Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-65.60.195.210-20130621183357

Does anyone here know where this wiki is getting its figures on the actual size of the space marine legions? I find myself questioning the factual accuracy of those numbers because it doesnt square with that which I have read in the rulebook. I remember one place where it gave an actual figure on the size of a legion indirectly. It said that Dorn divided his legion in half, one half becomming the black templars, and the other became 3 codex chapters. That means, that Dorns legion must have totaled around just 6000 marines at the end of the Heresy. Now the attrition numbers of the Heresy are never spelled out, but you know, I have a really hard time believing that they suffered 94% casualties or something like this. They were defending the entire time, and they had backup from the white-scars and blood angels. This leads me directly to another issue I have noted: to justify these rediculous numbers of marines in the legions, they had to invent a way for them to have been produced in the first place. I.E. Cloning/Gene-modding facilities. I would refer every single person here to the article on the "Space Wolves" -- they make reference to them not being able to manufacture successor chapters due to intervention of Magnus the Red. After reading that, I found myself asking the question "did this writer even read the warhammer material?": I mean, seriously? Thats not the way the Marines multiply themselves: in fact, that has more-or-less never been the way they multiplied themselves after the heresy. Ignorining the fact that its now the Adeptus Mechanicus who create new chapters from gene-seed tithes, this does not make any sense. The salamanders were almost completely oblitterated and yet they didnt use the "cloning/gene-moddification" technologies. Instead they rebuilt through the typical fashion: harvesting and re-implanting their gene-seed generation by generation. The only legion/chapter which did this was Corax's legion/chapter, and that was said to have resulted in a failure so spectacular that it drove Corax to exile/death. Lets face the facts here, the texts suggest that this process was unknown to the Astartes both before AND after the heresy. The only one who managed to use this technology was the Emperor, and for some reason, he had a very hard time doing it again after the initial creation. The only reason why I even bring up this topic, is I need to get the story straight for Dark Heresy Gaming purposes. One of my cheif complaints with the Warhammer 40k Universe itself is that its creators seemed to have no clue or sense of scale. 1000 space marine chapters in the galaxy vs 1 million worlds. That literally a single marine per planet. A chapter of space marines purging a hive world of over 100,000,000,000 (100billion). Give me a f******* break. It doesnt even go along with the numbers Dorn gives [from a rulebook] of a space marines value. I think it went something like "Give me 10 space marines, 100 elite troops, or 1000 regular soldiers". Thats right boys, your vaunted chapter is worth only about a million gaurdsmen. I remember reading in the fifth edition rulebook a single troop transport held 5,000,000 soldiers and dis-appeared. If they are ret-coning here and fixing their colossal screwup when it came to their sense of proportion, I want to honor it. Otherwise I must assume its intentional, and the imperium is deliberately, sparsely populated on the vast majority of worlds.

I would love to hear from every one of you single basement dwellers here, on this topic. POST! 