Imperial Guardsmen actually are meant to represent pretty competant, trained reasonably well equipped troops. While they are often treated like cannon fodder by the Imperium and are often individually out matched by the xenos they fight compared to most PDF or militia troops they are pretty elite.

Added to this is the fact that manpower is not something the Imperium has in short supply.

With all this in mind it doesn't make a huge amount of sense for the Department Munitorium to continue to feed, water, transport, regulate, adminsiter and equip a regiment that is made up of geriatrics, suffering from chronic PTS or are simply physically worn out. Far more efficient to retire off the old regiment and raise a new one.

On this basis I think that Guardsmen do retire. I would suspect they probably have a long mandatory tour to complete 15+ years up and are encouraged to re-enlist. After they retire, receive backpay and what ever passes for a pension after which they are on their own. If they are lucky then they get to colonise a world. If they are unlucky they find themselves at a random space port a long way from anywhere.

There would be lots of caveats to this though.

First the type of regiment. Penal Legions obviously don't retire and I doubt many abhuman regiments do either (possible exception of Ratlings). Certain regiments like the Death Korp don't retire for historic reasons for example.

Second the types of enemies that Guardsmen fight and the sheer brutality of the Imperial tactics probably mean that most don't last long enough to retire and those that do are likely so institutionalised and desensitised to violence or are suffering from various battle traumas that they couldn't cope in the outside world.

Thirdly I suspect that simple issues such as pay, pension and cultural dissonance probably means that retirment for many guard probably makes retirement impractical and they just reenlist.

So if your from a feral world regiment your pay might be six chickens a day. On your home world that seemed like a great deal but 15 years later your back pay converted into thrones might not amount to a whole lot. Certainly not enough to get you back to your own planet.

And this is to say nothing of the fact that the day you retire your out . This means the administratum doesn't feed you, they don't tell you were you are, you don't have any briefings to tell you what to do. If your really unlucky you might be the only one i nthe regiment retiring that day. Do you even speak the language of the world you happen to be on?

In short I think Guardsmen do retire but it isn't necessarily as simple as that.

WH40k is a fictional setting and mundane aspects have not been worked out/depicted. Or depicted in many different ways.

So what we can do is take historical facts and try to match them to how the Imperium would operate....

Historically, armies have developed quite sophisticated retirement schemes for its soldiers. Often, they would be better/more advanced than any civil pension/retirement scheme. Not out the goodness of their hearts but because it was very good for morale and because having men trained to commit violence wandering about without any other means to support themselves was a bad idea™.

That's why the notion of retired soldiers being dumped by the regiment is a rather silly idea. What is more likely to happen? These men will stoically starve or turn to banditry/attack the uncaring regiment that dumped them there after years of faithfull service?

Regarding pay, I can't think of any army in history which didn't pay their soldiers. Perhaps not very much, but pay was necessary. The army can't provide every thing, soldiers have individual needs and luxury items such as alcohol and cigarettes must be paid for. Soldiers have often mutinied if not paid and one individual who mutinied for not being paid even demanded to be paid in full what he was owed before being executed for combat refusual.

The Imperium IMO is not stupid. It has rules and regulations for everything and in order to best organise and deploy its resources. So it stands to reason that it would have regulations for retirement & pay because that offers the best return on investment. If tales spread that guardsmen were treated horribly (beyond their actual lot) by the powers that be, the powers that be would have to invest a lot more effort in raising regiments.

Not to say that stupid things don't happen but that's mostly because regulations are followed dogmatically without thought or applied inappropriately.

Personally, I still think you are applying too much of the real world onto 40k. Whilst a lot of the franchise has been inspired by it, there are some important differences which affect the overall result - not to mention that you seem to be limiting your real world concerns to the past few centuries.

Let's take the idea of "soldiers being dumped by the regiment", for example. Whilst returning a soldier who has served overseas has been standard practice for militaries for some time now, this has not always been the case, simply due to transportation not being easily available and it being too much of an effort for the state to arrange for individual troops to return to their homes. If we didn't have regular airplane, train and bus services these days, you can bet that it wouldn't be standard practice now either, out of sheer necessity.

A Roman Legionnaire serving in another corner of the world surely was not expected to be returned by the Empire itself. He'd receive a payment for his service - whether or not he uses it to purchase travel back home, and whether or not said travel was actually available, would have been their business. Due to interstellar transportation in the 41st millennium being highly limited, I am of the opinion that it would be similar for the 40k Imperial Guard.

In fact, it became common practice to provide retired Legionnaires with plots of land in the conquered area, turning them into settlers in order to establish a Roman influence in the new colony. The 2E Codex: Imperial Guard explains the Imperium of Man doing the very same thing. A regiment either fights until it is destroyed, or its members retire by being "granted custodianship" over a world in whose conquest they participated, with the officers becoming the new nobility.

As for regular payment ... you pretty much already delivered an argument against your own proposition. If the Imperial Guard cannot provide these luxury items you referred to, who else will? The tau, the eldar or the orks whose planets they are sent to attack? The feral world savages who don't even know what money is?

Not that I disagree entirely on this point, mind you! Personally, I like the idea put forward by James Swallow regarding a form of scrip (which has a real world history of military usage , too), as it seems like an excellent medium to support troop morale whilst still retaining a degree of control over how exactly it is spent, as well as logistical/economical necessities (acceptance of local coins etc). I just wanted to expand a bit on the likely pros and cons and special considerations regarding any form of pay, provided one adds this to their interpretation of the setting.

In a number of facets, I can also see "going home" to be spotty. You might've fought for years, even decades, and meanwhile, life in your home trooped on. I don't imagine any world in the Imperium of 40k being like the town I live in, with suburbia, houses, picket fences, yards, frivolity, and such; Hive Worlds are people-stuffed nightmares that make Star Wars locales like Nar Shaada, or waste byproduct dumping grounds like Ord Mantell and Raxus Prime look positively clean and serene by comparison, while Forge Worlds are smoke-belching infrastructure on a Coruscant-like scale. Other varieties are often equally extreme examples, as whole worlds are specifically devoted to singular objectives. The point of that babble is, while your gone, your home goes on, maybe your family continues, maybe they die, maybe they get squashed by competition, hiver gangs, or xenos incursion. Work in warp travel time dilation, and who knows what might have happened, and over how long a span? You could get home to find nothing left, and then just contribute to more urban squalor, one more homeless wretch bloating the waste of Hive population bloat. Kind of better to keep them on victory fields, where they have proven their faith, and have all the more reason to defend it, in the future. Of course, they might start to become like knights or samurai in peacetime, bored, jerk-like, and getting poor, good for little now that their lord doesn't need their only skill, and succumbing to banditry to make ends meet, or feel the old rush.

For money, I sort of agree that I'm not sure what all you would find it good for. You could trade it with your fellow soldiers, and one might want to store it up for when the fighting's done, and the place becomes a town, and you need money to be someone there, but barter is as good for while you are a soldier, and I often imagine the Guard battling on a fallen world already taken by whatever, leaving no cities to trade with, and spend your coin; that's part of why I brought up fraternization all that time ago, since I didn't see Guard having various settlements to visit, and pick up prostitutes, like various soldiers do on Earth. If you aren't fighting Humans, you can't even take prisoners for it, and Commissars would probably frown on it for with heretics almost as much as with aliens. That's why I wondered if the Guard had camp followers, or if their superiors were "typical of the Guard" blinders on what's going on in detail, so long as the end result is what they wanted. Still, if you were more a mobile regiment, like those ferried to numerous battlefields by voidship, I could see some, like Aoife Armengarde's Bansidhe , have literal mall-segments, and you could buy up stuff during the voyage,like stopping in a town.

Ord Mantell would be even worse in the 40k universe after the rebellion that took place in the events of swtor. I almost wouldn't wanna go home for fear of discovering that everyone I knew was dead. Or perhaps worse, didn't recognize physically or emotionally after all I'd been through, or thought I was weak for my scars, not getting what I'd actually been through and/or trying to understand and failing (considering Imperial propaganda).

Or like the cadians*:

You get sent halfway across the imperium to fight (let's say) Orks, and after long years of fighting hard and bearely surviving you get sent home only to find Failbaddon has now finaly made a dent in the Cadian gate and your home kasr has been overrun by world eaters- scourged by cadian bombardment,-reconquered by chaos forces and finally scoured by a blackstone fortress? And the rest of the world isn't in much better shape. Welcome home son!

And how about veterans from death worlds? You get sent home to a world that's a hundred times more lethal than the one you just left.

* Now Cadians have this image of being the ultimate guardsmen, and you'd expect them to just pick up their lasgun and keep fighting on their home soil, but still comming home like that gotta hurt a little.

Or like the cadians*:

You get sent halfway across the imperium to fight (let's say) Orks, and after long years of fighting hard and bearely surviving you get sent home only to find Failbaddon has now finaly made a dent in the Cadian gate and your home kasr has been overrun by world eaters- scourged by cadian bombardment,-reconquered by chaos forces and finally scoured by a blackstone fortress? And the rest of the world isn't in much better shape. Welcome home son!

They probably would keep fighting, but that'd sting like hell. They'd be less effective overall too, what with the shock in addition to it all.

Personally, I still think you are applying too much of the real world onto 40k. Whilst a lot of the franchise has been inspired by it, there are some important differences which affect the overall result - not to mention that you seem to be limiting your real world concerns to the past few centuries.

Let's take the idea of "soldiers being dumped by the regiment", for example. Whilst returning a soldier who has served overseas has been standard practice for militaries for some time now, this has not always been the case, simply due to transportation not being easily available and it being too much of an effort for the state to arrange for individual troops to return to their homes. If we didn't have regular airplane, train and bus services these days, you can bet that it wouldn't be standard practice now either, out of sheer necessity.

A Roman Legionnaire serving in another corner of the world surely was not expected to be returned by the Empire itself. He'd receive a payment for his service - whether or not he uses it to purchase travel back home, and whether or not said travel was actually available, would have been their business. Due to interstellar transportation in the 41st millennium being highly limited, I am of the opinion that it would be similar for the 40k Imperial Guard.

In fact, it became common practice to provide retired Legionnaires with plots of land in the conquered area, turning them into settlers in order to establish a Roman influence in the new colony. The 2E Codex: Imperial Guard explains the Imperium of Man doing the very same thing. A regiment either fights until it is destroyed, or its members retire by being "granted custodianship" over a world in whose conquest they participated, with the officers becoming the new nobility.

As for regular payment ... you pretty much already delivered an argument against your own proposition. If the Imperial Guard cannot provide these luxury items you referred to, who else will? The tau, the eldar or the orks whose planets they are sent to attack? The feral world savages who don't even know what money is?

Not that I disagree entirely on this point, mind you! Personally, I like the idea put forward by James Swallow regarding a form of scrip (which has a real world history of military usage , too), as it seems like an excellent medium to support troop morale whilst still retaining a degree of control over how exactly it is spent, as well as logistical/economical necessities (acceptance of local coins etc). I just wanted to expand a bit on the likely pros and cons and special considerations regarding any form of pay, provided one adds this to their interpretation of the setting.

I think you misunderstood my point. I agree that the Imperium is not going to go out of its way to get guardsmen back to their home planet. Too costly. But it is not just going to dump them after their service has ended. Because that would be stupid and would lead to banditry as history clearly showes.

The fluff suggests that they are retired as colonists much like the roman legionnairs which indeed makes the most sense.

As to money, I defy anyone to find an example of an army without money of some kind....Wherever a community arises (such like large bodies of troops), there will be a brisk trade in (illegal) goods. And that will require either money or trade in goods. Which means military supplies which is why armies prefer to pay their men instead of having vital ammunition or parts being traded....

And it won't be tau or Orks providing such luxury goods...it will be human camp followers. Even the red army paid its soldiers during WWII.

Seriously, do you people ever read a book about soldiers? Watch a movie? Maybe about prisoners of war? Or even just prisoners in a prison. There always will be trade because people want luxeries, even if that just means a bar of soap and some more ciggies...

I think you misunderstood my point. I agree that the Imperium is not going to go out of its way to get guardsmen back to their home planet. Too costly. But it is not just going to dump them after their service has ended. Because that would be stupid and would lead to banditry as history clearly showes.

The fluff suggests that they are retired as colonists much like the roman legionnairs which indeed makes the most sense.

As to money, I defy anyone to find an example of an army without money of some kind....Wherever a community arises (such like large bodies of troops), there will be a brisk trade in (illegal) goods. And that will require either money or trade in goods. Which means military supplies which is why armies prefer to pay their men instead of having vital ammunition or parts being traded....

And it won't be tau or Orks providing such luxury goods...it will be human camp followers. Even the red army paid its soldiers during WWII.

Seriously, do you people ever read a book about soldiers? Watch a movie? Maybe about prisoners of war? Or even just prisoners in a prison. There always will be trade because people want luxeries, even if that just means a bar of soap and some more ciggies...

A) I'm from a military family. B)I've lived it (not on WW2/1 scale, but still.) C) I've read eight of the forgotten voices books.

Admittedly, I was definitely never a POW, so I can't speak for that, but actively serving men usually trade in goods. (I never smoked, so if I somehow got my hand on a pack, I'd trade it away for something.) I can only think of one or two times when I payed money, and that was the official selling of certain items by the quartermaster.

I think the cliche is about cigarettes ... but tbh I've only ever seen people trading (parts of) ration packs.

Then again, there were surprisingly few smokers in my unit - things might be different in a prolonged campaign with regular battles where addiction to certain drugs becomes more common.

As for the camp followers - where would they get their goods from, and what use could they possibly have for some locally minted currency? Assuming a lack of established supply lines (one of the reasons for the lasgun being so popular .. no ammo imports needed!), there won't be a lot of goods they could offer the troops. Sure, many of them would offer services, and others might wander off to hunt food, but even then a bunch of coins you can only pay for on a couple specific worlds seems like a questionable form of payment.

Barter, though ... or, like I said, scrip vouchers. Even the US military used scrip to pay soldiers deployed abroad.

I think the cliche is about cigarettes ... but tbh I've only ever seen people trading (parts of) ration packs.

Then again, there were surprisingly few smokers in my unit - things might be different in a prolonged campaign with regular battles where addiction to certain drugs becomes more common.

Yeah, but it was huge to smoke at the time, and alot did, whereas I just never bothered. I could trade them for sausages, or someone's Judge Dredd when they were done (one of the aforementioned 'certain items', but there never seemed to be quite enough.) I've always been thin, even after the training so I needed a bit more food and those 'sausages' were so good. (At the time, at least. ) I hadn't really thought about scrip, though it'd make sense to pay Imp's in scrip, instead of thrones. Bit harder to lose too, if you're careful.

Loyal worlds are supposed to make supplies available to any guard regiments that come to their world. But some worlds don't see it that way*, but will sell their stuff to the guard. The guard will usualy just pay them for what they need, write down the cost and then the administratum increases that world's taxes. The munitorium manual even advises using a local go between and local currency.

* If a world flat out refuses to supply guard regiments it is considered hostile and may be freely engaged.

I think you misunderstood my point. I agree that the Imperium is not going to go out of its way to get guardsmen back to their home planet. Too costly. But it is not just going to dump them after their service has ended. Because that would be stupid and would lead to banditry as history clearly showes.

The fluff suggests that they are retired as colonists much like the roman legionnairs which indeed makes the most sense.

As to money, I defy anyone to find an example of an army without money of some kind....Wherever a community arises (such like large bodies of troops), there will be a brisk trade in (illegal) goods. And that will require either money or trade in goods. Which means military supplies which is why armies prefer to pay their men instead of having vital ammunition or parts being traded....

And it won't be tau or Orks providing such luxury goods...it will be human camp followers. Even the red army paid its soldiers during WWII.

Seriously, do you people ever read a book about soldiers? Watch a movie? Maybe about prisoners of war? Or even just prisoners in a prison. There always will be trade because people want luxeries, even if that just means a bar of soap and some more ciggies...

A) I'm from a military family. B)I've lived it (not on WW2/1 scale, but still.) C) I've read eight of the forgotten voices books.

Admittedly, I was definitely never a POW, so I can't speak for that, but actively serving men usually trade in goods. (I never smoked, so if I somehow got my hand on a pack, I'd trade it away for something.) I can only think of one or two times when I payed money, and that was the official selling of certain items by the quartermaster.

I agree that out on patrol/in the boonies there might be very little use for money while actual goods provide immediate ROI.

But once back in camp etc., nobody is going to lug their barter goods around....money is much easier. And sometimes a deal with barter can't be made but money is always good....Because the barter you have depends largely on what is available. Let's say an armoured regiment wants to buy ciggies from an infantry regiment. Why would the infantry regiment be interested in tank engine parts or tank ammo?

Operation petticoat has a good scene in which the crew of the pink submarine run an illegal casino to acquire the parts they need....they offer chips/money in return....

As for the camp followers - where would they get their goods from, and what use could they possibly have for some locally minted currency? Assuming a lack of established supply lines (one of the reasons for the lasgun being so popular .. no ammo imports needed!), there won't be a lot of goods they could offer the troops. Sure, many of them would offer services, and others might wander off to hunt food, but even then a bunch of coins you can only pay for on a couple specific worlds seems like a questionable form of payment.

Your historical knowledge here is lacking, Lynata. Or just your knowledge of human nature .

Camp followers/merchants/suttlers always have goods to sell, even when the actual army is starving. It's their usp.

A good example would be the Peninsular campaign of 1807-1814. Suttlers provided a very necessary service and somehow always managed to find goods to sell. Even the French suttlers belonging to Massena's army before the lines of Torres Vedras when they were cut off from Spain.

It would take a very barren world with no local settlements or army provided supplies to let these shrewd merchants run out goods to sell. And even then, I'd expect them to have backroom deals with corrupt Munitorium staff to get some goods to sell...

Which brings me back to historical references (yes, I know, I keep mentioning this). You read about soldiers hiding money or valuables in their shoes/uniforms/shakos/belts as emergency funds. Not about them hiding a few extra ration packs or a live chicken. Because money and baubles are portable and usually far more valuable for their weight than typical barter goods....

But once back in camp etc., nobody is going to lug their barter goods around....money is much easier. And sometimes a deal with barter can't be made but money is always good....Because the barter you have depends largely on what is available. Let's say an armoured regiment wants to buy ciggies from an infantry regiment. Why would the infantry regiment be interested in tank engine parts or tank ammo?

Operation petticoat has a good scene in which the crew of the pink submarine run an illegal casino to acquire the parts they need....they offer chips/money in return....

It's true, I concede to your point here. It is very true about the universal value of money, but you're also wrong in one point. 'Why would they need tank engine parts or tank ammo?'. They wouldn't, but that's not what you'd trade. Almost any regiment has something another would want. For example, the infantry regiment has whisky rations, but are subsisting on corpse starch and leaves. The armoured regiment really crave a good sip of liquid fire, but don't have any. What they do have are rations nobles such as they would expect.

See where I'm going with this?

(I reckon we've argued to a standstill.)

As for the camp followers - where would they get their goods from, and what use could they possibly have for some locally minted currency? Assuming a lack of established supply lines (one of the reasons for the lasgun being so popular .. no ammo imports needed!), there won't be a lot of goods they could offer the troops. Sure, many of them would offer services, and others might wander off to hunt food, but even then a bunch of coins you can only pay for on a couple specific worlds seems like a questionable form of payment.

Your historical knowledge here is lacking, Lynata. Or just your knowledge of human nature .

Camp followers/merchants/suttlers always have goods to sell, even when the actual army is starving. It's their usp.

A good example would be the Peninsular campaign of 1807-1814. Suttlers provided a very necessary service and somehow always managed to find goods to sell. Even the French suttlers belonging to Massena's army before the lines of Torres Vedras when they were cut off from Spain.

It would take a very barren world with no local settlements or army provided supplies to let these shrewd merchants run out goods to sell. And even then, I'd expect them to have backroom deals with corrupt Munitorium staff to get some goods to sell...

Which brings me back to historical references (yes, I know, I keep mentioning this). You read about soldiers hiding money or valuables in their shoes/uniforms/shakos/belts as emergency funds. Not about them hiding a few extra ration packs or a live chicken. Because money and baubles are portable and usually far more valuable for their weight than typical barter goods....

I'd think when Americans go to war against other Humans, this makes more sense than when the Guard shows up to reclaim a world taken by Orks, Nids, or some other "wreck everything!" army. By the time the IG get alerted to a problem, mobilized, warp travel, get lost twice, get hurdled a few decades the wrong way through time (because Tzeentch is just a tool that way ), and then finally arrive, deploy, and whatnot, there aren't usually Human settlements left. Sending your people to go trade with that Ork camp is heresy.

Also, and this sort of gets back, a bit, to the retirement bit, in a roundabout way, if I'm an Allied soldier in Nazi Germany circa 1944, it might do me some good to squirrel away some extra money; when I get home, and I hopefully still plan to, I can spend it, or, if it's German money, exchange it Deutschmarks to Dollars. If I'm a Catachan 88th on Kulth, I'm probably never leaving Kulth, and Kulth is at least a world with people on it. If I were deployed to fight on an Ork-held world, again there will be no shops to visit, no towns to barter with, or pay for goods, and possibly no leaving, even if we win; someone has to stay there, in case those Ork spores sprout a decade or three down the line.

This can be one of those scenarios where real-life comparisons can fall through. Orks don't have money (they have teef), and even if you shot a bunch of Orks, and your Colonel said "harvest the monsters' teeth, and we'll use them to barter with the more sympathetic tribes," he'd immediately be shot by the Commissar for heresy, and that assumes Orks have anything you still want. So many IG engagements seem, at least to me, to be more from the perspective of "IG goes to an already infested hole, being now the only Loyalist Humans on the planet, and have to wreck everything to get it back for the Emperor," rather than "the IG were sitting there, and suddenly had to repel the Greenskins, when they came to invade." That's more PDF, in my mind, while Guardsmen are more firefighters, sent to an existing problem to fix it. It seems less likely to find loyal Humans there, who can be of assistance, and such,

And spending money in camp? I would certainly not say that Quartermasters can't be bribed with money for better stuff, even if that stuff isn't theirs, but where is the Quartermaster spending it? He might never be leaving, either, or just to be deployed to the next engagement zone. If you aren't in a place with a strong civilian population (in which case what are the menacing Orks or Nids actually doing?), I don't see as many opportunities to squander, err spend any money, be it on hard liquor, soft company, or whatever your particular itch/fix is. Again, I've never served, so the life of an active soldier in a foreign place, Earth or 40K, is not something I'm familiar with, but what seems to work in this world, with actual people, sympathetic populations, and a certainty that you CAN go home, someday, doesn't as well pan in a place filled with DIFFERENT alien nightmares, total devastation, and a hierarchy above you that will shoot you for saluting wrong.

And spending money in camp? I would certainly not say that Quartermasters can't be bribed with money for better stuff, even if that stuff isn't theirs, but where is the Quartermaster spending it? He might never be leaving, either, or just to be deployed to the next engagement zone. If you aren't in a place with a strong civilian population (in which case what are the menacing Orks or Nids actually doing?), I don't see as many opportunities to squander, err spend any money, be it on hard liquor, soft company, or whatever your particular itch/fix is. Again, I've never served, so the life of an active soldier in a foreign place, Earth or 40K, is not something I'm familiar with, but what seems to work in this world, with actual people, sympathetic populations, and a certainty that you CAN go home, someday, doesn't as well pan in a place filled with DIFFERENT alien nightmares, total devastation, and a hierarchy above you that will shoot you for saluting wrong.

The quartermaster I mentoined sold official items, and the money went back to the army or government or something I guess. It wasn't a 'bribe' thing. He might do something similar with the Munitorum, or maybe he sends it home to his family or something. But as you said this 'doesn't as well pan in a place filled with DIFFERENT alien nightmares, total devastation, and a hierarchy above you that will shoot you for saluting wrong.'

Camp followers/merchants/suttlers moving across an unpolluted world populated with other humans producing compatible goods and willing to part with them always have goods to sell, even when the actual army is starving.

Fixed that statement for you.

I think I've already alluded to it earlier, but if those goods you want to trade cannot be procured, they won't be available for sale! Everything has to come from somewhere, and the more devastating a war becomes, the less likely a sutler will be able to acquire stuff from settlements in the area the regiment is passing through.

And this is all assuming that the soldiers won't simply loot whatever they need (as was the case at least during the invasion of Fenris, as per codex fluff). Apparently, during the Thirty Years War, camp merchants were made largely redundant by the armies "supplying themselves", if you know what I mean.

This is in the order of a good argument. If it seems too abrasive or just plain boring, please say so and we can go on to the next topic.

I agree with all that say that there might not be any (sympathetic) human settlements on many war fronts. Or that what passes for money in one sector might not be valuable in another.

Still, I'd argue strongly that merchants will find a way to make a buck and will provide goods (of any kind soldiers will want). This is depicted in too many books/films etc. set in so many different historical periods to ignore IMO.

And i suspect this will also apply to armies fighting nasty aliens. In starship troopers, Rico and his roughnecks are given a party with booze, a ball and even a violin. Probably none of this was army issue....

So if the departemento munitorium doesn't provide and neither does the Emperor, there will be an enterprising merchant who will. Maybe even a rogue trader who will arrange to supply independent suttlers or have his own organisation which follows IG forces around and sells wanted items. Not too far fetched IMO....

As to money and relative worth, that would be handled just like different currencies are in our time. You could even come up with a system in which for example the Falconi Nitwits guardsmen sign I.O.U.'s to the suttlers on planet Nogoodshere which are then sold to a rogue trader or free captain/shipping company and these are subsequently paid off by their relatives on the planet of Falconi.....

I never actually served but I was called up for conscription back in 1986 and volunteered for the logistics branch in the Dutch army because I thought it might help with a later career in business unlike running around toting an assault rifle. I got the first educational course books etc. which included a bit about black market dealings. Don't know if the Dutch army was particularly prone to this or not but it was considered important enough to mention that soldiers will always try to make their lives a little more pleasant, apparently by acquiring stuff the army didn't consider good for them .

As I was accepted at my university later that summer, I was given a deferement which lasted long enough for conscription to be abolished so I never became a second lieutenant in the logistics branch....but I still have a soft spot for those black marketeers the army was so worried about.....

I never actually served but I was called up for conscription back in 1986 and volunteered for the logistics branch in the Dutch army because I thought it might help with a later career in business unlike running around toting an assault rifle. I got the first educational course books etc. which included a bit about black market dealings. Don't know if the Dutch army was particularly prone to this or not but it was considered important enough to mention that soldiers will always try to make their lives a little more pleasant, apparently by acquiring stuff the army didn't consider good for them .

As I was accepted at my university later that summer, I was given a deferement which lasted long enough for conscription to be abolished so I never became a second lieutenant in the logistics branch....but I still have a soft spot for those black marketeers the army was so worried about.....

I did Combat Medic work mostly (Within my fireteam of course), alongside the aforementioned rifle toting gooning. Helps with becoming a doctor, plus it's a family tradition, I had to do something. Dad did logistics after he did his knee in. In my teenage years I got all sorts of clothing etc that he mysteriously happened to make its way into his attic, including a pair of Russian gloves that happened to find their way into his kitbag one winter. Also, I'm not bored so far. And yeah, it does take place in most armies I should expect, they're still humans who want to live fairly comfortably, or have something to ease their lives a little bit.