Obsessive Fluff Minutae Funtime

[Yodhrin]

I tend to spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over little details of my armies that have no bearing at all on the tabletop but are fun to work out. I'm the sort of person that actually looks at the numbers in the Forgeworld IA vehicle profiles and tries to work out the in-scale internal volume of Rhinos to see if 10 SMs will fit inside

I've been at it again with the Skitarii organisation, wondering what people think; plausible/thematic?

The given organisation runs Squad > Maniple > Cohort > Macroclade > Legio, which I modified slightly to Section > Maniple > Cohort > Clade > Macroclade > Legio(because coming from Britain "Section" sounds more right somehow than Squad & it serves to differentiate the Mechanicus military from the Imperium at-large, and because it seemed odd jumping straight from Company+ level right up to Division level).

Then I started thinking about ways to determine the standard number of soldiers in each level; most Imperial armies use a simple linear progression in tens - ten men is a squad, ten squads is a company, ten companies is a chapter/battalion etc, and while that works for Mechanicus in that it's ordered, it also feels a bit too straightforward. My sense of the Mechanicus is they would prefer a system that appears to the unenlightened as disordered or nonsensical but in reality has a highly ordered structure, which led me to Primes. If a Section is 10 infantry/5 heavy infantry/3 vehicles, and we progress through the sequence of Prime Numbers you end up with:

Section 10/5/3, Maniple 20/10/6, Cohort 60/30/18, Clade 300/150/90, ie 2 Sections = Maniple, 3 Maniples = Cohort, 5 Cohorts = Clade, 7 Clades = Macroclade, with Macroclades depending on the composition of the Clades & Cohorts that make it up, and Legio being the designator for all units from a particular Forgeworld.

So an outsider might look at a Mechanicus order of battle and wonder why a Macroclade numbers 1518, but a Mechanicus adept could easily compute that said Macroclade consists of 3 Infantry Clades, 2 Heavy Infantry Clades, 1 Vehicle Clade, and 1 mixed Clade consisting of 3 Infantry Cohorts, 1 Heavy Infantry Cohort, and 1 Vehicle Cohort.

Next step is to figure out a unit numbering system derived from the Primes. EDIT: Just noticed my math is wrong, one sec...right, fixed, I think.

[Ammonius]

I like the cut of your jib!

 

As a person who looks at part numbers all day, I fully approve of the idea that "1518" means more than the one-thousand and eighteenth grouping of Skitarii. I look forward to seeing the fruits of your work!

 

I suppose you'll have to decide what to do with leading zeroes. Since I am commander of Beta-Macroclade 0725*, I have a vested interest :)

 

 

*check out Rashbold's thread for what I'm talking about.