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There have been times when the imperium was suffering dire straits, like then the beast reached earth and an ork "ambassador" was actually allowed on Terra because the beast's fleet was in the system. There was the reign of blood when the vandire heresy split the Imperium apart, and of course the recent kerfuffles..

One question is have that I've never seen the BG deal with (not that it didn't and I missed it.) is :How did they keep feeding the emperor during these times? "

The emperor's eating problem has been part of the deep lore since Rouge trader days, "a thousand souls a day must be sacrificed" to maintain the emperor.

Now lore has shifted a little here and there. At one time it was implied at least a thousand psykers must be fedto the emperor a day, then it was a thousand psykers are lost maintaining the astronavicom, not maintaining the emperor. This seems to go back and forth.

But during times when everything is really going to hell, like the ork beast being in the terrain system or the imperial palace occupied by an arch heretic high lord, how do they keep getting black ships full of psyker mcnuggets getting to Terra and the emperor's table?

Or does the emperor need psykers to live? Could he sustain hums of off normal human life forces? Even it took 10 ordinary men to take the place of one of the emperor's preferred morsels i'm sure the custodes would have little problem throwing10,000 people seized at random into the emperor's blender.

(Maybe that is why Terra has such an obscenely bloated population? Emergency emperor chow reserves?)

So, anyone have any idea on how the emperor keeps getting his meals on heels when the imperium is having a really bad year?

Reserves? Unlike certain countries irl they don't rely on supply coming at exact pace of demand so are less bothered by slowdowns.

Seeing inherit unreliability of warp travel seems like wise precaution to begin witq

Re: the Emperor or the Astronomican, I think of it as more of a system.

When the black ships first started carting psykers to power the golden throne it was to maintain the psychic wards holding the human webway together, a job the empror was doing personally. The psykers allowed him to get off the throne for a break and take part in the actualy battle in the webway.

10k years later, and the near-dead empror with his failing golden throne cannot maintain the Throne/Astronomican system on his own like he could when he was still 'alive'. The psykers sacrificed provide the horsepower and he just points it in the right direction. If there were no psykers, the weight of maintaining the beacon would destroy him (hence, he needs them to survive).

As far as how many per day? Scale is hard to imagine in a galactic empire of a million worlds. I dunno if it would be possible. 40k is generally better if you headcanon your own numbers a little bit anyway I find.

I don't think the orks blockaded Terra for long enough to mke a difference.

Age of apostasy, black ships would still have got through.. it's a civil war but no-one wanted to kill the Emperor. (Also, total retcon but it would make sense that the Brides of the Emperor were actually sisters of silence..)

I imagine one of the Custodes duties is making sure supply is always secure.

Rogal Dorn moonlights as an uber eats driver.

Not everything has an answer. Not everything needs an answer. What is this need to codify everything and leave no mystery? Why can something not just be absolute? Please, we do not need another Onething on our hands.

With that out of the way, The Imperium has ships docking at Terra all hours of the day. It is constant, non stop. The novel Carrion Throne gives lots of snippets into life on Terra. People hardly get any sleep due to the constant comings and goings on hundreds of thousands of ships daily. There are untold trillions of Imperial citizens out there with billions amongst them being psykers. It's not hard to work out The Imperium gets by and it doesn't really need to be spelt out.

The adepts who give their lives in the chamber of the astronomican are trained intensively in philosophy and meditation over a very long period, and it take several months for them to exhaust their energy after they enter the chamber and begin their duty. They wouldn’t be interrupted during a brief blockade because the ones in the chamber wouldn’t need to be replaced immediately and there are many in training, so the it would only be new candidates entering training that would stop in a blockade.

The psykers on the golden throne can be any old quality of payment. If the blow made lasted a year I’m sure they could find 356,000 psykers on a giant megalopolis planet in that time, even if they had to start using Astropaths, Inquisitors, and couple of Imperial Fist librarians.

Doing some rough math:
1,000 per day X 365 days per year X 10,000 years is only 3,650,000,000 that Emps has consumed since his internment into the Golden throne
That's just under half the current world's population.

The Imperium has trillions of citizens, and I'm certain that enough of them are fit for "psyker mcnuggets"
The imperial tithes likely bring in enough to spare for these times when the Black Ships cannot get through

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Also How long as the Big E been on the John for.

its possible he had a reserve of P energy after his death and only after a long period of time did he need to get juiced up.

as well logistically only grabbing 1000 psykers a day makes no sense when talking about the distances needed to travel. its more likely they nab several million at a time. a literal stock pile of food. probably in multiple batchs on multiple black ships.

and as galef pointed out there its a little drop in the bucket to maintain that many psykeres even if they are rare.

Ok some good answers that cover the evolving background. Not much snark, more humor that actual snark. I wonder if ships we're unable to reach Terra could some forces use the we way to Luna, a'la guilleman, then teleport to the Imperial food drop off window.

Wouldnt it make sense to breed people with psychic powers?
Get one guy who is a psychic to impregnate a women every day. Actually just take 1 test tube sample and artificially inseminate thousands of women a day.


Heck it maybe possible grow a bunch of psychic brains in vats.

I'm sure chaos would love that.

I don’t think they import 10000 every day that are eaten, I assume the black ships bring way more in and they have a reserve to keep it going for a little while as due to the nature of space travel there are inevitably shortages.

Also don't forget - in 'normal' circumstances it's rejects and surplus of psyker sanctioning and astronomicon/astropath programs that are fed to Throne. In crisis time there'd be no qualms of requiring final sacrifice from ones in training - despite small percentage of 'em among Black Ship cargo their total numbers on Terra can be high enough as training is most probably very far from instant.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
So, anyone have any idea on how the emperor keeps getting his meals on heels when the imperium is having a really bad year?

They don't bother feeding the corpse and pretend they did. It's not like all those sacrifices accomplish anything, it's just ritual slaughter in front of a golden idol and an excuse to pretend that the psyker purges are anything other than mass murder.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
So, anyone have any idea on how the emperor keeps getting his meals on heels when the imperium is having a really bad year?

They don't bother feeding the corpse and pretend they did. It's not like all those sacrifices accomplish anything, it's just ritual slaughter in front of a golden idol and an excuse to pretend that the psyker purges are anything other than mass murder.

Adepta Sororitas pedagogues are on their way to provide you with some "lessons" in holy doctrine citizen.