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2012-11-11, 03:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
And I regard the numbers given by the canon sources as very far from trustworthy.
I just find it difficult to imagine how a civilisation that most closely resembles some blend of Aztec priest-theocracy (without the philosophical education), Catholic Inquisition (without the due process) and Puritan witch-hunts (without the clean living), crossed with the war-economics of WWII Russia and the social stratification of 19th century Brazil, could by any stretch of the imagination not be an extraordinarily unpleasant place to live. (On average.)
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2012-11-11, 03:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Yeah, my impression is that a Hive World consists of a few massive arcologies of one form or another (The "Hives"), with a pollution-blighted, acid-rain scored, uninhabitable wastelands between them. Or even just one huge hive, with the rest of the world as an unlivable ruin.
as for the standard of living, as I understand it, the rule with the setting is "If you can imagine it, and it's not outright heretical, it probably exists somewhere".
w40k tends to focus on extremes. You hear about the extreme anarchic poverty of those in the bottom of the hive, or the extreme decadence of those at the top levels of society. When fiction does portray less extreme planets, it tends to be in the context of a war. Several of the Cain books seem to exist on planets that, before the latest alien/mutant/heretical threat showed up, seem to possess a modern standard of living.Last edited by BRC; 2012-11-11 at 03:22 PM.
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2012-11-11, 03:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Spoiler
If you won't trust the canon any discussion is about it is pointless.
I just find it difficult to imagine how a civilisation that most closely resembles some blend of Aztec priest-theocracy (without the philosophical education), Catholic Inquisition (without the due process) and Puritan witch-hunts (without the clean living), crossed with the war-economics of WWII Russia and the social stratification of 19th century Brazil, could by any stretch of the imagination not be an extraordinarily unpleasant place to live. (On average.)Princess in the streets.
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2012-11-11, 03:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
They don't need to. As I've pointed out repeatedly, 1% of the surface area, built up to 50 metres, is sufficient for a population in the trillions (in real life, we already have 3% of our land surface area covered.) And these arcologies are supposed to be kilometres deep. So even 0.1% of the surface area at 2 kilometres of bunk space + support works out to 8 Trillion inhabitants.
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2012-11-11, 03:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Well, I'm sure it will be productive when you ignore basic math.
Read some Black Library? Lot of people seem to be doing ok there until the xenos show up.
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2012-11-11, 03:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Except, as I pointed out, feeding one trillion inhabitants requires so many starships to arrive, unload, and depart on a daily basis that you'd be able to wrap them around the equator of said planet several times, and you'd still have ships left over. And of course, given the danger of space travel in 40k, you'd need hundreds of escort vehicles with said ships. Oh, and you'd need to feed the crews of said ships, and fuel them, and...
Also, if you're packing that many people into that small a space, you run into heating problems; As David Morgan Mar pointed out, Coruscant (which has a population of only one trillion) would produce enough heat to melt the entire planet's surface. You're packing 8 times that many people into a much smaller space.Steam ID: The Great Squark
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2012-11-11, 03:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I'm not ignoring your maths, I'm saying that extrapolating all sorts of figures to estimate a population when the canon already has a figure just makes you wrong - big difference
You can argue that Hives should have bigger populations, that this and that should be true - I may even agree with you - but you can't use figures that dispute the canon to prop up an argument about another bit of canon.Princess in the streets.
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2012-11-11, 03:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
For that matter, any calculation that even remotely considers 'efficient living space' is going to be off by hilarious orders of magnitude. We're talking about a civilization that installs gargoyles in their heating ducts (not really) - they have a cultural obsession with making everything looming, overbearing, and gothic, not to mention simple inefficiency...a centrally planned arcology might be able to support trillions of people, but the average Hive isn't built all at once, they reach their Hive status over thousands of years of building, rebuilding, and expansion.
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2012-11-11, 03:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Take Tokyo. Stack it on top of itself ten times, then put another five layers underneath the surface, then put it in an arcology. The population is 500 million.
I would call that a Hive City. And even if it was the only city on a planet, I'd call it a hive world. Despite less than a billion people.
You're arguing based on "How much the population would be if the cities covered X% of the landmass", but the indication is that they don't cover a massive proportion of the landmass. A planet probably has a few of these gigantic cities, but not enough to cover an entire planetary surface or even a terribly large percentage of it.Avatar by Simius
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2012-11-11, 04:07 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
(Well, the comic in question specifies 100 trillion, not 8.) Like I said, all food would have to be produced locally from recycled waste. I'm not sure about the heating problem, but I'm assuming direct chemical manufacture of protein/vitamins, which, if possible, should cut down on the energy requirements. Given adequate surface ventilation, it might be possible.
Overheating would definitely be a problem for a place like necromunda/terra, unless they have some very fancy future tech for efficiently pumping waste heat into space. *shrugs*. I dunno. Maybe they couldn't exist. But my point is that, if hive or forge worlds did exist, in anything resembling the official description, they would necessarily house huge populations.
EDIT: Tokyo comparisons don't really cut it, since none of our modern cities approach the density of an arcology.Last edited by Carry2; 2012-11-11 at 04:12 PM.
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2012-11-11, 04:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
The thing is, someone did not just go about and say, "Hey, let's build a hive world" Hives just sort of... happen.
On the coruscant problem: Huh. I didn't bother to calculate the population he was using, given that the current canon figure is just 1 trillion.Steam ID: The Great Squark
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2012-11-11, 04:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
40K canon is infamous for its blatant incosistencies, sometimes in the very same paragraph. Ward for example makes the necrons somehow end up several orders of magnitude with more numbers than they started with before their nighty-night, despite aparently having experienced mostly decay and destruction during that same period.
It's called propaganda and brainwashing. Lots of people in the IoM would happily kill their own family if someone told them the emprah wanted it (and they do that, see the Death Korps of Krieg for example). Lots of people also seem willing to side with anyone with the IoM due to the sheer agony their daily life is.
And if you don't side, well, guess where the IG is getting their numbers and who's manning up all the military factories and logistics needed to keep the IoM's eternal war going?
Not to mention all the talk on how countless citizens die trying to pilgrimage to holy places.
You simply cannot keep a 10 000 years constant war going in multiple fronts whitout exploiting your full population to the max (in particular when 99% of the IoM strategy is making their enemy run out of ammo by throwing more men with flashlights at them, no wonder axes and swords are a pretty popular choice of weapons). Sure the top elites may get nice lives in their spires, but the remaining 99.99999% are in for a pretty rough ride. Of course the IoM's propaganda machine works day and night to make them think that's a pretty good life.Last edited by deuterio12; 2012-11-11 at 04:41 PM.
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2012-11-11, 04:42 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I think you might be overthinking this a tiny bit, and also making one big invalid assumption. Namely, that the Imperium has any idea whatsoever on how to build things efficiently, which they do not. Frankly, given the fact that everything they do is designed by hand, usually by people who are just regurgitating facts from someone else's partially degraded work three thousand years ago, I'd be surprised if they managed to meet modern population density figures, especially given how much the Imperium loves to waste space on ornamentation and ostentation.
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2012-11-11, 05:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
...I'd be surprised if they managed to meet modern population density figures, especially given how much the Imperium loves to waste space on ornamentation and ostentation.
The problem of central planning seems serious, but if you're recycling everything locally, central planning may not be that critical. (Also, it's hard to see how you prevent lateral sprawl without it or distribute imported rations, though I don't think that happens.) Hive worlds are supposedly super-crowded, psychologically stressful environments, and if they managed even 10% of the figures Iextracted from my asstheorised, that still puts 90% of the imperium's population toiling away in hive-blocs.
EDIT: As for overthinking: yeah, I do that.Last edited by Carry2; 2012-11-11 at 05:25 PM.
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2012-11-11, 05:32 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
You simply cannot keep a 10 000 years constant war going in multiple fronts whitout exploiting your full population to the max (in particular when 99% of the IoM strategy is making their enemy run out of ammo by throwing more men with flashlights at them, no wonder axes and swords are a pretty popular choice of weapons). Sure the top elites may get nice lives in their spires, but the remaining 99.99999% are in for a pretty rough ride. Of course the IoM's propaganda machine works day and night to make them think that's a pretty good life.
However, as other have pointed out, there are numerous worlds that are just settled, where live is ok, or even pretty good. They're surely not that plentiful, and all in all, life in the Imperium has a high chance of sucking hard, but there are lot's of normal folks around. The Eisenhorn and Ravenor books frequently mention them.Si non confectus, non reficiat.
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2012-11-11, 08:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I don't want to get involved in the “is the Imperium a nice place to live” conversation , but I do want to get involved in the “how many people should there be in a hive city” conversation. I'm a physicist, and we love approximating things to be spheres and cubes and what not, but even I have to disagree with assigning each population member a unit of cubic volume and just multiplying that by the population.
I think you sum it up when you say
Tokyo comparisons don't really cut it, since none of our modern cities approach the density of an arcology.
They build vast religious structures which house effectively 0 people. On strategically important worlds (and most hive worlds seem to be strategically important), they build huge fortifications. The upper spires of most hives are portrayed as palatial complexes inhabited by a few super-rich aristocrats. Most importantly, most hive worlds are tithe grade “Exacta Extremis”, so they have to produce stuff. During the Armageddon campaign there was mention of a tank factory so large that sweeping tank battles were being fought inside it.
Of course, you can bolt on correction factors to your previous calculations, and you'll come to the same conclusion – even if you say there's ten times as much space devoted to machines and walls and penthouses and factories as there is to population housing, your numbers aren't going to change by more than an order of magnitude, and you need many orders of magnitude to square your calculation with the smaller picture. But I still think that's going about things the wrong way: the manufactoriums and such aren't add-ons, they come first.
If you're constructing a hive city, the first thing you need to think about is where these centres of planetary industry are that drew so many people together. Then you place the hab-blocks around them that you need, to house their working population. Then you build the Cathedral of the Holy Worker or what have you to service their spiritual needs, and the Palace of the Guild Commercia, and a shuttle-port or three, and some big orbital defence lasers and walls. Of course, this all brings in more people, so you have to house them too; the place is starting to look a bit polluted with all this urban/industrial activity so best stack 'em inside the walls, not outside.
Over time, this mega-city is going to become the dominant economic force in the region, and more and more people are going to move there as its demand for manpower increases (and in most cases, as it poisons the surrounding land), so it grows upwards. New factories get built with the new money, and new workers are needed to make those factories go. Old structures become unsound or abandoned, and new structures get built over them. There's a cross-sectional diagram of a hive in an old White Dwarf which shows it as a layered cone: as you get deeper and closer to the centre, the more derelict/unlivable the structure gets.
The picture I get of your average hive is that most of its volume is 'dead' – killed by the weight of the city on top. You're going to have an inner cone kilometres high that is urban wasteland, underhive territories which can support only a scraggly population of gangs. The vital activity of the hive – manufacturing, habitation for the average citizen – is going on in a surface layer surrounding that core, with a gradual gradient between the two. It's like an old tree - the dead stuff on the inside is pretty much just providing a structural skeleton for the living surface to cling to.
This is just my picture, so obviously you're free to disagree. I can think of a little bit of canon support – there's that diagram, and in the FFG RPG line they talk a fair bit about Hive Sibellus being built over itself, to the extent that a lot of buildings are carved out of old broken statuary that no-one remembers the meaning of. I don't think canon support is too important here – all I'm trying to do is paint a plausible picture of a hive world with a population in the billions, not trillions. I'm not saying it's implausible that an advanced hive city could be built in an arcology fashion, with the intention being to stack as many people in one place as possible (and then your numbers would stack up fairly well); I'm just saying that I think this alternative picture also makes sense.
The Imperium as a central administration doesn't care too much about efficiency or living standards; even if it did, it's just too big to be able to implement them. What it cares about is rates of production, and there are two ceilings on that: working population, and the resources available to be exploited. If you hit the second ceiling before the first (imports/exports moving at maximum capacity for the physical size of your city, etc. - things which are mostly going to be a function of surface area, not volume), then no-one off-world is going to care how much housing space you waste. And even if it does get to the state where re-building it more efficiently seems attractive, by that time it'll be so vast and sprawling that the short-term cost would be astronomical.
I'm interested in this, by the way, because I'm trying to flesh out a hive world for my current Dark Heresy campaign. Just thinking about this enough to write it down has been helpful in consolidating some of my ideas, so apologies for the rambling post.Last edited by LCP; 2012-11-11 at 08:46 PM.
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2012-11-11, 08:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
This is a very good point. A Hive World is essentially a Death World, except that the HW has a few points of 'civilisation' where production can actually be done. Remember, Necromunda's primary purpose is to manufacture lasguns. Not to house people. And the Imperium needs a lot of lasguns.
Also, 'The Imperium is not a nice place to live'. That actually is a factor in a Hive City. The attrition rates are enormous. You can't work? Dead. You stole somebody's bread at lunch and they caught you? Dead. You didn't steal somebody's bread and didn't feed yourself? Dead. You stepped out of your hab at the wrong time and caught a stray Auto-round from a gang-war three levels down? Dead. Over time, habs and entire hab-blocks don't become uninhabitable, they just become uninhabited. As LCP pointed out, in a Hive, there are 'dead' spaces - and I'm using the term literally. There are spaces in a Hive where everyone is just dead.
It should also be noted that a lot of Hives have an unsustainable population. The reason why there are 'only' billions in a Hive, and not trillions, is that there really isn't enough resources for that to happen.
The Imperium is not a utopia. Not even close. You're the Planetary Governor. You ran out of money to feed your planet? Oh dear. You best petition the Administratum about that. They'll get right on that...In about 50 years. By which time three quarters of the population will be dead and starvation wont be a factor so much as gang warfare and disease will be.
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2012-11-11, 11:28 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I don't think anyone said utopia. Or even "Nice place to live." I think the argument is
"Some people do not live utterly horrible lives. In fact, some people leave lives of moderate quality, comparable to today's modern middle class."
For example, in the Eisenhorn books, at one point Eisenhorn visits a bar for mutants. This suggests that on that particular Agri-World, even mutants, the lowest of the low, have both leisure time and disposable income. Admittedly, probably not a whole lot of either, but it's there.Avatar by K penguin. Sash by Damned1rishman.
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2012-11-11, 11:30 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I think part of the reason Hives get built too is that the Imperium doesn't like abandoning worlds. It's one thing to prioritize the survival of one world or another, or to deny it to the enemy, but just abandoning a world that's been in human hands for 20000 years (And I suspect many hives date back to the dark age of technology) strikes me as something that the eclisiarchy would object to.
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2012-11-11, 11:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Sure, yeah. There are a few Civilized worlds out there that would be outright pleasant. Most of the places Cain visits, for one, Macragge, that sort. Heck, there are a few 'Garden Worlds' and Shrine Worlds out there that are actually paradisiacal. The only rule of the Imperium is that "yes, things are like that too", which is why we can have musketeers inducted into the Imperial Guard serving with cyborgized Skitarii who are more machine than man, right alongside Feudal lancers and some guys who were very impressed when they figured out that copper was not the pinnacle of mettalurgy. But, in general? Here's a relevent quote from Dark Heresy. This is the very second thing the book says about life in the Imperium:
To be alive in the 41st Millennium is to know that the universe is a terrifying and hostile place. It is a place where you are but one amongst billions and, no matter how heroic your death, you will not be missed.Avatar by the wonderful SubLimePie. Former avatar by Andraste.
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2012-11-12, 03:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I think part of the reason Hives get built too is that the Imperium doesn't like abandoning worlds. It's one thing to prioritize the survival of one world or another, or to deny it to the enemy, but just abandoning a world that's been in human hands for 20000 years (And I suspect many hives date back to the dark age of technology) strikes me as something that the eclisiarchy would object to.
As far as I know, no or only very few planets have ever been given up due to excess polution. Whatever the Imperium does wrong, they seem to manage that, at least. As ine, polute everything BUT the Hive.Last edited by GolemsVoice; 2012-11-12 at 03:48 AM.
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2012-11-12, 09:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
That's not quite what I meant. I mean, several times people like to compare the Imperium's way of doing things, with our own IRL. And, often, it's the case that 'we' can do things better than 40K, surely they could do something better than we can, right? Well, no.
By 'utopia', I merely meant that everything can run, or has the potential to run as smoothly as things here, IRL.
IRL, take the GFC. A bunch of countries start losing money all over the place. Countries then asked other countries for more money, it happened in a matter of weeks-to-months. Sure, some countries are more in debt that others, but, overall, things went back to normal. I think that's about as brief as I can be without stepping on Forum rules.
In 40K, if a country (read; planet) doesn't have any money, or food, etc. Well, things go to Hell in a handbasket in a hurry.
On another topic, during our Deathwatch game last night, the matter of Wrap transit time was brought up, and I remembered the same subject here on the Forum and how starmaps don't mean anything if time and distance are unrelated. It was also mentioned that if it takes 50 years to get to Terra, wont the psykers on the Black Ships be useless by the time they get there?
I didn't have a proper answer then, and I'm an idiot because the answer actually is obvious and apparent and I felt like an idiot last night at the table when someone pointed out the totally obvious.
Time and distance are only related to people outside the Warp. Yes, it really does take 50 years to get to Terra, but only on the outside. If you're actually moving towards Terra inside the Warp, you'll barely notice the journey (as much as anyone could ignore a few years in a box), but, 50 years will still pass.
So, in the game, the conversation went like this...
GM: Okay, looking at the map, the planet is here, and you're here. It takes you this many years to get there.
Player: So we have to age our characters?
GM: What? No. Why would you, it's only been a few days, two weeks, tops.
Player: But you said years.
GM: Not for you. Time still passes on the outside, you know? That's why it's gone to [poop] by the time you get there.
Then I facepalmed as I remembered the conversation here. Time is meangingless in the Warp. But not to the people outside, and a good GM (or anyone trying to write a story) factors that in when Warp-travellers deal with ordinary folk.
Remember that totally cool guy you met in the first game session? Well, four missions and thirty years have passed. He's dead.
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2012-11-12, 11:05 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
Dayum.
Really brings a whole sense of tragedy to anybody in any profession that requires any sort of frequent warp-travel. Any contacts you may have met will be long dead by the time you have any chance to return to that planet, unless they to warp-travel with any frequency. Traders, soldiers, inquisitorial folks, crew-members of ships, freight captains...
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2012-11-13, 12:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
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2012-11-13, 06:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
It's also customary to compare calendars and clocks whenever two ships meet, just to see if they're both matching.
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2012-11-13, 08:14 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
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2012-11-13, 08:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
I might have to come back and review your post in more detail later in the week, but I do appreciate the feedback.
For the moment, my main objection would be that, given that hive worlds are supposed to suffer intense competition for resources, a corrosive environment and great difficulty with policing their population, any abandoned areas would probably collapse from disrepair and/or be stripped of their infrastructure within a few generations. All that metal can't just sit there, it has to be actively maintained.
Besides- saying that the main purpose of a hive world is production, not population, doesn't make much difference to a society that has a superstitious aversion to the assembly line (and arguably, the main export is 'people'). A forge world might be able to cut down on human labour requirements by an order of magnitude or two, thanks to AdMech expertise/dispensations, but in many cases that's just shifting the labour requirements from indentured serfs to cybernetically-lobotomised slave-drones.
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2012-11-13, 08:55 AM (ISO 8601)
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2012-11-13, 08:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
If you want a different line of argument, and even if you assume that hive worlds got fed by agricultural imports, then the closest terrestrial analogy that we have are the 'dark satanic mills' of industrial britain (minus the scientific brilliance or impetus for long-term social reform.)
The industrial period saw the vast majority of the population being concentrated in major urban centres, and for the most majority of their population, life sucked. Sure, there were fantastic amenities available to the upper and middle classes, but they were only on the icing on the Dickensian layer-cake of factory workers, poorhouse inmates, plantation slaves and gunboat diplomacy. And this was a society that had absolutely no problem with labour-saving devices.
So, yeah. Life in the imperium may be all peeled grapes and janus simulacra for some of the folks in charge, but there's gonna be 10, 100, or 1000 soot-blackened schmucks working to keep him or her in the lap of luxury.
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2012-11-13, 09:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Warhammer 40k fluff thread VI: They see me Ward'en, they haten
...given that hive worlds are supposed to suffer intense competition for resources, a corrosive environment and great difficulty with policing their population, any abandoned areas would probably collapse from disrepair and/or be stripped of their infrastructure within a few generations. All that metal can't just sit there, it has to be actively maintained.
This would be particularly true in a hive city where upwards (rather than outwards) growth is the norm, and those low-level habs that are getting buried are becoming increasingly lawless gang-lands as they get buried deeper. The planet's crust doesn't complain when your intensive mining facilities pull ore out of it; the Steel Spiders might kick up something of a fuss when you turn up to dismantle the old chemical shed they live in.
I'm not sure where "superstitious aversion to the production line" comes from either. The thing I mentioned with the tank factory on Armageddon mentions how a production line conveyor belt was used to anchor the battle-line, and how the battle was won when the Guard counter-attacked in unpainted Chimeras that had just rolled off the assembly line.
EDIT: Just saw your later post, and thought I'd add - I think "Dickensian" is a great descriptor for Imperial society as a whole. It's how I try to play it.Last edited by LCP; 2012-11-13 at 09:17 AM.