Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hi everyone,
I've played 40k for some time and have always wondered this question.
Is the main difference between forge and hive worlds, the level of tech that they produce?
example being that forge world produces more rare techs(titans, super heavy tanks, transmogrifiers), while a hive would produce more mundane everyday things(lasguns, spoons, etc.)
I know that there is a difference in population and whatnot, I'm just curouis(spelt wrong) about the production
Thanks a ton Dakka

A Hive Worlds industry will produce basic armaments like Lasguns, Bolters, ammunition, probably even stuff like Chimeras/Sentinels/Valkyries. Most machines/tools for a Hive City are probably produced on the world itself as well like the Hive Spires/buildings, Generators, utensils, transportation, etc..

Forgeworld will produce complicated equipment like Leman Russ', Baneblades, Rhinos, Landraiders, Thunderbolts, Starships and certainly Titans. Complicated pieces of civilian machinery like space stations, Warp Drives, etc. are probably produced on a Forge World as well.

Thanks,
That pretty much confirmed my theory

Hive worlds are just giant population centres, while forge worlds are dedicated to manufacture of war machines and supplies.

A forgeworld is entirely run by the adeptus mechanicus or has in the very least mechanicus leaders. The Mechanicus is often referred to as the empire in the imperium because they basically have their own worlds.
Hiveworlds are not controlled by the adeptus mech. But rather imperial officials and all mechanical items produced are sanctioned by the priesthood of mars.
Some secrets of production are thus not for the common imperials to understand or even consider. The mechanicus guard their secrets well.

tarnish wrote:A forgeworld is entirely run by the adeptus mechanicus or has in the very least mechanicus leaders. The Mechanicus is often referred to as the empire in the imperium because they basically have their own worlds.
Hiveworlds are not controlled by the adeptus mech. But rather imperial officials and all mechanical items produced are sanctioned by the priesthood of mars.
Some secrets of production are thus not for the common imperials to understand or even consider. The mechanicus guard their secrets well.

Some might say they guard it too well...

a Forge World is a planet that is devoted entirely to industry and cranks out massive amounts of war material.


Hive Worlds are massive pop centers. their main use to the imperium is to crank out recruits for the IG, essentially overglorified baby factories with some side industries.


Hive Cities are common to most imperial worlds. they allow huge concentrations of people in small areas so more land is avaliable for other uses, like farming, industrial complexes, training grounds...


a Hive Planet will basically be covered in hive cities to the point of 100% coverage. the original Hive Cities will instead be the location of different spires(essentially the equivilant of skyscrapers surrounded by suburbs)

Grey Templar wrote:a Forge World is a planet that is devoted entirely to industry and cranks out massive amounts of war material.


Hive Worlds are massive pop centers. their main use to the imperium is to crank out recruits for the IG, essentially overglorified baby factories with some side industries.


Hive Cities are common to most imperial worlds. they allow huge concentrations of people in small areas so more land is avaliable for other uses, like farming, industrial complexes, training grounds...


a Hive Planet will basically be covered in hive cities to the point of 100% coverage. the original Hive Cities will instead be the location of different spires(essentially the equivilant of skyscrapers surrounded by suburbs)

a very rough generalisation when you read the necromunda fluff. this hiveworld is basically the opposite of what your Description. Besides, no world exists only to serve the imperial guard. they do get their recruits from hiveworlds as well, but their purposes are much more diverse. read the fluff for necromunda and dan abnetts inquisitor books and you might see it from a fresh perspective.

tarnish wrote:
Besides, no world exists only to serve the imperial guard. they do get their recruits from hiveworlds as well, but their purposes are much more diverse.

Krieg and Armageddon are solely dedicated to producing Imperial Guardsmen and equipment for the Guard.

tarnish wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:a Forge World is a planet that is devoted entirely to industry and cranks out massive amounts of war material.


Hive Worlds are massive pop centers. their main use to the imperium is to crank out recruits for the IG, essentially overglorified baby factories with some side industries.


Hive Cities are common to most imperial worlds. they allow huge concentrations of people in small areas so more land is avaliable for other uses, like farming, industrial complexes, training grounds...


a Hive Planet will basically be covered in hive cities to the point of 100% coverage. the original Hive Cities will instead be the location of different spires(essentially the equivilant of skyscrapers surrounded by suburbs)

a very rough generalisation when you read the necromunda fluff. this hiveworld is basically the opposite of what your Description. Besides, no world exists only to serve the imperial guard. they do get their recruits from hiveworlds as well, but their purposes are much more diverse. read the fluff for necromunda and dan abnetts inquisitor books and you might see it from a fresh perspective.

I have read Eisinhorn and Ravenor thank you very much.

and Hive Cities were originally to save space. Necromunda has become a Hive Planet. Hive Planets will have some Industry, but it won't be huge.

I am speaking in the sense of Galctic importance. unless a planet provides HUGE quantities of exports it won't matter as anything else is too small or simply a self sufficient production for the planet only.


on a Galactic level, the planet's only real worth would be it's population.

ok i forget the Tax revenue, but that and recruits for the IG and thats about it. everything else doesn't have a galactic impact and isn't important.

Grey Templar wrote:
Hive Cities are common to most imperial worlds.

I would say that this is a massive over generalisation, there are approximately 32,380 Hive Worlds in the Imperium. Planets with grades of agri (ave. pop. 15,000 to 1,000,000), dead (ave. pop. a few 100 to 500,000), death (ave. pop. 1,000 to 15,000,000), feudal (10,000,000 to 500,000,000 but only up to black powder tech), feral world (100,000 to 5,000,000 but below civilised level of tech) and paradise worlds all have populations too low to need even a single hive city or have a level of technology that makes hive cities unmaintainable.

Snarky wrote:

tarnish wrote:
Besides, no world exists only to serve the imperial guard. they do get their recruits from hiveworlds as well, but their purposes are much more diverse.

Krieg and Armageddon are solely dedicated to producing Imperial Guardsmen and equipment for the Guard.

Krieg is dedicated to war production out of shame and Armageddon is dedicated to war due to the fact that it is still currently infested with orks, it is not however dedicated to producing IG and IG equipment as it has to maintain its own PDF that is constantly fighting.

Note i said cities, Not Worlds.

even an Agriworld might have a, small, Hive to act as its Capital and food processing center.


Dead and Feudal worlds can only be called Imperial in the losest sense.

Feudal worlds often only have the Worship of the Emperor in common with the rest of the imperium. they often don't tith because they arn't productive enough to warrent the expense of collecting it.

Dead worlds are, well, dead.

Grey Templar wrote:even an Agriworld might have a, small, Hive to act as its Capital and food processing center.

.

Even Tanith had a small hive city as the capital as it needed a starport to export the Nalwood produced planetside.

Then tell me this: Wouldent slums and a wast unused population be a terrible waste if they did not want them all to be guardsmen? The imperium is more then a giant bootcamp.
Remember, war is not the natural state of mankind. yes, we frequently employ it but the wast majority seek to distance and distract themselves from it all the time. if the imperial worlds that have a dense population where little more then bootcamps then the imperium wouldnt have lasted this long.

in the grim darkness of the far future there is more then war.

Feudal Worlds all tithe. Any planet above "colony" status in the Imperium is required to tithe to the Administratum, without there being special conditions to suspend or excuse its tithe.

Their tithe might be psykers, or raw iron ore, or lumber, or illuminated devotional texts, or simply people to put in the low-decks crews of Imperial Naval ships... but it tithes.

A Hive City is, indeed, a major population center... however, all of these people need jobs. Thus, massive industry, or Administratum data-crunching, or Ecclesiarchal pew-polishing, in order to give the population something to do. Not all of these jobs will affect the Imperium as a whole, or even the planet's local sub-sector... but it's still a job, and Hives still crank out a prodigious supply of, well, *stuff* to their own population as well as off-world buyers.

Tanith, incidentally, was an Imperial World, not a Hive World. Though fairly low-tech in most of its regions, the spaceport presence doesn't mean it had a Hive as its capitol. You can build a spaceport without first building a Hive City.

tarnish wrote:Then tell me this: Wouldent slums and a wast unused population be a terrible waste if they did not want them all to be guardsmen? The imperium is more then a giant bootcamp.
Remember, war is not the natural state of mankind. yes, we frequently employ it but the wast majority seek to distance and distract themselves from it all the time. if the imperial worlds that have a dense population where little more then bootcamps then the imperium wouldnt have lasted this long.

in the grim darkness of the far future there is more then war.

uuuuuum, i hope thats sarcasim.

40k's slogan is "In the Grimdarkness of the Far Future, there is only war..."



and Hive Cities will certaintly have massive industry by our modern standards, but to the Administratum it most likely won't be significant. Pew polishing wouldn't be worth more then 2 lines in some scribes book on Terra.

tarnish wrote: Besides, no world exists only to serve the imperial guard.

cadia

and i thought the people in hive world sent there people to work in the forge world like people going to work every day

people in Hives would indeed have jobs in various places. much like any city operates now, there will be industrial sections with public transportation to get to and from work.

then there would be entertainment and mercantile sections too.

then there is always the copious black market and psuedo-legal activities that will take place in run down sections(usually the lower levels)

Some of this is extrapolation:

A colony will form on a planet that appears to have something valuable to the Imperium as a whole - Promethium, Adamantium deposits etc - settlers and resources will pour in from other areas in order to exploit the planet and the hive cities will begin to form; as this point the planets will begin to need agricultural imports as the population in the hive cities grows beyond the potential of the planet to feed itself. Secondary industries will also burgeon in order to keep the planet maintained - mining equipment factories, lasgun factories for the PDF etc.
Eventually the world will reach a peak in it's output of raw materials and population, ever more agressive methods of extraction will poison what's left of the environment making the planet entirely dependant on either food imports or low quality gruels grown from algae/fungus in vats - at this point the planet must find another way to be important to the Imperium such as mass manufacturing machinery or being strategically important, or the population will crash as people leave to new colonies and die of starvation/disease. Of course this whole cycle may take thousands of years!
After many many more years the pollution may settle down and the planet may be converted over to agriculture/agriworld - of course by this point the population has fallen from Billions to Millions or even Thousands and the Hives will probably have been dismantled.

A forgeworld on the otherhand is entirely devoted to manufacturing equipment, never produces its own food, has a stable population and is always important to the imperium - A forgeworld does not bother with production for it's own sake, food and simple machines will be brought in from elsewhere so that the forgeworld can focus on the production of high-end machinery or equipment. Some forgeworlds specialise to an extent, such as Plasma technology or Vehicle Chasis'.

The major difference is in what the planets make, rather than the quantity - Hive Worlds will usually massively outstrip a forgeworld in the quantity of the material produced but most of it will be raw materials or everyday items for itself and the forgeworlds and agriworlds.

Grim badger has it nailed. tarnish out and done with this thread

Grey Templar wrote:Note i said cities, Not Worlds.

even an Agriworld might have a, small, Hive to act as its Capital and food processing center.

As stated in fluff an average agri world has a top population of 1,000,000, london has a larger population (The population in 2005 was thought to have been about 7,518,000) than that so i doubt they would actually have a hive city, just a city.

I still say you are over exaggerating and removing a large number IoM worlds that don't fit you view doesn't help.

It should be noted, however, that most of the initial colonists on any new world will either be indentured servants to the Rogue Trader that discovered the world, IG "mustering out" as part of the deactivation of their unit (this is considered the ideal way out of the Guard, the founding of a new world for the Empire, the other way out being death), or people tithed to the Explorator Fleets of the Mechanicus, used in pretty much the same way as the indentured serfs of the RT. AdMech finds a planet of interest, they send down a team of Tech Priests and all their colony-building machines and such, and a few thousand normal people who serve the AdMech but are not, themselves, slated to become Tech-Priests. If the planet is viable enough, it may become a Forge World, or may instead be some program of selective breeding, study of environmental effects on human genetics, or other such thing overseen by the Magos Biologis, all depends on the specific world.

Also, clarifying my previous post, it's not that colonies are not required to tithe, simply that, at their outset, the Administratum is generally not expecting as high an output as they would from a more-established world with the facilities to produce a far greater amount of materials. Again, though, this depends on the specific world. A Mechanicus-run mining colony might have only 5000 breathing inhabitants, but its mining concerns could be automated/servitor-driven, and so be expected to produce a rather high amount of ore (though this would go to the Mechanicus, not the Administratum).

As far as concerns the "pioneer" type of Imperial Citizen, notes from Rogue Trader seem to indicate that these people "buy in" to a plan to settle a recently-discovered world, paying the RT to transport them to the world, and provide the basic necessities to found the colony (varies by world) in the hopes that the world proves profitable, from which they will build their own, personal fortunes as time goes on... some worlds don't pan out, or their production estimations are grossly exaggerated, leaving a colony world in discontent and possible revolt. The RT, of course, pockets all of the pioneer's "buy in" money, as well as having sale rights to some or all of the planet's production beyond its expected tithe, as well as other concessions, depending on the terms of his or her Writ.

Other than that, the majority of Imperial worlds are capitalist economies under the rule of a Planetary Governor, who rules with near-absolute power. In the Hives, people need to work to buy food, pay their rent (generally a license fee for the right to live within a hab), pay for the various things they can to make their lives a bit easier, maybe a bit of reconstituted grox-meat once a month, a few pints of the local brew at the pub after a work-shift, etc. Room and board are generally not provided by the Hive Rulers to the working-class residents... can't pay, you get removed, and end up in the under-Hive, if you're lucky.

I've always thought that hive worlds, or normal industrialised worlds, do produce a far amoutn of war materiale, just not the highly specialized stuff. Chimeras, Leman Russes, and the like are all pretty basic stuff. Any planet that can build tractors can build them.

Polonius wrote:I've always thought that hive worlds, or normal industrialised worlds, do produce a far amoutn of war materiale, just not the highly specialized stuff. Chimeras, Leman Russes, and the like are all pretty basic stuff. Any planet that can build tractors can build them.

I think you're confusing advanced Imperial tanks with WW2 Russian tanks - last time I checked the Russians didn't have Lascannons and layered adamantium/ceramite hulls

((oops, wrong thread... nevermind))