Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-4851119-20140118095944/@comment-217.234.124.225-20150119094632

oh and a sidenote to get more into canon

Guilliman himself knew that without sth like the codex astartes ( which was not written until well after isstvaan, or indeed the battle of terra)

you would not put together a force from the different legions...

from "the unremembered empire"  chapter 17

"They were a resource of great potential, and their resolve and determination, having been witnesses to treason and atrocity, was beyond doubt. A way had not yet been found, however, to resolve them into one force. Guilliman had begun to find duties for some, as suited their specialisms, and it was, of course, straightforward to place Iron Hands with Iron Hands and Raven Guard with Raven Guard. But to alloy them more permanently threw up problems of differences in Legion practices and methods, of motivations and loyalties, of intentions and desires. Would the flesh-spare leaders of the Iron Hands form a command backbone to a force of survivors? Would the Raven Guard or the Salamanders be content to follow that? Could command be shared? Could orthodoxies be matched? Could the survivors be inducted as additional squads to the Ultramarines or the Dark Angels? As things stood, the Shattered Legions were hard to wield as one force. In an emergency, such as the one that presently hung like a shroud across Macragge, they could not be deployed with unified effect as could the Ultramarines or the Dark Angels

The question of it had vexed Guilliman. Euten had seen him struggling to resolve the issue many times in the previous few days. ''‘The individual character and characteristics of the Legions is what invests them with their strengths, and makes them wonders,’ he had said to her. ‘The idiosyncrasies of composition and method are precisely why there are eighteen Legions, rather than one Legion eighteen times the size. But it is a weakness too, a mortal flaw, when it comes to forging them together as one. It makes one long for a formal, martial codification that would burnish away the rough edges, clean out the differences, and provide for a perfect, easy fit.’''

"

aka: forget taking in legionaries from other legions and absorb them into the ultramarines