Was there a reason why BL and DH started retconning the number of worlds in the IoM upwards?

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**JNAProductions**

That’s a lot of realistic science.
Reminder: this is a 40k background thread.

**Tyran**

Well my overall point is that a smaller IoM makes more sense than a bigger one, and a million world IoM is big enough to sound big while small enough to be feasible as how it is described.

That is if we are talking about numbers that "feel" right.

**Gert**

It's all relative.
1 billion vs 1 million, the former is much much bigger.
1 billion vs 100-200 billion, not so much.

And the thing to remember is that the Imperium generally speaking didn't actually need to build on most of the worlds it conquered during the Great Crusade.
These were worlds colonised by humanity that mostly just needed a "political adjustment" to conform to the ways of the Imperium.
Sure there would have been a lot of worlds colonised since then but with even the fragments of STCs the Imperium has, colonising is a relatively simple process.
Besides, if the new colonists can't grow crops, corpse starch exists.

**Overread**

And yet the Imperium is more than happy to waste base resources like food, water and manpower instead of just using super-advanced weapons from orbit.

Heck not that long ago there was a Warhammer+ animation where they wasted resources going to a warzone to collect a tithe of the last ammo the planet had to then ship it to a storage world that was so overloaded that they scrapped the ammunition upon arrival.

It's not a totally sane setting and many resources like manpower and the whole infrastructure it supports are in such gross excess (whilst at the same time never being enough) that they will waste resources on a ground invasion.

Not every time of course; sometimes sanity prevails for a moment; but many times they will.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Tyran wrote:
Overread wrote:
At some point you have to go down there to make very sure they are dead and not hiding in bunkers and such. Sure you can use Exterminatus but in general thats a rare thing; costs a LOT of resources and so on. It also assumes that they don't have ground defences that can threaten spacefleets.

The thing is that a planetary assault, sending troops down there?, is more expensive than exterminatus.

Every gram of every guardsman you send has to fist be accelerated beyond the gravity well of their homeworld (which very likely has a near 1G gravity), make a long trip to their home system's Mandeville point, make an even longer trip through the warp, make the long trip form the enemy system's Mandeville point to the enemy world, and then decacelerate like crazy to make it to the ground in one piece.

All this takes absurds amount of oxygen, of water, of food, of the logistics support needed to maintain and distribute that water and food, that further exponentially increase the mass needed to be transported.

The total amount of energy needed to do of all of the above, with the many millions of troops needed to occupy a whole planet? Literally easier and cheaper to blow up the planet.

There is a reason we have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate ourselves into extinction yet we have only visited the moon a handful of times and barely can send drones into Mars after years of long travel. Space travel is expensive to the point nukes look cheap.

The only way a planetary invasion makes even remote sense is if you are planning to develop the planet so it can pay back all of the above, an investment that will take thousands of years to pay off.

Well, this has sent me down a spiral of thought.

On the effort of ferrying troops here, there and everywhere? The Imperium relies on ship designs from a more enlightened, technologically competent age. It can build new ships, but it doesn’t really have a solid understanding beyond being able to follow a blueprint.

But, given the vintage of the designs? I think we can reasonably assume they’re well equipped for air, food and water production. And it’s perfectly common for the crew to be generational, living, dying and reproducing aboard ship for who knows how long.

And so we can almost hand wave away the logistical challenges of modern spaceflight as having long since been solved, even if The Imperium doesn’t understand or appreciate the relic tech that makes such things comparatively trivial in a galaxy spanning empire.

Which all feeds into the weirdness of the Imperium’s technological base. It has staggering technology it doesn’t truly understand, and some of it (Lasguns are a bloody miracle weapon) is just seen as tremendously mundane.

**Tyran**

Overread wrote:

And yet the Imperium is more than happy to waste base resources like food, water and manpower instead of just using super-advanced weapons from orbit.

Heck not that long ago there was a Warhammer+ animation where they wasted resources going to a warzone to collect a tithe of the last ammo the planet had to then ship it to a storage world that was so overloaded that they scrapped the ammunition upon arrival.

It's not a totally sane setting and many resources like manpower and the whole infrastructure it supports are in such gross excess (whilst at the same time never being enough) that they will waste resources on a ground invasion.

Not every time of course; sometimes sanity prevails for a moment; but many times they will.

It is the combination of insanity with restrain that I find weird. The IoM is a aggresive xenophobic and militaristic regime willing to invade everywhere and anywhere regardless of benefit, yet it is restrained when it comes to outright killing planets, even if it could never benefit from such worlds?

**Overread**

Tyran wrote:
Overread wrote:

And yet the Imperium is more than happy to waste base resources like food, water and manpower instead of just using super-advanced weapons from orbit.

Heck not that long ago there was a Warhammer+ animation where they wasted resources going to a warzone to collect a tithe of the last ammo the planet had to then ship it to a storage world that was so overloaded that they scrapped the ammunition upon arrival.

It's not a totally sane setting and many resources like manpower and the whole infrastructure it supports are in such gross excess (whilst at the same time never being enough) that they will waste resources on a ground invasion.

Not every time of course; sometimes sanity prevails for a moment; but many times they will.

It is the combination of insanity with restrain that I find weird. The IoM is a aggresive xenophobic and militaristic regime willing to invade everywhere and anywhere regardless of benefit, yet it is restrained when it comes to outright killing planets, even if it could never benefit from such worlds?

Consider that to the Imperium human life is cheap - dirt cheap. So cheap they don't even have health-and-safety in factories. That citizens can die of horrible things just living not to mention use WW1 style tactics of trenches and charging over the top with bayonets.

If you've a world you can take with manpower which is cheap and disposable then you'd use it over exotic and expensive planet destroying weapons that you'd better keep for use on more critical military fronts.

You also have to consider that at the local level not every division is going to have access to the same weapons. They might ground invade because its all they've got and they don't have access to Planet busting weapons. Or they are saving them for more dangerous foes; or the local political scene doesn't want to use them and so on and so forth.

Plus don't forget a planet busting weapon might be attached to the Imperial Navey whilst the Imperial Guard is a totally separate entity. You ground command generals might well push for a ground invasion for the glory, experience, training opportunities and more. Ergo the whole ground invasion might purely be to help a General advance his social and military standing by adding another victory to their name. So what if countless millions of troops die in the process.

**Tyran**

Overread wrote:

If you've a world you can take with manpower which is cheap and disposable then you'd use it over exotic and expensive planet destroying weapons that you'd better keep for use on more critical military fronts.

Planet destroying weapons aren't exotic, any random warship plasma drive can burn down a continent from orbit if it isn't careful.

It does back to my short rant regarding how much energy it takes to move anything in space in relevant human time lapses. Add the fact that the IoM loves giant multi-kilometer long warships and killing everyone on a planet is so damn easy you actually have to be very careful to not destroy it by accident.

Hell for a very funny example a troop transport could just do a drive-by by throwing its guardsmen out of an airlock. Each dead body would hit the planet with the power of a nuke just by the sheer kinetic energy it would have.

**Lathe Biosas**

I'm not sure if a guardsman is an effective Kinetic Energy Weapon.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

There’s also the movement of the spheres and gravity to consider.

Let’s say Planet Instantdeathfromhavingyourbumturnedinsideout is proving troublesome. It’s completely uninhabitable by humans, as whenever any human lands on it, their bum gets turned inside out with messily fatal consequences.

It sits in a system with far more useful planets rich in minerals and useful gases. It’s also home to a an aggressive species with non-warp capable warships.

So, whilst only a nuisance in that locale, they are still a nuisance when you’re trying to make use of theother planets.

You could, I suppose, just shatter the planet from orbit. You’ve got the technology, and it does sound like an amusing way to deal with the threat. But what happens to the local system when it’s part in the local gravity landscape is gone? If it had a moon or moons, where might they go, now the local larger body is smooshed into tiny gritty bits? What of other planetary bodies? Everything is effecting everything when it comes to gravity after all.

Might it be better to just Not Take That Risk, and just leave an interdiction fleet whilst you get on with strip mining the worlds you can make use of?

**Charax**

It might be so, but the question remains, what's an nbum?

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

It’s a typo! A particularly unpleasant Xenos, fond of ruining jokes.

**-Guardsman-**

Gert wrote:
Our understanding of the number of planets in the galaxy has changed since the 90s thanks to the advance in technology and scientific research.
It's billions because that's a more realistic estimate of what's in the Milky Way.

Yeah I think it really boils down to how you count the worlds of the Imperium. Are you counting how many inhabited worlds pay a tithe to Terra, or how many planets can be found in the part of the galaxy claimed by the Imperium? The latter could be a thousand times higher than the former.

Also, not every bit of info is reliable. Sometimes an in-universe character is wrong, and sometimes it's the writer who's wrong.

.

**Tyran**

Admittedly in-universe the IoM claims the whole galaxy, so if you ask them they have trillions of planets, some of which (the vast vast majority) are occupied by illegal Xenos.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

On that last point? Apparently, our Solar system has around 293 Moons of varying sizes. And that includes objects orbiting asteroids.

But with no other species laying claim to them and their hypothetical resources? They’re Ours. That we’re currently not very good at getting to them, and being able to actively mine/exploit them remains some way off is ultimately neither here nor there.

Now, expand that across The Imperium’s holdings and…yeah, you can get to big numbers pretty quickly. It has the capacity to mine asteroids and barren planets. Not all will have a permanent settlement, but most will, presumably, have at least a domed village type thing for the workers to shelter in when off shift,

**Tyran**

The good old question of if Pluto is a planet, and if yes then how small planets get?

A nice way to reconcile numbers could be a million Earth-like planets and a billion of colonized moons, planetoids, asteroids and other weirder colonies like gas giant "cloud cities".

**Overread**

Lets face it if we actually had interstellar travel today; and thus a far greater understanding of the components of solar systems and of other worlds and setups we'd have a mountain of different planet categories and sub-terms and such.

In fact there'd likely be several including some that would argue Earth doesn't count as a "planet"

**Insectum7**

Tyran wrote:
The 10th ed rulebook still mentions a million worlds, so either the most recent core rulebook is wrong or BL authors are wrong.

This. And in my view the rulebook always trumps BL novels.

But also note, it says "worlds", not "planets". I'd say Pluto is a "world", as are moons.

**Flinty**

Most worlds have more or fewer resources that will eventually be of use to the imperium. I think there would be few worlds that are absolutely useless, as they still have space magic terraforming equipment available. The Imperium plans things oferlillenia, even if they lack the resources to follow through on some stuff, or the plans need to be revised due to outside influences like warp storms.

By divine right, The Imperium is the master of the galaxy (according to them) and it’s wasteful to fully destroy a planet when it might be needed later.

**the-gentleman-ranker**

Insectum7 wrote:
Tyran wrote:
The 10th ed rulebook still mentions a million worlds, so either the most recent core rulebook is wrong or BL authors are wrong.

This. And in my view the rulebook always trumps BL novels.

But also note, it says "worlds", not "planets". I'd say Pluto is a "world", as are moons.

Seconded.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tyran wrote:
Overread wrote:

If you've a world you can take with manpower which is cheap and disposable then you'd use it over exotic and expensive planet destroying weapons that you'd better keep for use on more critical military fronts.

Planet destroying weapons aren't exotic, any random warship plasma drive can burn down a continent from orbit if it isn't careful.

It does back to my short rant regarding how much energy it takes to move anything in space in relevant human time lapses. Add the fact that the IoM loves giant multi-kilometer long warships and killing everyone on a planet is so damn easy you actually have to be very careful to not destroy it by accident.

Hell for a very funny example a troop transport could just do a drive-by by throwing its guardsmen out of an airlock. Each dead body would hit the planet with the power of a nuke just by the sheer kinetic energy it would have.

This reminds me of that Chapter Approved text "Rocks are not free" where this Naval officer gets done in by the finance office for 'lobbing a asteroid' at a planet when it is apparently cheaper to just fire five torpodoes at the damn planet.

**KamikazeCanuck**

The Imperium is about a million worlds. Some of the quotes in the OP seem to be referring to all possible habitable worlds in the galaxy or they could just be an actual character misspeaking.