There’s been a lot of trash talk recently about the impossibility of every Crux Terminatus containing a fragment of the Emperor’s armour. Well I’m here to set the record straight!
The first thing we need to consider is how many Crux Terminatii are there? Let’s assume that only the ones on suits of Tactical Dreadnought Armour count – no doubt many marines that have been awarded the Crux carry small replicas with them to show off when not suited up, but the real ones are on the armour. Each suit bears only one Crux, so the question boils down to how many suits are there?
Codex Chapters are usually divided into ten Companies of roughly equal size. As a full strength Codex Chapter consists of 1,000 Marines, this means each company will have 100 members. Only the first Company are usually provided with Terminator Armour, so at full strength each Codex Chapter could be considered to have 100 suits.
Of course, not all Space Marine Chapters are Codex compliant, and very few Chapters of any type are ever at full strength or full equipment. However, there are said to be around 1,000 Chapters in total, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that over such a large sample size things will even out. Roughly speaking therefore we can assume that at any time the Imperium has 100,000 suits of Tactical Dreadnought Armour at its disposal.
Now, how big would the Emperor’s armour have to be to provide material for 100,000 suits? This depends on how big the piece on each suit is. For the sake of argument, let’s say each Crux Terminatus contains a one centimetre cube. This works out to 100,000 cubic centimetres. The cube root of 100,000 is 46.416, so therefore the fragment of the Emperor’s armour for every Crux Terminatus in the Imperium could be provided by a cube 47cm (18.5 inches) on each side.
That’s pretty damn small, especially considering the Emperor was a frickin’ giant!
So, simple maths makes it abundantly clear that the Emperor’s armour is more than capable of providing a sample of material for every suit of Terminator Armour in the galaxy. Hell, a one metre cube could provide enough material for every Space Marine in the galaxy (1,000 Chapters of 1,000 Marines) to carry a one centimetre cube around his neck!
Ain’t numbers wonderful? 😀
