I've had alot of issues with Ariadna's population since the RPG book came out. They botched the numbers really hard and should have really caught that earlier. Now it's going to linger as a giant source of problems for a long time.
Botching population and soldier numbers is fairly common in fiction, Star Wars clone wars army is smaller than todays american army for instance. It's one of the things I think 40k did great, the vastness of the galaxy and the crazy amount of planets and people that means.
And a Land Raider's amazing future armor, comparable to 88mm of steel plate! 40k just has different numbers botched like crazy, mostly having anything to do with weapons or vehicles.
Scale up a two inch marine to high 8 foot height and then do the math for a 48" sniper rifle range. It's embarrassingly short.
Yeah, absurds like facts that most of space marine equipment (terminator armors and predators for example) was made 10k years ago and they haven't learnt to reproduce it yet or for 10k years they haven't really invented anything new that is produced on mass scale is pretty ridicolous. Convenient for the setting but ridicolous nontheless.
Don't get me started on the models/rules vs real life. While it's something that I've put a lot of time and effort into for the past 17 years, it's so funky that there is nothing to do but laugh at it at this point. I'm kind of sad that I missed the age of disco marines and all that.
If you're talking Damascus pattern steel, we know how to make both (Roman concrete is soaked in sea/ocean water for a while, as to get the little calcifier creatures on it. They are looking on how to mass produce it), so yeah... They have whole planets who's only job is to manufacture and invent, but they can't come up with anything new really. They can produce terminator armor and some of the other stuff, but they make so few that they can barely keep them at operating numbers, with whole planets of manufacturing. PLANETS to manufacture weapons and barely a trickle of stuff. It's just pants on head thinking. I'd rather take some funky population numbers over retarding everything to keep a setting in the same state.
Many of the old legendary steel manufacturing techniques are legendary because it produced high-quality materials in an age when iron or steel was of extremely poor quality. From what I've heard on the subject it was more to do with the volcanic ash both preventing cracks and reacting with salt water to form a stronger material than the original mix.
That's the issue. And "complexity' of concrete is faaar lesser than some "technology magic" in 41 millenium. Also mind that "free-thinking", "out-of-the-box" is not exactly in use there.
40K has a LOT of idiocies built in to enable them to exaggerate the story something fierce. The Imperium of Man is somewhat explained by them having a long-running inquisition hell-bent on killing anyone considered to think outside the box (and their friends and family, just to be sure), but the Eldar race is also stagnant technology in spite of being described as highly intelligent and extremely idiot-savant in their chosen area of obsession, meaning naturally the Eldar race should have developed technologies far beyond what the "Slaan" gave them. Add to it that we know from our own history that merely being 10 years behind in development means you're fighting at a disadvantage, that the Eldar starting tech from their old Gods has them have a leg-up of 1000 years over the human golden age (which itself is several hundred years ahead of current 40k Imperium) and a single Eldar Exarch should have been able to conquer Earth single-handedly much like how the Vikings of A.D. 800 wouldn't have stood a chance against an F-22 intent on bombing their village (and that's a much smaller technological gap) 40k is so ridiculous in scope and so extreme in their exaggerations that it's not even remotely compatible with comparisons to anything else. It's like all of 40k's fluff was written through several generations of oral re-telling before someone finally put it to print. It's like if they later released the "Real 40K Storyline" which shows that Leman Russ turns out to be just the local IT guy who through a series of unlikely events managed to defeat a particular emaciated demon (at least he claimed it was a demon) that one time and then had a small cult form around him and the Emperor was just a noble who got killed by a burglar while sitting on his 24 carat golden toilet. I just don't think you can use 40k to compare to anything.
This reminds me of the premise of Blue Planet RPG. Basically the same story as Ariadna (and possibly a source of inspiration for CB). Humanity finds a wormhole with a habitable planet on the other side of it (in this case a waterworld, little landmass and what's available is comparable to Melanesia/Polinesia). First colony ship goes through perfectly, but before second can be sent an ecological disaster ravages Earth, and the attempt to send note about it to the colonist fails. So when the second ship fails to arrive on schedule (10 years after first wave, IIRC), the colony waits a few more years and then figures out that something happened. They can't sustain their hi-tech, because they don't have the means to build and service advanced heavy industry (the machines, tools and resources for that were supposed to be sent during the second wave). They could sustain Industrial Revolution tech level, but don't have the manpower for that. So in the end they decide that their best chances for survival is to spread across different archipelagos, and go native. Hunting, fishing, limited farming (mostly aquatic - kelps, etc.). What helps is that all colonists are genetically modified for aquatic life. Think either gills or ability for holding breath like aquatic mammals, modified fat layer, enchanced eye protection, etc. They're also a fairly elite group intellectually-speaking - scientists, engineers, managers. So the final result is something akin to culture of Pacific Islanders with quite good education base. This allows them to thrive until Earth manages making a Recontact after circa 70-80 years. Even Native/new colonists/megacorp conflicts are very much like a Helot/Ariadna insurgency. @Mahtamori:
Better/worse, the techniques to make better steel were only passed down via word of mouth, so were essentially a 'trade secret'. Even today, among blacksmiths that make Damascus steel all the time, they can have issues with the layers not welding together. And that's starting with steels that we know are actually good in the first place!
Only if you assume it's a 1:1 linear scale AND the same scale as miniature scale. Which GW have NEVER used in 40k. Frequently, the two are not the same, and can't be the same unless you want to play on a foosball field. Weapon ranges get "compressed" for that reason. Weapon range bands are probably on separate multipliers. It's probably closer to something like: 6"=25m, 12"=50m, 18"=150m, 24"=300m, 36"=800m, 48" 1600m and artillery ranges (like the old Earthshaker) which had 120" is probably several kilometres more. As for 40k and population numbers ... Not like they get anything close to "real" numbers. They use numbers that sound large but taken into context of the larger whole are ridiculously small. An empire of a million worlds (admittedly, not all would be hive cities crammed cheek by jowl with meatbag cannonfodder) that has "1000 chapters of 1000 marines" protecting it? So one per world. And that's providing they follow the numbers limitations - the imperium has used "technicalities" to get around restrictions before after all. The sisters of battle only exist because the ecclesiarchy isn't permitted "men under arms", for example. Reserve units, vehicle crews, forge crews don't count against that 1000 limit and several notable chapters openly flout that reg anyway. So that's something that ALL games tend to have in common. Humans just can't generally think in terms of gobsmackingly huge numbers.
How many did they start with?! How long have they been separated from the rest? Unless each guy had three wives or some other ways to bring the population up I can't see it getting that high that fast. If they had Cubes I can understand. They can have new bodies. But without I can't understand how it would get that high in such a short period of time.