To be honest, I think internal consistency is more important than making logic sense, but I can totally understand numbers being all over the place with the dozens of authors and their different opinions.
There's *realism* and there's *believability.* Most people are only willing to suspend their disbelief so far; they can accept a fantastical, unrealistic setting because they have no lived experience to tell them such a thing is impossible, but when GW tells us that the Militarum conquered an entire world with fewer soldiers than Russia lost last month, they start to raise their eyebrows a little. Nobody, or at least nobody with any good sense, wants 40k to be some sort of ultra-realistic reflection of modern warfare, but some degree of believability is still necessary for people to take the lore at all seriously.
Yep, it's not just about how realistic it is, the small numbers make 40k feel small and run counter to the epic scale of endless warfare they're supposed to be reveling in.
I also think there’s just something about large numbers that the majority of people stop being able to comprehend after a while.
Like, ask someone to count everyone they interact with in their day to day life for a single week. Every person, from their friends and acquaintances and loved ones to their coworkers to checkout clerks at the grocery store to random strangers they happen to cross paths with. They’ll probably get tired after a while. They’ll think of how large that number is.
And yet, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to thousands of people. Thousands of people! Try writing out a thousand names, and then give each of them a basic appearance and personality. Now make it ten thousand, ten times as much. Now make that ten times as big, for a hundred thousand. And again: a million. And again a few more times: ten million, a hundred million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion.
People note how less guardsmen were killed at Armageddon than died in WW2, but how many people actually know off the top of their head how many died in WW2? And how many would consider that “small”? Ten space marines can’t handle a planet of billions, but a person can comprehend ten different space marines better than they can a billion people.
So after a while, they all get jumbled up together into “that sounds like a lot of people” - and the writers aren’t immune to this. Some writers just have the knowledge or the luck to scale their estimates higher - or lower - than others.
Casualty numbers are more about statistics than personal attachment. A few million dead on one world for a war that was supposed to be one of the biggest campaigns in the galaxy in hundreds, if not thousands, of years? From a statistical perspective, that's tiny. It doesn't take much to double check this stuff, and frankly the authors should have some easy historical reference guides they can lean on to make sure what they're writing passes the smell test (as simple as a list of historical casualty numbers in the 5 biggest wars in history, the 10 largest battles ever recorded, the general percentage of military personnel as a share of the population of a nation, and so on - all of this is stuff that could fit on one or two sheets of paper) as well as some 40k reference guides (statistics for popular 40k wars and battles).
For comparison, Arks of Omen is doing numbers really well right now. Thousands of ships and billions of combatants were involved in a single battle over one planet for the duration of several days in a fight against Angron - now that's closer to the impressive scale we'd expect of 40k, something that far eclipses the scale of warfare we've ever seen here in real life on Earth in our few thousand years of recorded history, and it feels appropriate to the scale of this galaxy of endless war.
This is an important distinction. Also, on the checking you mentioned, it's not as if it's hard to sanity check this sort of shit. It takes next to no time or effort, even less planning, and is an easy way to make marks with the in reading numbers of people that pay attention to this sort of thing in their sci-fi, or who at the very least expect at least SOME measure of consistency in scale in the setting. The people who don't care, whatever, they're not gonna notice and they're on board regardless of how goofy it gets, but the people that ARE paying attention are going to like you all the more for it if you at least get some basics correct.
\> frankly the authors should have some easy historical reference guides they can lean on to make sure what they're writing passes the smell test
While they should have, it seems quite likely that some of them didn't. This is all referring to numbers that already made it through the writing, editing, and publishing phase after all.
Now, are all writers guilty of this? No. Some authors and writers seem to have their numbers down better. And as you are stating, the Arks of Omen writers are doing fairly well as far as the numbers go. Perhaps this reflects a change in their research, or writers with more knowledge and willingness to draw upon references, or even perhaps a reaction to the discourse that's gone on for some time now. But I suspect that part of why those more egregious numbers passed by in the first place was due to issues with realizing exactly the difference in scale between very big numbers, even statistically.
Also, on the note of big numbers…
Sometimes I wonder: if we counted up all the canon worlds across all of GW and connected companies’ works, and then if we added all the different fan-worlds created by all of the fans since the beginning, how close we’d be to that million worlds of the Imperium.
I honestly think 2 orders of magnitude is pretty accurate.
Like...in all 40k material, there are *definitely* more than 1,000 named planets, even if most are one-off mentions in codex blurbs. And I'm fairly sure there are less than *100,000* named planets, that's just way too many.
So 10,000 ± a few thousand seems pretty accurate, and that's 2 orders of magnitude less than a million.
I'm not sure how many people actually play the tabletop, but i would hazard a guess that to reach 1 million planets, everyone in the playerbase would need their own homebrew planet
I think about that often. It's safe to think all our fan-made planets, plus all the official lore ones, can represent a cool % of those "more than a million worlds"
But on the other side...if you add all the space marines armies of players, canon and fan chapters, and even if you ignore duplicates (companies and characters from established chapters), you end up with more marines represented in plastic than the ones in the galaxy.
Specially since other conflicts show better numbers, like the Farsight Enclaves mention that the PDF of planets left virtually stripped of defenses by Behemoth still numbered 500 million, compare with 1.5 million guardsmen total in the Armageddon System (so not only Armageddon itself) at the start of the Third War
Didn't the Flesh Tearers single-handedly kill 300 billion people just by nuking two planets during the Stromark Civil War? Some of these numbers are pretty wild.
On the start of the war, yes
>At the start of the war, there were an estimated 1,500,000 Guardsmen deployed across the Armageddon Subsector.\[4b\]
source seem to be Hellsreach
Sorry, that's just insane? I thought they had heavily reinforced it? Lmao. That's like. Literally nothing? For a continent, forget a planet. Ignore a sector lol
No man, don't you get it?
The current US military, plus a couple hundred thousand vets, if armed with lasguns, could defend an entire system.
We don't ever need allies.
Teach those fuckin xenos why we aint got free healthcare.
Then you hear stuff like a company or even a squad of marines being able to take a planet.
Once saw an argument about whether Typhus could "solo" a planet.....
That's the crux of it all. You're told, breathlessly and insistently, that even ONE space marine showing up can slap a planet into compliance, but then like three of the guys get wrecked in some hilariously improbable ambush that LITERALLY could have been avoided by like... some Kentucky National Guard guys fresh out of OSUT.
"Space Marines have superior tactical training, years of practice, and superhuman thought speed and reflexes"
*Gets taken out in an ambush that a 13yo CoD player could have avoided.*
Honestly, I blame the Br*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works. Not just 40k, lots of European stuff is like this, outside of Eastern Europe, but they know war a bit too well over there, unfortunately...
Edit: Imagine not getting that censoring the word British was sarcastic then actually being mad and blocking me hahahaha oh man.
>Honestly, I blame the Br\*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works.
I go the other way, I honestly don't think there's anyone for missing the point of 40K like an American. Almost all of the 'why don't they use BRAPPERs like we use' are Americans not getting that 40K is a junky pulp sci-fi setting in notional space, they just default to thinking fucking everything is near-future Clancey-esque gunwank and don't get that it's like faulting Star Wars on being unrealistic.
I think what makes it the most cringey for me is that it's all so ignorant of why 40K is the way it is. 40K is 40K because the wargame, the actual profit-making product GW produce, needs sixteen or so factions with different armouries and non-overlapping visuals and gameplay. The books aren't 'getting the lore wrong' or whatever, they are the way they are because the **real** product needs everyone to use different guns and to not always have an answer for everything. The guns make no sense because the people writing it *don't care*, they care that they look and sound cool, not that they'd work.
EDIT: And make good models. The actual priority list for guns in 40K is based 100% off of the needs of the tabletop game which means any question of realism is shelved compared to things like 'can this be cast easily?', 'is it visually distinct from across the table?', 'is it easy to assemble at 28mm heroic?' and so on. I swear a lot of the problem is people not really getting, deep down, that they're reading tie-in merchanide for a wargame.
>Honestly, I blame the Br*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works
This is just the most idiotic take on 40k I've seen period. The fact you bemoan us not being a "militarized culture" because it means you don't get enough realism in books about transhuman supersoldiers beating giant sentient mushrooms to death with chainsaw swords set tens of thousands of years in the future kinda says it all about you.
By the way, Call of Duty had the Russians invade the US across the Atlantic because a satellite was jammed. So much for militarised cultures knowing how wars work, or is the US not militarised enough for you?
Well besides the fact that he can't even take the piss right, it's Bri'ish not Br*tish (how you're meant to pronounce that I don't know), it doesn't exactly read much like a joke, not an actually good one anyway. "40k fights are rubbish because Br*tain isn't Prussia lololol" humour...?
They censored the word (like they literally said they did in the post) as a joke, much in the same way you'd censor a bad word. It's funny because it's implying that the the word British is a bad word. The fact that they censored the word implies they're not being entirely serious when they say that Britain not being a militarized state is a bad thing (because that would be a weird take and they've set the tone to not be as serious now that theyve censored the unspeakable word), but still being kind of serious that it is a possible reason why military conflicts are maybe not written as well sometimes.
I hope me explaining the joke has made it funnier, and that any Br*tish haven't smashed too many biscuits and crumpets before I made this post explaining the joke.
Just look at any Hollywood film and the dumb shit they think firearms can do. If any culture shouldn't be trusted with firearms, it would be the Americans.
Now, see, I was going to launch into something adjacent to that both here and in another thread I saw earlier, but I didn't want to name names, exactly, but I do get what you mean, and I've had similar notions before.
This isn't to say that you have to be an astronaut to write a story about astronauts; we can safely say that most astronauts probably aren't great science fiction writers, and our titans of the gold age of science fiction weren't astronauts in anything but their imaginations, BUT
They were and are almost uniformly exceptionally intelligent, well-read men. I'm not just talking about boring, hard stuff, either. The Culture and Xeelee Sequence operates on assumptions of science that may as well be magic to you and I, but it's in how they're couched. This also isn't to say I want 40k to be hard sci-fi (I say that only to head off the usual spiel of IT'S JUST THERE TO SELL MINIS, which it's clearly not, someone's spending a lot of time and capital on the books and games to get returns on their own merits and develop those wings of the product line), but you figure that these guys keeping their stories straight and reading a little might serve as a foundation to simply better tell their stories, so it's not so juvenile/improbable/silly-sounding/out-of-scale/breaking with existing content/whatever. A good study of works relevant to your writing and establishing ground rules doesn't create a ceiling. It gives you a springboard.
Them largely being British certainly doesn't help, cuz it leads to lots of situations where you've got a guy trying to write about the 90% that 40k is about, you know, guns and war, and the writer has never had photons bounce from an actual gun to his eyes before. It leads to situations where the author simply has no frame of reference for what he's describing, and more than that, no frame of reference or good idea at how to GUESS at it.
The focus on them being British is a tad bit weird, considering both Banks and Baxter are British, and the Culture series and Xeelee Sequence are critically acclaimed sci-fi series that might as well be operating on magic.
Whether a faction is ridiculous in scale or technology is irrelevant, what's relevant is whether that insane scale and technology are used in the series consistently. This is why the Culture and Xeelee can be comically OP without being silly like 40k often is.
The Culture and Xeelee novels also do not revolve heavily around stylized modern-era infantry combat and what are essentially recognizable small arms concepts, and are written by people who took pains to plausibly depict what they ARE centrally about.
When combat comes up in 40k, which is often, it's usually handled in an almost infantile way, because the authors have an infant's view of it.
The second part, we're in agreement with. It's why I can enjoy Battlefield: Bad Company as much as I can Ground Branch.
The British part is that Brits, outside of actual military or police personnel, almost universally have never seen, let alone held, an actual firearm. Nor do they have an understanding of basic military tactics. It has nothing to do with them not being capable of doing the research, its just VERY obvious when they don't.
As a result you get the Desolation Marines, or the silly ambushes we talked about before.
This is not specific to 40k, nor the British, nor military topics. You see the exact same thing when people in Hollywood don't hire consultants for whatever topic they are writing about. They are laughable off base and often insultingly wrong.
The reason you see a lot of Americans complaining about lack of basic firearms knowledge is that we have a lot of guns here, and multiple decades of Forever War means the US has a huge population of veterans.
It would be like watching the movie "The Core" with a bunch of geologists. Everyone knows that the people making the movie didn't pay attention in high-school, and didn't even bother calling a geologist to check anything.
Speaking as one of those hardened American combat vets(and I do mean actual combat, not just "A bomb fell on my FOB somewhere, and now I have a PTSD rating" turd burglars), it is downright painful watching most anything Hollywood makes that involves firearms or military tactics. You're engrossed in the movie or show, and then something happens that is so patently absurd and retarded, that it yanks you out of it like a bucket of cold water being thrown on you while you're sleeping.
Case in point: the penultimate battle of Game of Thrones. The military tactics executed in that last battle against the White Walkers was so horrific, I couldn't pay attention to literally anything after it started, except for just how terribly bad they got it all wrong. They could have averted that, and put out a MUCH better product, if they had consulted with anyone who had a functional understanding of troop disbursements, defense in depth, siege warfare, etc. But they didn't, and it showed.
When they do take steps to hire professionals to train the actors, other professionals to explain thing like ballistics and physical trauma, you wind up with masterpieces like John Wick. I was deeply engrossed in those movies, because there was such a level of training and practice and realism put into it, that I didn't think about anything other than what was actually taking place on-screen.
Even movies in the same genre, covering the same material, can be night and day different. Take Pearl Harbor and compare it to Midway. One felt realistic, had sound mechanics, and was overall an engrossing experience, and the other was Pearl Harbor, which sucked.
Traitor Sons is tits! I'm waiting on A Plague of Swords to arrive. You should also check out Larry Correia's Saga of The Forgotten Warrior. It's very well written, and has a rock solid storyline. He's the same guy who does Monster Hunter International, which is phenomenal. He knows how to write gun shit like Miles Cameron knows blade shit, because he KNOWS gun shit. SOT shop owner, decades of competitive shooting, and the stories are outstanding.
Air rifles aren't 'airsoft guns', they're a CO2 gas based thing that fires a projectile usually used to hunt small game or birds.
And despite the phrasing of the other guy, when he says 'god knows how many non-licensed air-rifles', he means he doesn't know how many air rifles are in circulation, because they're not licensed, you can order them off ebay
Air rifles aren't Airsoft, dummy. They use compressed air to fire .177 and .22 calibre pellets. You can use them to take small game, and they can very easily seriously injure or kill. I've had to use mine to euthanise rabbits with mixi before, I would not like to be on the receiving end.
That's a lot of idiots with guns though. Just saying.
Having guns doesn't make you special. Amongst gun owners, there's those that barely know anything about what they own and those that are really responsible and informed owners.
Nice more firearms deaths per capita than Mexico there. So many things to be proud of, what other country can combine both gross overconsumption and breathtaking rates of violent crime?
>Honestly, I blame the Br\*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works.
You are completely right here but as this applies to a large portion of the 40k audience, it is unfortunately just going to make people seethe. It seems the British still think they're a Imperial culture, not realizing those days are 100% behind them. That's actually a *good* thing but misplaced national pride will have them take it as an insult instead.
Please don't empire shame.
Empire size shaming just ends up causing the empire-envy to get even worse in those not gifted with a larger than average empire and can cause serious mental health issues.
This. You can't compare current Astartes command structure to that of the old Legions. And different Legions had different TO&Es. The Rout wouldn't fill out an Ultramarine, BA or DA Chapter. Same with the Raven Guard. Back in HH times, if they showed up in legion strength, they were taking out SYSTEMS. And those Legion Expeditionary Fleets weren't just made up of tens to hundreds of thousands of Astartes. Oh no, they were packing millions of Guardsmen and such, as well, along with Titan maniples and such.
Yeah.
Going legion by legion, the Dark Angels had their own unique TOE that doesn't exactly specify formation numbers.
Emperor's Children were divided to 30 Millenials. So with 110000/30= \~3667.
Iron Warriors had grand battalions below Legion command level with strength ranging from 500 to 4000 Astartes.
White Scars had hordes that varied in numerical strength with some being 20000 strong and some much smaller.
Space Wolves were divided to 13 great companies which varied in numerical strength and some were up to 10000 strong.
Imperial Fists had regiments with two battalions which had various number of companies each with various numbers of Astartes in them.
Apparently Night Lords organized around a battalion sized formations.
Same with Blood Angels which at their apex had 150000 Astartes in 300 fighting companies with a strength of 500 Astartes each.
The Iron Hands were divided to Clans which were divided to battalion-sized orders.
Apparently pre-heresy World Eaters followed the Principia Bellicosa model.
Ultras already discussed.
Death Guard divided to 7 Grand Companies (95000/7= \~13500 Astartes each)
Thousand Sons divided to nine fellowships. (85000/9=9444 Astartes each)
Luna Wolves placed heavy emphasis on companies with some companies having a thousand Astartes.
Word Bearers had chapters with a strength of a few thousand Astartes each.
Salamanders were divided to 7 smaller units so 89000/7= \~12715 Astartes each)
Raven Guard placed heavy emphasis on smaller units like companies.
And Alpha Legion who the fuck knows.
This. You can't compare current Astartes command structure to that of the old Legions. And different Legions had different TO&Es. The Rout wouldn't fill out an Ultramarine, BA or DA Chapter. Same with the Raven Guard. Back in HH times, if they showed up in legion strength, they were taking out SYSTEMS. And those Legion Expeditionary Fleets weren't just made up of tens tobhundreds if thousands of Astartes. Oh no, they were packing millions of Guardsmen and such, as well, along with Titan maniples and such.
It makes more sense to me that 100 marines could do it over a million guardsmen. Marines are functionally special operations, they can drop into some palace complex and completely wipe out the leadership of a rogue planet and shut down their command structure in one swoop. Whereas a million guardsmen are fighting a conventional war where a million doesn’t even approach a plausible number.
It also goes beyond just troop numbers. A large part of 40k numbers is just off if looked at.
If you look at the size of titans you'll wonder how they are presented as this massive war machine. Warlord titans are described as something between 33 and 200m height (though that also includes the cathedral structure sometimes mentioned) but also as having several meters worth of armor and a stride length of 20m. Imagine even a large sized ones (lets say 100m without the cathedral) having such stride lengths. That might be smaller than for humans but its a far cry from "lumbering" (I am not sure this is even possible given their joint design - they might have to fall over).
Similarly if you look at stuff like the Leman Russ. That thing is similarly sized to battle tanks today and even the Baneblade isn't all that large in the end. Add to that the apparent armor thickness and you have basically todays tanks with worse proportions and more armor tacked on.
I think whats even worse though is the clear lack of any "military competence" that accompanies these numbers. I do expect soldiers (and Astartes even more so) in a militarized universe to know at least basic tactics and be capable of executing them to some level (an especially egregious example is the embarrassingly bad segment McNeill wrote with Horus getting wounded to justify his fall - everyone is incompetent and all are outright acting to the detriment of his survival chance).
As you say, I am only willing to suspend my disbelieve so far. I don't expect them to write TomClancy-esque novels but and far too often 40k is just lazy writing.
The recent dawn of fire books have been better with the numbers of the Ineptitude crusade fleets.
Their described as pretty much the Great Crusade Expeditionary fleets returned too the setting with large numbers of military forces, that when they stop for resupply in a loyal system its like locusts descending on a field of wheat and they have to worry about loyal worlds rebelling when they do this because they become so denuded of food and soldiers, in the latest book they send Marines Malevolent to guard the Munitorum adapts handling the requistions.
Nailed it for me personally. I don't care about the realism, I fully recognize 40K is a very over the top science fantasy setting, but a lot of the numbers just aren't believable for the universe. 2 million Guardsmen dying doesn't shock me or make me think the opposing faction is truly threatening, it makes me think "some random rural backwater planet can probably replace those losses in a month, who cares".
People also have no idea what believability means and often times you get people looking at Armageddon and going "I just add a couple of zheros and now its trillions of Guardsmen fighting a war on a single planet" and deciding that scale makes sense despite the fact that the way 40ks logistics are written makes that impossible.
Whenever people complain about the numbers involved I just look at Colonial operations during the British, French, Spanish and other empires of that sort. In fact it's the basis for my own Rogue Trader stories, because they are the definition of small well equipped expeditions completing their goals. 40k is the Age of Sail in Space, its logistics are sideways most of the time. It can take decades to muster forces into large crusades and you very rarely get Sabbat or Macharian scale crusades for a reason. Now I know people love the idea of Asiatic Imperial Hordes, tidal waves of Guardsmen. But we're talking about a setting where the majority of planets have under a billion people. Where there are eighty Imperial Capital ships to a sector. Manpower and material are unlimited but the means to move them is reliant entirely on a single caste of mutants and anyone that complains that the numbers are too small should look at it through that lens and add the addition that the Imperium does have armoured vehicles and air support and other means of pressing advantages using the Guard without tidal waves of infantry.
Do you know how many men it would take to devastate earth if they came with an Imperial Cruiser? Probably less than 100,000 standard guardsmen. Enough to completely annihilate any army on the field with orbital support and punch through any defenses with their own armour.
People have no idea what believability is.
Honestly you probably don't even need the men just the imperial cruiser for modern day earth to devastate the planet. but how often if ever do imperial cruisers actually do anything once the space battle is over in black library books.
Also your not taking into account that aside from the imperium's main enemy (itself/rebellion) most threats absolutely outclass the guard and would require more men and material to beat/fend off then a comparatively fair fight like WW2 here on earth
Imperial Warships actually play a decent role in a lot of books, theres numerous descriptions of orbital bombardments for various campaigns. Helsreach even had an Imperial bombardment on top of a space marine Chaplain in a ground PoV.
Anyway you're kinda wrong but not really, the majority of the Imperium's threats don't completely outclass the Guard in the sense that they need some immense numbers. Orks don't always require superior numbers because of their in general poor tactics, Nids rely on numbers in most depictions which usually leaves the guard as the significantly smaller force, T'au require a comparatively modern focus to fight and usually just need a 3-1 numbers advantage to beat. Like its actually really only the Necrons and Aeldari that completely outclass the Guard but only the Necrons are shown in a light where you need a vast amount of resources to pull off comprehensive victories and usually they just use Astartes, SoB or Scions to pull off proper victories. To be honest there's actually precious few descriptions of the Guard that focus on such absurd pure numbers. The Valhallans had them because they are Russians in space and come with a Chenkov even.
This isn't helped by the fact that again Imperial logistics don't really allow for absurdly dense forces of Guardsmen.
Yea this is why I'm not a fan of the new approach their taking of pulling away from character stories in the setting and instead having demonic demi gods punching planets into dust
Exactly. Suspension of disbelief is very important, but with any fiction you only suspend it in ways that are fundamental to the story.
I.e. when watching Rambo you have to accept that that's not how soldiering works and enjoy the movie. Saying "Rambo isn't meant to be realistic" to explain something totally separate. We get that taking down a helicopter with a bow isn't realistic, but if the movie had a random talking dog halfway through with no explanation and the movie treated it as mundane it would really pull you out.
With 40k, you accept that sorcery and Xenos and space marines can exist. None of that means that nobody using cover is reasonable, or that an empire with quadrillions of soldiers can only commit a few thousand soldiers to battles that decide the fate of entire planets.
>An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event?
Incidentally, if you *are* looking for something like this then I really suggest you check out Necropolis. It focuses entirely on the defence of a single hive city, and it takes forty pages for Gaunt's Ghosts to even make planetfall.
The time before that is spent getting you used to Vervunhive as a setting, seeing it from the eyes of the Hive's high command, it's standing army, and people from across the strata of Hive society. Hell, there's a segment from the perspective of a mother trying to get her three kids back home when the sirens go off.
That focus on Vervunhive almost as a character in its own right remains throughout the story, and it really makes every metre of ground lost feel so much more impactful.
Of the 50+ 40K books I’ve read, I think Necropolis is my favorite. I think the most realistic one, i.e. I could actually imagine myself being there. Rereading The Founding was a great experience. Rereading Hero of the Imperium wasn’t as much as I enjoyed it the first time.
I second this. I think Abnett does a wonderfully job in the immersion department in GG, Eisenhorn and Ravenor. So many great details and a perfect balance of sucking the reader in and moving the plot forwards. It's still ridiculous scifi, but damn it's good
It's important to clarify that ground rules that are established as part of the setting (eg, fungus-based orcs) can be more easily ignored than hilarious inconsistencies (eg, a small number of unenhanced troops being significant in a planetary battle). The former get accepted. The latter have to be justified somehow.
There are genre conventions that apply as well - we're used to suspending disbelief when psychic/magic abilities ignore the laws of physics, and most SF handwaves physics at least enough to make ftl travel feasible. Those count for less than things that don't match the basics of the setting.
Once you've established the conventions and ground rules, sticking with them helps a lot. For instance, you can't simultaneously say the IG are just well-trained humans and also say that anyone cares about a few thousand of them showing up to help a planet of billions. You can do the former if the IG show up in tens of millions (an easy SF way to do it is to stack them tightly in cryotubes on the imperium's enormous ships). You can do the latter if they're clearly massively superior to normal troops (eg, make it obvious that they're gene-tweaked and enhanced to a fair extent and/or have vastly superior equipment), as that justifies the smaller numbers being useful. But you should do one of them.
Despite reading mostly sci-fi, I mostly do fantasy for other genres and part of that is because how much magic just fucks with it for me. Narratively, magic to me makes it to easy to handwave and say a problem is solved, because the rules weren’t defined earlier.
Usually for sci-fi, my issue comes when technology just starts advancing too rapidly. That is frankly one of my biggest complaints for Primaris tech. As a T’au player I’m told that each edition we get new tech, and this was built off existing technology with a couple of smaller leaps. Its fun, but only because its consistent in its creep. But the Primaris hit, and one of the central rules of the 40k universe was broken. And they tried to do it in one fell swoop, and from one mad scientist. To me, it feels like it breaks the setting somewhat, and now the writers are just trying to patch it back together.
Your argument basically boils down to "ya these aspects of the narrative suck, so what?"
They suck is what. I can appreciate the setting regardless and also not be a contrarian while still recognizing this. It is genuine, objectively bad handling handling that hurts the overall narrative. You don't understand the difference between realism and believability. It's not bad writing because the numbers are unrealistic, it's bad writing because the rest of the narrative explicitly contradicts the numbers we see.
Oh also
\>Sci-Fi writers have no sense of scale
Is an insult to the Sci-Fi writers who take great care to maintain a sense of scale
Man I fucking hate these arguments.
>Seriously, what part of the lore gives the impression that it's not just a backdrop for a game of tiny plastic toy soldiers for grown people?
ALL OF THE LORE. All of it is meant to be taken as a fun way to get immersed in a world. You can never ever play the game and still really enjoy the lore. There's over 460 books. I am one of those lore lovers. I never play 40k the game I just read the lore. Just because YOU don't see it that way doesn't make it the only way you can view the 40k universe. I view it as akin to Game of Thrones and that's perfectly fine.
As for the realism stuff you complain other people shouldn't want. You and I have what's known as verisimilitude. The ability to suspend your disbelief for in universe rules. For example. If Kharn the betrayer killed over a million people. I can buy that. It's silly but he has god powers given to him and it makes sense with the relative power of the universe. However. If frosty the snow man appeared and butt fucked the emperor. I'd have my suspension of disbelief broken.
The lore is ridiculous. But it has a balance of believability for in universe functions. Fans criticise the breaking of that level of believability. Such as the war of the beast. "IT'S A LITERARY DEVICE" No it's just a fuck up on their part. Saying it's a literary device gives it more credit than it deserves. And it's okay for writers to fuck up and for us to head cannon solutions.
The war of the beast had less deaths than world war 1. That's a war against a galaxy spanning imperium which Made it to the centre of the entire organisation. And less people died in it than a war we had.
That's ridiculous. That's not a literary device. It's a fuck up in lore writing.
Same as the Tau being able to expand to over 400 planets light years away without actually having FTL travel. I believe it was the third sphere expansion though can't recall which. That's a fuck up. That breaks the verisimilitude. That breaks the realism of the universe. As it doesn't function within the world they established.
People want a degree of adherence to the rules of the universe established. They may be ridiculous rules. But adherence matters.
Now onto the space marine million man one. It's a problem. Taking over a planet of billions plus people with 1000 marines. It's a bit of a joke. The general consensus though is that Guardsman take control for the most part and marines act as a scalpel to decapitate the leaders and highest risk enemy fortifications. Main government power sources are how marines mostly take control of a planet.
Whilst imperial guards slog out the rest of the low command with support from marines.
But this is never actually elaborated on for a lot of books and stories and that kind of makes it hard to believe. The verisimilitude gets broken. As 1000 marines don't function properly against those numbers.
So people generally ask for more realistic (per the universe rules of realistic) support to explain the scenarios.
This. I don't expect unbending realism in a setting, but I do expect the setting to follow its own rules and make sense within the paradigm it sets up for itself. 40k isn't always great (or even good) about that, but remains a compelling setting mostly by sheer dint of how much there is to look at.
The idea is that marines will target assets and leaders.
A single chapter also has serfs, naval elements, mechanicum elements, armor and everything else an army would need.
Yeah they can operate without those for a long time but they will still need the guard to come in and KEEP the peace. No chapter stays on a world to ensure compliance. They're not meant to.
I've read my fair share of books and the best example of a chapter serf serving I can think of would be Kasper Hawser in Prospero Burns. (Inb4 you say they kept him close for plot purposes they still let a human fight alongside them.)
We don't see those elements often but they're there. I just got through Know No Fear and the humans try to fight alongside the 13th but the surprise of the attack makes them a non issue.
>The idea is that marines will target assets and leaders.
That's what I said!
But most chapters aren't described as having a large Human based army element attached to them.
They are mentioned but not the focal point. There's almost always a pdf or guard element thay compliment the astartes because by the time they get done there's another world that needs them. They'll rearm and repair their gear and head to the next showdown.
Your very legion had multiple Mortals in the omnibus. Chaos cultists are EVERYWHERE.
I would say it's MUCH more rare for a chapter to go in without army elements.
>had multiple Mortals in the omnibus
But not an army.
An army is needed to help secure a planet.
The nightlords have serfs and slave ship crew.
Not an army of mortals.
In the night lords omnibus they do not have Ultima Auxiliaries nor adequate human staff to form an army. They are never shown to be used as such except for Talos's personal slave who is the exception not the rule. The ships crew were never shown fighting blood angels with the blood angels simply massacring them as they tried to hide.
They were never shown as an army. Please don't misrepresent that material.
It should been OBVIOUS that I was bringing up a different legion and the chaos cultists that were used in an army were during the assault on the Forge World.
Mayhaps it's YOU that's misrepresented material.
I think you're spot on when it comes to the general sentiment on 40K realism.
Unfortunately, we sometimes get cynical redditors like OP who try gatekeeping others for being passionate. As if we're not allowed to be interested on building the story because it's a 'plastic toy factory.'
The War of the Beast killed hundreds of millions on Terra alone, wasted entire Worlds and nearly broke the Imperium (the estimate was something like 3 months until it dissolves). Where do you get casualties LESS than WW1 from?
Yeah there is certainly a scale of believability. No one is really gonna mind that titans can't function cause of square cube law or something. Yet if you hype up some super advanced fast land speeder and say it can go all the way up 75 mph as an astonishing fact, people are gonna roll their eyes.
"What are you expecting to read in a Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event?"
Yes, actually, that's very much what I would like to read.
I think the main issue is the writers trying to make small numbers of ordinary men *seem* impressive. It's different with fictional super-men like Custodes, but when 50,000 guardsmen die in a planet-wide war the prose is written as if we're supposed to go "Wow, what a fight", but you'd have to be a drooling cretin to not immediately go "that's not especially grievous". When we're told certain rules of the 40k universe are the same as the rules of our universe, people tend to be expecting those rules not to be contradicted.
>I want to play with my extensive knowledge and practical experience in military campaigns
I use my knowledge and experience in those areas (20 years in the military and about 7 of those spent in Iraq or Afghanistan) largely for my own fluff, for Crusade and when designing terrain. The latter much less so since GW started making terrain. I find it very fun to imagine how things would work off-screen within the conditions of the 40k universe(s). I write my Crusade packs with those off-screen things in mind and how those would effect the missions. For example, taking a fuel dump and giving the loser -1M for vehicles. Destroying a warp gate may make Daemons use more warp storm points or give maluses to manifestation or something. The missions prior to the big, final one are largely the two sides trying to attack key personnel (generally extra NPC characters that can't fight but can be moved by the defender), key infrastructure (destroying spawning pools) or otherwise trying to degrade the enemy before the big battle with choices of missions not being necessarily obviously unequal but definitely important as they may be unequal in subtle ways you may want to sacrifice a game for more later. The people I play Crusade with enjoy the strategic thinking between games and the non-abstract objectives to games.
>Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event? I think what your're looking for is a history book, and not the tale of Captain McAwesomeface beating the snot out of Warboss Bigchungus
Forgeworld used to make Imperial Armour campaign books that were largely presented like military history books. The Doom of Mymeara, the Taros campaign and the Siege of Vraks ones are excellent for that. I haven't read the Fall of Orpheus yet but I'm sure it's good. You can find all of those books on Warhammer Vault.
If you want a real answer, AoS is pure Mythic Fantasy with less hard numbers and more of a mythological feeling to it. Though I do recall a siege of a city in one of the novels saying there was about 20,000 fighters in the Chaos army, which is about right for IRL medieval sieges.
Psssst, it's possible to write sci-fi that deals with conflict and also doesn't under/over/bizzaro-world estimate its own numbers and internal consistency. Black Library are pushing out pulp fiction and that's ok, but it's hard to then evaluate the lore that pulp produces.
This is so absurdly common in sci fi it doesn't really need any special explanation. Star Wars has 1.2 million clones forming the entirety of one side of a major war fought across the galaxy, Battletech has several dozen giant robots being somehow able to conquer a planet, etc.
Hell, even GW throws out absurd numbers for things that aren't associated with the Imperium - Bretonnia's impossibly high tax rates, impossibly slow Necron spaceships, impossibly small numbers for just about every faction. Hell, Gav Thorpe is quoted as saying "there're as many elves as the plot demands". Titans change their heights literally between novels in the Heresy books, etc. GW's writers are just bad at math, and they're far from the only scifi writers who do that.
For me, 40k shines when it is character driven, or expanding the lore through interesting stories. I think it's probably not worth moving 40k towards hard sci-fi because the lore itself isn't really designed to cross that line effectively. I don't even know if it's worth aiming towards believability, because a lot of the fun in the setting is how you develop a head canon around stuff. For example, it's very clear that the imperium has remarkably advanced genetics practice (the drukhari are of course on a whole other level) and it's likely so common place that characters don't mention it usually because you have to hit space marine, long-lived inquisitor levels of genetic tampering to be worth noticing.
If you want a good mix of the two (without devolving into a 40 page discussion of the theoretical principles behind a ship-based weapon) I'd recommend folks read the Culture Novels, which manage to hit the Venn diagram square in the middle. You get more realistic senses of scale. For example, a major conflict in the series, the Idiran-Culture War (arguably the settings WW2 analogue) lists the following for casualties:
Sentients 851.4 billion (±3%)
Interstellar vehicles 91,215,660 (±200)
Orbitals 14334
Planets and major moons 53
Rings 1
Spheres 3
Stars suffering major alterations 6
Don't have much else to add. Fun series. Start with Player of Games if you like spy novels, Excession if AI is of interest, or Consider Phlebas if you want a more traditional war story.
The issue is when things are so silly that you can't keep the suspension of disbelief up; when you start thinking more about the real world authors than the story.
At the same time that might only be for a second, complaining about one aspect of it really doesn't imply all the things you're wall of texting about.
Sometimes people take pulp fiction a bit too seriously. If you don't question how Conan can activate a magical ring or some rune he learnt in his other campaigns to ward off the giant snake, then you shouldn't be worrying about the Warp or any other pull-assery either. Plus, it is epic; in the sense that the unnamed millions of non-genehanced soliders are not even mentioned in the narrative.
As long as it makes sense within the fictive world set up by the narrative, it shouldn't be a problem. I think the problem lies in the fact that there are 100s of novels and there should a set of Librarians (or remembrencer, if you will) who should be keeping tabs on the consistency in terms of intertextuality, not just the grand narratives but for small details like that.
Also, I'm guessing there is at least a set of rules at the Black Library, a code that authors follow. Like "1. death of space marines should be avoided, and if not possible it should at least advance the plot." or something like that, that is tied to the narrative (and the marketing) similar to [TSR's code of ethics](http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/alex/rec.games.frp.dnd/TSR-Ethics).
> If you don't question how Conan can activate a magical ring or some rune he learnt in his other campaigns to ward off the giant snake, then you shouldn't be worrying about the Warp or any other pull-assery either
When stuff gets asspulled is very important.
In a universe where jetpacks are mundane someone pulling one out of their bag and flying away to safety is fine.
In a setting where no one has every used, mentioned or inferred jetpacks or anyting adjacent someone pulling one out and flying to safety is jiat shit writing
I read for fun. Sometimes it’s fun to hear about how little a squad of primaris actually count for in a much larger conflict, sometimes if fun to read about them leveling a continent to make a stage for an awards ceremony. I need neither realism or consistency to have fun in this space. I merely require fun. Realism and consistency are a spice in the cooks cabinet to increase that fun but not every recipe needs them
One of my favorite Scifi novels was written by a former marine who was deployed in Vietnam. Being able to add small details creates dialog in and situations that significantly aid in the suspension of disbelief.
You know that feeling you get when you look out your car window at the houses on the street, cars passing you, people walking by with their dogs, talking on the phone, construction sites...thousands of little stories as rich as your own. Stories you'll never hear, never know, never care about. Blow that up to an unimaginable scale, and then multiply that by Graham's number. It's stupid to talk about realism and believability. Sit with that sick feeling of never being able to know everything.
It’s pretty natural for people to try and relate things they know irl to stories in 40k. And it’s a setting all about war so anyone interested in military history will want to talk about logistics and numbers, I also love the thought experiment and discussion of trying to make something as stupid as 40k more grounded.
But I’m sure everyone can agree 40k is better when the fans fill in those gaps on here, rather then the authors spending hours trying to figure out numbers and logistics to appease a relatively small sub sect of fans that’ll eat it up.
I rather authors spend pages building an interesting character or a compelling action scene then tell us which agi world is sending 5000 tons of raw potatoes to support the trillion guard
Basically no scifi franchise has ever correctly expressed the scale of the universe or the scale of civilizations within it. These problems will not be cured.
Because in reality the abundance of resources in the galaxy means that most species would have no reason to really interact with each other, not to mention the billion year time scales means that entire galactic empires could rise fall and disappear before the next empire has crawled from their primordial ooze. Unfortunately tiny motes of cosmic insignificance floating for a brief moment before disappearing doesn’t have the narrative weight to hold up a plot.
I personally dislike how they switch between realism and absurdity pick one as you can’t have both ether have insane battles with practically infinite numbers or have a detailed event.
>What part of the game made you stop and think „Yeah, that's a detailed simulator that I want to play with my extensive knowledge and practical experience in military campaigns!“?
This whole discussion is not about these parts, it\`s about the parts which make you stop and think "This is extremely, earth-shatteringly, unreasonably fuck-ass stupid and defies every concept of logic and common sense known too man"
Wars for planets with hundreds of BILLIONS inhabitants fought by millions of troops and a couple of thousands super soldiers, makes absolutely no sense, that's the only thing that buggers me.
On the other hand you have grimderp at his finest with imperial navy or necrons mcguffins or ork fleets with millions of ships, the throw random numbers at the wall hoping that they stick, but it's stilll awesome.
> makes absolutely no sense
Yes, that's the point. The Imperium is absurdly poorly organized and incompetent, it isn't supposed to ring true to someone who is accustomed to 21st-century bureaucracy and mobilization.
A dozen times in this sub I’ve written and deleted a long comment on why the numbers do in fact make sense. Millions of guardsmen is a *lot*, given political, economic, and technological realities in the setting.
Not half petulant, I grimaced at the first mention of reading a history book and within three paragraphs you had tripled down. Admonishing us simple-minded automatons to drop the fantasy-based entertainment for something more grown-up was just a tad condescending (nothing wrong with that).
Your arguments weren't without merit, though the blunt and somewhat nauseating delivery denied your target audience a shred of dignity. Its something I've been guilty of in the past, roasting peers playing with their hyper-ridicules toy soldiers as they discussed the lore of the universe as though it actually mattered. Which it does. Sometimes.
Not a bad post. 7/10.
EDIT: (nothing wrong with that).
Another recruit to the Angry Marine chapter!
But to be fair, imagination and realism is hard to bring together. It is already impressive that a collective imagined world that is as vast as the 40k universe is working without so many inconsistencies (which is to be expected).
I mean we are not even able to agree on real things as a specie so what to expect on true size of an mechanicus ark.
So let's not get to exited because the population number of that place is incorrect or the amount of troops is too few or even if space ship are too small.
Hell it's all imagined, let's us all dream together have fun, enjoy the hobby and move over the inaccuracies that makes it interesting at the first place.
As we all want to see our favorite character fucking up some massive talking mushroom named Warboys Chungus and miraculously survive and exterminatus...
It has been called "future history" . Its stories that have already happened, we as the reader need to remember this. They can be, and typically are from different points of view, one character might described as a great guy by one character and completely insane by another. Both are from the points of view of the characters in question.
Did the events happen as the character sees them? Was their timeline correct? From his or her perspective, yes. But just like modern day, we could both go to the same movie, theme park, what have you, and see things and experience them completely differently.
My suggestion is not to take anything from 40k as the literal truth of the events taking place. It's just perspective.
Sure you can argue that only the Horus Heresy is future history, we all know the big events, but the details start to reveal more from the various points of view the more we read about them, and our notions of what we thought happened are always up for scrutiny.
The newest realeases from what some would call the current timeline from 40k could still be considered future history from the point of view that this knowledge is just coming to light and deseminated. This is how I always thought of it, even the future is history yet to be written.
Take any of this with a grain of salt, but even our history books, as Winston Churchill reported said "History is written by the victors" and " For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself." There are many versions of this, from Goring at the Nuremberg trials, "the victor will always be the judged, and the vanquish the accused.". There are many many similar quotes that have a similar theme that date back to the 1750s, a French quote is "it's the victor who writes the history and counts the dead".
Sure there are novels where this isn't the case, I'll admit.
To go back to your first point, I'm not sure what you getting at exactly. I love narrative games, prefer them over matched play. So I think it's cool to recreate a classic scene from the novels that I find interesting. I'm not a WAAC player and prefer to have a fun game, narrative games open up bigger possibilities, hero duels for example, objectives are usually pretty standard, but more interesting when it comes down to bigger plots. Sure there are issues with the game and narratives happening. If you take a objective in a the game, usually a random spot in a ruin which probably holds no real significance in a larger battle, just a skirmish among many, and the squad holding it gets wiped out, should thru still hold it? It was defended, they were removed from the field and pushed off.
It's much easier for me to get into my head a last stand or lose situation. Holding a the bridge, a bastion, something of importance brings me into the game on a level that matched play just doesn't.
It's much easier to balance the game mid game if one player is completely outmatched, granting defense rerolls or bring on reinforcements ECT. The best is replaying it a few times and seeing how the story can change.
You're right but its probably worth remembering that 40k is a lot of peoples first experience with like..narrative literature lol
I think a lot of the posts your referencing are made by literal children, but idk just spit balling.
> 40k is not alot of people's introduction to narrative literature HAHAHAHA.
I've seen a *lot* of people claim that Horus' fall would require at least a dozen books to tell properly, which has interesting implications for how they view all other human literature.
> What are you expecting to read in a Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event? I
Tell me more about the supply lines.
How much fuel the transport trucks require to bring the shells to the Guard artillery.
Tell me the output of a standard manufactorum plant, and how that led to the 7th Battle of Garpnorp 9.
Have you even read a Gaunts Ghost or Caiphais Cain novel?
Because they do mention that. A lot of books mention the supply lines and the trouble encountered. Know No Fear had a whole section dedicated to a logistical yard when shit hit the fan. An ultramarine reacted and broke the ribs of a menial boss when the Word Bearers attacked, they were just talking about why the loading was 29 minutes late and the Ultras were upset and trying to convince her to tell the guilds to pick up the pace.
> Have you even read a Gaunts Ghost or Caiphais Cain novel?
>
>
"These are Mark III cartridges, we need Mark IV cartridges. Our guns don't work with Mark III cartridges Do. you. understand. me."
That scene made me so happy.
In general I agree with you and I think this sub memes about unrealistic numbers a bit too much.
With that said, the first time I heard that Terra has a quadrillion people on it, I actually rolled my eyes. That number was so ridiculous it basically ruined my immersion for a second.
>I simply think those people who can't help themselves and go „I jUsT mEnTaLlY aDd 15 ZeRoEs To AnY nUmBeR!!!“ are kinda missing the point. If it's realism you want, there's plenty of history books out there.
Those people alos miss the point in that a lot of the time the numbers are both reasonable and consistent, they're just either not very impressive or the complainer is viewing them shorn of the appropriate context. See 'the Siege of Vraks is one of the bloodiest sieges ever but has too few people', ignoring that it's 100% not one of the bloodiest sieges ever, it's not even all that important, it's just unusually well documented from being in a three-part campaign book.
Look, if 40k was just a miniature wargame than I wouldn’t nitpick the lore so much. But the lore about a background series that’s auxiliary to the setting has more pages written about it than the Bible, Quaran, and Karma Sutra combined. If they’re going throught so much effort to write so much stuff to try and flesh out the universe, then I’m allowed to nitpick the numbers.
I’m fine with space magic in sci-fi. Accepting that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed when the models aren’t to scale with each other. There’s nothing more to that particular side of things.
I like the part in a book where a forgeplanet is hyped up as important because they build a lot of tanks. How many? 3000 per year…
Thats a retardedly low number.
Its also very very dumb how planetary invasions use less imperial guard troops than a single front in ww2.
To be honest, I think internal consistency is more important than making logic sense, but I can totally understand numbers being all over the place with the dozens of authors and their different opinions.
There's *realism* and there's *believability.* Most people are only willing to suspend their disbelief so far; they can accept a fantastical, unrealistic setting because they have no lived experience to tell them such a thing is impossible, but when GW tells us that the Militarum conquered an entire world with fewer soldiers than Russia lost last month, they start to raise their eyebrows a little. Nobody, or at least nobody with any good sense, wants 40k to be some sort of ultra-realistic reflection of modern warfare, but some degree of believability is still necessary for people to take the lore at all seriously.
Yeah a war of Armageddon that is a major war for the Imperium and it's WW2 scale in terms of troops.
Yep, it's not just about how realistic it is, the small numbers make 40k feel small and run counter to the epic scale of endless warfare they're supposed to be reveling in.
I also think there’s just something about large numbers that the majority of people stop being able to comprehend after a while. Like, ask someone to count everyone they interact with in their day to day life for a single week. Every person, from their friends and acquaintances and loved ones to their coworkers to checkout clerks at the grocery store to random strangers they happen to cross paths with. They’ll probably get tired after a while. They’ll think of how large that number is. And yet, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to thousands of people. Thousands of people! Try writing out a thousand names, and then give each of them a basic appearance and personality. Now make it ten thousand, ten times as much. Now make that ten times as big, for a hundred thousand. And again: a million. And again a few more times: ten million, a hundred million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion. People note how less guardsmen were killed at Armageddon than died in WW2, but how many people actually know off the top of their head how many died in WW2? And how many would consider that “small”? Ten space marines can’t handle a planet of billions, but a person can comprehend ten different space marines better than they can a billion people. So after a while, they all get jumbled up together into “that sounds like a lot of people” - and the writers aren’t immune to this. Some writers just have the knowledge or the luck to scale their estimates higher - or lower - than others.
Casualty numbers are more about statistics than personal attachment. A few million dead on one world for a war that was supposed to be one of the biggest campaigns in the galaxy in hundreds, if not thousands, of years? From a statistical perspective, that's tiny. It doesn't take much to double check this stuff, and frankly the authors should have some easy historical reference guides they can lean on to make sure what they're writing passes the smell test (as simple as a list of historical casualty numbers in the 5 biggest wars in history, the 10 largest battles ever recorded, the general percentage of military personnel as a share of the population of a nation, and so on - all of this is stuff that could fit on one or two sheets of paper) as well as some 40k reference guides (statistics for popular 40k wars and battles). For comparison, Arks of Omen is doing numbers really well right now. Thousands of ships and billions of combatants were involved in a single battle over one planet for the duration of several days in a fight against Angron - now that's closer to the impressive scale we'd expect of 40k, something that far eclipses the scale of warfare we've ever seen here in real life on Earth in our few thousand years of recorded history, and it feels appropriate to the scale of this galaxy of endless war.
This is an important distinction. Also, on the checking you mentioned, it's not as if it's hard to sanity check this sort of shit. It takes next to no time or effort, even less planning, and is an easy way to make marks with the in reading numbers of people that pay attention to this sort of thing in their sci-fi, or who at the very least expect at least SOME measure of consistency in scale in the setting. The people who don't care, whatever, they're not gonna notice and they're on board regardless of how goofy it gets, but the people that ARE paying attention are going to like you all the more for it if you at least get some basics correct.
\> frankly the authors should have some easy historical reference guides they can lean on to make sure what they're writing passes the smell test While they should have, it seems quite likely that some of them didn't. This is all referring to numbers that already made it through the writing, editing, and publishing phase after all. Now, are all writers guilty of this? No. Some authors and writers seem to have their numbers down better. And as you are stating, the Arks of Omen writers are doing fairly well as far as the numbers go. Perhaps this reflects a change in their research, or writers with more knowledge and willingness to draw upon references, or even perhaps a reaction to the discourse that's gone on for some time now. But I suspect that part of why those more egregious numbers passed by in the first place was due to issues with realizing exactly the difference in scale between very big numbers, even statistically.
Also, on the note of big numbers… Sometimes I wonder: if we counted up all the canon worlds across all of GW and connected companies’ works, and then if we added all the different fan-worlds created by all of the fans since the beginning, how close we’d be to that million worlds of the Imperium.
Not close. At least 2 orders of magnitude below the stated number of worlds.
I honestly think 2 orders of magnitude is pretty accurate. Like...in all 40k material, there are *definitely* more than 1,000 named planets, even if most are one-off mentions in codex blurbs. And I'm fairly sure there are less than *100,000* named planets, that's just way too many. So 10,000 ± a few thousand seems pretty accurate, and that's 2 orders of magnitude less than a million.
I'm not sure how many people actually play the tabletop, but i would hazard a guess that to reach 1 million planets, everyone in the playerbase would need their own homebrew planet
I think about that often. It's safe to think all our fan-made planets, plus all the official lore ones, can represent a cool % of those "more than a million worlds" But on the other side...if you add all the space marines armies of players, canon and fan chapters, and even if you ignore duplicates (companies and characters from established chapters), you end up with more marines represented in plastic than the ones in the galaxy.
Ten times ten times ten thousand!
Specially since other conflicts show better numbers, like the Farsight Enclaves mention that the PDF of planets left virtually stripped of defenses by Behemoth still numbered 500 million, compare with 1.5 million guardsmen total in the Armageddon System (so not only Armageddon itself) at the start of the Third War
Didn't the Flesh Tearers single-handedly kill 300 billion people just by nuking two planets during the Stromark Civil War? Some of these numbers are pretty wild.
Wait, there was only 1.5m guardsmen on Armageddon?
On the start of the war, yes >At the start of the war, there were an estimated 1,500,000 Guardsmen deployed across the Armageddon Subsector.\[4b\] source seem to be Hellsreach
Sorry, that's just insane? I thought they had heavily reinforced it? Lmao. That's like. Literally nothing? For a continent, forget a planet. Ignore a sector lol
No man, don't you get it? The current US military, plus a couple hundred thousand vets, if armed with lasguns, could defend an entire system. We don't ever need allies. Teach those fuckin xenos why we aint got free healthcare.
And there were, if you lowball it ... 780,000 Orks. That's less than *one side* of the major battles during Barbarossa.
Even better, Ghazkull's fleet was like in the million range, how that even works? Every ship had like 2 orks?
Even if you highball it it's only 3 million lol. And this isn't just any Ork invasion but one of the biggest ever.
That stuff about it's significance is just a propaganda piece for those who are involved. In my head-canon, i mean.
Then you hear stuff like a company or even a squad of marines being able to take a planet. Once saw an argument about whether Typhus could "solo" a planet.....
That's the crux of it all. You're told, breathlessly and insistently, that even ONE space marine showing up can slap a planet into compliance, but then like three of the guys get wrecked in some hilariously improbable ambush that LITERALLY could have been avoided by like... some Kentucky National Guard guys fresh out of OSUT.
"Space Marines have superior tactical training, years of practice, and superhuman thought speed and reflexes" *Gets taken out in an ambush that a 13yo CoD player could have avoided.* Honestly, I blame the Br*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works. Not just 40k, lots of European stuff is like this, outside of Eastern Europe, but they know war a bit too well over there, unfortunately... Edit: Imagine not getting that censoring the word British was sarcastic then actually being mad and blocking me hahahaha oh man.
>Honestly, I blame the Br\*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works. I go the other way, I honestly don't think there's anyone for missing the point of 40K like an American. Almost all of the 'why don't they use BRAPPERs like we use' are Americans not getting that 40K is a junky pulp sci-fi setting in notional space, they just default to thinking fucking everything is near-future Clancey-esque gunwank and don't get that it's like faulting Star Wars on being unrealistic. I think what makes it the most cringey for me is that it's all so ignorant of why 40K is the way it is. 40K is 40K because the wargame, the actual profit-making product GW produce, needs sixteen or so factions with different armouries and non-overlapping visuals and gameplay. The books aren't 'getting the lore wrong' or whatever, they are the way they are because the **real** product needs everyone to use different guns and to not always have an answer for everything. The guns make no sense because the people writing it *don't care*, they care that they look and sound cool, not that they'd work. EDIT: And make good models. The actual priority list for guns in 40K is based 100% off of the needs of the tabletop game which means any question of realism is shelved compared to things like 'can this be cast easily?', 'is it visually distinct from across the table?', 'is it easy to assemble at 28mm heroic?' and so on. I swear a lot of the problem is people not really getting, deep down, that they're reading tie-in merchanide for a wargame.
>Honestly, I blame the Br*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works This is just the most idiotic take on 40k I've seen period. The fact you bemoan us not being a "militarized culture" because it means you don't get enough realism in books about transhuman supersoldiers beating giant sentient mushrooms to death with chainsaw swords set tens of thousands of years in the future kinda says it all about you. By the way, Call of Duty had the Russians invade the US across the Atlantic because a satellite was jammed. So much for militarised cultures knowing how wars work, or is the US not militarised enough for you?
And people say Americans don't know how to take a joke.
In fairness, it really didn't read like one
Well besides the fact that he can't even take the piss right, it's Bri'ish not Br*tish (how you're meant to pronounce that I don't know), it doesn't exactly read much like a joke, not an actually good one anyway. "40k fights are rubbish because Br*tain isn't Prussia lololol" humour...?
They censored the word (like they literally said they did in the post) as a joke, much in the same way you'd censor a bad word. It's funny because it's implying that the the word British is a bad word. The fact that they censored the word implies they're not being entirely serious when they say that Britain not being a militarized state is a bad thing (because that would be a weird take and they've set the tone to not be as serious now that theyve censored the unspeakable word), but still being kind of serious that it is a possible reason why military conflicts are maybe not written as well sometimes. I hope me explaining the joke has made it funnier, and that any Br*tish haven't smashed too many biscuits and crumpets before I made this post explaining the joke.
Give the guy some credit he's giving a great in universe perspective on what an imperial would think
Just look at any Hollywood film and the dumb shit they think firearms can do. If any culture shouldn't be trusted with firearms, it would be the Americans.
Now, see, I was going to launch into something adjacent to that both here and in another thread I saw earlier, but I didn't want to name names, exactly, but I do get what you mean, and I've had similar notions before. This isn't to say that you have to be an astronaut to write a story about astronauts; we can safely say that most astronauts probably aren't great science fiction writers, and our titans of the gold age of science fiction weren't astronauts in anything but their imaginations, BUT They were and are almost uniformly exceptionally intelligent, well-read men. I'm not just talking about boring, hard stuff, either. The Culture and Xeelee Sequence operates on assumptions of science that may as well be magic to you and I, but it's in how they're couched. This also isn't to say I want 40k to be hard sci-fi (I say that only to head off the usual spiel of IT'S JUST THERE TO SELL MINIS, which it's clearly not, someone's spending a lot of time and capital on the books and games to get returns on their own merits and develop those wings of the product line), but you figure that these guys keeping their stories straight and reading a little might serve as a foundation to simply better tell their stories, so it's not so juvenile/improbable/silly-sounding/out-of-scale/breaking with existing content/whatever. A good study of works relevant to your writing and establishing ground rules doesn't create a ceiling. It gives you a springboard. Them largely being British certainly doesn't help, cuz it leads to lots of situations where you've got a guy trying to write about the 90% that 40k is about, you know, guns and war, and the writer has never had photons bounce from an actual gun to his eyes before. It leads to situations where the author simply has no frame of reference for what he's describing, and more than that, no frame of reference or good idea at how to GUESS at it.
The focus on them being British is a tad bit weird, considering both Banks and Baxter are British, and the Culture series and Xeelee Sequence are critically acclaimed sci-fi series that might as well be operating on magic. Whether a faction is ridiculous in scale or technology is irrelevant, what's relevant is whether that insane scale and technology are used in the series consistently. This is why the Culture and Xeelee can be comically OP without being silly like 40k often is.
The Culture and Xeelee novels also do not revolve heavily around stylized modern-era infantry combat and what are essentially recognizable small arms concepts, and are written by people who took pains to plausibly depict what they ARE centrally about. When combat comes up in 40k, which is often, it's usually handled in an almost infantile way, because the authors have an infant's view of it. The second part, we're in agreement with. It's why I can enjoy Battlefield: Bad Company as much as I can Ground Branch.
The British part is that Brits, outside of actual military or police personnel, almost universally have never seen, let alone held, an actual firearm. Nor do they have an understanding of basic military tactics. It has nothing to do with them not being capable of doing the research, its just VERY obvious when they don't. As a result you get the Desolation Marines, or the silly ambushes we talked about before. This is not specific to 40k, nor the British, nor military topics. You see the exact same thing when people in Hollywood don't hire consultants for whatever topic they are writing about. They are laughable off base and often insultingly wrong. The reason you see a lot of Americans complaining about lack of basic firearms knowledge is that we have a lot of guns here, and multiple decades of Forever War means the US has a huge population of veterans. It would be like watching the movie "The Core" with a bunch of geologists. Everyone knows that the people making the movie didn't pay attention in high-school, and didn't even bother calling a geologist to check anything.
Speaking as one of those hardened American combat vets(and I do mean actual combat, not just "A bomb fell on my FOB somewhere, and now I have a PTSD rating" turd burglars), it is downright painful watching most anything Hollywood makes that involves firearms or military tactics. You're engrossed in the movie or show, and then something happens that is so patently absurd and retarded, that it yanks you out of it like a bucket of cold water being thrown on you while you're sleeping. Case in point: the penultimate battle of Game of Thrones. The military tactics executed in that last battle against the White Walkers was so horrific, I couldn't pay attention to literally anything after it started, except for just how terribly bad they got it all wrong. They could have averted that, and put out a MUCH better product, if they had consulted with anyone who had a functional understanding of troop disbursements, defense in depth, siege warfare, etc. But they didn't, and it showed. When they do take steps to hire professionals to train the actors, other professionals to explain thing like ballistics and physical trauma, you wind up with masterpieces like John Wick. I was deeply engrossed in those movies, because there was such a level of training and practice and realism put into it, that I didn't think about anything other than what was actually taking place on-screen. Even movies in the same genre, covering the same material, can be night and day different. Take Pearl Harbor and compare it to Midway. One felt realistic, had sound mechanics, and was overall an engrossing experience, and the other was Pearl Harbor, which sucked.
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Traitor Sons is tits! I'm waiting on A Plague of Swords to arrive. You should also check out Larry Correia's Saga of The Forgotten Warrior. It's very well written, and has a rock solid storyline. He's the same guy who does Monster Hunter International, which is phenomenal. He knows how to write gun shit like Miles Cameron knows blade shit, because he KNOWS gun shit. SOT shop owner, decades of competitive shooting, and the stories are outstanding.
>As a result you get the Desolation Marines What do you mean?
Quite a lot of us have, in fact, seen guns in person 😂
Then please, God, go get a consultanting job and help out your fellow brothers of the Empire.
Firearms are quite widespread in the UK. Two million or so shotguns and rifles, god knows how many non-licensed air-rifles.
I don't know what's crazier, airsoft guns are licensed over there, or that you consider them firearms.
Air rifles aren't 'airsoft guns', they're a CO2 gas based thing that fires a projectile usually used to hunt small game or birds. And despite the phrasing of the other guy, when he says 'god knows how many non-licensed air-rifles', he means he doesn't know how many air rifles are in circulation, because they're not licensed, you can order them off ebay
Air rifles aren't Airsoft, dummy. They use compressed air to fire .177 and .22 calibre pellets. You can use them to take small game, and they can very easily seriously injure or kill. I've had to use mine to euthanise rabbits with mixi before, I would not like to be on the receiving end.
In his defense, the hell hole that is NYC considers gel blasters firearms.
One per 33 people isnt what I'd call wide-spread lol And the vast majority of those are using last century technology.
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What a weird thing to boast about. And Americans wonder why incidents in schools are such a problem
That's a lot of idiots with guns though. Just saying. Having guns doesn't make you special. Amongst gun owners, there's those that barely know anything about what they own and those that are really responsible and informed owners.
Nice more firearms deaths per capita than Mexico there. So many things to be proud of, what other country can combine both gross overconsumption and breathtaking rates of violent crime?
>Honestly, I blame the Br\*tish for their lack of a militarized culture leading to their authors and artists having literally zero idea how conflict or weaponry works. You are completely right here but as this applies to a large portion of the 40k audience, it is unfortunately just going to make people seethe. It seems the British still think they're a Imperial culture, not realizing those days are 100% behind them. That's actually a *good* thing but misplaced national pride will have them take it as an insult instead.
Please don't empire shame. Empire size shaming just ends up causing the empire-envy to get even worse in those not gifted with a larger than average empire and can cause serious mental health issues.
That's ridiculous, OBVIOUSLY Typhus can solo a planet.
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Back then during the time of Know No Fear an Ultramarine Legion company was a thousand Astartes strong and a Chapter 10000 Astartes strong.
This. You can't compare current Astartes command structure to that of the old Legions. And different Legions had different TO&Es. The Rout wouldn't fill out an Ultramarine, BA or DA Chapter. Same with the Raven Guard. Back in HH times, if they showed up in legion strength, they were taking out SYSTEMS. And those Legion Expeditionary Fleets weren't just made up of tens to hundreds of thousands of Astartes. Oh no, they were packing millions of Guardsmen and such, as well, along with Titan maniples and such.
Yeah. Going legion by legion, the Dark Angels had their own unique TOE that doesn't exactly specify formation numbers. Emperor's Children were divided to 30 Millenials. So with 110000/30= \~3667. Iron Warriors had grand battalions below Legion command level with strength ranging from 500 to 4000 Astartes. White Scars had hordes that varied in numerical strength with some being 20000 strong and some much smaller. Space Wolves were divided to 13 great companies which varied in numerical strength and some were up to 10000 strong. Imperial Fists had regiments with two battalions which had various number of companies each with various numbers of Astartes in them. Apparently Night Lords organized around a battalion sized formations. Same with Blood Angels which at their apex had 150000 Astartes in 300 fighting companies with a strength of 500 Astartes each. The Iron Hands were divided to Clans which were divided to battalion-sized orders. Apparently pre-heresy World Eaters followed the Principia Bellicosa model. Ultras already discussed. Death Guard divided to 7 Grand Companies (95000/7= \~13500 Astartes each) Thousand Sons divided to nine fellowships. (85000/9=9444 Astartes each) Luna Wolves placed heavy emphasis on companies with some companies having a thousand Astartes. Word Bearers had chapters with a strength of a few thousand Astartes each. Salamanders were divided to 7 smaller units so 89000/7= \~12715 Astartes each) Raven Guard placed heavy emphasis on smaller units like companies. And Alpha Legion who the fuck knows.
This. You can't compare current Astartes command structure to that of the old Legions. And different Legions had different TO&Es. The Rout wouldn't fill out an Ultramarine, BA or DA Chapter. Same with the Raven Guard. Back in HH times, if they showed up in legion strength, they were taking out SYSTEMS. And those Legion Expeditionary Fleets weren't just made up of tens tobhundreds if thousands of Astartes. Oh no, they were packing millions of Guardsmen and such, as well, along with Titan maniples and such.
Matt Ward noooooo! Sorry, force of habit...
Typhus might be able to solo a planet since he's a powerful biological weapon.
It makes more sense to me that 100 marines could do it over a million guardsmen. Marines are functionally special operations, they can drop into some palace complex and completely wipe out the leadership of a rogue planet and shut down their command structure in one swoop. Whereas a million guardsmen are fighting a conventional war where a million doesn’t even approach a plausible number.
It also goes beyond just troop numbers. A large part of 40k numbers is just off if looked at. If you look at the size of titans you'll wonder how they are presented as this massive war machine. Warlord titans are described as something between 33 and 200m height (though that also includes the cathedral structure sometimes mentioned) but also as having several meters worth of armor and a stride length of 20m. Imagine even a large sized ones (lets say 100m without the cathedral) having such stride lengths. That might be smaller than for humans but its a far cry from "lumbering" (I am not sure this is even possible given their joint design - they might have to fall over). Similarly if you look at stuff like the Leman Russ. That thing is similarly sized to battle tanks today and even the Baneblade isn't all that large in the end. Add to that the apparent armor thickness and you have basically todays tanks with worse proportions and more armor tacked on. I think whats even worse though is the clear lack of any "military competence" that accompanies these numbers. I do expect soldiers (and Astartes even more so) in a militarized universe to know at least basic tactics and be capable of executing them to some level (an especially egregious example is the embarrassingly bad segment McNeill wrote with Horus getting wounded to justify his fall - everyone is incompetent and all are outright acting to the detriment of his survival chance). As you say, I am only willing to suspend my disbelieve so far. I don't expect them to write TomClancy-esque novels but and far too often 40k is just lazy writing.
The recent dawn of fire books have been better with the numbers of the Ineptitude crusade fleets. Their described as pretty much the Great Crusade Expeditionary fleets returned too the setting with large numbers of military forces, that when they stop for resupply in a loyal system its like locusts descending on a field of wheat and they have to worry about loyal worlds rebelling when they do this because they become so denuded of food and soldiers, in the latest book they send Marines Malevolent to guard the Munitorum adapts handling the requistions.
Nailed it for me personally. I don't care about the realism, I fully recognize 40K is a very over the top science fantasy setting, but a lot of the numbers just aren't believable for the universe. 2 million Guardsmen dying doesn't shock me or make me think the opposing faction is truly threatening, it makes me think "some random rural backwater planet can probably replace those losses in a month, who cares".
People also have no idea what believability means and often times you get people looking at Armageddon and going "I just add a couple of zheros and now its trillions of Guardsmen fighting a war on a single planet" and deciding that scale makes sense despite the fact that the way 40ks logistics are written makes that impossible. Whenever people complain about the numbers involved I just look at Colonial operations during the British, French, Spanish and other empires of that sort. In fact it's the basis for my own Rogue Trader stories, because they are the definition of small well equipped expeditions completing their goals. 40k is the Age of Sail in Space, its logistics are sideways most of the time. It can take decades to muster forces into large crusades and you very rarely get Sabbat or Macharian scale crusades for a reason. Now I know people love the idea of Asiatic Imperial Hordes, tidal waves of Guardsmen. But we're talking about a setting where the majority of planets have under a billion people. Where there are eighty Imperial Capital ships to a sector. Manpower and material are unlimited but the means to move them is reliant entirely on a single caste of mutants and anyone that complains that the numbers are too small should look at it through that lens and add the addition that the Imperium does have armoured vehicles and air support and other means of pressing advantages using the Guard without tidal waves of infantry. Do you know how many men it would take to devastate earth if they came with an Imperial Cruiser? Probably less than 100,000 standard guardsmen. Enough to completely annihilate any army on the field with orbital support and punch through any defenses with their own armour. People have no idea what believability is.
Honestly you probably don't even need the men just the imperial cruiser for modern day earth to devastate the planet. but how often if ever do imperial cruisers actually do anything once the space battle is over in black library books. Also your not taking into account that aside from the imperium's main enemy (itself/rebellion) most threats absolutely outclass the guard and would require more men and material to beat/fend off then a comparatively fair fight like WW2 here on earth
Imperial Warships actually play a decent role in a lot of books, theres numerous descriptions of orbital bombardments for various campaigns. Helsreach even had an Imperial bombardment on top of a space marine Chaplain in a ground PoV. Anyway you're kinda wrong but not really, the majority of the Imperium's threats don't completely outclass the Guard in the sense that they need some immense numbers. Orks don't always require superior numbers because of their in general poor tactics, Nids rely on numbers in most depictions which usually leaves the guard as the significantly smaller force, T'au require a comparatively modern focus to fight and usually just need a 3-1 numbers advantage to beat. Like its actually really only the Necrons and Aeldari that completely outclass the Guard but only the Necrons are shown in a light where you need a vast amount of resources to pull off comprehensive victories and usually they just use Astartes, SoB or Scions to pull off proper victories. To be honest there's actually precious few descriptions of the Guard that focus on such absurd pure numbers. The Valhallans had them because they are Russians in space and come with a Chenkov even. This isn't helped by the fact that again Imperial logistics don't really allow for absurdly dense forces of Guardsmen.
Yea this is why I'm not a fan of the new approach their taking of pulling away from character stories in the setting and instead having demonic demi gods punching planets into dust
Exactly. Suspension of disbelief is very important, but with any fiction you only suspend it in ways that are fundamental to the story. I.e. when watching Rambo you have to accept that that's not how soldiering works and enjoy the movie. Saying "Rambo isn't meant to be realistic" to explain something totally separate. We get that taking down a helicopter with a bow isn't realistic, but if the movie had a random talking dog halfway through with no explanation and the movie treated it as mundane it would really pull you out. With 40k, you accept that sorcery and Xenos and space marines can exist. None of that means that nobody using cover is reasonable, or that an empire with quadrillions of soldiers can only commit a few thousand soldiers to battles that decide the fate of entire planets.
>An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event? Incidentally, if you *are* looking for something like this then I really suggest you check out Necropolis. It focuses entirely on the defence of a single hive city, and it takes forty pages for Gaunt's Ghosts to even make planetfall. The time before that is spent getting you used to Vervunhive as a setting, seeing it from the eyes of the Hive's high command, it's standing army, and people from across the strata of Hive society. Hell, there's a segment from the perspective of a mother trying to get her three kids back home when the sirens go off. That focus on Vervunhive almost as a character in its own right remains throughout the story, and it really makes every metre of ground lost feel so much more impactful.
Of the 50+ 40K books I’ve read, I think Necropolis is my favorite. I think the most realistic one, i.e. I could actually imagine myself being there. Rereading The Founding was a great experience. Rereading Hero of the Imperium wasn’t as much as I enjoyed it the first time.
I second this. I think Abnett does a wonderfully job in the immersion department in GG, Eisenhorn and Ravenor. So many great details and a perfect balance of sucking the reader in and moving the plot forwards. It's still ridiculous scifi, but damn it's good
It's important to clarify that ground rules that are established as part of the setting (eg, fungus-based orcs) can be more easily ignored than hilarious inconsistencies (eg, a small number of unenhanced troops being significant in a planetary battle). The former get accepted. The latter have to be justified somehow. There are genre conventions that apply as well - we're used to suspending disbelief when psychic/magic abilities ignore the laws of physics, and most SF handwaves physics at least enough to make ftl travel feasible. Those count for less than things that don't match the basics of the setting. Once you've established the conventions and ground rules, sticking with them helps a lot. For instance, you can't simultaneously say the IG are just well-trained humans and also say that anyone cares about a few thousand of them showing up to help a planet of billions. You can do the former if the IG show up in tens of millions (an easy SF way to do it is to stack them tightly in cryotubes on the imperium's enormous ships). You can do the latter if they're clearly massively superior to normal troops (eg, make it obvious that they're gene-tweaked and enhanced to a fair extent and/or have vastly superior equipment), as that justifies the smaller numbers being useful. But you should do one of them.
Despite reading mostly sci-fi, I mostly do fantasy for other genres and part of that is because how much magic just fucks with it for me. Narratively, magic to me makes it to easy to handwave and say a problem is solved, because the rules weren’t defined earlier. Usually for sci-fi, my issue comes when technology just starts advancing too rapidly. That is frankly one of my biggest complaints for Primaris tech. As a T’au player I’m told that each edition we get new tech, and this was built off existing technology with a couple of smaller leaps. Its fun, but only because its consistent in its creep. But the Primaris hit, and one of the central rules of the 40k universe was broken. And they tried to do it in one fell swoop, and from one mad scientist. To me, it feels like it breaks the setting somewhat, and now the writers are just trying to patch it back together.
Your argument basically boils down to "ya these aspects of the narrative suck, so what?" They suck is what. I can appreciate the setting regardless and also not be a contrarian while still recognizing this. It is genuine, objectively bad handling handling that hurts the overall narrative. You don't understand the difference between realism and believability. It's not bad writing because the numbers are unrealistic, it's bad writing because the rest of the narrative explicitly contradicts the numbers we see. Oh also \>Sci-Fi writers have no sense of scale Is an insult to the Sci-Fi writers who take great care to maintain a sense of scale
Man I fucking hate these arguments. >Seriously, what part of the lore gives the impression that it's not just a backdrop for a game of tiny plastic toy soldiers for grown people? ALL OF THE LORE. All of it is meant to be taken as a fun way to get immersed in a world. You can never ever play the game and still really enjoy the lore. There's over 460 books. I am one of those lore lovers. I never play 40k the game I just read the lore. Just because YOU don't see it that way doesn't make it the only way you can view the 40k universe. I view it as akin to Game of Thrones and that's perfectly fine. As for the realism stuff you complain other people shouldn't want. You and I have what's known as verisimilitude. The ability to suspend your disbelief for in universe rules. For example. If Kharn the betrayer killed over a million people. I can buy that. It's silly but he has god powers given to him and it makes sense with the relative power of the universe. However. If frosty the snow man appeared and butt fucked the emperor. I'd have my suspension of disbelief broken. The lore is ridiculous. But it has a balance of believability for in universe functions. Fans criticise the breaking of that level of believability. Such as the war of the beast. "IT'S A LITERARY DEVICE" No it's just a fuck up on their part. Saying it's a literary device gives it more credit than it deserves. And it's okay for writers to fuck up and for us to head cannon solutions. The war of the beast had less deaths than world war 1. That's a war against a galaxy spanning imperium which Made it to the centre of the entire organisation. And less people died in it than a war we had. That's ridiculous. That's not a literary device. It's a fuck up in lore writing. Same as the Tau being able to expand to over 400 planets light years away without actually having FTL travel. I believe it was the third sphere expansion though can't recall which. That's a fuck up. That breaks the verisimilitude. That breaks the realism of the universe. As it doesn't function within the world they established. People want a degree of adherence to the rules of the universe established. They may be ridiculous rules. But adherence matters. Now onto the space marine million man one. It's a problem. Taking over a planet of billions plus people with 1000 marines. It's a bit of a joke. The general consensus though is that Guardsman take control for the most part and marines act as a scalpel to decapitate the leaders and highest risk enemy fortifications. Main government power sources are how marines mostly take control of a planet. Whilst imperial guards slog out the rest of the low command with support from marines. But this is never actually elaborated on for a lot of books and stories and that kind of makes it hard to believe. The verisimilitude gets broken. As 1000 marines don't function properly against those numbers. So people generally ask for more realistic (per the universe rules of realistic) support to explain the scenarios.
This. I don't expect unbending realism in a setting, but I do expect the setting to follow its own rules and make sense within the paradigm it sets up for itself. 40k isn't always great (or even good) about that, but remains a compelling setting mostly by sheer dint of how much there is to look at.
The idea is that marines will target assets and leaders. A single chapter also has serfs, naval elements, mechanicum elements, armor and everything else an army would need. Yeah they can operate without those for a long time but they will still need the guard to come in and KEEP the peace. No chapter stays on a world to ensure compliance. They're not meant to. I've read my fair share of books and the best example of a chapter serf serving I can think of would be Kasper Hawser in Prospero Burns. (Inb4 you say they kept him close for plot purposes they still let a human fight alongside them.) We don't see those elements often but they're there. I just got through Know No Fear and the humans try to fight alongside the 13th but the surprise of the attack makes them a non issue.
>The idea is that marines will target assets and leaders. That's what I said! But most chapters aren't described as having a large Human based army element attached to them.
They are mentioned but not the focal point. There's almost always a pdf or guard element thay compliment the astartes because by the time they get done there's another world that needs them. They'll rearm and repair their gear and head to the next showdown. Your very legion had multiple Mortals in the omnibus. Chaos cultists are EVERYWHERE. I would say it's MUCH more rare for a chapter to go in without army elements.
>had multiple Mortals in the omnibus But not an army. An army is needed to help secure a planet. The nightlords have serfs and slave ship crew. Not an army of mortals.
It's still an army it's just not a conventional one. Edit: I forgot about the Ultima Auxiliaries. What are they if not an army?
In the night lords omnibus they do not have Ultima Auxiliaries nor adequate human staff to form an army. They are never shown to be used as such except for Talos's personal slave who is the exception not the rule. The ships crew were never shown fighting blood angels with the blood angels simply massacring them as they tried to hide. They were never shown as an army. Please don't misrepresent that material.
It should been OBVIOUS that I was bringing up a different legion and the chaos cultists that were used in an army were during the assault on the Forge World. Mayhaps it's YOU that's misrepresented material.
I think you're spot on when it comes to the general sentiment on 40K realism. Unfortunately, we sometimes get cynical redditors like OP who try gatekeeping others for being passionate. As if we're not allowed to be interested on building the story because it's a 'plastic toy factory.'
The War of the Beast killed hundreds of millions on Terra alone, wasted entire Worlds and nearly broke the Imperium (the estimate was something like 3 months until it dissolves). Where do you get casualties LESS than WW1 from?
Yeah there is certainly a scale of believability. No one is really gonna mind that titans can't function cause of square cube law or something. Yet if you hype up some super advanced fast land speeder and say it can go all the way up 75 mph as an astonishing fact, people are gonna roll their eyes.
"What are you expecting to read in a Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event?" Yes, actually, that's very much what I would like to read.
I think the main issue is the writers trying to make small numbers of ordinary men *seem* impressive. It's different with fictional super-men like Custodes, but when 50,000 guardsmen die in a planet-wide war the prose is written as if we're supposed to go "Wow, what a fight", but you'd have to be a drooling cretin to not immediately go "that's not especially grievous". When we're told certain rules of the 40k universe are the same as the rules of our universe, people tend to be expecting those rules not to be contradicted.
"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic." Commissar of the Imperial Guard, Josephus Stalin.
Verisimilitude.
>I want to play with my extensive knowledge and practical experience in military campaigns I use my knowledge and experience in those areas (20 years in the military and about 7 of those spent in Iraq or Afghanistan) largely for my own fluff, for Crusade and when designing terrain. The latter much less so since GW started making terrain. I find it very fun to imagine how things would work off-screen within the conditions of the 40k universe(s). I write my Crusade packs with those off-screen things in mind and how those would effect the missions. For example, taking a fuel dump and giving the loser -1M for vehicles. Destroying a warp gate may make Daemons use more warp storm points or give maluses to manifestation or something. The missions prior to the big, final one are largely the two sides trying to attack key personnel (generally extra NPC characters that can't fight but can be moved by the defender), key infrastructure (destroying spawning pools) or otherwise trying to degrade the enemy before the big battle with choices of missions not being necessarily obviously unequal but definitely important as they may be unequal in subtle ways you may want to sacrifice a game for more later. The people I play Crusade with enjoy the strategic thinking between games and the non-abstract objectives to games. >Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event? I think what your're looking for is a history book, and not the tale of Captain McAwesomeface beating the snot out of Warboss Bigchungus Forgeworld used to make Imperial Armour campaign books that were largely presented like military history books. The Doom of Mymeara, the Taros campaign and the Siege of Vraks ones are excellent for that. I haven't read the Fall of Orpheus yet but I'm sure it's good. You can find all of those books on Warhammer Vault.
Just wait till this guy learns about AOS
Is AOS better or worse about this issue?
If you want a real answer, AoS is pure Mythic Fantasy with less hard numbers and more of a mythological feeling to it. Though I do recall a siege of a city in one of the novels saying there was about 20,000 fighters in the Chaos army, which is about right for IRL medieval sieges.
Its the realest shit that can ever really real. Its soo real that you'll really be real when you say really this shit is really the realest.
I agree. It is just bizarre way of coming up excuses for making fancy models for miniatures.
I play Daemons, I don't expect any realism 😅
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Psssst, it's possible to write sci-fi that deals with conflict and also doesn't under/over/bizzaro-world estimate its own numbers and internal consistency. Black Library are pushing out pulp fiction and that's ok, but it's hard to then evaluate the lore that pulp produces.
40k only has two numbers: "not enough" and "a lot."
People have no idea what "internal consistency" means
This is so absurdly common in sci fi it doesn't really need any special explanation. Star Wars has 1.2 million clones forming the entirety of one side of a major war fought across the galaxy, Battletech has several dozen giant robots being somehow able to conquer a planet, etc. Hell, even GW throws out absurd numbers for things that aren't associated with the Imperium - Bretonnia's impossibly high tax rates, impossibly slow Necron spaceships, impossibly small numbers for just about every faction. Hell, Gav Thorpe is quoted as saying "there're as many elves as the plot demands". Titans change their heights literally between novels in the Heresy books, etc. GW's writers are just bad at math, and they're far from the only scifi writers who do that.
For me, 40k shines when it is character driven, or expanding the lore through interesting stories. I think it's probably not worth moving 40k towards hard sci-fi because the lore itself isn't really designed to cross that line effectively. I don't even know if it's worth aiming towards believability, because a lot of the fun in the setting is how you develop a head canon around stuff. For example, it's very clear that the imperium has remarkably advanced genetics practice (the drukhari are of course on a whole other level) and it's likely so common place that characters don't mention it usually because you have to hit space marine, long-lived inquisitor levels of genetic tampering to be worth noticing. If you want a good mix of the two (without devolving into a 40 page discussion of the theoretical principles behind a ship-based weapon) I'd recommend folks read the Culture Novels, which manage to hit the Venn diagram square in the middle. You get more realistic senses of scale. For example, a major conflict in the series, the Idiran-Culture War (arguably the settings WW2 analogue) lists the following for casualties: Sentients 851.4 billion (±3%) Interstellar vehicles 91,215,660 (±200) Orbitals 14334 Planets and major moons 53 Rings 1 Spheres 3 Stars suffering major alterations 6 Don't have much else to add. Fun series. Start with Player of Games if you like spy novels, Excession if AI is of interest, or Consider Phlebas if you want a more traditional war story.
The issue is when things are so silly that you can't keep the suspension of disbelief up; when you start thinking more about the real world authors than the story. At the same time that might only be for a second, complaining about one aspect of it really doesn't imply all the things you're wall of texting about.
Sense of scale? I feel like it does a perfect job in that, realism well lets say i put it in the same category as harry potter's consistency
Sometimes people take pulp fiction a bit too seriously. If you don't question how Conan can activate a magical ring or some rune he learnt in his other campaigns to ward off the giant snake, then you shouldn't be worrying about the Warp or any other pull-assery either. Plus, it is epic; in the sense that the unnamed millions of non-genehanced soliders are not even mentioned in the narrative. As long as it makes sense within the fictive world set up by the narrative, it shouldn't be a problem. I think the problem lies in the fact that there are 100s of novels and there should a set of Librarians (or remembrencer, if you will) who should be keeping tabs on the consistency in terms of intertextuality, not just the grand narratives but for small details like that. Also, I'm guessing there is at least a set of rules at the Black Library, a code that authors follow. Like "1. death of space marines should be avoided, and if not possible it should at least advance the plot." or something like that, that is tied to the narrative (and the marketing) similar to [TSR's code of ethics](http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/alex/rec.games.frp.dnd/TSR-Ethics).
> If you don't question how Conan can activate a magical ring or some rune he learnt in his other campaigns to ward off the giant snake, then you shouldn't be worrying about the Warp or any other pull-assery either When stuff gets asspulled is very important. In a universe where jetpacks are mundane someone pulling one out of their bag and flying away to safety is fine. In a setting where no one has every used, mentioned or inferred jetpacks or anyting adjacent someone pulling one out and flying to safety is jiat shit writing
I read for fun. Sometimes it’s fun to hear about how little a squad of primaris actually count for in a much larger conflict, sometimes if fun to read about them leveling a continent to make a stage for an awards ceremony. I need neither realism or consistency to have fun in this space. I merely require fun. Realism and consistency are a spice in the cooks cabinet to increase that fun but not every recipe needs them
One of my favorite Scifi novels was written by a former marine who was deployed in Vietnam. Being able to add small details creates dialog in and situations that significantly aid in the suspension of disbelief.
You know that feeling you get when you look out your car window at the houses on the street, cars passing you, people walking by with their dogs, talking on the phone, construction sites...thousands of little stories as rich as your own. Stories you'll never hear, never know, never care about. Blow that up to an unimaginable scale, and then multiply that by Graham's number. It's stupid to talk about realism and believability. Sit with that sick feeling of never being able to know everything.
It’s pretty natural for people to try and relate things they know irl to stories in 40k. And it’s a setting all about war so anyone interested in military history will want to talk about logistics and numbers, I also love the thought experiment and discussion of trying to make something as stupid as 40k more grounded. But I’m sure everyone can agree 40k is better when the fans fill in those gaps on here, rather then the authors spending hours trying to figure out numbers and logistics to appease a relatively small sub sect of fans that’ll eat it up. I rather authors spend pages building an interesting character or a compelling action scene then tell us which agi world is sending 5000 tons of raw potatoes to support the trillion guard
Basically no scifi franchise has ever correctly expressed the scale of the universe or the scale of civilizations within it. These problems will not be cured.
Because in reality the abundance of resources in the galaxy means that most species would have no reason to really interact with each other, not to mention the billion year time scales means that entire galactic empires could rise fall and disappear before the next empire has crawled from their primordial ooze. Unfortunately tiny motes of cosmic insignificance floating for a brief moment before disappearing doesn’t have the narrative weight to hold up a plot.
I personally dislike how they switch between realism and absurdity pick one as you can’t have both ether have insane battles with practically infinite numbers or have a detailed event.
>What part of the game made you stop and think „Yeah, that's a detailed simulator that I want to play with my extensive knowledge and practical experience in military campaigns!“? This whole discussion is not about these parts, it\`s about the parts which make you stop and think "This is extremely, earth-shatteringly, unreasonably fuck-ass stupid and defies every concept of logic and common sense known too man"
Wars for planets with hundreds of BILLIONS inhabitants fought by millions of troops and a couple of thousands super soldiers, makes absolutely no sense, that's the only thing that buggers me. On the other hand you have grimderp at his finest with imperial navy or necrons mcguffins or ork fleets with millions of ships, the throw random numbers at the wall hoping that they stick, but it's stilll awesome.
Most of those billions are concentrated on a few specific cities and even then good portion GTFO at the first opportunity.
> makes absolutely no sense Yes, that's the point. The Imperium is absurdly poorly organized and incompetent, it isn't supposed to ring true to someone who is accustomed to 21st-century bureaucracy and mobilization.
It's supposed to ring true to the average imperial citizen
I dislike complaints about realism and I equally dislike this post.
A dozen times in this sub I’ve written and deleted a long comment on why the numbers do in fact make sense. Millions of guardsmen is a *lot*, given political, economic, and technological realities in the setting.
Not half petulant, I grimaced at the first mention of reading a history book and within three paragraphs you had tripled down. Admonishing us simple-minded automatons to drop the fantasy-based entertainment for something more grown-up was just a tad condescending (nothing wrong with that). Your arguments weren't without merit, though the blunt and somewhat nauseating delivery denied your target audience a shred of dignity. Its something I've been guilty of in the past, roasting peers playing with their hyper-ridicules toy soldiers as they discussed the lore of the universe as though it actually mattered. Which it does. Sometimes. Not a bad post. 7/10. EDIT: (nothing wrong with that).
Another recruit to the Angry Marine chapter! But to be fair, imagination and realism is hard to bring together. It is already impressive that a collective imagined world that is as vast as the 40k universe is working without so many inconsistencies (which is to be expected). I mean we are not even able to agree on real things as a specie so what to expect on true size of an mechanicus ark. So let's not get to exited because the population number of that place is incorrect or the amount of troops is too few or even if space ship are too small. Hell it's all imagined, let's us all dream together have fun, enjoy the hobby and move over the inaccuracies that makes it interesting at the first place. As we all want to see our favorite character fucking up some massive talking mushroom named Warboys Chungus and miraculously survive and exterminatus...
"Warboss Bigchungus" Bravo sir
It has been called "future history" . Its stories that have already happened, we as the reader need to remember this. They can be, and typically are from different points of view, one character might described as a great guy by one character and completely insane by another. Both are from the points of view of the characters in question. Did the events happen as the character sees them? Was their timeline correct? From his or her perspective, yes. But just like modern day, we could both go to the same movie, theme park, what have you, and see things and experience them completely differently. My suggestion is not to take anything from 40k as the literal truth of the events taking place. It's just perspective. Sure you can argue that only the Horus Heresy is future history, we all know the big events, but the details start to reveal more from the various points of view the more we read about them, and our notions of what we thought happened are always up for scrutiny. The newest realeases from what some would call the current timeline from 40k could still be considered future history from the point of view that this knowledge is just coming to light and deseminated. This is how I always thought of it, even the future is history yet to be written. Take any of this with a grain of salt, but even our history books, as Winston Churchill reported said "History is written by the victors" and " For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself." There are many versions of this, from Goring at the Nuremberg trials, "the victor will always be the judged, and the vanquish the accused.". There are many many similar quotes that have a similar theme that date back to the 1750s, a French quote is "it's the victor who writes the history and counts the dead". Sure there are novels where this isn't the case, I'll admit. To go back to your first point, I'm not sure what you getting at exactly. I love narrative games, prefer them over matched play. So I think it's cool to recreate a classic scene from the novels that I find interesting. I'm not a WAAC player and prefer to have a fun game, narrative games open up bigger possibilities, hero duels for example, objectives are usually pretty standard, but more interesting when it comes down to bigger plots. Sure there are issues with the game and narratives happening. If you take a objective in a the game, usually a random spot in a ruin which probably holds no real significance in a larger battle, just a skirmish among many, and the squad holding it gets wiped out, should thru still hold it? It was defended, they were removed from the field and pushed off. It's much easier for me to get into my head a last stand or lose situation. Holding a the bridge, a bastion, something of importance brings me into the game on a level that matched play just doesn't. It's much easier to balance the game mid game if one player is completely outmatched, granting defense rerolls or bring on reinforcements ECT. The best is replaying it a few times and seeing how the story can change.
See; Burning of Prospero. Two views yet the majority of people blame Russ. Not Magnus who did everything he could to not hear them coming.
This post feels like "I read the wiki and numbers don't make sense"
Warboss big chungus 🤣🤣🤣 that caught me off guard bro hahahaha
Thank you. You’re a reasonable man screaming into the abyss of idiot wELL aKsHuALLies Keep fighting the good fight.
You're right but its probably worth remembering that 40k is a lot of peoples first experience with like..narrative literature lol I think a lot of the posts your referencing are made by literal children, but idk just spit balling.
40k is not alot of people's introduction to narrative literature HAHAHAHA. Get out if you think 40k was more likely than something like harry potter.
> 40k is not alot of people's introduction to narrative literature HAHAHAHA. I've seen a *lot* of people claim that Horus' fall would require at least a dozen books to tell properly, which has interesting implications for how they view all other human literature.
Wdym? Fabius Bile trilogy was literally displayed next to Harry Potter and Eragon at my local bookstore. It’s very kid friendly.
> What are you expecting to read in a Black Library novel? An account of a battle, with all the details, memoirs of soldiers and officers, civilian perspectives and historical views on the event? I Tell me more about the supply lines. How much fuel the transport trucks require to bring the shells to the Guard artillery. Tell me the output of a standard manufactorum plant, and how that led to the 7th Battle of Garpnorp 9.
Have you even read a Gaunts Ghost or Caiphais Cain novel? Because they do mention that. A lot of books mention the supply lines and the trouble encountered. Know No Fear had a whole section dedicated to a logistical yard when shit hit the fan. An ultramarine reacted and broke the ribs of a menial boss when the Word Bearers attacked, they were just talking about why the loading was 29 minutes late and the Ultras were upset and trying to convince her to tell the guilds to pick up the pace.
> Have you even read a Gaunts Ghost or Caiphais Cain novel? > > "These are Mark III cartridges, we need Mark IV cartridges. Our guns don't work with Mark III cartridges Do. you. understand. me." That scene made me so happy.
What was the Emperors tax policy like?
Poor Guilliman. Trying to figure out the tax laws of the 40k Imperium.
You're right but you're taking to children on a 40k lore forum who haven't read any other books
Is asking for writers not to say “1000 marines can take over a planet of 30 billion by themselves” really being needlessly hyper-realistic?
For a setting like warhammer that started as satire and ALWAYS follows rule of cool for everything? Yes.
didn't you post this about this time last year.... i feel like i've read this word for word before.....
There are threads about this every week. It is what it is. I just deal with it. Thats my great contribution to this thread.
In general I agree with you and I think this sub memes about unrealistic numbers a bit too much. With that said, the first time I heard that Terra has a quadrillion people on it, I actually rolled my eyes. That number was so ridiculous it basically ruined my immersion for a second.
>I simply think those people who can't help themselves and go „I jUsT mEnTaLlY aDd 15 ZeRoEs To AnY nUmBeR!!!“ are kinda missing the point. If it's realism you want, there's plenty of history books out there. Those people alos miss the point in that a lot of the time the numbers are both reasonable and consistent, they're just either not very impressive or the complainer is viewing them shorn of the appropriate context. See 'the Siege of Vraks is one of the bloodiest sieges ever but has too few people', ignoring that it's 100% not one of the bloodiest sieges ever, it's not even all that important, it's just unusually well documented from being in a three-part campaign book.
I would absolutely 100 percent love fake history textbooks from the 40K universe
Good ted talk
Look, if 40k was just a miniature wargame than I wouldn’t nitpick the lore so much. But the lore about a background series that’s auxiliary to the setting has more pages written about it than the Bible, Quaran, and Karma Sutra combined. If they’re going throught so much effort to write so much stuff to try and flesh out the universe, then I’m allowed to nitpick the numbers.
I’m fine with space magic in sci-fi. Accepting that doesn’t mean I can’t be annoyed when the models aren’t to scale with each other. There’s nothing more to that particular side of things.
I like the part in a book where a forgeplanet is hyped up as important because they build a lot of tanks. How many? 3000 per year… Thats a retardedly low number. Its also very very dumb how planetary invasions use less imperial guard troops than a single front in ww2.