The recruitment, enhancement, and training of the Adeptus Astartes is legendarily brutal, with massive levels of attrition in everything from the trials aspirants undergo to be accepted into the Space Marines to the failure rate of the organs transplanted into those very same recruits. This arduous, arguably wasteful process is, in many cases, not performed on planets with large, stable populations with the ability to absorb a continual drain on their young population, but rather on sparsely populated, dangerous planets such as Fenris or the moons of Baal. Like many things in the Warhammer 40,000 university, this grandiose, larger than life, “turned up to 11” approach to the universe can be dismissed as comically unrealistic.
But just how unrealistic is it? And can we interrogate the strategic implications of Space Marine recruitment as it is portrayed in-universe? In this presentation, we construct a population dynamics model of a Space Marine chapter and their attendant recruiting world, exploring under what conditions the chapter can remain viable. What losses can they sustain? What is their risk they will exhaust the population of their recruitment world? Under what circumstances is it the planet’s population vs. the limited availability of progenoid glands that limit the growth of a chapter? Under what circumstances might a chapter be in the position to breach the nominal limit of 1,000 marines set forth in the Codex Astartes, vs. desperately trying to keep a few companies in the field? In addition to exploring these questions, we also introduce Chapt.R, an interactive toolset to both explore these questions and to teach the modeling of population dynamics through the lens of science fiction.
Author bio
Eric Lofgren is an Associate Professor at Washington State University, where he works as an infectious disease epidemiologist. He is also an avid wargamer. His work primarily focuses on healthcare associated infections, while his spare time is spent writing for Tabletop Battles, and attempting to make progress on his substantial hobby backlog.
