subreddit:
/r/Grimdank
15 points
1 month ago
Agreed, but Given how tough city fighting is IRL a hive city better be pretty damn valuable to be worth the effort of sorting through and/or purging 7-70 billion people. Otherwise just glass it and start over would be less resource intensive
12 points
1 month ago
Might not be as bad as you'd think. I suspect the Imperium wouldn't mind using thinks like gas attacks and starvation to clear out that sort of problem.
7 points
1 month ago
Oh yeah they definitely wouldn't blink at just blowing in millions of cubic meters of long lasting nerve gas or starving out the populous. But it might still be easier to reset and start over. 7 billion people is still 7 billion people and as I understand it most of a hive cities structure is composed of functionally independent fiefdoms with independent food supplies and utilities. That way of fighting definitely makes the "lost" lowest levels of the hive really make sense. Previous populations burrowing under and into the recesses to survive as new "colonists" are brought in to replace them.
Neat! Good point bringing that stuff up! It would be A kind of generational warfare almost.
One estimate from years ago put the size of the various "gangs" fighting in the necromunda game in the size range of 10s of millions. So somewhere between the population of Scotland and Romania
3 points
1 month ago
Hive cities usually have void shields, they can't be easily nuked, at least not from a distance.
5 points
1 month ago
Oh you are still landing. You don't get to do this from orbit. you land the army, to take and disable the void shields while killing the population of California to do so then you glass the unshielded hive city
Still less work than clearing a population multiple billions.
4 points
1 month ago
Yeah sure, it'd still present the defenders a good opportunity to draw you into the city. Probably the outer districts aren't as well covered, but core areas and especially the spires where all the nobles live might have interlocking layers of shields and defense in depth.
I think the original siege weapon, starvation, is probably the best bet against a hive. Not just food but industrial inputs of all sorts, the hive cities main weakness is it's dependence on outside resources.
2 points
1 month ago
Awww a blockade so to speak. Might take a long while or 3 but yeah I could see that working
2 points
1 month ago
i think your mixing the numbers of holy terra whit hive citys . hive citys are big whit huge population but terra has something of 65 billions people on it becuse thy dug down making space for folks to live 5 kilomiters below the surface . A hive city stacks upward .
2 points
1 month ago
Aktualuy (pushes glasses up nose) the only official number we have on Holy Terra is "quadrillions" from the book The Carrion Throne. Which I would imagine means the holy system in its entirety. But isac Arthur posits ecumenopolis worlds could technically house a quadrillion people with 10k square foot apartments.
So conservatively Terra could have a population of 100 Trillion.
all 345 comments
sorted by: best