White Scars - Pioneer Companies: In its earliest incarnation, the Vth Legion was not the singular body that many of the other proto-Legions formed. It was a Space Marine Legion in name only. Instead, it was organised into autonomous companies, each of which had few links to any of their brethren and operated entirely independently.Indeed, prior to the recall that was sent after the discovery of Jaghatai Khan, many of the Pioneer Companies had no contact with any other body of the Vth Legion and developed a set of traditions and rituals unique to that company. This was especially true as the Great Crusade progressed, with each company often forced to pursue recruitment as they travelled because supply and reinforcement convoys were rarely able to keep up with their rate of advance.Oddly, this brought several of the Pioneer Companies closer to the other Legions, especially where they fought in close proximity, as the Vth Legion warriors, still lacking a Primarch to rally around, began to adoptelements of the other Legions' practises.These distinct sub-cultures would endure beyond the integration of Jaghatai's new order, with many of them being subsumed into the pre-existing Chogorian obsession with small superstitions and others among the Warrior Lodges that permeated the Terran branches of the White Scars.These Pioneer Companies were composed of as few as 500 and as many as 3,000 Legionaries; with records listing perhaps 800 known companies by the year 800.M30. The sum total of the entire Vth Legion is estimated to have been around 80,000 at this point in the Great Crusade, but is rarely known to have gathered in strengths of greater than a few thousand, barring such exceptional incidents as the Battle for Thapsus in late 744.M30.Though spread thin, the Vth Legion remained a sizable force, mostly due to the opportunistic recruitment patterns practised by many of the companies of the Legion to offset the relative scarcity of reinforcements received from Terra. This practise caused no little friction between the Legions, as the warriors of the Vth had on a number of occasions encroached upon territory ceded to the moreestablished Legions.In particular, both Ferrus Manus and Leman Russ are known to have made issue of the Legion recruiting from worlds whose populations were pledged to them, and only the direct intervention of Horus Lupercal is known to have prevented the censure of the Vth's errant warriors.Within each Pioneer Company there was to be found a tremendous diversity of sub-divisions and heraldry, the most common being the old Terran standard of the Unification Wars armies which sub-divided the larger company into groups of 100 warriors, each commanded by a Captain and one among that number acting as overall commander, a First Captain.Heraldry among the early Vth Legion was just as varied. Most Pioneer Companies maintained the numeral that marked the Legion designation granted them by the Emperor, but also adopted a number of unofficial insignia of their own, marking the various titles granted them by both the Imperial forces they served and the enemies they hunted.A sample of these titles and heraldic devices, displayed above as found in the Liber Armorum Terranicus edition of 756.M30, shows a growing lack of unity between the Legion's far flung sons in the years just before the discovery of their Primarch.