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Even with strong marines, there arent enough to matter.

The 1000 chapter limit is by far one the dumbest decisions by gw. Imperium billions of marines. Galaxies are incomprehensibly huge and you could lose two million marines in a bad afternoon on a galactic scale.

Martel732 wrote:
Even with strong marines, there arent enough to matter.

The 1000 chapter limit is by far one the dumbest decisions by gw. Imperium billions of marines. Galaxies are incomprehensibly huge and you could lose two million marines in a bad afternoon on a galactic scale.

I agree. I think the chapters should be 10,000 strong. When marines arrive they usually want to engage multiple targets. Without several chapters worth of strike forces the marines couldn't really make a big effect on a planet wide war. Maintaining combat effectiveness after a single engagement would be difficult with a ground force numbering only about 300. After 1 good fight the strike force may not be able to engage effectively because of loses from the first battle.

10 thousand marines would make sense if you wanted a space marine chapter to be able to independantly operate in a sector (or even major planetary) theatre by themselves and make a noticable differance. the Imperium doesn't. scars of the horus Heresy. chapters are deliebratly kept small eneugh that if one should go to chaos it's not going to utterly screw the imperium. meanwhile for major campaigns multiple marine chapters can, and do work together. Vigilus, just for example, had over 33 chapters involved in the fighting, each with multiple companies.

Again putting aside that GW is bad with numbers in general, an easier fix would be to just up how many chapters there are in general than upping the over number in a given chapter of around 1000 ( which when you actually look at really means about 1500 or so).

Fluff aside I've always felt the 1000 per chapter/ 100 per company because that's partially a marketing gimmick to give players an absurd but possible goal to collect. A 100 company or 1000 chapter is feasible long term, 10000000000 force isn't.

HoundsofDemos wrote:
Again putting aside that GW is bad with numbers in general, an easier fix would be to just up how many chapters there are in general than upping the over number in a given chapter of around 1000 ( which when you actually look at really means about 1500 or so).

Fluff aside I've always felt the 1000 per chapter/ 100 per company because that's partially a marketing gimmick to give players an absurd but possible goal to collect. A 100 company or 1000 chapter is feasible long term, 10000000000 force isn't.

yeah you're proably not wrong. and I agree, the problem isnb't the 1000 man chapter, it's the "1 thousand chapters" .thats silly and I've always assumed we aren't supposed to take that literally so much as it's a nice sounding number that works well in pretty speaches

BrianDavion wrote:
10 thousand marines would make sense if you wanted a space marine chapter to be able to independantly operate in a sector (or even major planetary) theatre by themselves and make a noticable differance. the Imperium doesn't. scars of the horus Heresy. chapters are deliebratly kept small eneugh that if one should go to chaos it's not going to utterly screw the imperium. meanwhile for major campaigns multiple marine chapters can, and do work together. Vigilus, just for example, had over 33 chapters involved in the fighting, each with multiple companies.

I think we're arguing around the same thing. If a WHOLE chapter of 1,000 could deploy, then it would be able to effect the battle over a planet for the course of action in that planetary theater. However Space Marines never deploy in that number. The deployment of a chapter in its entirety is considered a rare event of singular significance.

What usually happens is multiple battle forces from different Chapters must collaborate together and then with the IG. It would be much better if a battle force was 1,000 strong and didnt need to work with other chapters to get there missions accomplished. Especially considering how poorly the varied Marine chapters get along.

If GW changed the SM fluff to say that Marines kept the whole of their chapters together and usually deployed as a whole, THAT would make more sense AND lias better with other IoM forces.

BrianDavion wrote:

yeah you're proably not wrong. and I agree, the problem isnb't the 1000 man chapter, it's the "1 thousand chapters" .thats silly and I've always assumed we aren't supposed to take that literally so much as it's a nice sounding number that works well in pretty speaches

I don't think the 1000 Chapters is supposed to authoritative just like the million worlds of the Imperium. These are gross estimate from the Administratum that really has no clue about the exact number of Space Marines or hte exact numbers of worlds in the Imperium. There could a 600 chapters spread the 152 000 worlds that composes the Imperium for all we care. Games-Workshop itself has never created or mentionned more then 650 or so Chapters and any number of them might have been destroyed at some point. The rough idea is that the Imperium is immense and Space Marines are very, very few.

I think when you consider a number of factors chapters being much smaller than their Legion era organization makes sense.

Despite how they play on the tabletop and despite the grand apocalyptic battles we're shown... a force like Space Marines would want to avoid those types of large scale set piece battles and every time they end up in one it should be regarded as a significant tactical error. A crusade force of 10,000 from the pre-heresy era, is an instigating force, launching a war and starting fights; a 40k era chapter is a rapid response force, going to where the Imperium is attacked and interceding to disrupt or cripple an enemy until the brunt of Imperial Forces can arrive.

One person above mentioned the vastness of the galaxy as to why the marine numbers don't make sense. The thing is even if there were billions of Space Marines, they would want to operate in these chapter sized forces or smaller. These forces have to cover a lot of space and you need as many small autonomous forces as possible to do that, whether those forces end up garrisoning a planet or constantly patrolling a couple sectors. As things are a space marine "chapter" can't really be in more than 10 places at once; they would probably consider sending demi-companies if they had more ships. The types of ships themselves may be a limiting factor, in addition to all the stuff related to producing a marine.

In the current lore, Robute recognizes the deficiency of space marine chapters for carrying out crusades and large scale campaigns, and its why when he goes about trying to push back Chaos with his Primaris forces they remain in a 100,000+ force that he breaks pieces off of as he needs to.

If you take one step back from the lore, I think there are a number of other things to consider. First while we see this universe as these narrative battles, realistically these forces are on a ship for years, maybe decades, and while a Chapter is 1000 marines, its very clear each one is effectively surrounded by many servants and servitors going on about the different maintenance and support each superhuman-machine-power armored system needs... That is a lot of people and a lot military forces that are effectively idle, just traveling. That is a lot of resources that have to be set aside, even without the demands made to maintain uber-technology. There is an economic cost that we can't really get a sense of here.

Second, while hive cities and other planets have millions and billions of people, when you stop and think about all the necessary agri-worlds, and random stations and asteroids... and how relatively low population would be the great majority of the time, if a 100 space marines showed up it is more than enough, even in direct combat. In one novel we're shown an Agri-world that gets attacked by Deathguard, where the PDF is only a couple squads, and the rest of the planets population is relatively small because so much of the equipment doing the farming are autonomous. For every Necromunda you need 100s of those worlds, where chances are 100 space marines is overkill to respond to any force that would have attacked. To contextualize this to a different fictional universe that people feel is realistic, look at the Colonial Marines in Aliens... Earth in that setting is effectively like how Earth is portrayed in Bladerunner... a hive city... Contact with a Colony is lost and yet only a single squad is dispatched; why would this make sense? -For much the same reason; there is a lot space to cover and being gone for months and years you really don't want more than just enough military assets just sitting on a ship in transit.

Third, the great majority of the time Space Marines would mostly fight normal humans, abhumans, and mutants. We think of Tyranids and Orks and other threats, but in lore we're looking at 100s sometimes 1000s of years inbetween marines encountering them. Between chaos corruption and the general population of the galaxy being human controlled, humans and tolerated offshoot humans are what Marines would most likely encounter. Where a bolter would be more than sufficient and a plasmagun overkill. Further while the tabletop for the sake of fairness and the due to the granularity of a d6, allow Space Marines to die easily, the lore and reality it wouldn't be as bad. Even setting aside the super-hero cinematic descriptions of marines and grounding it to the basics of what a space marine are, it wouldn't be as bad. In universe every lasgun shot that's ever killed a marine was a lucky shot; and when you look at the lore the Imperial Guard are not as consistently well equipped as people build their armies. The IG codex used to include a break down of a typical IG multi-company force, that included a little lore piece... where an entire battalion of Cadians only had a single plasma gun, that was a prized relic only brought out when things were bad. Even then the great majority of the time what is represented as a killed Space Marine on the tabletop, would simply be one that's knocked out of action. The game doesn't really represent the setting well, and each Space Marine would go further, but still need to be stretched further into these larger number of smaller forces.

We can talk about the technological reasons why there aren't more Space Marines, but the technology exists and when Robute stepped in and used his ultimate bureaucrat skills to get Mars producing more ships and equipment that wasn't a technological limitation they did it and cranked out more weapons and ships. The main limitation that holds the Imperium back from having more Space Marines is economics. Even in the real world, producing in small quantities is less labor intensive and often more profitable. There isn't really any incentive to change that, and even when there is the crushing weight of the bureaucracy might keep the most needed components and resources from reaching the few places that can produce the stuff that go into space marines. Power armor is described as something that costs so much only a Governor or well off noble could afford it... its not for a lack of knowledge because its apparent the Imperium can still produce that technology in quantity, see Primaris or SoB, and at one time during the great crusade power armor was seen as almost disposable hardware.

With Robute doing what he does, they probably can and do produce more space marines, but between the pre-existing depletion of forces and higher operational tempo, they're likely going through a lot more marines.

I don't think such an economic limitation would really exist, despite what the bolter porn says. Or even gw. Forgeworlds as described can make a lot of gak. Billions of power armor suits from one fraction of one forge world per year. Regardless of what gw says.

Its all arbitrary wankery and makes no sense at all.

Sure, run efficiently.

When the slightest deviation, process improvement, or tech change can cause OMG DEMON MACHINES KILLED US ALL, production and distribution doesn't scale like it would in the real world.

Bharring wrote:
Sure, run efficiently.

When the slightest deviation, process improvement, or tech change can cause OMG DEMON MACHINES KILLED US ALL, production and distribution doesn't scale like it would in the real world.

I don't think it can though, they just THINK it can. The whole demon machine thing is incredibly dumb regardless of the truth.

Also, when you have entire planets producing stuff, you don't even need to be that efficient. Scale. Scale. Scale.

Possibly. They might have to cut corners and risk chapters turning to chaos if they do, though.

Scrapcode.

And scaling doesn't work that way in practice. You might bottleneck on central planning's approval/instruction. You might bottleneck on piping the shipments through standard shipping channels. You might wind up with several different incompatible versions from different sources.

For scaling, it takes a lot of work and careful planning to freely scale a system. We even automatically scale lots of stuff today, but only because a ton of work went into solving those questions. Thanks to the nature of technology, though, work done on scaling systems can be applied to other systems. One of the biggest things fubaring 40k is that that's not true. Systems aren't well enough understood to apply improvements on one system to other systems. And, even if it were, another factor fubaring them even more is that improvements often lead to MASSIVE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION. Scrapcode and demon machines, for instance, aren't just "myth" - they're well established in the lore.

You can take the average website and host it on two servers or ten. The average website, if not designed for scaling, will then break. Perhaps it's session management. Perhaps it's bottlenecking a content datastore. Consistency issue. Lots of possible problems. Scale isn't as easy as saying "Let's just do it moar".

Even if you could carbon-copy Planet 1 to a dozen systems, though, now you need to handle correlation and distribution. If you took your local post office, and multiplied their volume by 10, they're not going to keep up. Even with simple envelopes. Now imagine "packages" of varying sizes. Now imagine "packages" that need to correlate to specific other sets of "packages". Adding more distribution capacity isn't just about increasing the number of assets; multiply production by 10 then shipping vessels/trucks by 10, and now everything breaks down when allocating produced goods to vessels/trucks. (Side note: if you think that that's silly, just go ahead and solve the Knapsack Problem. Or Traveling Salesman problem.)

Scaling is easy only when your ole is to say "But MOAR", and blaming the people who couldn't execute.

And that's just talking about generic systems problems. 40k has even more trouble. Remember that Space Marines are split into chapters of ~1000, so that no one individual is too powerful. Sure, a Marine may be more powerful than a shipping vessel. But is it more powerful than 100? So if you scale up the shipping vessel operation, someone at the top gets too powerful. You can further subdivide the shipping operation, which keeps the lower rungs less powerful - but the higher rungs are unaffected.

Active traitors. Advanced Persistent Threats. Random warp storms. Real-world MBA-lite "all that execution stuff is easy" arguments work even worse in 40k than in real life.

Basically the setting is stupid. Got it.

Your lack of understanding of nuances doesn't make the entire setting "stupid".

Oh, so now I just don't understand. Got it.

Calling 40K nuanced is a pretty big slap in the face to intelligent world building.

Recognizing what little nuance the setting has doesn't insult better world builders.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't think such an economic limitation would really exist, despite what the bolter porn says. Or even gw. Forgeworlds as described can make a lot of gak. Billions of power armor suits from one fraction of one forge world per year. Regardless of what gw says.

Its all arbitrary wankery and makes no sense at all.

Putting all the issues of warp related problems aside (this is literally a setting were reading the wrong book or putting a set of stones in the wrong order will cause the Apocalypse and supernatural forces can possess practically any living or mechanical being).

It's also strongly hinted in multiple sources that the Ad mech play up how lost tech is or how difficult it is to produce certain things to keep a monopoly on their over all importance/ semi independent status. If I know a single forgeworld can crank out 1 million plasma guns and power armor per day then I don't need as many and I don't need them as free as they are.

If I'm convinced only one particular world can make any given item and that if we lose that world then they over all have a lot more leverage and relative power.

Its fiction. It's as nuanced as the plot demands. I think the Empire could support more SMs or more advanced tech in general. The real downfall of empires is rot from within. Leadership in the Imperial bureaucracy or the Cult of Mars becoming greedy and passing power to inept friends and family instead of competent underlings.

Your industrialized planet COULD produce 1,000 suits of power armor OR 100 suits of power armor a d 10,000 big screen TVs. As much as the armor keeps the greater Imperium "safe" (in that vague sense of "us"), 10,000 TVs sold would make you monstrously wealthy. So what if 10 chapters of the Adeptus Astartes cant replace their lost equipment? The Imperium has existed for ten millennia! What's a little greed going to hurt?

In comes the demi God Robuoute. He DEMANDS 1,000 suits of armor. HE is NOT to be denied. Robouute is a famous logistical genius. When he demands 1,000 suits of armor its because he KNOWS that the planet can produce the 1,000 suits of armor. And voila! Suddenly the misbegotten industrial wasteland is capable of producing the extra 900 suits of armor.

Ah, just look at the Black Templars.
They have been in excess of a thousand for thousands of years.
I am sure as a crusade fleet they have mastered the art of beating the chaos out of you as evident with their fanaticism.
They have chapter keeps pretty much everywhere. They could be like their spiritual predecessors and guard the paths to holy Terra.
I would say at least the precedence has already been made: with sufficient zeal, all transgressions are overlooked.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't think such an economic limitation would really exist, despite what the bolter porn says. Or even gw. Forgeworlds as described can make a lot of gak. Billions of power armor suits from one fraction of one forge world per year. Regardless of what gw says.

Its all arbitrary wankery and makes no sense at all.

Well I say its an economic thing precisely because Forgeworlds "can" make a lot, but don't. So its either because the can't necessarily get the resources they need, which is an economic failure or for whatever reason they'd prefer to produce something else that's in more demand.

Its hard for many people to wrap their head around but while Forgeworlds have a lot industry its controlled by a relatively small oligarchy that would rather spend their time playing with and trying to understand more advance technology than overseeing large scale manufacturing efforts.

The Imperium's veneration of Space Marines as the equivalent to angels likely contributes to its challenges to equip them. If something like every bolter shell a marine fires is blessed at each step its being assembled, it isn't something that's being churned out 100 rounds a minute like the machines that produce modern ammunition. Its been implied in the lore and in one of the GW podcast outright said, but the bolt rounds a marine fires it effectively that masterwork of some low level techpriest. That likely isn't just all the religious stuff either. With the general prohibition of certain types of robotic technology it means a person or servitor is behind every operation of manufacturing. When this is the case how does a machine assisted person produce micro circuitry that makes a bolter shell semi-guided? With the kind of prohibitions on more intelligent technology and the tight control by a few oligarchs, you have technology more advanced than today's technology produce with the assistance of technology more advanced than today's technology, but with a manufacturing mindset and approach that is more akin to the renaissance.

Its also important to keep in mind what it means that the Imperium is a galactic civilization. Not every Forgeworld knows how to make power armor, and Space Marine power armor is an even more niche type. Even if a Forgeworld knows how to manufacture power armor it doesn't mean they have access to or know how to process or produce the specific metals and cerametals needed for manufacturing a suit of power armor. If you think a bolter shell has a lot of micro-circuitry for someone to effectively hand make, consider how much has to go into suit filled with high speed, highly responsive servos. A mining operation in the Imperium, while they have lasers to assist them to dig into rock, its still mostly a manual process occasionally assisted by a few industrial servitors. Imagine trying to find and dig materials rarer and more exotic than anything exists and to do so by by hand.

A Forgeworld is covered by industry, but what does that all do? - Today we have particle accelerators that covers miles upon miles. To manipulate some of the exotic matter being used could easily require something on that scale to produce something relatively small. The original plant used to produce enriched uranium for nuclear weapons required over a square kilometer of equipment to produce about 400lbs of that material over about 2-1/2 years. Much of what Forgeworlds are playing with are more exotic than that.

The relatively limited number of Space Marines may actually work against them from an economic stand point. Economy of scale is the principle that as you manufacture at larger and larger volumes means the distributed costs of manufacturing and overhead are spread more thinly across so many more things that the effective cost is small. Even if a Forgeworld were to set out to make new armor for every last marine that's only a million suits, which on a galactic scale isn't a lot and that fact makes it hard to justify the effort. What would be the average needs of a Chapter? 10 new suits a year? - That's 10,000 suits a year. Again with this being a galaxy spanning civilization, a galactic economy, Space Marines are not all in one place, you can't just have a single Forgeworld producing all the power armor. If you did, you would ship it out and it might take several decades to show up at a then extinct chapter. So you have a lot of forgeworlds, regardless of specialization or immediate capability producing small volumes of armor. The vary craftsman workshop approach to supplying Space Marines may in fact be because the scale of a Forgeworlds industry can't be refocused to produce something so small in required volume.

Even if power armor were as simple to produce in labor, the nature of materials, and requisite technology as a Leman Russ battle tank, it would be more expensive just because of the tiny quantity. For what it costs the Imperium to maintain the Astartes they could have 10 million, maybe 20 million more Leman Russ tanks. So the economics of why the Imperium only has 1,000,000 Space Marine may in fact be the bureaucracy seeing what a trade off it is to have more marines than what they have, and only maintaining what they do because of standing laws, tradition, and/or religious veneration.

You're assuming a post-`scarcity` society. The Imperium isn't even a `scarcity` society - it's more *pre*-`scarcity` society. The society isn't even advanced enough for resources to be the meaningful limiting factor.

Bharring wrote:
You're assuming a post-`scarcity` society. The Imperium isn't even a `scarcity` society - it's more *pre*-`scarcity` society. The society isn't even advanced enough for resources to be the meaningful limiting factor.

No. When you're talking about manufacturing output resources can always be a limiting factor. Keep in mind when I'm discussing resources, its not just whether the Imperium has access but having it where they need it. That even a Forgeworld is dependent on the inflow of resources and things that it doesn't produce itself; whether that makes sense or not its stated in the lore. Whether its a pre or post-scarcity society, luxury and rarer items are still more expensive and more demanding to acquire. But, what I read is something of a messed up hybrid state of this society's economy. Imagine a galactic empire that at one time operated in that post-scarcity state. Then imagine trying to maintain the infrastructure and technology around without all of the resources that made it possible and without a reliable source of parts and technology. Its a depleted post-scarcity civilization on a galactic level. Its a civilization that has many classes all with varying levels of access to technology and resources. Its also important to remember on a system to system, sector to sector basis, not all regional economies are as badly off as the average imperial world. Resources are why people starve on Necromunda and countless other planets, but not everyone does. There is in a sense several parallel economies servicing these different portions of the population and Space Marines are privileged but present challenges to this exclusive economy.

We know from the lore there are some things the Imperium can do, and some things they can't do when it comes to manufacturing. They can produce millions upon millions of Leman Russ battle tanks, but they struggle to keep 1 million Space Marines equipped with new equipment. The why is interesting to speculate, but that inability is the reality of the setting either way. Compared to so many other technologies, power armor really doesn't seem to contain anything that should make it more difficult to produce than other bits of technology the Imperium has no problem producing... but it does.

We know when Robute shows up more than half of Mar's orbital ship yards have been idle for over 5000 years. After he steps in thats where within 100 years of coming to earth he has a whole knew fleet and all those fully equipped primaris. This would generally indicate either a lack of will and/or an infrastructural and resource logistics problem as the primary constraints keeping Mars and other Forgeworlds from being more productive.

We know from the lore that Space Marine power armor and weapons take a long time to produce and generally require the focused efforts of many techpriests. When it comes to advance technology its very much a Magos building something the way a present day engineer builds a prototypes. In real life as a prototype we would produce a couple thousand Xm-25 grenades for $3k-$5k a shot, in mass production it would have been $15-$25... This is the sort of the economic problem of producing more for Marines; even if a Magos wanted to produce more armor and equipment for marines, it isn't needed on the same scale other things are produced. Could a Magos justify halting his efforts to continually produce millions of tanks and tank components, to go and focus on 10 suits of power armor a year. Its a very distributed demand in a setting that has a centralized authority, requires a distributed manufacturing, but where once manufacturing is decentralized fails to meet any sort of economy of scale on par with the other weapons that are mass produced.

I feel it's a mix of immediate demand, and sheer Bureaucracy.

The Imperium actively needs those millions of Leman Russ Battle Tanks, because there are untold millions of Astra Militarum Regiments to equip. Without whom, much of the Imperial armed forces would collapse.

Astartes? Well, they do only need what, a dozen or so Land Raiders at anyone time. And the Techmarines are proven dab hands at keeping those they've got fighting fit.

Let's consider a ridiculous catastrophe happens. And all Astartes suddenly lost their warmachines. Rhino and the variants. Land Raiders and Land Speeders. All just gone.

That's only 90,000 or so Rhino APC to replace all losses. It's a fairly piffling 10,000 or so Predator Chassis (the weapons, if memory serves, are interchangeable). And totally meaningless 10,000 or so Land Raider chassis.

That's not a big order at all. I'm fairly sure a given Forgeworld (STC presence allowing, and one assumes at least one Chapter would be able to provide those) could get that order fulfilled in a few months.

But whilst that doesn't happen, Astartes are ultimately a lower priority compared to the endless appetite of the Astra Militarum - who do suffer absolute loss, on a Regimental basis, with alarming frequency

But it's the bureaucracy, and it's lag. Things are needlessly complex, because for around 10,000 years, Pomp And Ceremony utterly replaced practical considerations.

With Guilliman returning, and Cawl having had 10,000 years to get his stuff together? It's at least arguable that Guilliman was in a position to simply cut through the bureaucracy. If he told Mars 'I need X Battle Barges in 10 years, hop to it' - there's nothing and no-one to gainsay him. He simply wields too much authority. Especially when he's got the Custodes on-side confirming he speaks with The Emperor's authority.

Now, how long they can keep up that level of production? Who knows. Having the knowledge and ability is one thing. Maintaining the resources, quite another. After all, initial stockpiles would be used up first. And if you're on a frenetic pace of building, said stockpiles won't be replenished any time soon.

Consider it like Command and Conquer. You get your currency, and plan the force you want to send out. Buildybuildybuildy, then swamp them. Whilst one can replace lost units, you have to be going very good guns to replace the losses as they happen.

it's also possiable Cawl was perparing for the Ultima founding over the last ten thousand years. even the last thousand years would have been more then eneugh time to squirral away what was needed. This BTW is why exact numbers of chapters, and space marines in general are never going to be known by the IoM. they'll never know the exact number of anything because the IoM is so big a billion of something is a rounding error. and Space Marine material is proably a "miscilenious expense"