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So, there's one thing that always intrigued me, and I can't find an answer for it. How does someone get sent to a Penal World? IE, why weren't they just executed and be done with? What does someone have to do to get sent to a Penal World instead of being killed on the spot? Are there any examples of Guardsmen being sent to a Penal World, but not a Penal Legion, as in they weren't to be soldiers, but just another slave mining away at some rock?

It would depend on what message a punishment is supposed to send. Adeptus Arbites that fail spectacularly enough are sent to a penal colony according to the Enforcer trilogy, for example. Letting them off with a quick death is too soft and the threat of slave work until you die inspires the rest to work even harder at their duties.

Is there anything that would involve guardsmen being shipped off? If not just one or two men but maybe half a regiment or something? Would the amount of men involved in the crime change the difference between killing the soldier and writing up a file why he was killed and shipping them away to some backwater world and having them spend their time there instead?

 2BlackJack1 wrote:
Is there anything that would involve guardsmen being shipped off? If not just one or two men but maybe half a regiment or something? Would the amount of men involved in the crime change the difference between killing the soldier and writing up a file why he was killed and shipping them away to some backwater world and having them spend their time there instead?

It probably varies from crime to crime, and who is sentencing them and the circumstances.

Was the crime high profile to where an example needs to be made of them now? Are the guardsmen in question valuable enough to not be executed out of hand? Are there extenuating circumstances which might mandate a different type of sentence?

Keep in mind that most serious crimes either result in execution OR getting sent to a Penal Legion. At least for Guardsmen. Penal colonies seem mostly reserved for non-guardsmen related crimes.

I think one possible situation where guardsmen might get sent to a penal world would be if there were no penal legions or major conflicts in the immediate vicinity, but there was a penal colony in need of more laborers. Or maybe the soldiers instead of getting sentenced to labor are forced to be guards on said prison colony. A dead end dangerous assignment with no opportunity for glory or advancement.

Something like the following occurs,

Guardsmen regiment manages to commit some fairly serious crime as a group. Commissar decides that the crime isn't serious enough to warrant summary execution, especially of so many soldiers. Instead, they are reassigned to Penal Colony X-27GH as part of the interior security.

Penal Colony X-27GH is well known for being a nasty place. The colony has 2 rings of security. The inner ring guards the actual prisoners and interacts with them on a daily basis, interior security is also usually made up of more minor felons whose punishment is providing security for the more serious offenders. The exterior security is there to keep both Interior Security and the actual prisoners from escaping.

In the Last Chancers books, the penal colonies were kind of a 'holding tank' where they stuck Kage until Schaeffer needed to rebuild the 13th Legion.

Ok, so I see people mentioning the crime can vary on how someone gets sent off. With that in mind, I take it there is no real general crimes that get you X punishment, instead each case is more individual in its sentencing? Would it be possible that a soldier being charged with murder of another soldier being sent away, possibly to a planet where they just mine some rocks or something, while all traces of their real identity being removed? Would that work if I were to put it under the punishment is being more dead to the IoM than whoever they murdered?

Sorry for all of the questioning, but the answer I'm hoping for is a rather specific one, and I'm looking for some sort of green light before I get too far into a project that doesn't have very strong foundations to begin with.

Again, we only really have the Last Chancers as far as I know that goes into penal colonies in any depth - Kage gets sent there for killing another officer, but he was a special case - he'd already been through the system once and won a pardon as a penal legionnaire.

I can't remember why he was put in the PL originally though. I think it was something similar.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the Last Chancers, but thanks for the info. My only real book I've read involving a Penal World was Commisar by Andy Hoare, and that world was in the middle of a rebellion, so you didn't get much insight on how the world worked under normal circumstances.

IIRC there is one in ADB's Night Lords trilogy - very nasty place

In a scifi book I am reading, they have something similar to penal worlds. They basically drop pod the prisoners on to it. Then once every bundle of years, come back and pick up the drop pods.
In this series, the 2 characters sent to Darkside (the horrible scary prison planet that you never can leave) are sent to it instead of killed because they were horrible traitors, however may be useful in the future, and had a little redemption. The original plan was execution on the spot. These books are not as grimdark though.

I could see 40k doing something similar, but as to why penal worlds exist? Some things are scarier than death. Where a fanatic may be willing to die for a cause, are they willing to go to a penal world for that cause?

Penal Regiments exist because they're useful expendable fodder for the Emperor's many wars. In other words, cheap expendable manpower. Presumably Penal Colonies are the same.

Most likely Penal Colonies are sent to miserable, inhospitable environments to extract important resources. Imagine a world where machinery has a short lifespan (say, high oxygen and moisture content, so ferrous metals rust overnight). A place where muscle and sweat are more useful than Servitors and automated earth moving equipment.

Conditions will be hideous, of course. Prisoners will get the bare minimum required to survive and meet their production quotas. Guards will be disinterested in the prisoners at best or deliberately charged with interfering with and harassing the prisoners at worst (to disrupt any attempted uprisings).

Alternately, a Penal Colony might be the subject of long-term social, psychological and/or biological experimentation. Lab rats. Sux to be you, but it's for the Machine God, hey?

Let your mind run rampant. It may be a frozen hell, a scorching desert planet or a straight-up deathworld of jungles and swamps. There could be a hostile indigenous population that hunts inmates for fun and profit... or the guards and their families might be the ones restricted to fortified 'safe' compounds while the prisoners fend for themselves in some lethal environment.

It could be as twisted as your warped little mind can imagine. We are talking Grimdark here.

My two cents.

You could have been born there. I imagine most of them are like really harsh colonies rather then prison cells.

It could be that you were just arrested for something relatively minor stealing, owing money, being lazy, but the IoM needed people to work this mine so they rounded up a prison block to be transported off world.

It also could be a thing where you did nothing wrong. Like if a planet had a problem with insurgents so they just round up the whole population and ship them off as a form of collective punishment.

Overall I think the reason they ship you off rather then killing you is if they want you for something.

Indeed. Your life on its own is worthless, so summary execution is an easy way out. The Imperium almost certainly has overpopulation on some worlds, so the occasional cull might be beneficial. Unless those bodies could be put to use mining or somesuch menial task.

 gwarsh41 wrote:
I could see 40k doing something similar, but as to why penal worlds exist? Some things are scarier than death. Where a fanatic may be willing to die for a cause, are they willing to go to a penal world for that cause?

This.

Decades of eternal fear, pain and misery < Death.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Indeed. Your life on its own is worthless, so summary execution is an easy way out. The Imperium almost certainly has overpopulation on some worlds, so the occasional cull might be beneficial. Unless those bodies could be put to use mining or somesuch menial task.

Especially if it's a dangerous job that nobody else wants to do.