Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-91.224.27.226-20131031140001/@comment-3258762-20131225194533

Vaughn891 wrote: All of these are logical and possible alternatives based on what little we know which is both insanely frustrating and incredibly mysterious. It is possible the Primarchs were killed before joining their legions and that the legions themselves left leaderless strayed, but I think it is more likely Russ's Censor came after they rejoined their legions. The one thing I am certain of is at least one of them still lives. I mean if the Emperor spared Angron who actually tried to attack his own father there is the possibility that he let these two live and just imprisoned them. Legionaire I agree the Ultramarines growth as a legion could be attributed to the vastness of the Ultramar region which they controlled and recruited from. However,  it is the speed with which they grew that makes me hesitant to believe it. The recruitment, training and implantation of a space marine takes significant time and resources to complete before a marine is made. It is not like simply recruiting a regular army soldier who is could be trained in several months. Don't get me wrong I am ruling nothing out we literally can't based off of what we know. Also now that I think of it, all of the Primarchs were found because they made statues of the 20 Primarchs surrounding the Imperial Palace. However, one must remember that the Legions had a lot more apothecaries and a lot better tech than modern Astartes. The training would take a long time, but the implantation wouldn't necessarily take too long. Lets say that every company of a 100.000 marines strong legion has 1 apothecary to it, and say that we have half that number of "home-based" apothecaries, we would have around 5000 apothecaries for 500 worlds. Split evenly, there would be 10 apothecaries on each of the Ultramar worlds. This, coupled with the easily produced gene-seed (due to Guilliman still being "alive" so to speak) would allow for many more candidates to be trialed. A lot of the Ultramar worlds also had a warrior/soldier culture, giving perfect candidates, and with better tech, lets say each world produces 5-10 Ultramarine initiates. These could then be trained on entire planets dedicated to their training, and in 10-20 years would be full-fledged battle brothers.

In the great scope of it all, I don't think it's too shocking with such a numerical increase during such a short time. After all, when they say "short time" about the GH they rarely mean a year or so, they're often talking about half a century or more.