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Again some fluff question for my homebrew regiment's system:
I read somewhere that the Adeptus Mechanicus have moved one of Mars moons to Titan, that they at least tried to prepare to teleport Mars out of the system and that the Orks also teleported moons/planets in their history.

Appart from that, does the Imperium have the tech to move small planets/moons within a star system over the course of decades/centuries?
In the givven instance it would include moving a moon roughly the mass of earths moon a distance roughly equal to Jupiter=>earth and either place him in a stable orbit around the star or even better as a second moon of the main planet. Would this be achievable in the course of let's say 50-100 years with the resources of one system? Are there examples of this in the lore?

In a similar vein: does the Imperium still perform terraforming? Like changing atmospheres, increasing/decreasing water content etc.?

It would only be possible with MAJOR mechanicum involvement - both "move a planet" examples we know of (deimos and ullanor) were specifically done by Mars, with their near-unlimited stocks of squirreled-away archeotech.

A random Imperial system? Not a chance.

Terraforming - they can, but it's more a question of need than anything: the Imperium has a lot of naturally habitable planets thanks to the Dark Age, the Old Ones and the Eldar, so they aren't pressured for habitable worlds, especially since....um..."living standards" aren't really a big thing in hive cities.

Again, possible, but look to the mechanicus rather than generic Imperial Governor.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
Appart from that, does the Imperium have the tech to move small planets/moons within a star system over the course of decades/centuries?

Probably, yes. The Rock is just a large Chunk of Caliban converted into a ship so it would stand to reason that this could theoretically be replicated for a small planet or moon.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
In the givven instance it would include moving a moon roughly the mass of earths moon a distance roughly equal to Jupiter=>earth and either place him in a stable orbit around the star or even better as a second moon of the main planet.

Again, Theoretically yes.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
Would this be achievable in the course of let's say 50-100 years with the resources of one system? Are there examples of this in the lore?

This is where the entire thing falls on it's head. Imperial bureaucracy is a dumpster fire. It would probably take 50 -100 years just to get it approved. This would also take the resources of several systems which are unlikely to get diverted unless doing so would give an outstanding advantage. Those resources could be put to better use building armaments than moving a planet or moon for a distant governor's pet project.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
In a similar vein: does the Imperium still perform terraforming? Like changing atmospheres, increasing/decreasing water content etc.?

I've no doubt the mechanicum has this sort of tech squirreled away somewhere, getting them to bring it out and put it to use would be another matter entirely. Increasing or decreasing water would likely just be a fact of either siphoning it from a nearby planet with abundance or, as covered in the Konrad Curze novel (I think), Snagging ice comets and selling them to the planet as a resource.

It has been suggested that they did with Terra, given its location on the map.

There is also at least one shipyard that entirely encircles a planet (in orbit) that explicity has the capacity to travel though the warp, though I can't remember the name of it offhand and it wasn't designed to bring the planet with it.

If they can generate a gellar field and warp field large enough to encompass something of that size then they could certainly move a planet through the warp, though moving it through realspace intact is a different matter.

A.T. wrote:
There is also at least one shipyard that entirely encircles a planet (in orbit) that explicity has the capacity to travel though the warp, though I can't remember the name of it offhand and it wasn't designed to bring the planet with it.

If they can generate a gellar field and warp field large enough to encompass something of that size then they could certainly move a planet through the warp, though moving it through realspace intact is a different matter.

Do you mean Imperial Forge World Graia?

beast_gts wrote:

A.T. wrote:
There is also at least one shipyard that entirely encircles a planet (in orbit) that explicity has the capacity to travel though the warp, though I can't remember the name of it offhand and it wasn't designed to bring the planet with it.

If they can generate a gellar field and warp field large enough to encompass something of that size then they could certainly move a planet through the warp, though moving it through realspace intact is a different matter.

Do you mean Imperial Forge World Graia?

Sounds like Graia.

There is also Port Maw, which is a hollow artificial planetoid that is now a hive world and the base of operations for Battlefleet Gothic. It looks like a giant Pac Man, hence the name.

beast_gts wrote:
Do you mean Imperial Forge World Graia?

Quite possibly. It was something I remember reading while looking for something else months ago, though reading up on graia suggests that the crown is somewhat smaller than a full planetary ring.

 Pyroalchi wrote:
Again some fluff question for my homebrew regiment's system:
I read somewhere that the Adeptus Mechanicus have moved one of Mars moons to Titan, that they at least tried to prepare to teleport Mars out of the system and that the Orks also teleported moons/planets in their history.

Appart from that, does the Imperium have the tech to move small planets/moons within a star system over the course of decades/centuries?
In the givven instance it would include moving a moon roughly the mass of earths moon a distance roughly equal to Jupiter=>earth and either place him in a stable orbit around the star or even better as a second moon of the main planet. Would this be achievable in the course of let's say 50-100 years with the resources of one system? Are there examples of this in the lore?

In a similar vein: does the Imperium still perform terraforming? Like changing atmospheres, increasing/decreasing water content etc.?

Pretty sure terraforming is still a thing. There was some fluff on how long it would take to terraform a planet back into habitability after a virus-bomb exterminatus. (It was a long time.) So we know terraforming is a thing. There are always contradictions on specifics in the fluff, though, so the usual answer is “it depends”.

You can always explain a moved planet or moon as the result of some machine from the Dark Age of a technology. Back in 3rd/4th/5th, there was a map of the galaxy with Earth (and the whole Solar System) in the wrong place. The “official unofficial” explanation was that it was moved there during the DAOT.

I think one of the Ultramarines novels references a volcanic planet that's resisted all attempts at terraforming so they definitely can do it by 40k.

They were much better in 30k as there's multiple mentions of Russ turning down the option of making Fenris into a nice place to live.

There's one confirmed instance in all the fluff of moving a planet.



They can still terraform -it just takes valuable resources now so is rarely done (Lords of Mars trilogy) whereas during the great crusade it was a commonly available technology.

The Chaos Gods can also move planets ( dark Adeptus)

In The Great Work Bellesarius Cawl mentions that they have the technology to terraform planets which have been devastated by tyranids, although this is a surprise to the marine he is talking to, so it can't be that common.

The Imperium definitely still terraforms planets, with Mechanicum assistance. Though it will definitely be a slow and expensive process, which means an already existing biosphere is very valuable.

I recently re-read the greater good by Sandy Mitchell. In it the mechanicus specify that they usually don't bother terraforming planets because it's more effecient to just build facilities, veichles and tools that can withstand whatever problem they have. They they spend a few centuries mining out the planet and stripping it of resources. Afterwards they move on to another planet to repeat the process. Not sure if this logic would hold if habitability was an issue. With the Tyranids entry to the galaxy I suspect planetary restoration technology would be in much higher demand.

less then you might think, by time the 'nids are done with a world, there's not a lot of major value left, unless the world was strategicly, or symbolicly important., it may not be worth it

BrianDavion wrote:
less then you might think, by time the 'nids are done with a world, there's not a lot of major value left, unless the world was strategicly, or symbolicly important., it may not be worth it

If you catch up with the nids down the track and apprehend the biomass you could then use it to terraform/reterraform with. If you consummately defeated a splinter fleet and crashed the hive ships into atmosphere you are looking at the potential for a very very productive biosphere in the future, with all that extra biomass getting around.


Personally I think the issue is not: If it is possible for the mechanicus to do.
I think the issue is: If the mechanicus can be bothered doing it.


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Personally I'd go with the basically turn moon into deathstar and then it can move itself approach.
If the moon is basically made out of metals, well you just need to tunnel in and make the requisite facilites, leave great big swathes of rock as extra armour and room for exspansion.

Augment with metal from asteroid fields, and power with big reactors running on something from your gas giant(you'd want a massive supply even for an efficient system).

Depends on the envisioned manpower of your solar system and their familiarity with the tech required and the expertise of the people avaliable.

I envision a big craggy deathstar like station. Could be a floating hive, could be a floating fortress, like a poor man's blackstone fortress.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'd imagine the imperium is constantly doing terraforming, even after you strip the mineral wealth(LOL who does asteroid mining it's not like they're more plentiful and are easier to collect and mine for a space faring empire) of a planet the husk is still very important, becasue there is one thing that makes an empire.

It's not emperors, marines, primarchs, armies or any of the other(Well it sort of is but you know ).

It's manpower and labour. The husk, if terraformed can support billions of people, trillions of them. They are the lifeblood of the imperium. The more inhabitable planets you have the more workers you have, the more production, the more of everything you can field. Except for marines, they only come in packets of 1000 or so I'm told.

Having a few extra planets to lend populations to the empire's labour pool is possibly vital to the imperium's future.

Interesting take, Oldmate.
The situation I had in mind in my lore is a pretty dry mostly desert mainplanet in the system that gets by pulling an ice asteroid into its atmosphere every other year. They have a neighboring AM industrial planet (in the way to become a Forgeworld one day) with a massive energy output and are aware of an icemoon in orbit of a gasgiant nearby (similar to Europa around Jupiter).

So I thought if it would be possible to somehow push the moon out of its orbit, possibly near enough the main planet to transfer enough water to turn it into a garden world while leaving enough that the thawing icemoon can also support life.

I know, it's my fluff, so I can do what I want, but I was interested if there are examples in the fluff. Something like strapping big engines to a moon or evaporating its backside so that the gases function like a rocket

That's a possible, or also thawing one side enough to effect its orbit, a slingshot style effect.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
You'd risk turning it into a comet, but hazard of the job.

I recently had another idea in this direction which I'm considering for my fluff. Just posting it here so that you might spot and point me to any logic flaws I have missed.

Reading a bit about terraforming I realized that there might be situations were terraforming might be a relatively simple and straight forward thing, as long as energy is not that much of a problem, without the need to move planets around. Imagine a planet who is inhabitable because of 3 reasons:
1. While still "hot" inside, its crust isn't broken into tectonic plates and it isn't tectonically active enough to create an own magnetic field
=> it cannot hold an atmosphere, as it is blown away by solar winds.
2. Lacking an Atmosphere with greenhouse gasses it is to cold for liquid water, even though at least enough of the frozen stuff is there, together with frozen Carbon dioxide
3. The ice coverage reflects sunlight, cooling it even more, to a point were even Nitrogen is fluid.

Now if my logic isn't completely off, it should be possible to terraform it by "just" punching it enough with Lances, Macrolasers and heavy weapons. Basically what I imagine could happen would be the following:
1. Some massive pounding cracks the crust, leading to the formation of tectonic plates.
2. By pouring some more energy into the core with Laserweapons or a weaker form of cyclonic torpedo the tectonic activity in the core is jump started => a magnetic field forms
3. The clefts between the plates and some newly created volcanoes start pumping CO2 and water vapor into the newly forming atmosphere, creating an increasing greenhouse effect
4. The planets surface is further heated up by dispersed Macrolasers. At some point the first the Nitrogen cooks, followed by the CO2 subliming and finally the Water. The loss of solar reflection supports the heating
5. The Atmosphere reaches a point were the pressure is bearable for humans and the heat can be more or less held.

So far any elemental flaws?
The funny thing would be that for my own fluff, the kind of energy for that would be there as, as I said, there is an industrial/becoming Forgeworld nearby with a large, not really sensible used energy supply. So basically with such an ice planet in the same system they could build a bunch of freaking big lasers, do the calculations to hit it over the distance and start heating up/cracking the planet?

Didn't they move titan into the warp for a while?

Also, i read one article about a Kson legionnaire reflecting on his life and remembering how the Ksons had teleported prospero thru the warp to the eye of terror with a mass communal spell.

As to terraforming, the imperium usually does the opposite, taking a perfectly good earthlike world, then overpopulating and polluting it into a devastated poisonous hell hole barely able to sustain life at all, like Holy Terra itself now.

Also amageddon and necromunda. Any any world hit with exterminatus.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Didn't they move titan into the warp for a while?

Unless it's happened again since - this was in order to set the Grey Knights up in the first place, aaaaaall the way back in 30K. Fresh recruits and planet go in, fully-trained and ready Chapter with fortress-monastery comes out. And, frankly, this was only possible because of incredible protections that would only really be available to the Knights and perhaps Inquisition, certainly not for your average planet.

It is easier to destroy than to build or restore. The rareness of inhabited or inhabitable worlds is why Exterminatus is such a big deal and not the first option the Imperium turns to.

Also the Imperium is supposedly stretched to its near breaking point, and only partially salvaged for now by Guilliman. His military efforts are presumably sucking up a great deal of resources, and the Imperium cannot really spare vast resources for long term projects, which is what terraforming entails. The Eldar Maiden World process for example took generations of Eldar time before they were ready. The rapacious Imperial appetite for resources is why they ruin ecosystems and worlds. Short term gain is prioritized because the Imperium is desperate, and nobles or Rogue Traders want to get rich(er) quickly.

At best, I think the Imperium might do something like Taros, and even that might be a project started from several thousand years ago when the Imperium was portrayed as less at the brink of collapse. Taros is a barely inhabitable desert world with tiny highly alkaline seas as the only standing bodies of water. So I might see the Imperium in the past terraforming from a truly uninhabitable world to a barely inhabitable world, in order to get at the resources in a slightly more efficient fashion, although it would take a long time for return on investment.