Scale of the galaxy relative to the IoM

[b1soul]

The Imperium controls around a million worlds...

 

The Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and at least that number of planets. Let's go for a mid-point and say 250 billion stars and 250 billion planets. That would mean the Imperium controls around 1 out of 250 thousand...or 0.000004%

 

Vast swathes of the galaxy are still unexplored by the Imperium or held by non-Imperial powers. I really wish GW and BL would more emphasise the incredibly porous nature of the Imperium...like a really big net but with really big holes.

 

40K fluff treats the Imperium as still the dominant galaxy-spanning civilisation, a declining behemoth but a behemoth nonetheless. Its various Xenos threats are only an existential threat in combination with threats from Within and Beyond. This suggests to me that most of the Milky Way is probably not held by the traditional Xenos enemies of the Imperium: Orks, Tyranids, Eldar, Tau, Necrons etc., although the Necrons could have a truly staggering number of unknown tomb worlds.

 

Summary: really wish GW would emphasise the size of the Milky Way (hundreds of billions of stars and planets) and even though the Imperium might be the biggest (slowly crumbling) empire on the block, said empire only controls 0.000004% of the planets. There should be vast "dark patches" all over the empire's galactic map.

[apologist]

Yes, agree completely. Apart from the 'scale shock' feel of emphasising that the colossal Imperium of Mankind is a cobweb in an echoing, mostly empty galaxy, it'd also have narrative and commercial benefits for GW – allowing them to introduce new factions that have been there all along.

[Brother Casman]

Yeah, the setting should reflect a scattering of points of light in the endless black.

[b1soul]

20 minutes ago, apologist said:

Yes, agree completely. Apart from the 'scale shock' feel of emphasising that the colossal Imperium of Mankind is a cobweb in an echoing, mostly empty galaxy, it'd also have narrative and commercial benefits for GW – allowing them to introduce new factions that have been there all along.

 

13 minutes ago, Brother Casman said:

Yeah, the setting should reflect a scattering of points of light in the endless black.

 

Yes, definitely...I don't want the galaxy to be relatively empty, just relatively unknown to the Imperium

 

The Imperium is a collection of stellar hubs or nexuses connected by Navigator-enabled travel and Astropath-enabled communication...and all suborned to Terra to varying degrees. It is generally aware of the threats nibbling at these hubs, but beyond these more adjacent threats, its knowledge is limited and there could still be many strange Xenos species and non-Imperial human cultures out there.

 

Despite all the optimistic propaganda, the end of the Great Crusade simply meant humanity had built a stable power base with enough capacity to counter known threats and protect the Webway Project. It didn't mean humanity had pacified the entire galaxy.

[GreenScorpion]

Although the scattered distribution of the imperial worlds is not described so well in other sources, I think the Badab war books from Forge World actually described a scattered collection of systems that belonged to the Imperium in the middle of many other systems that were occupied by pirates, xenos or some other faction.

In Badab it was mostly due to the nature of the Maelstrom that made some systems difficult to reach through the warp, so the imperials focused on securing the systems they could travel to on a regular basis.

 

There are many reasons why a particular planet or an entire system might be left uncolonised by humans and in particular the imperials, since some planets would be too harsh for the humans to survive, although they might support xenos species, some planets or systems might lack the resources to be adequate colonies, they might be inhabited by particularly deadly factions or similarly to the maelstrom it might be difficult to reach those locations for some reason.

 

Most land based analogies for what an empire represents would not work in space due to the large distances between objects, but even if we forget about the empty space, the imperium in 40k would resemble an empire built on a desert, where the only settlements would be located in fertile regions like oasis and the rest of the territory is occupied by deadly creatures, dangerous storms or other natural phenomena.

[Lysimachus]

Agree completely. This was a post I made a few years back after doing some loosely connected research, I'll quote it rather than retyping:

 

Quote

I don't know about anybody else but occasionally I've struggled with the idea that the Imperium, spread out across the breadth of the galaxy and consisting of around a million worlds, still has room for all of our individual creations to be fitted in (and not to make the reader think 'well, why haven't I heard of them, then?').

However, I was doing some research after my 9 year old son asked me some questions about the stars, solar system, etc, and I happened to read on a bit further after those questions were answered. I was looking at the current (or as current as I could find, if anyone knows better feel free to correct me!) estimates for numbers of stars and planetary bodies in the Milky Way.

These estimates suggested a number of stars somewhere between 100 and 400 billion, with at least as many planetary objects. What does this mean for the 40k fluff? Well, let's assume the lowest estimate of 100 billion stars and 1 planetary body per star. So for every star with 1 of those million Imperial worlds, there are at least another 100,000 stars with worlds either controlled by alien empires, now-empty worlds long ago controlled by Mankind/Xenos, totally unexplored and never inhabited worlds, or - to be fair - lifeless balls of rock (though if we allow for the miraculously skilled terraformers of the DAoT, there might be less of those than you'd think). Just think about that - draw a dot on a piece of paper, then draw another 100,000 dots around it. That's how pitiful a proportion of the Galaxy mankind actually controls. Not to mention cases like the Terran system where there are multiple Imperial worlds around 1 star, thereby raising the proportion of non-Imperial systems around them even further!

When you think of the scale of the galaxy in these terms, it's much easier to see how what happens to the planets (and people) of the Imperium is so poorly recorded or even heard about. Planets and systems are constantly being discovered, conquered, lost, found and reconquered. Just finding an Imperial world out of the thousands is like picking a teeny, tiny needle out of a haystack! Huge crusades of countless millions of men go out into that vast nothingness and are lost, forgotten without even a footnote in the 10,000 year history of the Imperium.

So what does this random spiel mean for the average DIY creator? Well, like I said its nothing particularly new, but it really highlighted to me the truth of how the intro to the rulebook concludes:

"The universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed..."

 

 

 

Edited April 14, 2023 by Lysimachus

[ArielRSA]

TBH I’ve always taken it to be a million (mostly) habitable worlds for humans, with potentially millions more controlled or disputed. Still a drop in the bucket overall but maybe more meaningful ITO how much the imperium controls.

 

I do like the large net idea though

Edited April 14, 2023 by ArielRSA

[Doghouse]

I've always seen the map of the galaxy more like the old maritime maps marked with here be dragons.

[Bryan Blaire]

I agree and adhere to the idea that the Imperium is a scattershot of inhabited worlds connected by relatively stable pathways in the Warp that provide somewhat reasonable certainty that you are going to get between two locations.  In between them, amongst the sub sectors, should be hundreds or thousands of stars, some that the Imperium have been to, but found useless to them, some that are inhabited by those they can somehow ignore, but don’t have a reason to wipe out - or that they can’t get back to once they found it, and others that are a large struggle to get to reliably or even impossible to get to due to things like Warp tidal issues, storms, and the like.

 

The blobs defining the Imperium in any of the maps are in reality the barest of actually portions of that area that the Imperium can truly claim/control, an attempt to show a 3D map that has to be squished down to a 2D image with very generous interpretation of actual claim.

Edited April 14, 2023 by Bryan Blaire

[WARMASTER_]

Couldn’t agree most with this statement! It’s definitely a missed opportunity for the most part from GW!
 

Echoing what @GreenScorpion has said though there’s a few FW:IA books [Badab War and War Machines of the lost and the Damned] in particular that do a great job at showing the truly immense scale of the setting and how the imperium is just a million or so scattered planets in the endless black, loosely connected by the “Safer routes” through hell…

 

I think it’s also a great shame we don’t see more warp route maps like we did in HH book one 

 

I miss the IA series dearly and Alan Bligh for that matter

Edited April 14, 2023 by WARMASTER_

[Felix Antipodes]

The net analogy is exactly how I’ve always envisaged the Imperium.  It is held together by a network of stable Warp routes with a bunch of less stable routes coming off that.  These ‘super highways’ are the net threads holding the Imperium together.  Like a tide hitting the beach, the Imperium hits a high water mark (say the Eastern Fringe edge) and then just arbitrarily claimed everything in between.

[b1soul]

In my head, the one million mark is the number of planets the Imperium claims as a matter of Administratum decree...but the number of planets over which the Imperium exercises actual military control could be much smaller, say, in the low hundreds of thousands. All the while, the Milky Way holds hundreds of billions of planets.

[Felix Antipodes]

I sort of lean the other way, with the million being the planets/systems they have firm dibs on with millions more claimed in name if not fact.  Both work though.

[Lysimachus]

I reckon a million is a pretty rough estimate that probably changes far faster than the Adeptus Terra can actually keep track of?

 

I picture there being a constant fluctuation as new planets are found by explorator fleets, crusades conquer xenos worlds (or reconquer previously lost worlds)... balanced by Imperial worlds being conquered, swallowed up by the warp or just abandoned once the Imperium has stripped them of all resources.

 

In line with the 10th trailer, I suspect there are now more being lost than gained, so you could easily be down from 1 million to 900,000 or even lower...

[Felix Antipodes]

The creation of the Great Rift must have surely swallowed up a great many worlds.  I would be surprised if there are even 900,000 ish…

[Sky Potato]

Would they count uninhabitable planets? For example Mercury?

 

We know they've colonised and terraformed Jupiters moons and put orbital platforms around Pluto. Mercury is simply too close to the sun for the juice to be worth the squeeze with orbitals and terraforming, so would they count it as being under Imperial control or not?

 

Because if so, you could find yourself in a situation where the Imperium is boots on the ground on one planet and claiming possession of the other uninhabitable 4/6/8 (or whatever) planets of the system. So that 1,000,000 planets is actually 600,000 of uninhabited planets in the same systems as the controlled 400,000.

 

Who knows?

 

In fairness, the Million planets mark always seemed to me like the 1,000 chapters made of 1,000 Astartes - its a round number for convenience, its not necessarily the most accurate number.

[b1soul]

To control just 4% of our galaxy's planets (assuming a modest estimate of 250 billion planets in the Milky Way), the Imperium would need to span not one million but ten billion planets, i.e. x10,000.

 

So even if one treats one million as the "Imperial iron grip" figure, the inflated "Imperial legal claim" figure would probably not exceed x10 or maybe x100 of that. 

 

I don't think the one million figure applies to human-inhabited worlds as that's rather arbitrary. It's more sensible that one million refers to worlds with useful resources/assets, whether they host stable human populations or not.

Edited April 15, 2023 by b1soul

[GreenScorpion]

One of the reasons I mentioned the Badab war books is because it highlights the fact that planets/systems may count as imperial even if there is no direct presence of the Administratum there, as highlighted by the fact that they tried to collect the tithe of planets that were already rebel at that point and the indication that other than tithe payments, there was little interaction with many of the planets in the region surrounding the maelstrom, which might indicate that the million worlds include rebel planets or even planets that have already fallen to xenos, traitors, the warp or something else.

Essentially, if they are mentioned in the accounting "books" they are imperial worlds, regardless of the practical situation.