Quantifying the Imperium of Man

[Sarevok]

Is there any information on the size and scale of the Imperium of Man in warhammer 40000? By information I mean concrete statements or numbers. Most of the info I found on 40k is vogue anecdotes about how its so HUGE. But I am sure given the volume of 40k media there is bound to be some good and useful information. Specifically what are the numbers for.

- planets in the imperium.
- total number of warships.
- warship production per year.

Has anyone found any answers ?

[Serafina]

There is a sticky for that...

Anyway, you won't get anay concrete numbers, but there are some good order-of magnitude approximations in Connors analytics.

[Sarevok]

Well the threads here and Connors work in particular is the best approach I have seen. But they dealt mostly with the issue of firepower. I could not find an analysis on 40k industrial capabilities like for star wars or star trek here or elsewhere. Hence I was curious whether anyone approached that angle on 40k since a lot of vs debates boil down to "oh the IoM is very big and anyone attacking will get drowned in numbers".

[Darth Hoth]

The rulebook fluff has it, as far as I know, that the IoM has one million worlds, or perhaps a couple of million (as anyone who reads 40k knows, their census could likely carry a margin of error of a few hundred percent or so). I am, however, more or less completely ignorant about the last two revisions of the game, which may have changed things. If I recall correctly, some of Connor's later stuff implied a territory that was an order of magnitude greater or more, though that was probably based on novels (which are supposedly of lower canonical standing).

As for warships - no idea, although the fact that ships that are hundreds of years old are still maintained does not argue in favour of there being a large production surplus over the Holy Fleets' requirements. I am fairly certain that there was a fleetcount thread around here a couple of years ago, but cannot recall any details.

[Serafina]

As far as i know, the "one million worlds" refers to starsytems or small sectors (two or three systems), since they are apparently thrown together in that census.

[Darth Hoth]

That would be an acceptable extrapolation on the canon, I suppose. So, somewhere in the vicinity of ten million worlds or so as an upper-end estimate?

[Steel]

As a back of the envelope number for warships, in the BFG rulebook it describes how Imperial space is divided into sectors of 200ly cubes with 75 active warships (>1 km long) per sector. The Imperium covers the entire galaxy, but assume for the moment it only covers only from the core to a radius of 10,000ly (as opposed to the actual radius of the galaxy which is approx 20-50,000ly) and sectors are only 1 deep (as opposed to the ~1,000ly actual thickness) then we have a region of 7500 sectors with 75 warships. This totals to 560,000 active warships on the low end. There are mentions of numerous reserve or mothball fleets that are not included in the active service figure which could easily double or more the low end figure.

Warship ages are generally said to be of the order of millennia when mentioned, but it could just be selection bias that they only mention them when they're really old. If we take the mean lifetime of a warship to be 1,000 years (a rather long time considering how many ships get destroyed when we see a battle) then they'll need to be producing 560 warships a year to maintain strength. On top of that they've built all their ships in the last 10,000 years, so they must be producing another 56 per year even if they've only just got to that strength. Thats going to be a big minimum again.

(For curiosity if we assume the galaxy is 50,000ly in radius and 600ly deep then we'll get 75 times as many again, which is ~42million).

[NecronLord]

There are approx 32,380 Hive Worlds in the Imperium, according to the latest rulebook.

[Serafina]

And for each hiveworld, you (normally) need a couple of agriculutral worlds, too. People have to eat, and most hiveworlds are shitty for food production.