Starfleet Jedi

I was giving some random ST v 40K thread a quick look when I came across this post:

Deadguy2001 wrote:
As for the quote you were looking for about the Tyranids.

Here from the old 3E codex.

"A billion upon a billion Tyranids stand at the rim of the galaxy" Page 39.

Taken along with Xenology and some later sources this number would only count Hive ships and Synapse creatures since the lesser beasts like Rippers, Guants, and spore mines are actually manufactured on the spot and then digested after combat is over.

Or are you referring to the Stark Report which suggested to the High Lords that they draft every able bodied Man, Woman, and Child in the Segmentums Tempestus and Solar into the Imperial Guard/Navy to stop the primary Tyranid fleet?

A few posts later, he claims the following:

Deadguy2001 wrote: More importantly does this change the fact that the ST galaxy will be overrun by a quintillion strong swarm of city sized space monsters which could probably go around swallowing Borg cubes with utter impunity?

So, quick question:

Is the idiom X upon X supposed to mean X times X ?
I never understood "upon" that way, and I thought it referred to an addition of more or less a similar quantity ended in the same range or one or two orders of magnitude higher, like thousands upon thousands, which I took as many thousands.

Is it normal, here, that a billion upon a billion doesn't translate as something like two billions but quintillions?

Such phrasing doesn't occur often enough anymore, but unless the context made it apparent that the person was trying to make it some sort of multiplication or exponent function (which would be odd for the phrasing), it just means "a lot of millions". Another such floral phrasing might be "untold millions", which does not literally mean that there are millions who weren't told something.

"Thousands upon thousands" appears in "Mark of Gideon" and a Doctor Who episode if you need other sci-fi referents.

At the very least, "millions upon millions" suggests a lower limit of, say, four million, if you wanted to be too specific.

I'm generally inclined to think that Robert is right on this one. It would be very odd in most common day spoken English for someone to indicate a multiplier that way. Usually I've seen multipliers spoken as "ten times ten" or "a billion-billion", etc.

Without more information it's still a tough call.
-Mike

Yeah, seems to me it says "a few Billions", and not a Billion Billion Tyranids...