Good evening to all my friends on Hive and hobby enthusiasts that have the same plastic crack addiction as I do. After many years of being sober, not playing nor touching my Warhammer 40,000 collection I am back into it!

I have started learning how to play the new edition of the rules and am getting ready to paint a lot of unpainted miniatures.

Yesterday, I posted about the Mortifactors Chapter and a bit about what a Space Marine is. Super human warriors of the Imperium.

But what is a Chapter? How many Space Marines are there? There is a force organization chart in the LORE and one in the GAME. For me, the one must intersect the other.

Let's have a look at that and at some of my other Space Marines in my collection.

The Space Marine Chapter

Simply put, a Chapter is the name of a Space Marine force in the 41st Millenium. During the Great Crusade timeline, Space Marines were in much larger armies called Legions, but were broken up into smaller groups of Space Marines after a civil war that saw Space Marines turned to Chaos, usually the whole Legion at a time!

So to prevent so much might be converted to darkness all at once, the Space Marines are now organized into Chapters of a maximum of 1000 strong Space Marines.

Usually, Space Marines bring in new recruits to replenish their numbers and since they are involved in the heart of battle, generally a Chapter is never quite at full strength. Sometimes, a Chapter manage to crush their enemies so well that they do not lose too many Marines and there is a chance they grow into a force that exceeds the 1000 Marine capacity, then the Chapter will have an additional founding and split off from the host Chapter under new leadership and heraldry.

This is the reason some Space Marines are not even sure who their Primarch is! We will get to that later...

A Chapter of Space Marines is 1000 strong, divided into 10 Companies of 100. Each Company has 10 squads of 10 Space Marines.

1st Company - Veterans

Usually 1st Company is made up of Veterans and may wear Terminator Armor, which is big, heavy awesome armor.

2nd to 5th Battle Companies

These Companies are usually made up of 6 x Tactical Marine Suqads, 2 x Assault Marine Squads and 2 x Devastator Marine Squads.

Assault Marines generally wear jump packs to fly and jump in on the enemy while Devastators wield Heavy Weapons.

6th and 7th Companies are Reserve Companies with 10 x Assault Marines. 8th and 9th Companies are Reserve Companies with 10 x Devastator Squads.

Finally, there is 10th Company, where all the Scouts are, these are the trainees and neophytes.

This is great and all... but often there are some gaps. Each Chapter has a Chapter Command, so the Chapter Master and his Command Squad or a Captain and a Company Command Squad. So you would need to shuffle things around there a bit inside the Companies to make 1000 Matines fit.

After that, there are three other groups of Marines in each Chapter that are part of Chapter Command that do not fit in the Companies:

The Librarium - Librarians, the psychic leaders of the Chapter.
The Reclusiarch - Chaplains, the religious leaders of the Chapter.
The Armory - Techpriests, the engineers of the Chapter.

Not to mention that all Space Marine vehicles have Space Marine drivers and pilots! Therefore members of a Company or members of Reserve Companies will need to be stationed as pilots and drivers.

I dream of being able to put together whole Companies of Space Marines... look at how cool the models look when put together!

Some of my other Space Marines - Spectral Warriors and Iron Griffons

Spectral Warriors

Spectral Warriors Chapter with a Scythe on the shoulder pad - My own made up chapter. This was a single Marine I painted to check it out... and then I painted a Sergeant and a Terminator in these colors, will post that another day.

These guys were meant to be a part of my collections where I can field generic Space Marine rules.

This guy has a bunch of bullet holes in this shoulderpad. The only problem I have with this is that this shoulderpad usually shows what squad he is from... I could try paint something that is then shot into and dinged... might be tricky...

Iron Griffons

The model kits come with a lot of Aquilas - the double-headed eagle symbol of the Imperium.

I wanted to see if I could modify a marine to have a winged helmet and so I did. I used the "Beacky" Helm for this too.

Additional to this, I installed a special bolter with a strap, this one actually comes from the plastic Scout kit.

From front and back you can see the legs have a sort of tiger striping to it.

Now all I need to do is paint these colors on the below Marines...

Cheers!
@zakludick

Hive South Africa