Sisters... How many?

[Charlo]

Howdy forumites, I was just having a think and in the fluff it would seem that across the imperium the sisters muet be pretty numerous? Do we have an idea of how many sisters there are? We know there is roughly 1000x1000 marines so are the sisters much greater than this or much less?

[Fibonacci]

The last time this topic came up I believe it was narrowed down to between ten thousand and two billion.

[*Furyou Miko]

Depending on your source. The only studio answers we've gotten are the 2e codex saying "Six major orders of between five hundred and ten thousand Sisters each" and a blurb from a character for the Inquisitor RPG that put the Adepta Sororitas recruiting 500 new members a year.

Fantasy Flight then give us something like 15,000 Martyred Lady in the Calixis Sector alone.

Our very own Fulkes estimates that there are about two billion, but she pulls the numbers out of thin air and 'what's reasonable'. Which doesn't exactly fit with GW thought processes.

[Charlo]

Excellent! I think I'd like them to be more numerous than Space Marines personally, maybe many minor Ordos accross lots of worlds with a small but able force of Sisters per one. Possibly where the faith is strongest or even weakest to keep them in line?

[*Furyou Miko]

Well, yes. Ten thousand in the major orders is sixty thousand, but there are many, many minor orders containing anywhere from one to a thousand Sisters, with about a hundred being average.

[Duke Danse Macabre]

Its safe to assume a few million but not billions in my eyes with all the order, shrine guards, those attached to other forces, Ecclesiarchy, etc.

[Fibonacci]

Its safe to assume a few million but not billions in my eyes with all the order, shrine guards, those attached to other forces, Ecclesiarchy, etc.

This is what I would assume as well. 

It is either the 7th Ed book or 6th that also says that wherever there is a cathedral there is an Order of Adepta Sororitas.

 

On the other hand, if you need to quickly gather a massive army you are not going to be sending a ship to get a battle sister, a familarus and a couple of scribes from the cathedral on planet sodbuster.   The number of battle sisters in a combat ready group of significant size would be much lower.   

[MrFlutterPie]

The Imperium is made up of millions of worlds so if we assume there is at least 1 sister per planet then they number in the millions at the very least.

[BitsHammer]

I was a bit miffed by the idea of "thousands" of Sisters so decided to did some math a few years back as a kind of "this level would basically make sense" (in a completely unofficial sense, but I have it as my head canon (and cannon (boom)) now). So I sat down with a friend and tried to work out how many people are on each world (and took a low average when on the ones I didn't know) as we have a lot of info on most of the "million worlds" in the Imperium. We then took that and applied the following rules to keep the numbers low:

1% of the entire Imperium meets the very basic criteria to be considered for becoming a Sororitas. 
1% of those complete their "basic" training successfully 
1% of those are on active status at any time (the other 99% have been deactivated for any number of reasons). This last one was to really just push the number a lot lower based on the "stuff happens" quotient. 
50% of the final total is Militant Orders, the rest is divided into the various Non-Militant Orders (which makes each of those smaller than the combined Militant Orders). 

So running some basic numbers we figured that from the Hive Worlds (all 32,380 of them) had a rough average of 50,000,000,000 (we went with 50 Billion a Hive, which is about the middle of the range (10-100,000,000,000), and 10 Hive a planet, which is a bit lower than half as the range is 5-20) 16,190,000,000,000,000 people on the hives. 

To keep the math easy we went with an average of 5 Billion people on average on every other planet in the Imperium (working from 1,000,000 that means 967,620 worlds) which is lower than our current population on Earth. That gave us another 4,838,100,000,000,000 more people. 

This gave us a total of 21,028,100,000,000,000 people in the Imperium on a lowball math run (that is 21 Quadrillion people for the record). 

Of these 210,281,000,000,000 meet the very basic criteria (1% of the population). 
Of those 2,102,810,000,000 complete the basic training (1% of those who meet the basic criteria). 
Of those 21,028,100,000 are on any kind of active duty (1% of those who complete the training). 
Of those 10,514,050,000 are Battle Sisters (50% of those who are active duty). 

 

With 1 Million Worlds in the Imperium this means the Sisters could in theory put as many as 10,514 Sisters on every world on average (the real spread is likely much more varied depending on combat operations, duties on Shrine Worlds, escorting pilgrimages, ect. This is just to give a rough idea of how many there could be.)

 

Now understandably 10.5 Billion sounds like a lot, but considering the scale of the Imperium it turns out to only be .00005% of the entire Imperium (for a comparative basis it'd be like 300 Sisters in the United States,or 6 Sisters to every state in the US), so still plenty "elite" for the setting.

 

Likewise the same numbers could be applied to Tempestus Scions and Commissars (as they go through similar screening processes).

 

And just for fun, if the Imperium has properly tithed their Guardsmen and there were no massed casualties there would be 210,281,000,000,000 standing Guardsmen. Definitely enough to drown the enemy in bodies, eh?

 

EDIT:

 

Our very own Fulkes estimates that there are about two billion, but she pulls the numbers out of thin air and 'what's reasonable'. Which doesn't exactly fit with GW thought processes. :D

Uh, no, I have ten point five billion. And I didn't "pull it out of thin air", I sat down and put actual work and effort into it and tried to keep the numbers extra low (by eliminating 99% of them from active duty for instance).

 

But work and effort and a fair amount of thought into this also doesn't sound like GW. :P

[*Furyou Miko]

Your population data is sourced, but all the once percents and fifty percents aren't. Sorry for misremembering your numbers though.

[tvih]

To summarize I'd say it's a fairly safe bet there are quite a bit more Sisters than Marines, but exactly how much more is anyone's guess.

[*Furyou Miko]

You say that, I disagree, so...

[BitsHammer]

Your population data is sourced, but all the once percents and fifty percents aren't. Sorry for misremembering your numbers though.

 

The 1% was used to keep it low, I could have easilly argued for a higher percentage of Sisters but went low without getting silly and the 50% was from half of the Sisters being Militant Orders (which means you actually have the previous number as total Sisters).

 

EDIT:

 

 

You say that, I disagree, so...

 

Well seeing as there is supposed to be 1 Marine per Imperial planet, even if you say 2 Sisters per planet you already double them.

 

There is no real reason for Sisters to number less than Marines anyways. There is no cap in the fluff, no implants that would kill many of them, nor are they known for a high attrition rate (like the Guard). So anything over a million is really fair game in my book.

[*Furyou Miko]

They are known for a high attrition rate if you read most of the supplementary material. >>

 

That aside, the Sisters also have insanely high recruitment requirements, least of all being true faith, moving on to incredibly physical abilities and on top of that, they only have two training facilities.

 

According to the Inquisitor fluff for Sister Anastasia, the entire Adepta Sororitas only sees five hundred recruits a year, which has to be split between six Orders Militant, three Orders Famulous, three Orders Hospitaller, three Orders Dialogous, and at least one Order Pronatus and one Order Sabine.

 

That's not a high recruitment rate.

[BitsHammer]

500 a year is unreasonably low for an organization that has a "high attrition rate". I mean at minimum you'd need to take in at least 1 Sister for every 1 you lose to keep the numbers level, and more realistically you'd want at least 2 to every 1 casualty meaning either Sisters are only losing 250 Sisters a year, or writers can't work on any level of scale involving an Imperium quintillions deep.

 

And seeing as there are a lot of tropes regarding sci-fi writers and their lack of getting things right, I'm betting it's the latter.

[*Furyou Miko]

Well, ultimately its up to individual interpretation. In my head, whatever the numbers or whoever say, I estimate that there are about a hundred Sisters for every cardinal, plus perhaps another ten or so per habitable system.

[Eddie Orlock]

500 a year is unreasonably low for an organization that has a "high attrition rate". ...

It could just be a ratio. If every year on average they lose half the active units, it could just mean they operate at a replacement rate for a thousand sisters on active duty.

 

Really though, it comes back to Science Fiction Writers Have No Sense of Scale.

 

As tongue in cheek as that article may be, it does make reference to the technique of Fermi estimation which supports what Fulkes' attempted.

 

In the end, we can't measure it, so stick with what makes you feel fuzzy.

[Duke Danse Macabre]

Either way we look at it they number more than marines but less that tempestus scions of the elite guard.

The latter being much more common, I just struggle though to see there being billions of them as they are rare and not found everywhere.

You have to recall as well marines are so rarely seen by some that they are legend themselves.

[BitsHammer]

Either way we look at it they number more than marines but less that tempestus scions of the elite guard.

The latter being much more common, I just struggle though to see there being billions of them as they are rare and not found everywhere.

You have to recall as well marines are so rarely seen by some that they are legend themselves.

When you take in the scale of the Imperium you can have billions and still be rare. As I pointed out in my post, the number I provided was a mere .00005% of the total pop of the Imperium. Apply that to something we can easily picture in our heads and it's like having 6 Sisters of Battle per US State or 26-27 Sisters of Battle for the entire country of England (compared to the 25.01 Million people in the whole country). It's not a big number in context.

[tvih]

The way I see it... the Ecclesiarchy is huge. It seems like that they have a presence in most, or even all, inhabited planets that are part of the Imperium. An organization that big that is part of an Imperium so huge, having a military sect that would be smaller in number than Space Marines while not really even being superhumans like marines are? Not a very meaningful force considering the size of the Imperium.

 

One source may state 500 recruits per year or whatever, but going by that they'd be wiped out in a year given the other fluff and how they die left and right in it. As Eddie pointed out, sense of scale is easy to lose with something this big, and people who write up stuff like that certainly seem to suffer from just that, because that as written makes zero sense in any reasonable context. There's absolutely no reason for there to be so few Sisters.

[*Furyou Miko]

Its a pity we can't do a faith census and find out how many people on earth are truly faithful, and how many just claim membership of their religion.

 

The fact is that if true faith were that common, we'd see it more often outside the Sororitas.

[Charlo]

I'd just like to take another moment to thank GW for the quality fluff here. Hopefully they are listening here and will give us some explanation when sisters get a snazzy new codex and plastics (... Never :c)

[Willy Pete]

Just from a fluff point of view, the fuzzy numbers make a lot of sense.  I'm not going to let my enemies, (both inside and outside the Imperium) know what my total military strength is.  The less they know about that, the less likely they are to decide to attack.

 

It also helps to explain why there are so many contingents spread across the galaxy (aside from garrisoning shrines, helping Cardinals, etc.).  It is hard to either attack or defend against a force when you know neither how strong they are nor where they all are.

[Jacinda]

This is all left intentionally vague so we can come up with our own number that make sense to us.  Going by what is in the lore, there are many several plus a few many and then there are several many few.  That means there are enough Battle Sisters to be a common rare sighting among the populace of certain systems.

[Blagon]

I remember reading somewhere that every sister was an orphan at birth. No idea how that affects the numbers.