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How do?

Sorry for the slightly lengthy thread title.

But I’ve been wondering something with the advent of Cawl and Guilliman, alongside the Primaris Marines.

See, before this happened, Adeptus Astartes were, by and large, limited by the Codex Astartes to roughly 1,000 Marines (unsure if that number includes Novitiate Scouts or no). And for Good Reason, given the main aim of the Codex was to restrict the power any one military leader might have control over.

Yet, that most August Tome wasn’t written with the future they got in mind.

With the coming of the Cicatrix Maledictum (or whatever’s it’s called!), the resources of The Imperium are already stretched, despite its near unlimited manpower.

Now, the relaxing or outright change to the Codex Astartes is a relative doddle. Guilliman not only wrote it, but is also the de facto leader of The Imperium. He can, more or less, do as he wishes. I mean, it’s not a totally free hand, but I really can’t see resistance toward him working particularly well.

Perhaps he decides that doubling, or even tripling, a Codex Chapter Strength actually makes sense. The Generals and what not certainly have need of more men under arms.

But I’m genuinely questioning if The Imperium could physically triple its number of Astartes, be they Primaris or not.

See, the first question is just how stringent the selection process needs to be. Certainly during the Heresy, vast numbers of Astartes were created, and sustained.

When the Codex kicked in, and a Chapter Master suddenly had limited resources, one can understand why they might’ve insisted on solely the Best of the Best. Yet, 10,000 years later? Perhaps pragmatism has become Truth, and those responsible for the conversion process absolutely believe that that’s just how it always was, and always will be. It could be the relatively high mortality rates of would be Astartes is less down to temperamental technology, and far more ‘we don’t, really, know what we’re doing. Yes of course the candle is completely essential’.

Let’s assume that, with the purified Geneseed delivered by Cawl’s research that the success rate of creating a Primaris is lower. It’s also heavily implied that Cawl assisted in the creation of the original Astartes, and by extension, at least vaguely hinted he may even have contributed to the Primarch project.

So if anyone has even a vague chance of re-educating the wider Apothecarium, it’s Cawl (no, trust me. The neck bone is not connected to the ankle bone, and you do not need that sodding candle).

But in terms of arming, armouring and mobilising an increased number of Astartes? Can The Imperium do it? Because there’s exactly bugger all point creating an additional, say, 2,000,000 Astartes if you’ve no practical way to deploy them in a truly effective manner. And that’s regardless f whether you’re looking at 2,000 new Chapters, or tripling the strength of existing ones!

Hopefully I’ve done a decent description. And yes, this is largely speculative, delving as it does into stuff not really set down in the background. But hey, that’s what makes the background so much fun to discuss!

Right, off you go!

Quite possibly not.

The Twenty Legions may have represented a greater number of astartes, but they had the industrial might of a united Mechanicum and pre-death-of-innocence Mars behind them.
Even if Cawl is able to magically provide the designs for what they need - and not just the weapons and armour but the machines to make them, and the machines to make them and so on, the key industrial infrastructure of the Imperium - the number of active forge worlds - is in a pretty sad shape compared to the height of the crusade.

With the way GE writes its stories, the Imperium would have the resources to naintain twice the number of GC marines with only a handful of worlds

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

But in terms of arming, armouring and mobilising an increased number of Astartes? Can The Imperium do it?

Considering the Battle Sisters are all given power armor, armed with bolters, and drive around in Rhinos, I'd say the Imperium is very capable of it.

How would roughly doubling the number of Marines in a Chapter be significantly different, from a logistics perspective, from doubling the number of Chapters?

The Codex Astartes hasn't been what decides the number of Marines in the galaxy; the Imperium chartering Marines as needed and as they could equip them has always been a thing. And they've always needed them, so logistics has been the limiting factor in the number of Chapters.

As evidenced by the Primaris and the size of the geneseed storage facilities controlled by Mars, logistics and resources to pump out Marines isn't an issue if they need to.

the Imperium could, but all told they'd rather just triple the number of space marine chapters. the concerns behind the codex number limits haven't gone away (in fact it's implied that the fall of cadia and the formation of the great rift saw a wave of heresy hit and a large number of marines fell to chaos) keeping chapters small limits the damage that they can do, and nothing stops multiple space marine chapters from operating in theatres. it's worth noting that a lot of MAJOR battles (cadia, vigilus, armageddon) describe multiple chapters involved.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

But in terms of arming, armouring and mobilising an increased number of Astartes? Can The Imperium do it?

Considering the Battle Sisters are all given power armor, armed with bolters, and drive around in Rhinos, I'd say the Imperium is very capable of it.

The power armors and bolters (and other weapons) aren't a problem, that's true. If you can throw down the cash the AdMech can provide them. But a Chapter needs many other things not the least of which is a number of warp-capable ships to take them to the fight. Without transport the marines are just powerful guards for an important world, just as the SoB are often used.

Double or triple the marines, very possible. But that would already put some strain on the AdMech when it comes to producing ships for them. What other resource production is the IoM willing to reduce in order to give 2000 new Chapters at least a Battle Barge, 3 Strike Cruisers and 10 Frigates each?

Astartes Power Armour is also a more sophisticated than that worn by the Sororitas. And that’s because they need the Black Carapace interface.

An odd question, since the current setup _is_ the deployment of new Chapters left and right, and straight up replacing destroyed/devastated ones.

Its a non-issue, as
1) it is actually happening in the fluff

2) GW's numbers don't matter. If they want Roboute to send another million Primaris marines into the fight, another million go into the fight. Yes, they've got all the armor, weapons, vehicles etc they need.

And realistically, Forge _Worlds_. Arming 1,000 man groups is pretty trivial with just one world's resources, let alone multiples.

There's a variety of factors in play here:

1) There have to be enough aspirants (easy enough with hive worlds numbering in the billions)

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

3) Aspirant has to be trained (whose training them? If it isn't psycho-instilled, you may be looking at pulling battle-ready marines off the line to train aspirants depending on number of aspirants; likewise, most marines have trained for lengthy periods of time - usually measured in decades - before being "qualified" to fill certain positions, such as a Tactical)

4) Aspirant has to be equipped (if a guard's uniform and gun were somewhere in the range of $150, marine power armor and weapons could be in the thousands - and who knows how long it takes to make some of these things? The 40K verse isn't exactly somewhere where they can just plop down a new factory wherever they want to take up the new demand - in some cases, an existing factory may be the only place that can manufacture something and could be well at max output as-is - a factory producing Grav weapons may be a good example)

5) The whole process has to be filed, approved, distributed and acted upon. Considering the labyrinth nature of the Imperium's bureaucracy, I imagine Guilliman could spark things in Ultramar quickly, but the further away the slower the reaction - especially given the nature of Warp travel (either by hand-delivering the orders or if you really want to watch the Chaos gods feth things up, transmit it via Astropath...)

Overall, I believe the imperium could ramp up all the above to increase the number of marines perhaps by 5%-20% a year once it was approved; It's likely be a decade or more before they could double the numbers, and the marines would be minimally trained or ready for battle. And that's not counting casualties as you roll them off the assembly line and shove them into conflicts.

 Stormonu wrote:

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

Whomever wrote fluff to that effect dropped the ball. Each Space Marine makes enough gene-seed to make 2 more marines, one can be harvested 5 years after implantation, the other one upon the death of the marine. A 90% failure rate would doom every chapter to rapid depletion of their numbers.

They probably mean the pre-screening process kills 90% of potential applicants. The actual implantation process needs to be very successful to avoid the inevitable collapse of a chapter.

 John Prins wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

Whomever wrote fluff to that effect dropped the ball. Each Space Marine makes enough gene-seed to make 2 more marines, one can be harvested 5 years after implantation, the other one upon the death of the marine. A 90% failure rate would doom every chapter to rapid depletion of their numbers.

They probably mean the pre-screening process kills 90% of potential applicants. The actual implantation process needs to be very successful to avoid the inevitable collapse of a chapter.

I've struggled with this. I didn't know they could get more than 1 our of them (as I only hear of them being extracted at death), so seemed a stupid method of reproduction. I did head-canon it to be that one gland can be grown or developed into multiple implantations, which then in turn grow and mature and can be turned into multiple... so it was infact the death of a space marine and recovery of the glands that limited chapter growth.

TarkinLarson wrote:

 John Prins wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

Whomever wrote fluff to that effect dropped the ball. Each Space Marine makes enough gene-seed to make 2 more marines, one can be harvested 5 years after implantation, the other one upon the death of the marine. A 90% failure rate would doom every chapter to rapid depletion of their numbers.

They probably mean the pre-screening process kills 90% of potential applicants. The actual implantation process needs to be very successful to avoid the inevitable collapse of a chapter.

I've struggled with this. I didn't know they could get more than 1 our of them (as I only hear of them being extracted at death), so seemed a stupid method of reproduction. I did head-canon it to be that one gland can be grown or developed into multiple implantations, which then in turn grow and mature and can be turned into multiple... so it was infact the death of a space marine and recovery of the glands that limited chapter growth.

In theory, the 5 year gland keeps your numbers stable, the 'remove upon death' one covers potential growth. This has to assume a high success rate, because there's a 10% gene-seed tithe to Terra and there will be dead marines with glands that cannot be recovered because somebody used a meltagun on them (or similar).

I think there have been examples of force growing gene-seed, especially on Terra, but IIRC that led to the cursed foundings - lots of mutation and other issues.

And this dumb method of reproduction probably was intentional - it keeps any Tom/Dick/Harry/Fabius Bile from just mass producing Space Marines easily.

Logistics are the reason that chapters are the size they are. They need a minimum size to reproduce (maintain) themselves effectively. To have ships they need a number of tech marines and they need to be able to rotate some out for repair. To maintain numbers they need a certain size apothecarion, including enough to train new apothecaries, and a certain number of officers. It would be terrible to have one or three apothecaries, one or three captains, and one or three tech marines having to maintain a whole 200 marine mini-chapter by themselves.

If that’s a minimum, why not make them bigger? No, instead they just make extras of these minimum-sized autocephalous chapters.

I think there have been examples of force growing gene-seed, especially on Terra, but IIRC that led to the cursed foundings - lots of mutation and other issues.

It’s the other way around. New chapters, and Raven Guard who have damaged gene seed, get their gene seed force-grown on Mars. When it’s grown in test slaves under laboratory conditions it comes out identically instead of being in regular marines getting exposed to environmental mutagens.

 John Prins wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

Whomever wrote fluff to that effect dropped the ball. Each Space Marine makes enough gene-seed to make 2 more marines, one can be harvested 5 years after implantation, the other one upon the death of the marine. A 90% failure rate would doom every chapter to rapid depletion of their numbers.

They probably mean the pre-screening process kills 90% of potential applicants. The actual implantation process needs to be very successful to avoid the inevitable collapse of a chapter.

Yeah, I don't know about the 1 in 10 stat either. If I had more time atm I'd poke around and try to find something on that.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 John Prins wrote:

 Stormonu wrote:

2) The aspirants have to survive the process (varies by chapter, but seems to be 1 in 10 or worse)

Whomever wrote fluff to that effect dropped the ball. Each Space Marine makes enough gene-seed to make 2 more marines, one can be harvested 5 years after implantation, the other one upon the death of the marine. A 90% failure rate would doom every chapter to rapid depletion of their numbers.

They probably mean the pre-screening process kills 90% of potential applicants. The actual implantation process needs to be very successful to avoid the inevitable collapse of a chapter.

Yeah, I don't know about the 1 in 10 stat either. If I had more time atm I'd poke around and try to find something on that.

I think John's right - I think it's the selection process/pre-trials that tend to kill the aspirants before they undergo modifications. The only chapter I can remember off-hand where the actual process may do in the aspirant is with the Space Wolves, where they can end up feral creatures or worse.

I think a mind like Guilliman could definitely organise the imperium to support larger chapters, it wouldn’t be universal as some chapters in particularly dangerous areas are struggling to keep their current numbers while others in more stable areas could expand.

There’s definitely a need in my mind for the legion’s of old in the current imperium, and I personally don’t think more chapters is as effective as a legion. But the reasons the legions were broken up are sound and still hold.

I would personally like to see the first founding and certain extremely well proven reliable and loyal chapters designated as legions again but their numbers limited to the low tens of thousands not hundreds of thousands, I think this is a good compromise with the flexibility of small chapters scattered all over but the occasional large hammer of a mini legion here and there.

 Stormonu wrote:

4) Aspirant has to be equipped (if a guard's uniform and gun were somewhere in the range of $150, marine power armor and weapons could be in the thousands - and who knows how long it takes to make some of these things? The 40K verse isn't exactly somewhere where they can just plop down a new factory wherever they want to take up the new demand - in some cases, an existing factory may be the only place that can manufacture something and could be well at max output as-is - a factory producing Grav weapons may be a good example)

This is honestly a non-issue. The Mechanicum can get complex weaponry like meltaguns and plasmaguns to 1 in 10 of untold billions of guardsmen (or at least 1 in 50 or so if you want to fairly distribute the different special weapons). Going from 1 million marines to 2 or 3 million is never going to strain any factories by comparison.

And this doesn't include equipment already mothballed. Or produced by whatever crazy setup Cawl has for Primaris, that managed to produce weapons for the entire wave of Primaris for the century or so of the Indomitus Crusade.

5) The whole process has to be filed, approved, distributed and acted upon. Considering the labyrinth nature of the Imperium's bureaucracy, I imagine Guilliman could spark things in Ultramar quickly, but the further away the slower the reaction - especially given the nature of Warp travel (either by hand-delivering the orders or if you really want to watch the Chaos gods feth things up, transmit it via Astropath...)

Nope. Labyrinthine bureaucracy makes it easier in a case like this. Orders can be done locally (on relevant worlds) without fething about, and Guilliman can employ the 'Lord Regent Fiat of (semi-divine) Absolute Rule,' backed up by summary execution if he really has to. Seriously, who in the modern Imperium is going to tell a Primarch that 'No, he can't outfit marine chapters to combat the encroaching hordes of chaos.'

Overall, I believe the imperium could ramp up all the above to increase the number of marines perhaps by 5%-20% a year once it was approved; It's likely be a decade or more before they could double the numbers, and the marines would be minimally trained or ready for battle. And that's not counting casualties as you roll them off the assembly line and shove them into conflicts.

Again, Lord Regent. He doesn't actually need anyone's approval. Someone way up could try to spike the process in specific places, but they'd probably by killed if they tried. Marine Chapters are small enough, independent enough and politically powerful enough that they don't have to play by the bureaucratic rules that plague the Guard and Planetary Defense Forces.

It's a matter of scale. Managing weapon production and recruitment for a unit of 1000 is utterly trivial on a galactic scale. The sheer quantity of war material produced by the Imperium is laughably huge, and equipping them with gear that isn't 'can only be produced on one remaining forge world' is trivial by comparison. We've seen a lot of chapter organization and equipment tables over the years, and most chapters don't keep that many tanks on hand (<100), so even that isn't a major problem
Tracking it happening in a galactic bureaucracy would be harder than actually doing it. If a single chapter's logistical needs make it to 1% of a Forge World's output, I'd be very surprised. Keep in mind that most of them are dedicated worlds, and most of them are very definitely on a perpetual war economy. They don't produce much else, and have far more facilities and people than we do on each one.

Training is actually the real barrier, but Devastation of Baal is already showing signs that they're planning on ramping up the creation of new marines, taking candidates that they disqualified in the past. And the genesis pods for creating Primaris marines took a matter of weeks to set up and start production (RG and the fleet arrived at the tail end of the battle for clean up, and the genesis pods were set up and 'working correctly' before the BA had started any cleanup of the fortress-monastery. So even production of marines isn't a real problem.

Fun factoid: The Codex Astartes fluff in 7th edition had barely changed from when it was codified in 2nd edition, with one exception that crept in around 3rd edition: That the Codex was a hard limit of 1000 marines. 2nd edition's Codex: Ultramarines actually stated that during times of war a chapter might be expanded although it didn't cover by how much, but an epic paint guide explained the Ultramarines heraldry system going up to 30 companies.

Codex doesn't have a hard limit of 1000. we've been told some exceptions to the rule over the years. Noted exceptions seem to be specialists (Librarians tech Marines etc) as well as honor guard and command squads. Officers. and well it's never explicttly been stated each Marine vessel has a marine assigned as captain, not listed as one of the 1000 in the codex, and likely has a crew of marines as well. If we assume that each ship has 5 marines assigned to it, and assume the 3 Battle Barges, 7 strike cruisers and a dozen or so strike vessels as details in the 6th edition codex (which many people belive for the ultramarines is less then they actually have) then between ship crew and command squads you've got an 11th company worth of marines.

So yeah a chapter with lots of specialists, full command squads etc is proably closer to 1200 marines in size.

and then there's the fact that there's no hard limit on the size of a scout company, with ultramarines and ravenguard specificly being called out for having "bigger then useal" 10th companies.

BrianDavion wrote:
and likely has a crew of marines as well.

Marine naval vessels are crewed by chapter serfs, which are generally failed aspirants and their descendants. BFG specifically calls out Marines as too important to be used as naval crew.

 Platuan4th wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
and likely has a crew of marines as well.

Marine naval vessels are crewed by chapter serfs, which are generally failed aspirants and their descendants.

Sorry I meant to say command crew the vessel captain etc. useally the novels depict a ship as having a squad of marines aboard. it's possable they only have a single marine a captain, and said captain is a cripple. but I'm deliberatly highballing it.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
and likely has a crew of marines as well.

Marine naval vessels are crewed by chapter serfs, which are generally failed aspirants and their descendants.

Sorry I meant to say command crew the vessel captain etc. useally the novels depict a ship as having a squad of marines aboard. it's possable they only have a single marine a captain, and said captain is a cripple. but I'm deliberatly highballing it.

Naval vessels are captained by the Company Captain the ship is assigned to and under direct command of the Master of the Fleet(4th Company Captain) when not on assignment. There's no permanent Marine crews attached to Naval vessels according to BFG fluff.

What I liked about the pre-primaris story was the fact that the Imperium couldn't even maintain the current marine chapters. The crushing attrition, increasingly degraded geneseed and loss of ancient technologies meant that not enough marines could be created and those that were are wracked by various flaws. There were mentions of armour and bionics being irreplacemable or of poor quality compared to the older stuff too.

In that context, I would say it is highly unlikey that the Imperium could conjure up a large amount of new chapters especially after being cut in half by warpstorms.

Lest we forget the armories of the various chapters also have tons of extra equipment. That Centurion didn't melt down his carapace armor to make power armor, his power armor, his chainsword to make a lascanon, his lascannon to make a chainsword, and his chainsword to make a bolter, and then all of it to make his centurion armor.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Guilliman could somewhat easily somewhat with difficulty reforge all his successor chapters into the Ultramarines Legion again. He's the boss, so it's easy. Everyone whispered and pointed at him for ignoring his own Codex during the Grey Shields and Indomitus campaign so it would create some difficulties.

This is all semantics anyway. There is always SOMEONE who has command of multiple space marine chapters - be it Guilliamn, the High Lord(s) of Terra, etc. - Whether they are 200 successor chapters or one Legion, does anyone believe Guilliman as Primarch, let alone High Mucky Muck of the Imperium, doesn't/didn't still command a legion? The same can be said of any of the Loyalist Primarchs and their successor chapters. You think the Angels of Absolution aren't going to line up with a Sir, Yes Sir, Three Bags Full Sir - the second the Lion says "Could you do me a favor?"?

While I'm gonna appreciate your post but after reading the first sentence I can already tell you the answer is yes. And it's yes for one reason, cawl.

Cawl is the absolute biggest marry sue/shoe horn character in the story right now and if GW wants him to be able to do something he can/will.

Source, the fact he did genetic manipulation, and some how kept a massive secret cloning facility under wraps with the universe best secret finders next door, the Inquisition, while breaking one of the most sacred rules the emperor put forth during his time, no genetic modifications to humans or astrarties, a rule that caused a chapter, emperor's children, to help push them into their decent j to chaos.

With cawl anything is possible.

If anything I would expect there to be more chapters per sector, at least 1 per an sector as one of the major defenders. It would make sense given the scale of the galaxy.

So for every 4 solar systems the imperium owns there is one space marine chapter.

One hundred thousand or two thousand space marine chapters makes more sense than just a thousand chapters.

If you think about it logistically bigger chapters makes more sense than more chapters, the strike cruisers and especially battle barges never carry a full load of marines so a bigger chapter wouldn’t need new ships they could just load them to capacity. And the new ships has to be the biggest problem from an equipment point of view

 Asherian Command wrote:
If anything I would expect there to be more chapters per sector, at least 1 per an sector as one of the major defenders. It would make sense given the scale of the galaxy.

So for every 4 solar systems the imperium owns there is one space marine chapter.

One hundred thousand or two thousand space marine chapters makes more sense than just a thousand chapters.

It depends whether you go with the Strong Marine Theory or the Weak Marine Theory;
i.e. Marines are portrayed inconsistently in the background, sometimes unkillable gods of war, sometimes dying from a stiff breeze!

1000 chapters of 1000 marines doesn't make sense in the Weak Marine Theory because losses would be too high and there would be too few marines to make a difference.