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Something's been bugging me about economics in the 40k universe: the Admechs have a monopoly on tech, but how does it get distributed? do they own all the factories that make the machines, or do they license out production to third parties who then sell the product. I just can't see a tech priest as a salesman, which makes me think that if the Admechs do produce all the tech they must not be the ones selling it. does anyone know anything about this? I'm asking because we're going over this in me economics class and it just makes me wonder.

It might be less payments and more tithes. Remember, 40K is a feudal socity.

Departmento Munitorium. They hold all the materiel that the Imperial Guard uses, and are in charge of distribution. Depending on the type of campaign, supplies can either be shipped in via orbital drops, truck convoys, train systems, or air drops.

There was a Gaunt's Ghost vignette in Ghostmaker that dealt with protecting a supply convoy passing through an ambush site.

It looks like it's a mix of everything (as always, with heavy variations depending on the source): most of the higher-tech products seem to come directly from AdMech forge worlds, but how they get to their final users varies: some are handed directly to the Administatum (or the Munitorum, if they are military-related), that proceeds to distribute them depending on the needs or ancient customs of the various worlds and organizations in the Imperium (a process theoretically flexible, but usually bogged down by excessive bureaucracy); in exchange, as extablished by customs deriving directly from the deal struck by the Emperor with the Priesthood of Mars, the Administatum delivers tithes of raw materials and workforce to the various forge worlds.
Private deals with the Mechanicus are not unheard of, especially with Rogue Traders or chartist captains, exchanging hi-tech products for resources or informations about possible new tecnologies to research and study; the lawfulness of this kind of deals is uncertain, ranging from common and uccepted to shady or borderline illegal, once again depending on the sources.
Widely available, low-to-medium level technology are instead generally mass-produced on civilized worlds or more often hive worlds, in generally privately-owned factories (controlled by mid- and high-hives noble families, at least on Necromunda), usually supervised by AdMech tech-adepts.
Other sources, expecially FF RPGs, mention large collectives, industrial groups and guild producing goods of every technological level, on blueprints provided by the Mechanicus or privately researched.

The Ad Mech does some third party contracting of a sorts. Simpler technology gets produced in non-Ad Mech factories, but it is overseen by Techpriests of some level or another.

So there will be a Tech Priest on site to make sure all proper observences are being done.

With exporting vs. licensing it depends on what it is and how "precious" or rare the technology produced is.Stuff like Lasguns, Leman Russes, etc. will be produced on any old Hive World free of AdMech control. The real high-end stuff like Titans, Warpdrives, Battleships, etc. will be exclusively made by the Mechanicus.

Mechanicum have a monopoly on new tech. Currently when someone invents something or refines something I they file a patent to protect their IP. As I see it, in the Imperium, the patent office belongs to the Mechanicum. That way undesirable tech can be managed and they retain control.
R & D would be strictly supervised by local mechanicum agents also. All manufacturing plants would be regularly scrutinized by mechanicum agents.

As for getting tech to market, once approved it would be produced locally, though forge worlds would hold exclusive rights to produce certain technologies.
Even underhives have massive manufacturing capabilities compared to our modern world.

There must be huge space convoys carting raw materials from one place to another all the time. With the vagueries of warp travel a lot of material must get lost, more would be lost to pirates, aliens, chaos etc. Enough gets through to keep all the forge worlds and other industrial hubs functioning. Imagine a ship that transports foodstuffs from agri-worlds to hive-worlds. It might have a billion tonnes of food in its cargo. If that gets lost then there must be enough back up transport ships for food to keep the hives or army in the field fed.

Logistics in the Imperium would be staggering in their scope.


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Just a thought, we think about hive worlds as a collection of giant hive cities with desolated ground in between. Hive worlds might all have their own underground arcologies like in Calth where caverns are so enormous as to have their own forests, farmland and rivers.

In Necromunda's background, there is reference to growing fungus. Aside from that and hydroponics (which only the wealthy upper classes would be able to eat), there is of course the recycling of the dead. However even so, hive worlds are depicted in the background as requiring vast imports of food to stave off starvation and unrest. Even a billion tons of food is peanuts when one considers for example, the 2012 production of cereal grains on Earth is estimated to be 2.295 trillion tons, and this feeds only 7 billion or so people (discounting wastage for the moment). Consider how much more is needed to feed a hive world which is stated in background to sometimes have well above 100 billion people, even if one assumes some local production/recycling.

An interstellar transport arriving with food from an agri-world is likely going to be either delivering food to the wealthy upper classes of the hive that can afford "real" natural food, or delivering processed rations unrecognizable as natural food to the heaving masses that make up the bulk of the hive populations.

^ Your stats are somewhat misleading, as a vast proportion of that grain doesn't actually go directly to humans, but through either processing for further food stuffs, like corn into corn syrup into pop, or is fed through animals as feed. The average person eats the equivalent of 35 bushels a year. To feed 100 billion people you would only need to produce about 3 and a half trillion bushels of wheat. So, conceivably, Earth could theoretically support a hive world.

Then again it stands to reason that grain consumption would go up if the very same animals who eat a portion of the grain on Earth right now are no longer there ...

But yes, I suppose Earth could qualify as an Agri World according to the Imperial catalogue.

^I don't really know how that applys? Grain consumption would remain the same, it would simply be distributed differently.

Err, I'm no expert, but still I am fairly certain that humans and animals of various sizes do not consume the same amount of grain. Not to mention that the different animals also yield different amounts of meat and other byproducts (milk, eggs, ...).

I don't even know if there's a way to accurately calculate an accurate comparison. But there will be a difference.

Then again it stands to reason that grain consumption would go up if the very same animals who eat a portion of the grain on Earth right now are no longer there ...

Did you mean total grain consumption or individual grain consumption? Total grain consumption would actually go down, as, like you said there wouldn't be the animals eating a disproportionate amount of it. I think it's like 10 pounds of feed to one pound of meat for cattle, it's probably higher but it's late and I don't feel like asking my dad.

If you mean individual grain consumption it would likely go down as well, because the number of 35 bushels of wheat per person is the stat if that person ate nothing but grains, water, and salt for a year. So that stat actually can't go up very much....

Individual consumption - I thought that was what was being discussed there about the stats. You said that Iracundus' numbers would be misleading because a large part isn't eaten by humans ... what I was hinting at was that the part that is eaten by humans would grow if the animals also consuming grain would no longer be there.

About those 35 bushels ... where does it say that the "average person" eats only grains, water and salt? Even for the Third World that sounds a bit harsh.

People are not going to be just consuming unprocessed grains. Aside from being a boring diet, it is also nutritionally incomplete. The numbers were just to give an idea of the scale involved. In reality, people are going to need to eat a more varied diet, even run of the mill hive worlders because otherwise they would be too weak and malnourished to work.

The FFG RPG Dark Heresy does describe meat being shipped to hive worlds, so the total grain amount equivalence would be higher than the bare minimum of people eating nothing but grain and water. Even if hive worlders are eating processed rations, that is still likely to be equivalent to more than just the same amount of grain considering the processing involved, and the need to have other nutrients added.

The point of the earlier post was to show the sheer scale of just a single hive world, where even a billion ton delivery of food is only going to stave off starvation and riots by a short period of time. Also, hive worlds don't seem to have any clear population controls enforced. The existence of a massive "Underhive" population if Necromunda is taken to be a sample representative hive world means a large chunk of the hive world is beyond the reach of any form of law and order, meaning the only check on breeding would be lack of essentials or an excessively toxic environment. Hive worlds then in essence become more than just factories for making war material and goods, but also a factory for making people/soldiers.

Individual consumption - I thought that was what was being discussed there about the stats. You said that Iracundus' numbers would be misleading because a large part isn't eaten by humans ... what I was hinting at was that the part that is eaten by humans would grow if the animals also consuming grain would no longer be there.

Gotcha.

About those 35 bushels ... where does it say that the "average person" eats only grains, water and salt? Even for the Third World that sounds a bit harsh.

That was just to illustrate that currently the earth actually has the food production to feed a population of 100 billion people, and though yes it may indeed be bland, that is in fact all you need to survive. Grains, water, and salt. Though yeast is much appreciated.

That isn't even optimised for food production either, if you wanted to max nutrients and calories per acre nothing that I know of beats the potato. 7 pounds a day in addition to 2 litres of water and a teaspoon of salt will keep you alive and well. One acre of potatoes will average you 15 200 pounds of potatoes a year. That's enough to feed a family of ~6 for a year. By comparison, wheat averages in the low 6000, or just over 2 and a half people per acre.

When you do this kind of math doesn't it just make you laugh at the thought that there are hungry people on the planet with only 7 billion inhabitants, but we actually have the production capability to feed ten times that number and simply don't. I love humanity, if we were a person, we'ld be incredibly insane.

 Ratbarf wrote:

About those 35 bushels ... where does it say that the "average person" eats only grains, water and salt? Even for the Third World that sounds a bit harsh.

That was just to illustrate that currently the earth actually has the food production to feed a population of 100 billion people, and though yes it may indeed be bland, that is in fact all you need to survive. Grains, water, and salt. Though yeast is much appreciated.

That is untrue. You need more than that. If you live on purely grain and water, you will become nutritionally deficient. Depending on what type of grain or what type of processing, all sorts of various conditions are possible, ranging from scurvy to berberi to pellagra to name just a couple basic examples (and all will result in death). That is not even covering those conditions that may not be strictly speaking lethal are certainly disabling such as rickets. While it may fit grimdark to have malnourished downtrodden workers in the factories, it also creates inefficiency and people cannot work if they are too busy being incapacitated from disease. From the perspective of factory owners, even if they don't care about the lives of their workers, to constantly have to replace the sick and dying creates potential disruptions in meeting production quotas.

At no point in time did people live on purely grains and water. The peasants of ancient times all supplemented their staple diet through other forms of food gathering, hunting, or agriculture, which while not necessarily sufficient to stave off all nutritional deficiencies was at least sufficient to keep them going. A person living their whole life on a world in an enclosed urban environment because the air outside is too toxic to breathe unaided is not going to be able to do this, and so cannot survive on purely grains and water. The claim that the Earth's grain production is sufficient to feed 100 billion is therefore an underestimate of the true amounts of food necessary to keep a population maintained on a hive world. Even if the nutrition is coming in the form of processed foods with added trace nutrients, those trace nutrients have to come from somewhere. And some of those nutrients, such as vitamin D, are can be easily and cheaply sourced from animal related products, and these all require higher amounts of food input to raise and process.

Then how come people can be put on bread and water for years at a time and still survive? Also, it is actually possible to live off of beer and beer alone until you die of liver failure. I don't know exactly where they get their vitamin C, but it must be in there somewhere.

Same thing goes for rice as far as I'm aware.

 Ratbarf wrote:
Then how come people can be put on bread and water for years at a time and still survive? Also, it is actually possible to live off of beer and beer alone until you die of liver failure. I don't know exactly where they get their vitamin C, but it must be in there somewhere.

Same thing goes for rice as far as I'm aware.

Because they were not on literally bread and water without any other sources of vitamin C. The human body has about maximum about 4 weeks worth of storage. That is how long it would take before vitamin C is exhausted assuming no other dietary intake. Historically the only times you really got it except with alcoholics, was at sea where there was no fresh food of any sort. If you have any sort of fresh meat, fruit or vegetable intake, or even preserved vegetables like sauerkraut, there is enough vitamin C to stave off major clinical symptoms of scurvy. A person could still be deficient and not in the best of health but they would not die, and onset of scurvy could be delayed. A literal bread and water diet, without any supplementation, is not physically possible to sustain for years. What you are claiming goes against what is known about medicine and the human body. Ask your local physician if you want.

You might find also the historical example of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stark_(physician)

His experiment started with a basic diet of bread and water with a little sugar for thirty-one days. He became 'dull and listless' so ate better until he recovered. He resumed experimenting by adding various foods, one at a time - olive oil, milk, roast goose, boiled beef, fat, figs, and veal. After two months, his gums were red and swollen, and they bled when pressure was applied, a symptom of scurvy.

Scurvy set in at 2 months (probably because his added foods gave a little vitamin C so delayed the onset).

Also these days, alcoholics are precisely the patient group must likely to develop scurvy. They don't get their vitamin C from anywhere, or at best only marginal amounts from a poor diet. They are practically the only group of people these days that get scurvy because it is so easy to get vitamin C in the modern world because it is added to so many processed foods. That is why even alcoholics don't often get it these days unless they have a very poor diet.

Rice is again not possible to survive on alone, especially if you are talking polished rice, since rice has no vitamin C. You'd also get beriberi if you ate only polished rice. Human thiamine stores are roughly 30mg maximum. Half life is 9-18 days so about 45-90 days for exhaustion assuming no other intake. Then you'd start to get deficient. Again you can string things out for awhile if they have any intake of other sources, and there are numerous vegetable sources of thiamine (and unrefined cereal sources). Throw in any intake of thiamine and the clinical onset of beriberi can be delayed significantly. An alcoholic living purely off beer will develop Wernicke's encephalopathy and then later Korsakoff's syndrome long before they reach the stage of hepatocellular carcinoma. It might not be literal death, but it means they are incapacitated from their brain dysfunction.

In short, what you are claiming about the human body is simply not possible. People living on subsistence or poor diets (poor as in quality, not necessarily quantity) can last so long because they might have very marginal intakes that still provide some trace amounts, enough to render them deficient but not so far as to develop major clinical signs. I think it is this extending of the onset, and the time of a subclinical level of deficiency is what causes the misunderstanding that it is possible to survive on beer alone or only bread and water alone comes from. In reality, few diets were ever so restrictive unless deliberately designed to be, and then these were not truly meant for long term use. A bread and water diet as penance for sins, or punishment for a crime, would not result in death because any short term depletion would be made up for later.

I know what I am talking about when it comes to biology and medicine (biology and medical degree), and since 40K normal humans are still fundamentally humans as understood today, their needs are not going to be so outrageously different that we cannot use today's knowledge to judge their nutritional needs. It takes more than just a large quantity of grain to keep a human going.

That is why any hive world is going to have to be taking in more foods than just grain. Even if they took purely processed rations, these would have had nutrients added in during the processing stage, and these nutrients would have had to come from somewhere, such as animal sources or other non-cereal crops.

Dying of starvation from lack of calories is one thing. Dying from various nutritional deficiencies is another. Having vast mono-crop grain production can stop the first, but it wouldn't stop the second. That is why all ancient peoples had varied diets, with supplementation to their staple grain food.

I acquiesce, however, my point still stands as the capability of Earth meeting the needs of a hive world. Simply put, the vast majority of quality arable land isn't really managed in a way that is anywhere near as efficient as first world farming is today. So it should be a very possible feat to double the world's production of foodstuffs, including those extra nutrients that you mentioned, because the stats I was working off of and giving were all only the amounts that were already being produced. So just our production capability for grain is sufficient for the required quantity, and I would think it would be a simply thing, if earth was managed in an autocratic manner similar to the Imperium, to ramp up production of those foodstuffs that produced the other necessary nutrients, but not necessarily calories, that a hundred billion humans need to live.

Except you neglect the fact hive worlds are not all composed of populations living at a minimal level of balanced nutrition. The description of hive worlds shows a greatly stratified society with a noble upper class. These people are not going to be content with living on ration bars or bulk common foods. They dine well and eat animal protein. On a world of 150 billion or more people, even a 1% noble class is going to be 1.5 billion nobles all consuming at a high level. That is very roughly about the population of the current Earth's First World countries. This is before you get into the remaining 148.5 billion of a hive world, of which a substantial number will still be the common working class people.

So if you take current Earth's food production as an indicator, it would still need to allocate a significant amount of grain towards animal feed to raise the meat to meet the needs of the First World equivalent of a hive world. The remainder is not going to be sufficient to meet the needs of 148.5 billion humans. This is also before we consider that the needs of hive nobility is likely to be greater than just an average First World person (which includes any citizen of the First World including working and middle class).

Let's calm down a bit, technically could you feed a hive world with just earth, probably. would you, probably not. there's probably a group of agri-worlds supplying multiple other worlds. get some fruit for Tarsis Major, some grain from Gidon Prime, and some protein from Sarnis Five, mix it all together and make some ration bars. as for the nobles, they make their own deals, and I doubt they'd like to get their food from even the same planet as "those other people". also something to take into account on food production: aquaculture, farming fish and sea plants. I've seen some research on farming nutritious algae into a ribbon type food.

 yeri wrote:
Let's calm down a bit, technically could you feed a hive world with just earth, probably. would you, probably not. there's probably a group of agri-worlds supplying multiple other worlds. get some fruit for Tarsis Major, some grain from Gidon Prime, and some protein from Sarnis Five, mix it all together and make some ration bars. as for the nobles, they make their own deals, and I doubt they'd like to get their food from even the same planet as "those other people". also something to take into account on food production: aquaculture, farming fish and sea plants. I've seen some research on farming nutritious algae into a ribbon type food.

The background does support multiple agri-worlds per hive world, such as the description of the Eye of Terror campaign describing how a major world was at risk of massive starvation due to the fall of agri-worlds in the subsector to Chaos.

The relevance of the nobles' consumption levels is to show that the total amount of population supported for a given amount of grain is actually less than what might be expected, given the necessity to cater to the consumption of inefficient foods by the upper classes. Whether that food comes from planet A or planet B does not matter on the Imperium level, as it still means allocation of potential food for the purposes of raising these rarer foods.

Aquaculture is already accounted for as the Imperium's classification of an agri-world also includes those that rely on aquaculture, fishing, or more esoteric forms of mass food production like gathering vast swarms of edible insects. Aquaculture of fish is generally also inefficient, similar to raising of livestock, since fish feed is often composed of other fish. High value farmed salmon and tuna for example are fed from fish meal made from other lower value fish, yet these lower value fish could also have potentially fed people.

The relevance of noble consumption indirectly is also the necessity of sufficient orbital facilities to handle yet more traffic at both import and export end. It wouldn't be just a bulk freighter carrying huge quantities of ration bars or grain, but ships carrying potential perishables (given that warp travel can still take days, weeks, or months).

This all means that really the best way to take down a hive world is to cut off its food shipments by attacking shipping rather than assaulting the world directly. Even a reduction in the number of deliveries getting through should suffice to trigger widespread hardship, riots, or rebellion.

 Ratbarf wrote:

Individual consumption - I thought that was what was being discussed there about the stats. You said that Iracundus' numbers would be misleading because a large part isn't eaten by humans ... what I was hinting at was that the part that is eaten by humans would grow if the animals also consuming grain would no longer be there.

Gotcha.

About those 35 bushels ... where does it say that the "average person" eats only grains, water and salt? Even for the Third World that sounds a bit harsh.

That was just to illustrate that currently the earth actually has the food production to feed a population of 100 billion people, and though yes it may indeed be bland, that is in fact all you need to survive. Grains, water, and salt. Though yeast is much appreciated.

That isn't even optimised for food production either, if you wanted to max nutrients and calories per acre nothing that I know of beats the potato. 7 pounds a day in addition to 2 litres of water and a teaspoon of salt will keep you alive and well. One acre of potatoes will average you 15 200 pounds of potatoes a year. That's enough to feed a family of ~6 for a year. By comparison, wheat averages in the low 6000, or just over 2 and a half people per acre.

When you do this kind of math doesn't it just make you laugh at the thought that there are hungry people on the planet with only 7 billion inhabitants, but we actually have the production capability to feed ten times that number and simply don't. I love humanity, if we were a person, we'ld be incredibly insane.

Yup, the idea that the Earth cannot support the current population, or the population in the forseeable future, is a myth. What actually true is that we don't have the logistics to actually get the food to where it needs to go.

We would actually run out of living space before we ran out of space to farm(assuming all farmable land is used and to maximum efficiency and humans live in areas where farming is impossable)


What might actually end up happening in the far future is that most of humanity ends up living in orbital cities or on other planets in the solar system and Earth becomes on giant farm/fishery.

yes but the aquaculture bit was talking about their calculations of what earth could support, not what the Imperium does. sorry for any confusion.

Ya know, I think that Hive worlds would actually be pretty symbiotic for agri-worlds as well. I mean, those Hive worlds would produce human waste in the billions of tons per annum. Hopefully that waste is then carted off to the agri-worlds to use as manure/possible feed. <- Urea is a possible feed for micro-plankton and other such tiny see based organisms or so I'm led to believe. In addition to this human bodies would also be sufficient, and possibly necessary due to loss of biomass, for the rejuvenation of an Agri Worlds soil. Hows that for Grimdark?

The FFG RPG series already describes a common use for human bodies on hive worlds: processing into "corpse starch", which appears to be the Calixis sector name for certain kinds of processed rations.

Equally, manure can be used directly on hive worlds for hydroponics or other forms of food production. There is no need to ship stuff offworld when it can be used on site for growing stuff.

Where hive worlds are symbiotic for agri-worlds is more I think in the supply of machinery parts and other consumables such as high efficiency chemical fertilizers (which does better than human manure).

yes but the aquaculture bit was talking about their calculations of what earth could support, not what the Imperium does. sorry for any confusion.

I made a statement about that earlier. Modern aquaculture is still really oriented towards production of a few species. For fish, these are usually high value carnivorous species that eat fish meal derived from other lower value fish. With fishing stocks collapsing world wide and requiring ever more intensive fishing to maintain catch quantities, I have doubts as to the ability to massively expand fish farming aquaculture given its current dependence on processing other fish for meal.

I was more talking about plant and algae based aquaculture, currently mostly unexplored possibilities here on earth. but I could see where you'd get tripped up.

Although herbivorous fish can be farmed too, likely being fed algae.

So its really a case of the market wanting a specific kind of fish.

With reguards to someones post about inventing new things i am quite sure if you invented something your not going to be getting a imperial patent but quite likely a bonfire and burning for techherasy