Warhammer 40K: Just How Many Primaris Marines Are There? – PRIME
Grab your calculators. Let’s talk some Astartes numbers.
The Primaris Space Marines are the largest single addition to the Adeptus Astartes, and the most reinforcement the Imperium has received since the end of the Horus Heresy. These enhanced warriors are an improvement upon even the Emperor’s own work, His Angels of Death. Not only are they individually mighty, and armed with new and powerful weapons, but they come in staggering numbers. Across the wide galaxy as part of the Indomtis Crusade hordes of the newly awoken Marines have worked to reestablish Imperial control. But just how many Primaris Marines are there? Let’s take a look.
Cawl’s Gift
Sadly we aren’t given any solid total numbers here, but we do have some things to work with. When Cawl delivered the Primaris to Guilliman, he divided them into two groups. Half of the new Primaris were formed into brand new Chapters of their own. The other half were formed into a group known as the Unnumbered Sons or the Greyshields. The Greyshields traveled with the Indomitus Crusade and fought as their own formations. Besides, they were used to form new Chapters as needed and to reinforce existing chapters along the way.
The Greyshields
At what was the end of the Indomitus Crusade at the Battle of the Pit of Ruakos, now just the end of the first phase, there were still 20,000 Unnumbered Sons, as stated in Dark Imperium. If we take “new chapters” that some Greysheilds were split off to form as a bare minimum of 2, that adds 2,000 to the number. Since about 94% of the 1,000 existing classic MArine chapters have accepted some Primaris members, we can add a minimum of 940 to the Greysheilds, though we know the Ultramarines at least seem to have a full company of them so let’s add an extra 100. Not taking into account any battle casualties this would argue an absolute bare minimum of 23,040 Greysheilds, as this would be half the Primais force we can add in another 23,040 from the Ultma Founding for a total of 46,080 Primaris as the minimum at the start of the Indomitus Crusade.
Legions on Legions
I guess we know there are at least 9 Primaris Marines out there.
That number is, however, way on the low end. The Unnumbered Sons, only half the total Primaris Marines, were said to have been divided into nine groups (one for each Primarch Gene-line). These groups have been described as each being the size of an old Legion. Now the size of an old Legion could vary from 10,000 in older sources to 250,000, the more recent numbers given for Ultramarines at the time of the Heresy. Based on the most recent lore the average size at the start of the Heresy was 126,00, with just about 2,267,000 Marines active at the time. The most common number you hear for Legion size is however 100,000, so I’d guess when they say “legion size” that is the size they are thinking of. This would mean the Unnumbered Sons started the Crusade with 900,000 Marines, and that the Ultima founding formed another 900,000 into 900 new chapters (if you go by the 1000 Marines to a Chapter, the number is closer to 700 Chapters if you take the actual 1200-1400 Marine size of Chapters into account.) (As an outlier we can also say the maximum number of Primaris Marines was less than 4,500,000, as this would reflect them being based on the largest known Legion size of 250,000 for the Ultramarines). This would suggest that the Ultima founding nearly doubled the number of existing Marine Chapters and that there are about twice as many Primaris Marines as classic Marines.
Is This Reasonable?
We do have some additional evidence that suggests these numbers are reasonable. In the novel Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son, Space Marine Captain Vitrian Messinius is present on Cawl’s flagship the Zar-Quaesitor when the Primaris Project is unveiled. There he sees a demonstration of thousands of Primaris Marines and it is clear that these are but a small part of the overall force. In addition, he sees a single room that contains more than enough unused MK. X Marine armor to equip all the existing Marines. If we go by the most common numbers, of 1000 chapters of 1000 Marines, this means that the room contains more than a million suits of armors (also assuming Messinius isn’t exaggerating). As far as we know Classic Marines don’t use MK. X armor, meaning this is all meant either for Primaris Marines that had not yet awoken or for ones that would be made in the future. While this doesn’t give us hard numbers, it does show the scale Cawl was working at and suggests that 1,800,000 is a very reasonable number.
The Total Number
Putting this all together we can say that at the start of the Indomitus Crusade there were between 46,080 and 4,500,000 Primaris Marines in existence. Most likely, based on the common use of Legion, the number was around 1,800,000. Since that time the Primaris have no doubt taken many losses, but at the same time, they have been making new Marines at an increased speed. In addition, some number of Classic Marines have crossed the Rubicon and become Primaris Marines. So while we can’t know how many are currently active it’s possible there are now more around than at the start.
As a last note, if we include the roughly 1,000,000 active Classic Marines to the Primaris numbers, we can see that at the start of the Indomitus Crusade the Imperium could call upon 2,800,000 Marines of various types. This is a larger number of Marines then were active at the start of the Horus Heresy and likely the largest number of Marines that have ever been active at once.
