James workshop is also very bad at scale in their own universe though. You'll have 100 year full scale wars over entire systems and the lore will say some shit like "3 million casualties of IG over the course of the war"; like that's probably not even in the top 10 casualties list of imperial Chinese rebellions.
Worse is their space marine treatment, where apparently a million known space marines is enough to serve as shock troops over the entirety of their holdings in the galaxy.
Rule of cool and all, but every time I see a 40k novel mention numbers I have to add two zeros to the end for it to actually make sense given the quadrillions of imperials and the other quadrillions of their enemies.
100% in general, famously the leman russ tank has a comically small amount of armor. But when it comes to space marines specifically, imo part of the point is that the symbol of the Imperium's strength is spread too thin and is completely lacking, which is part of why the Imperium has been in a constant spiraling decline for over ten thousand years. I'll admit this take makes a bit less sense since they started advancing the timeline.
That is exactly why in Fantasy, they say "There are exactly as many Elves as the story needs".
(Even that doesn't justify though, the elves apparently being in such a population crisis that the death of even one elf is enough to be considered a tragedy for the race, yet hundreds of elves regularly die in battle, and every year, the Dark Elves celebrate Murder Christmas.)
Not that chuds have ever been good at math.
Earth/Terra alone is supposed to have a few quadrillion.
Umm, uhhh, Terra isn't a recruiting world for any chapters so it doesn't count
James workshop is also very bad at scale in their own universe though. You'll have 100 year full scale wars over entire systems and the lore will say some shit like "3 million casualties of IG over the course of the war"; like that's probably not even in the top 10 casualties list of imperial Chinese rebellions.
Worse is their space marine treatment, where apparently a million known space marines is enough to serve as shock troops over the entirety of their holdings in the galaxy.
Rule of cool and all, but every time I see a 40k novel mention numbers I have to add two zeros to the end for it to actually make sense given the quadrillions of imperials and the other quadrillions of their enemies.
100% in general, famously the leman russ tank has a comically small amount of armor. But when it comes to space marines specifically, imo part of the point is that the symbol of the Imperium's strength is spread too thin and is completely lacking, which is part of why the Imperium has been in a constant spiraling decline for over ten thousand years. I'll admit this take makes a bit less sense since they started advancing the timeline.
That is exactly why in Fantasy, they say "There are exactly as many Elves as the story needs".
(Even that doesn't justify though, the elves apparently being in such a population crisis that the death of even one elf is enough to be considered a tragedy for the race, yet hundreds of elves regularly die in battle, and every year, the Dark Elves celebrate Murder Christmas.)