though.

Situations where you'd see casualties like that on the scale of the entire Imperium, while certainly possible, would involve entire hive cities getting eradicated, at which point there would be no orphans - the children would be dead too. We're talking two thousand times more civilians dying than make up the entire Imperial Guard. And the IG lore refers to "a few million casualties" in one day being a HIGH number.

It would actually be more like 1 in every 10-20 citizen dying to war and leaving an orphan, cuz not all girls destined for the Schola will become a Sister of Battle (although the majority will) since psykers would be taken away to either feed the golden throne, become sanctioned psykers, or just killed, while the not-so-pious girls would probably end up in a more mundane position like the Scions, Commissariat (unless they ret-conned both to be men-only) or an administrative position.

And that's not even getting into account how roughly half of the orphans would be boys to begin with.

However given the state of the imperium and how many worlds are described as "feudal" I wouldn't be surprised if the average citizen had something like 10-15 children. And that's assuming of the ones killed off; More likely kids would be abandoned at the foot of the local Ecclesiarchy and then get sent to the Schola.

As above, GW is crap with numbers.

That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

Alhough it is very likely that most of the products of the Schola end up as Administratum clerks etc, GW does not mention that sort of thing anymore - and I understand that the latest depection in the Tempestus Codex has it being more like the the Hunger Games in there.

GW has always (IIRC) said that male students can be Navy officers, Commissars and Stormtroopers aswell as Priests. Females can be Sororitas, Inquisitors or Assassins. The current SOB codex has copy pasted the old text.

Of course Black Library has many females in all the above "male" roles (which IMO is a good thing)

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

That's a math task for anyone willing to find out how much G-force would be applied to the person ringing the bell and the bell itself.

I know a guy like that, but he does video game stuff.

He figured out how Fallout Mininukes could possibly work. Sorta. He eventually realized that answering that question adequately would equate to providing a guide on how to make a mininuke with 84 cents of radioactive material, and decided to stop even trying. And he also realized that while it could theoretically be done, nuclear physics are so complicated that he wouldn't be able to learn enough to figure out how to do it. Oh, and he also figured out that the amount of radiation released would kill everyone within 200 feet of the detonation within a few minutes.


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 Mr Morden wrote:
Alhough it is very likely that most of the products of the Schola end up as Administratum clerks etc, GW does not mention that sort of thing anymore - and I understand that the latest depection in the Tempestus Codex has it being more like the the Hunger Games in there.

GW has always (IIRC) said that male students can be Navy officers, Commissars and Stormtroopers aswell as Priests. Females can be Sororitas, Inquisitors or Assassins. The current SOB codex has copy pasted the old text.

Of course Black Library has many females in all the above "male" roles (which IMO is a good thing)

So... should we just leave the question of how many Sororitas exist at "more common than Space Marines, less common than IG" and be satisfied, since the numbers don't exist to adequately answer that question and GW has yet to provide a way to even figure it out accurately?

If I rememeber the anecdote was that the bell would have to be completely rung in the span of a fraction of a second considering that every space marine is considered a "hero", not to mention commendations given to entire regiments, regular deaths, posthumous honors, whatever the Eccelsiarchy "Declares" as a hero, and so forth. So that bell would probably need to be designed to be rung at sub-sonic speeds just to break even.

If you consider the "bell" to be small enough, you can get over 100 per second...

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
If you consider the "bell" to be small enough, you can get over 100 per second...

That gave me the mental image of a ministrum priest standing in front of a microphone in a huge tower rapidly ringing a cat bell

I can find you his video where he figures out how much G-force a cyborg ninja's arm and sword would have to sustain to reflect 6 miniguns firing at him in unison, if that would help?

His conclusion was that there is no material known to man which is capable of surviving the experience though. And it's a way more extreme situation.


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 JohnHwangDD wrote:
If you consider the "bell" to be small enough, you can get over 100 per second...

That's 6,000 rings per minute.

So essentially about the same rate as a minigun.

It's still too early for this much silly in my life. At least I woke up to a good mood today.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
It's still too early for this much silly in my life. At least I woke up to a good mood today.

I'm imagining a bell ringing at the same rate as a minigun firing, and I think I might become a heretic and burn down that bell's church for some peace and quiet, even if it means being burned alive by the Sororitas.

But then I also remember that that bell has been ringing at that rate for my entire life so I've probably gotten used to it already and wouldn't think anything of it.

No wonder all Imperial Equipment looks like they can shatter ear drums just by using it, by this point those humans must all have ear drums made of steel.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
No wonder all Imperial Equipment looks like they can shatter ear drums just by using it, by this point those humans must all have ear drums made of steel.

Or maybe they just don't live in hearing range of the Bell of... Heroes... or whatever it's called?

I would imagine that listening would be manditory, and would be transmitted to every receiver possible.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
I would imagine that listening would be manditory, and would be transmitted to every receiver possible.

That's gonna make combat operations impossible trying to communicate over the noise of the bell.

No wonder every Imperial soldier is shouting at the top of their lungs constantly.

Or why Space Marine Commanders refuse to wear helmets.

I never bought the "it's too expensive" argument. Russian and Polish companies have managed to produce lines of 28mm one-off Sisters models that look just fine. GW doesn't have the same resources as small Eastern European shops?

Considering the sky-high prices for Sisters on the secondary market, there is still demand for them. If "nobody played them" they wouldn't be selling for $5-6+ per bolter Sister model.

Then the heart of the argument...if you buff it, they will come. Give the sisters a real, viable, codex that can compete at mid-to-high-tier (with models) and they'll see play. Guaranteed.

So it's a choice by GW, for what it's worth. The least they could do is be honest with the player base about it. It also looks pretty bad when they just hang factions out to dry with no real explanation. Which faction will be next to be orphaned? Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence for players to invest in armies other than SM.

 Pouncey wrote:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

That's a math task for anyone willing to find out how much G-force would be applied to the person ringing the bell and the bell itself.

Lorewise the Bell doesn't get rung for everyone, it's for heroic last stands/significant individuals. I'm going to do some XKCD-style random guesswork for fun here.

The Warhammer wiki lists 205 distinct Imperial planets with their own pages, of which nine contain Space Marine Fortress-Monasteries. Since GW maintains that there are about a thousand Chapters in existence at any one time that's giving us about 23,000 distinct major planets. Guessing about 7 billion as an average population (the densely-populated hive worlds are balanced out by the sparsely-populated agri-worlds and feral worlds) that gives us a galactic population of around 1.6*10^14 humans.

Now assuming the standards of heroism for getting the Bell of Lost Souls rung at your death are on par with the standards the U.S. puts on getting the Congressional Medal of Honor (which has been awarded to 3,496 people over 153 years, for a rate of almost one person every two weeks), adjusting for population (going from an average population of about 165 million over the aforementioned 153 years to 1.6*10^14 people makes this approximate Imperium around a million times the size of the Imperium), we get roughly a million bell rings a fortnight.

Adjusting the units down that's only actually 49.6 rings a minute, just under one per second. Difficult if you want to be suitably large/dramatic about the bell ring, but building a bell to withstand that rate of ringing wouldn't actually be that difficult. A bigger problem is how Holy Terra can sleep with the giant-ass bell going off fifty rings a minute day and night, or what happens when it wears out and has to be replaced.

 WhiteBobcat wrote:
I never bought the "it's too expensive" argument. Russian and Polish companies have managed to produce lines of 28mm one-off Sisters models that look just fine. GW doesn't have the same resources as small Eastern European shops?

Considering the sky-high prices for Sisters on the secondary market, there is still demand for them. If "nobody played them" they wouldn't be selling for $5-6+ per bolter Sister model.

Then the heart of the argument...if you buff it, they will come. Give the sisters a real, viable, codex that can compete at mid-to-high-tier (with models) and they'll see play. Guaranteed.

So it's a choice by GW, for what it's worth. The least they could do is be honest with the player base about it. It also looks pretty bad when they just hang factions out to dry with no real explanation. Which faction will be next to be orphaned? Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence for players to invest in armies other than SM.

Metal and resin are actually cheaper to produce than plastic. It's because of the molds.

A mold for a plastic sprue has to be made of very carefully cut aluminum. I've heard that the molds for a plastic model kit cost something like a million US dollars.

The metal the models are made of is a more expensive material than plastic, but plastic has more of an up-front cost in terms of making the molds.


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 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

That's a math task for anyone willing to find out how much G-force would be applied to the person ringing the bell and the bell itself.

Lorewise the Bell doesn't get rung for everyone, it's for heroic last stands/significant individuals. I'm going to do some XKCD-style random guesswork for fun here.

The Warhammer wiki lists 205 distinct Imperial planets with their own pages, of which nine contain Space Marine Fortress-Monasteries. Since GW maintains that there are about a thousand Chapters in existence at any one time that's giving us about 23,000 distinct major planets. Guessing about 7 billion as an average population (the densely-populated hive worlds are balanced out by the sparsely-populated agri-worlds and feral worlds) that gives us a galactic population of around 1.6*10^14 humans.

Now assuming the standards of heroism for getting the Bell of Lost Souls rung at your death are on par with the standards the U.S. puts on getting the Congressional Medal of Honor (which has been awarded to 3,496 people over 153 years, for a rate of almost one person every two weeks), adjusting for population (going from an average population of about 165 million over the aforementioned 153 years to 1.6*10^14 people makes this approximate Imperium around a million times the size of the Imperium), we get roughly a million bell rings a fortnight.

Adjusting the units down that's only actually 49.6 rings a minute, just under one per second. Difficult if you want to be suitably large/dramatic about the bell ring, but building a bell to withstand that rate of ringing wouldn't actually be that difficult. A bigger problem is how Holy Terra can sleep with the giant-ass bell going off fifty rings a minute day and night, or what happens when it wears out and has to be replaced.

Actually we don't have to guess about galactic population too much. We have the range of population for a hive city, range of number of hive cities on a hive world, number of hive worlds in the Imperium, and the population range of a non-hive world, along with the total number of planets in the Imperium (one million).

Plugging in average numbers in all cases leads to a galactic population of over 20 quadrillion humans in the Imperium.

I think that, more likely than ringing the bell once a second, they'd further restrict the requirements for ringing it.

Resin and Metal molds are cheaper if you only plan on a limited casting run. Plastic Molds are much cheaper in the longrun if you plan on your kits lasting a few decade. Cut aluminium is expensive but it lasts far longer than the type of molds used for metal and resin, which can rapidly degrade if you push them too far. When tabletop gaming in general was still a niche hobby, a single mini will never see the demand that will require so many to be made nor a production run long enough for them to be viable after only a handful of years down the road. Thus the only reason to make stuff in plastic is when they're either too unfeasable for resin or metal (such as large vehicles that most players will buy more than one or two of) or stuff that will see multiple applications, like generic marine bodies that will have different accessories from different sets on them.

Now that 40k has moved onto massive armies and how models will be expected to hold for decades on end, Plastic models are far more practical than they use to be since you can expect the demand to be far higher than it would be practical for a single resin/metal mold to be able to produce.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
Resin and Metal molds are cheaper if you only plan on a limited casting run. Plastic Molds are much cheaper in the longrun if you plan on your kits lasting a few decade. Cut aluminium is expensive but it lasts far longer than the type of molds used for metal and resin, which can rapidly degrade if you push them too far. When tabletop gaming in general was still a niche hobby, a single mini will never see the demand that will require so many to be made nor a production run long enough for them to be viable after only a handful of years down the road. Thus the only reason to make stuff in plastic is when they're either too unfeasable for resin or metal (such as large vehicles that most players will buy more than one or two of) or stuff that will see multiple applications, like generic marine bodies that will have different accessories from different sets on them.

Now that 40k has moved onto massive armies and how models will be expected to hold for decades on end, Plastic models are far more practical than they use to be since you can expect the demand to be far higher than it would be practical for a single resin/metal mold to be able to produce.

I...am not sad to have gotten into 40k when I did.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

That's a math task for anyone willing to find out how much G-force would be applied to the person ringing the bell and the bell itself.

Lorewise the Bell doesn't get rung for everyone, it's for heroic last stands/significant individuals. I'm going to do some XKCD-style random guesswork for fun here.

The Warhammer wiki lists 205 distinct Imperial planets with their own pages, of which nine contain Space Marine Fortress-Monasteries. Since GW maintains that there are about a thousand Chapters in existence at any one time that's giving us about 23,000 distinct major planets. Guessing about 7 billion as an average population (the densely-populated hive worlds are balanced out by the sparsely-populated agri-worlds and feral worlds) that gives us a galactic population of around 1.6*10^14 humans.

Now assuming the standards of heroism for getting the Bell of Lost Souls rung at your death are on par with the standards the U.S. puts on getting the Congressional Medal of Honor (which has been awarded to 3,496 people over 153 years, for a rate of almost one person every two weeks), adjusting for population (going from an average population of about 165 million over the aforementioned 153 years to 1.6*10^14 people makes this approximate Imperium around a million times the size of the Imperium), we get roughly a million bell rings a fortnight.

Adjusting the units down that's only actually 49.6 rings a minute, just under one per second. Difficult if you want to be suitably large/dramatic about the bell ring, but building a bell to withstand that rate of ringing wouldn't actually be that difficult. A bigger problem is how Holy Terra can sleep with the giant-ass bell going off fifty rings a minute day and night, or what happens when it wears out and has to be replaced.

I would imagine that, due to the multiple galactic wars and whole societies based around war, to compare it to the Medal of Honor then it would not be how many people received it over the whole duration, but only during periods of intense war (so WW2, Vietnam War and Korean War periods). And considering the Imperium is far more suicidal than the US would be in terms of "Human Resources", I would multiply that by at least 2.

And those would just be for confirmed deaths. Ciaphas Cain was apparently deemed dead so many times that he was permanently put on the Imperial Payroll and never taken off because they simply did not want to deal with the paperwork. Assuming this he alone had the bell rang for him multiple times, and I wouldn't think this would be an isolated incident.

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:

 MechaEmperor7000 wrote:
That too. Remember if we go by every piece of lore, the Bell of Lost Heroes would be ringing faster than a bell could be physically rung due to the hilarious amounts of casualties, and it would still have a huge backlog to work through.

That's a math task for anyone willing to find out how much G-force would be applied to the person ringing the bell and the bell itself.

Lorewise the Bell doesn't get rung for everyone, it's for heroic last stands/significant individuals. I'm going to do some XKCD-style random guesswork for fun here.

The Warhammer wiki lists 205 distinct Imperial planets with their own pages, of which nine contain Space Marine Fortress-Monasteries. Since GW maintains that there are about a thousand Chapters in existence at any one time that's giving us about 23,000 distinct major planets. Guessing about 7 billion as an average population (the densely-populated hive worlds are balanced out by the sparsely-populated agri-worlds and feral worlds) that gives us a galactic population of around 1.6*10^14 humans.

Now assuming the standards of heroism for getting the Bell of Lost Souls rung at your death are on par with the standards the U.S. puts on getting the Congressional Medal of Honor (which has been awarded to 3,496 people over 153 years, for a rate of almost one person every two weeks), adjusting for population (going from an average population of about 165 million over the aforementioned 153 years to 1.6*10^14 people makes this approximate Imperium around a million times the size of the Imperium), we get roughly a million bell rings a fortnight.

Adjusting the units down that's only actually 49.6 rings a minute, just under one per second. Difficult if you want to be suitably large/dramatic about the bell ring, but building a bell to withstand that rate of ringing wouldn't actually be that difficult. A bigger problem is how Holy Terra can sleep with the giant-ass bell going off fifty rings a minute day and night, or what happens when it wears out and has to be replaced.

I would imagine that, due to the multiple galactic wars and whole societies based around war, to compare it to the Medal of Honor then it would not be how many people received it over the whole duration, but only during periods of intense war (so WW2, Vietnam War and Korean War periods). And considering the Imperium is far more suicidal than the US would be in terms of "Human Resources", I would multiply that by at least 2.

And those would just be for confirmed deaths. Ciaphas Cain was apparently deemed dead so many times that he was permanently put on the Imperial Payroll and never taken off because they simply did not want to deal with the paperwork. Assuming this he alone had the bell rang for him multiple times, and I wouldn't think this would be an isolated incident.

I went the opposite direction with the 'confirmed deaths' part, actually; the U.S. military keeps very precise track of all its troops, the Imperium is probably much more likely to not hear about/lose track of some fallen hero who deserved recognition than it is to list someone twice by accident.

Not to mention the Medal of Honour isn't always given posthumously, while ringing of the Bell is.

It also presumes that there's a set guideline for what would be considered a "heroic" deed.

Again going by fluff you'd think they'd ring the bell for every space marine that died regardless of reason, to say nothing of how the Ecclesiarchy will conflate what is a "heroic death" from a normal one.