Warhammer 40K Theories: There Are More Marines Around Now Than Ever
Grab your calculators 40K fans. It’s time to talk some surprising Astartes numbers.
The Space Marines are the Emperor’s Sword. They are the best warriors humanity has to offer to fight the darkness that everyday eats away at the Imperium. However, like the Imperium, they are a shadow of their former self. The Horus Heresy crushed the old Legions, and millennia of war have worn down the Chapters. The Marines are stretched thin. The standard line is that prior to the arrival of the Primaris, there were 1000 Chapters of 1000 Marines. In other words, 1,000,000 Marines. In many cases, it seems that Marines die faster than they can be made. Certainly, Space Marine numbers were down from the time of the Great Crusade. Most felt they would never recover. However, with the addition of the Primaris, all this changed, and there might well be more Marines around than ever. Let’s take a look.
The Primaris
The Primaris Space Marines are the largest single addition to the Adeptus Astartes 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 Indomtius Crusade, hordes of the newly awoken Marines have worked to reestablish Imperial control. But just how many Primaris Marines are there?
Cawl’s Gift
Sadly we aren’t given any solid total numbers here. We do have some hints 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 Ultima Founding. The other half were formed into a group known as the Unnumbered Sons or the Greyshields. The Greyshields traveled with the Indomitus Crusade. They fought in their own formations. They were also 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. It was here that the Greyshields were disbanded. 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.
About 94% of the 1,000 existing classic Marines chapters have accepted some Primaris members. So we can add a minimum of 940 to the Greysheilds. We also know the Ultramarines at least seem to have a full company of them. Let’s add an extra 100. Not taking into account any battle casualties this would argue an absolute bare minimum of 23,040 Greysheilds. However, this would be half the Primais force. We can add in another 23,040 from the Ultima Founding. this gives us a total of 46,080 Primaris as the bare 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, were only half the total Primaris Marines. They 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 126,000. That means there were just about 2,267,000 Marines active at the time!
Though some say there were a bit “smaller”
The most common number you hear for Legion size is, however 100,000. 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 (though since Guilliman formed them, maybe to him, a Legion size is 250,000?). 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.
Doing the Math – 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. Indeed, they may be making new Primaris faster than they lose them.
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. Many of these have since been converted to Primaris, but this would not affect the overall number. It’s possible indeed that the Crusade launched with over 5,000,000 Marines. This is larger than the roughly 2,267,000 Marines active then were active at the start of the Horus Heresy and likely the largest number of Marines that have ever been active at once.
Woe be to the enemies of the Imperium!
Let us know what you think about this math, down in the commnets!
