>>96876060
Well, roughly 10% of hunter cadres are battlesuits, which checks out with how their promotion system works. This can vary, but this was the example given to us so it's likely the 'average' cadre.

We know that there are singular Tau planets with trillions of people, Sa'cea being the premier example, and it's not even particularly habitable by Tau standards (it's actually something of a death world that breeds tough soldiers, the Tau just live in giant arcology domes to supply the needs of their population). We also know that they have enormous continent sized space habitats for their air caste to live in, so the population of any given planet probably won't need to account for that caste.

All this to say, with 240 or more planets (I would assume closer to 300 by now but we don't have specific numbers to work with other than it's at least 240 or so) we can probably assume there's at least tens of trillions of people in the Tau Empire, more likely hundreds of trillions but let's play things conservatively. If we assume a population of 10 trillion, then if only 10% of that population was Firewarriors, that would be 1 trillion Firewarriors. And if we assume 10% of those Firewarriors will be piloting battlesuits, that would be 100 billion battlesuits.

Now, this might be too high. For starters, the need for 4 years of active service in combat would likely lower that number. And, likewise, it's possible that there are a higher proportion of battlesuit-light cadres to battlesuit-heavy cadres. But regardless, we can at least assume that the numbers of battlesuits are likely in the billions at minimum, with tens of billions being my safest assumption.

>>96834299
Yeah makes me sad, I get the appeal of battlesuits and obviously the Tau are working up towards having their own versions of titans which is all well and good, but I really want more auxillaries, plus maybe some psychic auxillaries too.