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War and Pieces posted:In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium there is only refugee crisises This is probably all too accurate, really, especially given major events often involve major inhabited worlds getting blown up or hosed up. It's not uncommon for entire populations to be forcibly transferred, and apparently Imperial Guard regiments often don't get to go back home but are settled down on whatever planet they liberated/conquered/got stuck on. (Which sometimes can be like the Roman model and produce new noble lines, sometimes just ends up with a lot of bars with names like The 47th whose clientele mostly have thousand-yard stares and you really, really, REALLY don't want to try and rob them) Decorus posted:That got me wondering, given that your typical city planet easily has a population of trillion, where would you even find the people to inhabit that place? Even handwaving the construction process with magical nanites, just the sheer task of moving the population to a newly built city-planet would be gargantuan. It really, really doesn't make any sense. That is a good question, though. Actually can become a problem in Stellaris when you build your first city-planet; they have absolutely ridiculous population capacity to the point where you need all the help you can get to fill it out; Pops are one of the most important resources in the game. As they are in a lot of strategy games, and IRL if you actually know what you're doing. Use of birthrate-boosting policies and infrastructure, cloning, robots, encouraging immigration, 'encouraging' 'immigration' (that is, buying slaves) are a big part of the strategic level. Historically, cities were often such filthy, unhealthy, plague-ridden literal cesspits that they had negative population growth compared to the country and relied on constant immigration. (Maybe also that people in the city have more options than the farming lifestyle of popping out as many kids as you can manage as extra hands)
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Feb 8, 2025 05:43
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Most 40k hives also developed from populations seeded on worlds 30,000 years ago, during an age of lost wonders, so they could've just grown out naturally from a few thousand overactive generations. 40k technology may have greatly declined, but the worlds that have the technology to build out great big cities must have good enough healthcare to curb most early childhood deaths and pregnancy fatalities and even a fair amount of plagues. And if they've built up enough that there's room, why not fill that space? Humanity was estimated to be at like a world population of 5 million in 8,000 BC and moved up to 7 billion in 2,000 AD, and we're talking three times the timescale. I usually get the impression in 40k that space travel is not so much a thing for everyday normal schlubs, although the setting normally stays as far away from that type of person as possible. They're not really building new hives in their age of decay, too busy with the only war bit. Other settings not consumed by war and decadence would have more proliferation of space travel to make mass-immigration more feasible, but presumably you also have in the background lots of medical advances that lessened mortalities and made the birthing process easier, and still many settings stick big huge buffers in their historical backstory to leave lots of time for even less than geometric growth to fill out giant cities. In the real world our population growth is slowing down for a host of reasons, but largely a lot comes to just personal choice, and fancy space technology could concievably make big families more practical or desirable again.
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Feb 8, 2025 06:35
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Oh I agree, that's why I was wondering about the Star Citizen planet that was supposedly build in decades. There'd be no point in building the whole thing in one go, considering that actually populating the planet is the work of millennia, even for a moderately large civilization. It would take about 150 times the population of Earth to populate our land mass to Singapores population density, for example. I don't know how big the settled galaxy is in Star Citizen, but 150 planets worth of excess population and the lift capacity to move them around sounds like a lot. There was a discussion in Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise about evacuating a planet that was being targeted by a relativistic vengeance weapon. In that case, the entire existing transport capacity of humanity was insufficient for the task of evacuating a population of about a billion people. The evacuation was actually impossible at the first hurdle, since even using their single space elevator it would take far more than the remaining thirty years just to move the population off the surface of the planet, never mind taking them out of orbit or to some other star system. But that was a story where space travel was still somewhat limited by known physics, not Star Wars stuff where you can take the morning bus to your job on the moon or whatever. I like poking at the numbers when thinking at these kinds of ideas, breaking them down a bit shows how mindbogglingly huge they are. For a modern day (and stupid) comparison, we could try to create Mega Singapore by transporting every human being on the planet to the island of New Guinea, to get the population density in the right ballpark of a proper planet city. Please ignore the incredibly difficult and hostile climate/geography. And lets use existing transport capacity to simulate the fact that most people don't own their own space ships in the future either. To simulate life support requirements and such, we should perhaps only use ships designed for passenger transport. The first Google result claims that current passenger capacity of the entire cruise industry is about 800k, so that's a mere 10k trips by every hull on the planet. Assuming an average round trip of about a week, it would only take about 192 years.  For Star Wars levels of speed and convenience, we can use airplanes as the example. Total airline passengers in 2023 was about 4.5 billion. So two years of every airline aircraft in existence shuttling back and forth from New Guinea, maybe doubled to four years to account for the trips being one way only? Not too bad, really.
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Feb 8, 2025 20:05
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192 years to do anything is about par the course for Warhammer
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Feb 8, 2025 22:16
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Your regular reminder that sci fi writers are always terrible at numbers.
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Feb 13, 2025 05:21
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Decorus posted:To simulate life support requirements and such, we should perhaps only use ships designed for passenger transport. The first Google result claims that current passenger capacity of the entire cruise industry is about 800k, so that's a mere 10k trips by every hull on the planet. Assuming an average round trip of about a week, it would only take about 192 years. 800K at what's meant to be comfortable passenger levels. I'm sure if your getting into an everyone who we leave behind is going to die situation you could fit waayyy more people on each trip with people sleeping on all the floors and what not.
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Feb 13, 2025 05:34
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dr_rat posted:800K at what's meant to be comfortable passenger levels. I'm sure if your getting into an everyone who we leave behind is going to die situation you could fit waayyy more people on each trip with people sleeping on all the floors and what not. Absolutely, I was using "comfortable" on Earth to stand in for "being able to breathe" in space. That number doesn't account for short hop ferries either, since the total capacity is much harder to find. My excuse is that full on starships are a minority of spacecraft in 40k too.
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Feb 13, 2025 06:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXADvMf_7Mc The only decent 40K Loretuber's take on Terra
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Mar 2, 2025 20:16
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Your regular reminder that sci fi writers are always terrible at numbers. 40k is a very weird one because it's at once just as bad if not worse than other settings with its numbers - how hilariously small the forces involved in most conflicts are is a good one. Also IIRC the Leman Russ or some other tank was weaker than the Abrams. - but also at times better. Like not only do the ridiculous crew sizes of 40k's ships make sense when you consider the lack of automation and the size of the ships, but also 40k recognizes the logical consequences of those crew and ship sizes and basically has the old Star Wars Freudian Nightmare played straight as the default. Most ships are generation ships and the overwhelming majority of their crews will be born, live, and die as crewmen on what is essentially a city in space.
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Mar 2, 2025 20:28
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More like the central work that the franchise is built around is bad at numbers but some of the giant lore circlejerk has gone on for long enough that it kinda makes sense to some people even if most of the writing is inconsequential to the main structure of the franchise, as it is with most lore circlejerks. It's just harder to differentiate it because a franchise like 40k is lore all the way down.
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Mar 3, 2025 16:04
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It's also been stated that not everything that's canon is true. Also 40k is pretty much designed for people to effectively write their own fanfiction in and create their own OCs.
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Mar 4, 2025 04:46
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War and Pieces posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXADvMf_7Mc I wish all lore videos were presented as in-universe propaganda, or at least acknowledged that most most information about the 40k universe is unreliable.
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Mar 4, 2025 11:19
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Decorus posted:I wish all lore videos were presented as in-universe propaganda, or at least acknowledged that most most information about the 40k universe is unreliable. and that even thinking about this stuff gets you put on A List
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Mar 6, 2025 15:25
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War and Pieces posted:and that even thinking about this stuff gets you put on A List Feels good to be an A-Lister, always knew I would make it one day! Threads full of 'em, real classy place!
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Mar 6, 2025 19:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:Nal Hutta is a really interesting example because it's a wealthy world of unspoiled nature, but that nature is a gross swamp that the Hutts like because they're gross slugs. The Hutts can afford their fancy capital planet because most of the important business and industry is done at Nar Shaddaa, Nal Hutta's moon, which is entirely covered by city. Funny how that sounds a lot like Ferenginar, similarly the homeworld of a species mostly dominated by ruthless capitalists that's primarily fetid swamp, and implied they like it that way to the point of weather control systems making sure of it. (though going by Quark's attitude, not all of them do, at least after spending enough time off-world.) Oh, something else comes to mind; I haven't read them myself, but apparently the My Teacher Is An Alien series has a particularly unusual take on interstellar spaceships; their method of FTL travel only works with ships with enough mass to have a certain gravity well, so one of the smallest viable spaceships is named the New Jersey by humans because it's about the size of the state. And it's specifically noted that this means the ship size far dwarfs the accommodation needs for the crew to maintain it, so every single being on it has their own living space, amenities and anything they need available at the push of a button. It's actually something that's come up in real life, when designing vessels whose particular purpose or frame requires them to be much bigger than the bare minimum for a crew, like zeppelins and nuclear submarines, even aircraft carriers. If it needs to be that big anyway, you might as well use the extra space for amenities.
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Aug 27, 2025 14:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's actually something that's come up in real life, when designing vessels whose particular purpose or frame requires them to be much bigger than the bare minimum for a crew, like zeppelins and nuclear submarines, even aircraft carriers. If it needs to be that big anyway, you might as well use the extra space for amenities. I would urge you to examine photos the crew spaces aboard any of those examples. Depending on wjhere you live, you might even have an aircraft carrier available for in-person viewing.
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Aug 31, 2025 15:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:Cybertron in Transformers has even more seemingly inscrutable mechanisms, and the planet is alternately described as a giant city or a giant factory. Presumably most of the mechanisms are all broken as well. It seldom seems actually densely populated, even if there's definitely a lot of room for people to live, from the surface all the way down into the core. Transformers are also bigger than humans, but the planet overall seems smaller than Earth. Cybertron is kind of its own thing, especially given that it's a very alien landscape for what are described as mechanical lifeforms. It's got equivalents of wildlife, oceans, deserts, even forests in at least some continuities, and is usually the main centre of production for Energon that the Transformers rely on to survive. (though they can get it elsewhere) Also, it's sometimes a Transformer itself.
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Sep 1, 2025 08:41
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Madurai posted:I would urge you to examine photos the crew spaces aboard any of those examples. Depending on wjhere you live, you might even have an aircraft carrier available for in-person viewing. I mean there are amenities, including your very own heated bed. (It's heated by someone else sleeping in it)
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Sep 23, 2025 07:24
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