The Imperium and Organic Material

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**Mr Nobody**

The Adeptus Ministratum: Famous for it's endless paperwork.

But where do they get all their paper? Most worlds in the Imperium are famous for being barren wastelands, and quite defoliated. Are there worlds just dedicated to forestry? Perhaps they have hydroponics full of GMO plants for producing wood pulp? Can you make plastic paper?

And this goes most materials that humans use. There's a shocking amount of leather for an empire devoid of proper agriculture. Although, if you're willing to use a person's skull, then I guess their skin is useful too...

**Tsagualsa**

Mr Nobody wrote:
The Adeptus Ministratum: Famous for it's endless paperwork.

But where do they get all their paper? Most worlds in the Imperium are famous for being barren wastelands, and quite defoliated. Are there worlds just dedicated to forestry? Perhaps they have hydroponics full of GMO plants for producing wood pulp? Can you make plastic paper?

And this goes most materials that humans use. There's a shocking amount of leather for an empire devoid of proper agriculture. Although, if you're willing to use a person's skull, then I guess their skin is useful too...

Take it from 'The Hollow Mountain': There are literal whole planets dedicated to the production of vellum and pergament - the Imperium does not use that much paper, it's actually mostly pergament, i.e. animal skin, specifically gene-modded pig.

One object of particular importance was scarcely present in the imaginations of that ignorant citizenry. Young charges of the scholae, when asked to guess which was the seventh-most-vital import to Holy Terra by weight, almost never landed on the right answer. And yet, the chances were that the product of that importation was staring them in the face, marked with their own scrawl and stamped with the crest of their particular educational establishment.

Parchment. Vellum. Animal-hide. For millennia, it had been the choice material of record throughout the scriptoria of the Imperium. Far more durable than paper, much cheaper than crystal-plate or dataslab, less ideologically suspect than cogitator-wafer and harder to tamper with than audex screeds, parchment remained the medium trusted by scribes on worlds from Ultramar to Hydraphur. It was inefficient, to be sure, and prone to error in onward copy-transmission, and yet still it persisted, clung to by a savant class so wedded to its smells, its texture, its permanence and its cheapness that the mere suggestion of another method of record-keeping skirted close to a kind of heresy of its own. After so long in use, the infrastructure of vellum creation had become mind-bendingly vast, spread out across every industrial world in mankind’s sprawling possessions. There were whispers in the Imperium’s famed archive-worlds of entire wars fought over its production and distribution. Five hundred years ago, the great Master of the Administratum, Skito Gavalles, had been asked what would make his onerous job more bearable.

‘Pigskin,’ he was said to have replied. ‘More pigskin.’

Of course, few living humans had ever laid eyes on a porcine. Unless they worked on an agriworld, they would never have encountered one of those bloated and obese sacks of stimm-injected muscle and sinew, too colossal to walk without breaking their spindly legs and force-fed high-nutrient chemsoup to keep them growing in the pens. They would never have come across a bovine, either, unless you counted the thready strands of protein-extract pumped into their ration-trays during sanctioned rest-breaks. Such things were legends, in much the same category as relics of the Saints, the Angels of Death or Manifest Acts of the Emperor – things that definitely existed, but were unlikely ever to be encountered. The bulk of vellum used throughout the Imperium was not, of course, taken from such sources. Most of it was grown from stock genetic material in biotanks, then cured in kilometre-long reams before being sliced, rolled and pressed for delivery. Such stuff was hardy, inexpensive and plentiful – the perfect qualities for a culture that prized quantity and uniformity above all things. For a few senior scribes, though, that was not quite good enough. They wanted to run their auto-quills across the hide of something once-living. They wanted the iron tips to snag and catch on patches where hair had grown, or where a blood-vessel had wriggled. They wanted their documents to look like the ones in the mighty tomes of the past, bound in real-leather and lined with gold before being locked into vacuum-capsules and buried deep in alarm rigged vaults.

Excerpt stolen from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/m56uac/excerpt_the_hollow_mountain_terra_consumes_enough/

**Grey Templar**

There are almost certainly agri-worlds dedicated to forestry too though. Most would probably have areas too mountainous for farming, but perfect for cultivation of trees.

**mithril2098**

Odds are the paper the common person encounters day to day is probably made from agricultural byproducts.. grain stalks, uprooted shrubs, cut tree limbs, etc.. anything with cellulose that can be broken down and rendered into sheets.

**BorderCountess**

Mr Nobody wrote:
The Adeptus Ministratum: Famous for it's endless paperwork.

But where do they get all their paper? Most worlds in the Imperium are famous for being barren wastelands, and quite defoliated. Are there worlds just dedicated to forestry? Perhaps they have hydroponics full of GMO plants for producing wood pulp? Can you make plastic paper?

And this goes most materials that humans use. There's a shocking amount of leather for an empire devoid of proper agriculture. Although, if you're willing to use a person's skull, then I guess their skin is useful too...

It's been said that the Imperium's greatest resource is its population.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

And vellum is traditionally pig skin. Throw in a bit of Long Pig skin, and who’s gonna particularly care?

**Wyldhunt**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And vellum is traditionally pig skin. Throw in a bit of Long Pig skin, and who’s gonna particularly care?

So their vellum is sourced from the same place they get fat/wax for all those candles and purity seals?

There are some planets dedicated pretty much entirely to tree production iirc. There's a short story where Astorath goes to a forest planet that was colonized with the intent of harvesting the fast-growing super trees on the planet. At least, that's how I remember it. Maybe I made that up.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

You jest, but it’s entirely possible.

Humans are a resource. Just because you is ded, don’t mean you can’t contribute.

**Mr Nobody**

Now that I think about it, an entire political body running on vellum is an extremely british thing to do. I believe the British parliament has an entire archive of vellum documents.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Mr Nobody wrote:
Now that I think about it, an entire political body running on vellum is an extremely british thing to do. I believe the British parliament has an entire archive of vellum documents.

No no. That’s just Jacob Rees Mogg’s daily newspaper.

**mrFickle**

All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process. I expect, therefore, that humans have mastered the arts or recycling and probably STCs manufactoriums are design to take in lots of different scrap materials to break them down to output lots of things including parchments

**PondaNagura**

I would have guessed vatgrown tissue cultures and byproduct of grox farms.
Though there are in reality researchers looking into fungi-based leather substitutes, so I could see a black market for heretical orkoid hides mixed into circulation.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process. I expect, therefore, that humans have mastered the arts or recycling and probably STCs manufactoriums are design to take in lots of different scrap materials to break them down to output lots of things including parchments

Potentially asteroid or comet mining, combined with efficient recycling.

Given how advanced humanity was, I think we have to grant anything modern science can think of became a reality.

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process. I expect, therefore, that humans have mastered the arts or recycling and probably STCs manufactoriums are design to take in lots of different scrap materials to break them down to output lots of things including parchments

Potentially asteroid or comet mining, combined with efficient recycling.

Given how advanced humanity was, I think we have to grant anything modern science can think of became a reality.

Getting water is pretty easy when you have functionally unlimited energy - there's a lot of the stuff hanging around in space, you just have to concentrate it; but even easier is getting it out of a lot of common minerals like Gypsum, Vermiculite or the various Zeolithes - these form significant parts of easy-to-access geological formations and can be readily mined by the gigaton. Getting the water out needs ridiculous amounts of energy, but once you have fusion reactors and stuff like that that is your smallest problem.

**mithril2098**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:You jest, but it’s entirely possible.

Humans are a resource. Just because you is ded, don’t mean you can’t contribute.

case in point, Corpse-Starch/Soylens Viridans.

and as far as Terra goes, odds are that a lot of the water earth had before the oceans dried up is still there, just locked into rocks deep under ground or suspended in the air like on venus. given most of the depictions have it as cloud shrouded much like venus, i suspect that a lot of its water needs are filled by condensers and wind-traps that pull moisture from the air. think the water guild from Dune, with perhaps elements of the moisture farmers of tatooin from star wars. i suspect that many of the imperial hive cities on terra have vast cisterns below them to store such extracted water (perhaps also tapping into deep aquifers where possible) like those of Constantinople/Istanbul but on a far grander scale.

**Gert**

mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process.

Depends on how you define "water" and what sources you are truly ready to consider getting said "water" from.

**BorderCountess**

Gert wrote:
mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process.

Depends on how you define "water" and what sources you are truly ready to consider getting said "water" from.

Has anyone seen "Tank Girl"?

**Commissar von Toussaint**

It's interesting to juxtapose this with the "assault on Terra" thread because it's taking pretty much the opposite angle.

Put simply, the Imperium has the resources to use extremely inefficient storage media out of pure affectation. The amount of redundancies and intricate supply chains pretty much kill the notion that Terra could be blockaded into submission.

**mrFickle**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process. I expect, therefore, that humans have mastered the arts or recycling and probably STCs manufactoriums are design to take in lots of different scrap materials to break them down to output lots of things including parchments

Potentially asteroid or comet mining, combined with efficient recycling.

Given how advanced humanity was, I think we have to grant anything modern science can think of became a reality.

Wasn’t earth cutoff even from mars before the emperor conquered terra. Getting stuff from space sounds pretty industrial for techno barbarians although slavery is a common theme in 40K so they could have been industrious in that way. I expect that the STCs also have a soilant green setting and humans are mostly water

**Herzlos**

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
It's interesting to juxtapose this with the "assault on Terra" thread because it's taking pretty much the opposite angle.

Put simply, the Imperium has the resources to use extremely inefficient storage media out of pure affectation. The amount of redundancies and intricate supply chains pretty much kill the notion that Terra could be blockaded into submission.

On the contrary, paper has a major flaw in that it's not connected and can't really be verified beyond a seal. Provide a convincing bit of vellum with a convincing looking seal and you can get the authorization to do pretty much anything especially if the person granting the permission is distracted/disinterested/terrified enough to not want to investigate further. I mean, who would be brave enough to hinder official imperial business?

**Tsagualsa**

mrFickle wrote:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
mrFickle wrote:
All of the oceans dried up pre unification wars, they must have ways of making water and other materials that need water in their production process. I expect, therefore, that humans have mastered the arts or recycling and probably STCs manufactoriums are design to take in lots of different scrap materials to break them down to output lots of things including parchments

Potentially asteroid or comet mining, combined with efficient recycling.

Given how advanced humanity was, I think we have to grant anything modern science can think of became a reality.

Wasn’t earth cutoff even from mars before the emperor conquered terra. Getting stuff from space sounds pretty industrial for techno barbarians although slavery is a common theme in 40K so they could have been industrious in that way. I expect that the STCs also have a soilant green setting and humans are mostly water

The short story of it is that 'The water is gone' is a classic dystopian sci-fi genre convention that sounds cool, but has little basis in realitiy - water is the most common molecule in the universe, and even in the solar system liquid water is much more common than we thought as late as 50 years ago. Inside the temperature range that is considered habitable for complex life, you're absolutely swimming in the stuff. On a planetary scale, you also don't really lose any of it unless you bind it in minerals at an absurd scale, and 'boiling it off' like the original Horus Heresy stories said is not really feasible at all. Later on that got retconned to the oceans having been 'stolen', which i guess could happen at the 'a wizard did it' technology level of DAoT humans or with some random McGuffin that operates on essentially magic.

**Commissar von Toussaint**

Tsagualsa wrote:
On a planetary scale, you also don't really lose any of it unless you bind it in minerals at an absurd scale, and 'boiling it off' like the original Horus Heresy stories said is not really feasible at all.

Yeah, when people talk about that, I always ask "how does steam not escape gravity now?"

You can lock it up in ice, but if you just heat things up, you'd get an ice-free rain-washed planet - sort of like what the dinosaurs had. No ice caps back then and verdant growth sufficient to support 90 ton land-based herbivores. Ah for the good old days when a warmer earth was a better earth.

Ice is a lot scarier. Ocean levels drop, growing seasons are shorter and there is less land to farm under all the glaciers. Where I'm sitting right now was under an ice sheet 10,000 years ago. I get that arid, dusty conditions are standard fare for "environmental degradation" but I think an ice world covered with black, sooty snow would be worse.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Mars has been stripped of its atmosphere more than once. Surely that would allow water to be lost en masse?

**Commissar von Toussaint**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Mars has been stripped of its atmosphere more than once. Surely that would allow water to be lost en masse?

Yeah, except that Mars still has water, just no atmosphere. Taking the water while leaving the atmosphere (and not annihilating all life in the process) would be quite a feat.

**tneva82**

Maybe life did get annihilated and earth was later repopulated?

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Mars has been stripped of its atmosphere more than once. Surely that would allow water to be lost en masse?

Yeah, except that Mars still has water, just no atmosphere. Taking the water while leaving the atmosphere (and not annihilating all life in the process) would be quite a feat.

I’m meaning in 40K, where Mars has been terraformed successfully at least once, before war undid the good work.

Also I don’t know the underlying science mentioned earlier, hence the question mark

**Mr Nobody**

A little of topic, but the water talk is interesting.

I have noticed the later HH books talk a little bit about rehabilitating Terra's biosphere. Growing small oasis across the planet and refilling the oceans. So the water and wildlife was somewhere out there. I like to think that there is enough people and machinery that most of the earth's water is tied up in industry. Maybe there are oceans, but there much smaller than the ones we have now. Giant, polluted brine lakes that fill the spaces between continental shelfs.

**Commissar von Toussaint**

Mr Nobody wrote:
A little of topic, but the water talk is interesting.

I have noticed the later HH books talk a little bit about rehabilitating Terra's biosphere. Growing small oasis across the planet and refilling the oceans. So the water and wildlife was somewhere out there. I like to think that there is enough people and machinery that most of the earth's water is tied up in industry. Maybe there are oceans, but there much smaller than the ones we have now. Giant, polluted brine lakes that fill the spaces between continental shelfs.

Horrific mutant sea-monsters swimming in toxic oceans would be very on-brand.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Mr Nobody wrote:
A little of topic, but the water talk is interesting.

I have noticed the later HH books talk a little bit about rehabilitating Terra's biosphere. Growing small oasis across the planet and refilling the oceans. So the water and wildlife was somewhere out there. I like to think that there is enough people and machinery that most of the earth's water is tied up in industry. Maybe there are oceans, but there much smaller than the ones we have now. Giant, polluted brine lakes that fill the spaces between continental shelfs.

Horrific mutant sea-monsters swimming in toxic oceans would be very on-brand.

What did you call House Delaque??

**SpaceMcQuirk**

If you pulped paper from a carnivorous death world plant and got a paper-cut, does the spirit of the parchment feed from your sacrifice?