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Hi,

I'm further working on the fluff for my homebrew regiment from the desert world of Thoth and thinking about their homesystem, I imagined a neighbouring planet in a closer orbit and bound rotation with its sun (so the same side of the planet faces the light all the time). Being quite inhospitable this planet is not really suitable for colonization, but the intense and constant solar radiation and the pronounced thermal gradient between night and day side of the planet provide the opportunity for enormous power generation, so they decide to build a huge load of photovoltaic, solarthermic and thermal pumps to harvest it.

And that is somehow where I'm stuck: what would be a likely use for a large harvest of energy for the Imperium? First I thought about some kind of refueling station for spaceships, but these seem to function with plasma and fusion reactors. Are there maybe long range communication/navigation technologies that use electrical energy instead of psykers? Or would it make sense that this is a "recharge relay" for Lasgun/Lascannon power packs (I'm not sure if it is worth it to ship those to another planet for recharging)? Or would it make sense to power some kind of large scale gellar field to reduce the chance of demonic shananigans in the system (if it is even possible to create fields with the size of a planet)?
Any other proposal that do not just involve powering a giant weapon but something creative?

Promethium-cracking using solar energy. Nostromo, the destroyed home planet of the Night Lords had this, with people living on the dark side, and the planet itself was rich in adamantium. So, mining?

The most obvious use would be to have a lot of industry on site using that power to manufacture equipment. Foundries, forges, all that kind of energy-intensive stuff.

Promethium would be useful too, pretty much everything that isn't running on fusion in the imperium runs on promethium, so a planet with a lot of power would be a good place to synthesize it.

Also, electro-priests basically worship energy, electricity in particular. It could be a pilgrimage site for them.

Both of the above are good answers.
Another would be hilariously effective giant orbital defense lasers. Come here Abby I double dog...no triple dog dare you

Note that this is the Imperium; wasting huge amounts of power due to inefficiency is not only plausible but would extremely unusual for that not to happen. Maybe a significant chunk of power goes to rendering the stations habitable for servitors that run them? Powering defensive arrays continuously when they only need to be on during an attack? Calculating data reports that no one understands anymore? The best is tasks that are actually or theoretically useful in some capacity but are being done with immense inefficiency.

This is in addition to the actual main function, posters above raised some good ones.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ohhh, what about an enormous defensive laser/lasers that is always on (because they lost the knowledge of how to turn it off) and the mechanicum has since set up numerous refractor arrays to split & redirect the laser output to some industrial capacity when it isn't needed for defense.

Thanks for your input, especially regarding the reminder, that the imperium often does things in a very "special" way. Thinking about that I came back to the question I asked myself "could you build a system wide gellar field and what would happen if you did? Could it block chaos or reduce risks of psyker stuff?"

And that's about it. Some Adeptus Mechanicus priest asked himself the same and just went for it. Sure he does not know if it will ever work or will even harm or kill the systems inhabitants, but his curiosity is surely more important than half a billion lifes on some backwater planet.

Also while it at first seems dumb to dedicate a whole systems recources to a single experiment, its one system out of a Million, so who cares? Could also make for some interesting story if the Adeptus Mechanicus wants to test their device under field conditions and provoke some deamonic incursion.

Is there a point in having a Gellar field active in realspace, though? It's supposed to create a safe bubble when inside the warp. Outside of it I'm not sure it does anything...
Although if that region of space has warp-storms happening every other week, it would certainly be useful, providing shelter until it passes.

I seriously don't know if there would be any point in it. I could imagine that it might(!) make it harder for deamons to posess psykers or for rogue psykers and chaos worshipers to sumon deamons, but that's a wild guess without any proof.

Mixing up some of your ideas I imagine, that upon their first rediscovery by the Imperium, the systems inhabitants got the order by the Adeptus Mechanicus and the imperial autorities to start building the means to harvest that energy. Back then they were not yet decided if they wanted to use it to power some defensive weapons or start building a forge world. Either way, all the planetary government had to know at that point were their orders. Then the Imperium lost interest and then contact for some decades. But since the planetary governour never got any new orders and especially no order to stop, he just kept on building solar power generators to not get into trouble for disobeying orders. At first the generated energy was just used to build more generators but naturally they began running into problems to get rid of the surplus power. Then contact to the Imperium was reestablished and an Adeptus Mechanicus envoy arrived to examine the progress of the project. Confronted with the problem as well as opportunity to have all this energy to spend he decided that he might as well still his curiosity regarding gellar fields and see what happens. Since the imperial bureaucracy had no better idea and honestly did not care as long as the systems tithes are paid, they complied and so it will be build.

I think that sounds very Warhammer 40k Imperium style, doesn't it?

I would use it as others suggest above - to power a massive piece of arcane equipment that generates a massive Gellar field in nearpspace that is needed to cocoon a massive tear in realspace, with the full horror of the Warp held barely in check by said field.

This rip, without the Gellar field, will likely rupture further to become a second Eye of Terror and destroy everything in the sector.

Therefore, the AdMech have thousands of tech-priests, and millions of forcibly recruited humans, toiling on the dark side of the planet, watching over the machine that powers the field that contains the warp rift... for ETERNITY!

Then one day someone comes along and points at the bit of space in question and says, "Hey, I don't see any rip in there?"

ANARCHY ENSUES...

There are theoretical technologies out there for transporting solar energy by funneling it into a laser beam. Beam the energy to where you need it and fire it a conversion plant. Now blow it up to a proper 40k scale and use it to power the entire system. To make things nice and grimdark, make it a piece of archeotech that's being held together with prayers and duck tape.

Hmm, also sounds interesting. Besides I just realize something funny with this, since the energy would travel at "just" the speed of light. So even transporting the energy to a neighborplanet requires a to take into account some minutes of orbit movement of the target. And if you miss, you may as well just have fired a massive laser beam outside your system reaching the next in a couple of decades.

Imagine the astropath call: "Umm... Hi there Nova Terra. We... might have made a little upsie here. Nothing to dramatic but, lets say in about 150 years you might have to either evacuate or MOVE YOUR F***ING PLANET OUT OF THE WAY!"