The Dark Eldar are far fewer in number than their less evil kin and are concentrated in the Webway at their 'homeworld' Commarragh and a handful of other webway colonies. The population of the DE come from descendants that survived the fall escaping into the webway and from fallen Exodites.
I'm not convinced the DE are 'far fewer'. The trouble, I find, with this line of argument is much the same as is in Epic. 'The Dark Eldar are small'.
Are they?
CommorraghWe've no idea how big it is. A city. A few thousand Dark Eldar? A few hundred thousand? A million? A billion?
How do the DE even procreate anyway. Which DE in their right mind, providing their gestation works at all similar to primate gestation, would submit to pregnancy and voluntarily incapacitate themselves for a while?
Who would dedicate themselves to educating the young?
The DE society works best, IMO, if they've established a massive baby-factory system. Hundreds, if not thousands of babies produced per day. Most are simply eaten, as soulfood. Some are, y'know, kept, or accelerated to adolescence. Their minds might be programmed with didactic implants or techniques?
If the DE have any massive way of sustaining their population (and indeed I think it's best if Commoragh has a burgeoning population), then it's gonna be huge.
However, their society is incredibly insular. Why raid with dozens of DE to claim a thousand souls when you could raid with ten thousand DE (say, a warfleet) and stand a fine chance of, perhaps, claiming a billion? (Imagine a 'warfleet' sized assembly of ships simply 'dissecting' a Hiveworld and all its defences..., not a 'claim' of the entire planet, but incapacitating the whole damned thing...)
Fluff SupportI think it's worth restressing that many of our popular 'beliefs' about the races might be widely spread, but they're not necessarily accurate, necessary or sensible. Case in point: Commoragh being awesomely huge makes much more sense to me than a (relative to the other races) teensy DE population scraping about in the odd ends of the Webway...
In that regard, the Eldar items like Void Stalker, DE BB, DE GC and so forth can very viably be pre-fall artefacts. The Eldar race was destroyed (say 99.9%?) and in doing so the Eldar civilisation fell with it. But what about all the shipyards, all the fleets, the relics, the aeon-old weapons caches? I see no reason for the DE, CWE and CE not to have pilfered massive amounts of pre-fall Eldar tech. Given the existence of Craftworlds, I could happily believe that DE access to BBs comes from pre-fall technology.
Certainly, we
don't even know if the Dark Eldar even build their own ships anymore. The whole damned lot could be pre-fall tech. No need to 'force it to be a character ship'. These are techno-cannibals living in the hollow carcass of their former glory, and they're still terrifying.
The argument for the BB isn't "The others have a Void Stalker" it is: "It might be bloody cool and afford an extra layer of 'ooh, that's interesting' to the game".
The argument against is "I can't concieve of a sensible reason for the VS, ergo no to the DE too". Well, that's an horrid misrepresentation, but the basic 'anti-BB' stance is that big ships are silly for what are essentially raiding fleets. Sure, they are. I can't argue that on its own. The counterpoint, I feel, could happily be something as has been outlined above. The fluff
can support it, and it certainly doesn't
rule it out.
