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Post by Doug on Feb 4, 2007 9:35:24 GMT
Well, over on another thread, I know quite a few people have been saying they weren't happy with GWs interpretation of hive populations, especially in these circumstances. As such, I thought I ought to set this up for the matter to be discussed.
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Post by thenephew on Feb 4, 2007 17:22:00 GMT
I would suggest a HiveBerg of less the 15 million people. This would be more than enough to process the kind of intake it is feasible to expect, and avoids trying to convince oneself that Mount Fuji would float, if you flipped it and put a tower on top. I'm never that good with 3d calculations with that level of estimation and multiplying up, but it seems like the room required for 7 million people [assuming an approximately Pyramidal shape below water, and the same again, 1/10 scale, above] would be quite unbelievable enough, without trying to float a genuine Hive.
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Post by necris on Feb 5, 2007 1:49:32 GMT
I'd have to agree with nephew
Capital upwards of 100 Million Large Hive Burgs 20-25 million Hive Burgs 10-20 million Small Hive burgs up to 10 million
As for other things depending on what "shipping" is going to be like you could have floating towns and cities deisgned for the transport of fuel
City Frigate 50,000 - 100,000 Cog Frigate upto 50,000 Liner a few thousand Cog a few hundred
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vendile
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Posts: 234
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Post by vendile on Feb 5, 2007 13:40:51 GMT
floating towns and cities would just be smaller hive-bergs, not massive ships able to go to the ports.
traders and suchlike would IMO just be in ships of similar and probably a bit larger sizes as modernday tankers.
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Post by necris on Feb 5, 2007 14:12:46 GMT
well my idea was taking the tanker further, a permenent thing that constantly goes from one to the next and so on, never making port, but acting as a mass transit for resources.
this thing would need to be manned by a permenent crew that would need to be replenishabe maybe only taking on new crew when space is readily avalible.
so families would crop up
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Post by Caralinus on Feb 5, 2007 14:22:43 GMT
This is how I woked out my numbers.
The volume of a cone roughly the size of a hive (max. 16km high and 14km across) is about 820,000,000,000 cubic meters. Now, if one person requires a space of no more than 20 meters cubed then that's 8000 cubic meters. Allowing for a maximum population of roughly 100,000,000. But hives aren't perfect cones so we lose volume there and cubes don't fit perfectly into cones so we lsoe volume there as well.
Keep in mind that this uses up every last possible inch of space which we know doesn't gel with the established background for hives. They have teeming populations yes, but within a hive there are large empty areas, so much so you could walk for days or maybe even weeks and see no-one.
So I would say that you would have a population considerably less than half of that total figure. I would still say though that tens of millions of people living in such a small place is quite phenominal. Most of these people will most likely live in the middle, crammed in tight with the most expensive and most dangerous/poor areas being sparsely populated.
I don't recall ever reading a bit of background that stated billions of people live in a single hive and I've always thought that on any given hive world there are thousands of hives which isn't unlikely. Thousands of hives with millions of people in each one easilly gives you the hundreds of billions of people hive worlds are known for.
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vendile
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Post by vendile on Feb 5, 2007 16:33:10 GMT
there are never thousands of hives - a planet couldn't cope with it - there tend to be between 3 and 12 hives on "hive-worlds" - ovbiously our planet is an etirely differnt prospect though because hive-bergs are no way near the size of land-based hive cities.
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Post by thenephew on Feb 5, 2007 18:43:33 GMT
I think Caralinus' numbers are about right for what I was thinking of. The point about free space seems a little out of place, at least in the sizes previous GW background has given for land hives. I can't see a reason where a Hive would decide not to expand it's living quarters into empty parts, or take on people to replace those who lived there before they forgot to send in the food trucks. The calculations still stand because, from my imaginings, the volume fo space per person, including 'their share' of the various transport systems, massive engine blocks etc. are greatly in excess of the 20 cubic meters, given the inefficiently-sized workings that seem to be standard in Imperial machines. And the number of Hive-bergs need to be considered, though less pressingly than actual sizes etc.
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Post by Caralinus on Feb 6, 2007 0:44:03 GMT
3 to 12?
I don't claim that GW has stated there to be thousands of hives but, I've never seen it said that an entire world has less than a dozen.
Explain to me why a hive world couldn't cope with more than a dozen if you will and also if you can, how you came to that conclusion. By 'thousands' I mean less than 1500 which I believe I stated in another post somewhere else. I just can't credit that an entire world would have just 3 hives on it, just look on the Dark Millenium box art, they have two hives stood right next to each other.
I used 20 cubic meters as a ball park number for your average small flat where people are crammed in together and from all the background and novels I've read hives aren't that densely concentrated throughout the entire structure or even most of it.
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vendile
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Post by vendile on Feb 6, 2007 12:43:11 GMT
1) I said "they tend to have between 3-12" - not that thar was the maximum.
2) I don't play the ccg
3) I know planets exist that are purely a sinlge massive sprawl covering the entire planet
4) 1500 is rather alot of individual hives, with that mant i would have excepted most of them to join up with their neighbours and become conurbations. 1500 hives is also gonna need a hell of a lot of foodstuffs being shiped in every minute of every day.
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Post by thenephew on Feb 6, 2007 14:21:05 GMT
Mars manages to have an entire planet covered in Hives. They vat-grow large portions of the required food, and IV drip feed anything they can get away with. About 3-800 was the figure I thought would be supportable on the average hive world, leaving room for chemical waste dumping, travelling resource collectors (be it oil, ores or anything else) and those geographical bits too troublesome to build on. The problem is that most of the examples of worlds with Hives are those that GW puts campaigns on, which need massive wide open tracts of land for tank battles, rok landing, thermonuclear wasting, and similar things. On the densely populated worlds, of which we see little of on a grand scale in official bits, I would expect there to be less open (buildable on) plain.
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Post by Caralinus on Feb 7, 2007 14:48:49 GMT
Dark Millenium wasn't a ccg, it was the expansion for 2nd Edition 40K with loads of new wargear, psychic powers and what have you.
I must say I completely disagree with point 4. If you except that a hive world has a population of 500 billion people or less it doesn't matter if you pack them into one hive or a gazillion hives they will require the same amount of food regardless. [Looking to Necromunda] I don't know about Hive City, but in the Underhive most of the food they eat is produced locally. 'Eat recycled food; it's good for the environment and okay for you' My favourite quote from the Judge Dread movie. I've also read numerous times that off world food is usually reserved for the elites because it's so rare and expensive leading me to believe that either a hive can support its own population on cultivated algae and corpse starch extract and the like or the food shipped in from some other planet is about as basic.
The reason why I have mentioned London as covering 600 square miles is because an individual hive covers less than 100. Consider how many cities there are across the Earth and consider that, whilst many do sprawl over huge distances they aren't all connected. They are seperate from each other and I don't see why a hive world couldn't be the same way because even on a planet the size of Earth you could have hundreds (even thousands) of these things and you would still have thousands of miles of empty wasteland in between each one.
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Post by necris on Feb 9, 2007 0:28:46 GMT
To be fair I'd always though of a few dozen was the tops for most worlds,
and being blunt we only ever here of 3, Primus, Secondus and Tertius Hives.
Likewise for this world I'd only envisaged a few maybe two dozen maybe less.
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Post by Caralinus on Feb 9, 2007 1:11:02 GMT
My answer to that is one of practicality. How long would it take to come up with over a thousand names (and warzones if you want to look to Armageddon as a source for numbers)? Quite some time I'd say, so GW detail just a few and leave it pretty hazy. Chuck in some bad maths and there you go; less than a dozen hives.
Still, if the popular opinion is that you can fit billions of people inside one hive, despite the maths to the contrary then who am I to argue...
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Post by necris on Feb 9, 2007 1:25:22 GMT
I forget the population of Necromunda but that place most definatly has only one Hive, its one of its defining things, a single Hive world.
and as for the spire itself its 10 miles high and 10 miles wide at its widest point, thats huge
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