Starting from the Planetary Governor - Chapter 772

Chapter 767, War Group Expenses

The bloodline composition of the Blood Shark gene-seed used by the Chapter surprised Gu Hang.

How could half of the bloodline come from the Traitor Legion?

Even if some other gene-seed was used and mixed into the Chapter during its founding or subsequent expansion, it would at most mean that the warriors within the Chapter were of different bloodlines, making it a “hybrid” Chapter.

But I’d never heard of a single gene-seed being mixed with other bloodlines.

Normally, such a thing wouldn’t happen. A bat seed was implanted, creating a Bat Warrior. Whether it was a new seed that grew five years later or a seed exhumed from a body after death, it would all be of the Bat Legion’s bloodline. It wouldn’t be a fusion of two bloodlines simply because of prolonged contact with someone of Secret Guard bloodline.

Space Marines don’t reproduce sexually; there’s no natural union of two seeds.

Gu Hang suspected genetic technology.

Either the Blood Shark gene-seed had changed when the Chapter was founded, or perhaps they had accidentally or even intentionally altered their own gene-seed during their years in the Dark Outlands.

Both were possible.

Gu Hang made a note of the incident.

Regardless, now that the Blood Sharks have relented, the Alliance now controls six Grand Regiments and, at peak strength, can produce 8,000 Space Marines.

This is a force to be reckoned with.

This is true in terms of both quantity and quality.

Dragon Seeds, Phoenix Seeds, and Blood Shark Seeds are all of superior quality. As long as the quality of Blood Shark and Dragon Seeds matches that of Phoenix Seeds, then with the right investment, the proportion of Company Champions can be increased to 10-15%.

That’s 600 to 900 men.

A formidable battle.

To exaggerate, a Company Champion would be unrivaled among even the most ordinary Space Marine groups. Maintaining Space Marines is also expensive. For the Phoenix, Yellow Springs, New World Torch, and Fury, this isn’t a problem. If you’re short on funds, just provide them with basic ammunition and other supplies to ensure normal

training

.

Right

now, there aren’t many brutal battles where they’re needed.

But for the Dragon King’s Spear and the Blood Sharks, this isn’t so easy.

Especially for the Blood Sharks.

The Alliance made a promise, and it’s hard to break it.

For a Space Marine Chapter, the greatest costs of maintaining them lie in several areas.

The first is “people.”

The selection criteria for new Space Marines are quite demanding. This is why a Chapter needs a homeworld as a recruiting planet. While the taxes provided by a homeworld provide a stable income, they often provide a stable source of recruits.

Some Chapters choose remote, harsh natural environments as their homeworlds, motivated not by income but by the natural environment’s ability to select and cultivate suitable recruits.

Gene-seed is rare; a warrior can only produce two upon death. A single failed operation can result in devastating losses; a high probability of failure can even mean the extinction of the Chapter.

For this reason, the selection of new recruits for a Chapter is a particularly serious process, often mobilizing the entire planet, every eligible individual, for a costly and costly selection process. Some Chapters’ selections can even be described as “bloody.”

Unknown costs surround the cost of holding such a global event, unknown numbers of young men die or become disabled, and the ultimate success rate for those who emerge first—this is the dilemma faced by most Chapters, and the costs they bear. It

‘s hard to even put a monetary value on this cost.

A Space Marine, in their most basic suit of armor and equipped with a range of weapons, costs only a few hundred thousand tax coin, or at most two hundred thousand. But how much is a Space Marine worth? No one can say. That seed, the cost behind success, the decades and centuries of experience and growth—it’s all difficult to quantify.

However, this cost was completely borne by the Alliance.

More precisely, Gu Hang’s system’s power negated it. Simply paying a few inexpensive grace points allowed him to achieve optimal returns with minimal disruption.

This was a key consideration when Ewing ultimately chose the Alliance.

Besides the significant and difficult-to-quantify cost of personnel, the remaining equipment was much easier to manage.

Simply providing a set of power armor and individual equipment for each person was certainly not enough. But even if one included batches of Terminator armor and other powerful equipment, with only a thousand men, it wasn’t prohibitively expensive.

Furthermore, the Blood Sharks weren’t exactly building from scratch. They already had this equipment in stock; the Alliance simply needed to upgrade it.

Two billion per year would be sufficient for the warband itself; thirty or five billion would be considered extravagant.

But this only refers to the equipment for a thousand Space Marines themselves. Even if it includes all the advanced armor and vehicles they need, it’s only a thousand men, so it’s not that expensive.

However, another major expense for a Chapter lies in the auxiliary forces.

With only a thousand men, if every battle were to be fought by a thousand supermen, even those supermen would suffer losses. No Chapter wants to incur such losses.

Auxiliary forces are a necessity.

But this also presents a significant gap between the upper and lower limits of each Chapter.

Some simply don’t value them, treating them as cannon fodder; others treat them as close comrades; some want to build them up but lack the funds; and some, more affluent than the rest, build auxiliary forces that rival those of the top Astra Militarum…

Gu Hang directly allocated two army groups to the Blood Sharks.

While they essentially serve a similar function to the auxiliary forces, there’s nothing wrong with that. But before this, Gu Hang had made it clear to Ewing during his discussion with him that the Alliance Army was the Alliance Army, and the two army groups were there to coordinate operations, not to serve as cannon fodder. Their past attitude of treating mortals as if they were human beings must be corrected.

Ewing agreed.

They had seen the Alliance Army’s combat effectiveness.

Even if he were allowed to use the Army as cannon fodder, he wouldn’t have been willing to do so. This was a force allocated to his command, such elite troops, so why bother doing that? They were so useful; with just a little cooperation, victory would be assured. There was no need to mess around.

Of course, when necessary, they would fight tooth and nail,

even at the cost of losses. Not to mention the Alliance Army, even the Space Marines themselves were sometimes just more advanced consumables.

Of course, while building auxiliary forces was expensive, it wasn’t the most expensive. The

most expensive was the Chapter Fleet.

Ships were incredibly expensive.

To address this, the Alliance established a fifteen-year shipbuilding plan for the Blood Sharks. While financial constraints limited them to minor repairs in the first few years, a steady stream of ships would be delivered later. The ultimate goal was to increase the Blood Shark Fleet’s strength by over 70% within fifteen years.

Furthermore, the Alliance had taken on all the logistics and expenses that had previously been a major headache for the Blood Sharks.

Ewing was quite satisfied with this.

Even the most savage Blood Shark was satisfied, let alone the Dragon King’s Spear, whose treatment was similar but only slightly inferior.

(End of this chapter)