Joined
·
63 Posts
I have been reading some of the forgeworld books from the horus heresy and normal 40k and I noticed something. The army sizes are usually really small for forces that operate on a galactic scale and sometimes going long times without resuply. For example the imperial army at the muster of calth was only 1 million. That is smaller than just the army of the united states and this is supposedly the army of one entire hiveworld.
Now in and of itself that might just be how large armies are in 40 but the reason I am confused is the fact that hive are regularly in the exes of billions of people and the naval vessels of the imperium especially are weird to me. The dauntless class light cruise, one of the smallest ships. Has a crew of 65000. So if you have 10 of these in a fleet, which isn't to many for a 40k fleet battle, you already have more than half of your ground army?
And that is without taking larger ships into account.
While the amount of people in those ships seems perfectly normal, the face that the land army is ridiculously smaller in comparison just seems a weird conflict of scale. Even more so when you consider that in the fluff of the imperial guard they are described as drowning the enemy in bodies.
Should I just disregard horus heresy numbers as artistic licence to keep things approachable for story reasons, a bit like in star wars. Or were battles in the horus heresy just smaller than in 40k for whatever reason?
I am really curious and I couldn't find anything about in online so I thought I would ask
.
Now in and of itself that might just be how large armies are in 40 but the reason I am confused is the fact that hive are regularly in the exes of billions of people and the naval vessels of the imperium especially are weird to me. The dauntless class light cruise, one of the smallest ships. Has a crew of 65000. So if you have 10 of these in a fleet, which isn't to many for a 40k fleet battle, you already have more than half of your ground army?
And that is without taking larger ships into account.
While the amount of people in those ships seems perfectly normal, the face that the land army is ridiculously smaller in comparison just seems a weird conflict of scale. Even more so when you consider that in the fluff of the imperial guard they are described as drowning the enemy in bodies.
Should I just disregard horus heresy numbers as artistic licence to keep things approachable for story reasons, a bit like in star wars. Or were battles in the horus heresy just smaller than in 40k for whatever reason?
I am really curious and I couldn't find anything about in online so I thought I would ask