Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-124.180.236.54-20121215084836/@comment-71.203.138.145-20140101023514

according to the forgeworld books, which do a lot to lay out the orginizational structure of the legions, the iron hands legion does use a clan structure although there are a lot more clans. a clan at that time represented a force the size of a 'modern' space marine chapter rather than a company. Basically it went legion, then clan (chapter) then order (batallion) then company.

given that at the end of the great crusade the iron hands had over 110,000 legionairs, if you estimate that each chapter (clan) has an average of 1000 marines (though some may have had many more and some less) then there were up to around 100 clans in the legion, many of which probobly got wiped out at istivann v. Many others were seperated from the legion at the second founding such as the clan that became the red talons space marines chapter.

The book (HH 2: massacre) goes on to explain that only 2 thirds of the legion were present at istavan V, and so roughly 30,000 legionairs would not have been present and survived so the iron hands probobly had a decent number of second founding sucssesors although nowhere near the number of say ultras or fists.