Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-27151416-20171013124926/@comment-27151416-20171026194749

Millions in the Hives?

From the Necromunda website:

"In these places where man has been allowed to grow unchecked, teeming billions infest the vast hive cities. Even here the press of humanity is not strong enough to turn back the madness, or deflect the distaff forces of Chaos, heresy and death. Life is cheap. The bullet and the grenade are kings. Neither day nor night touches the billions of souls trapped in this nightmarish world. For them, there is just the unblinking septic gloom of ancient fluorescence. The putrid atmosphere of the underhive is stained with the dark patina of age. A brown haze fills air which has been recycled a million million times and offers the inhabitants but the meanest measure of life it can without choking them."

^ Talking about Hive Cities

"Hive worlds are planets whose industrial output, while technologically far cruder than that of a Forge World of the Adeptus Mechanicus, nonetheless feeds the Imperium’s unquenchable hunger for base manufactured goods. They utilise vast towering metal cities intended to maximise the exploitation of both natural resources and manpower, and invariably, the surfaces of such worlds are polluted wastelands, ashen plains made barren by generations of mining and used as dumping grounds for the toxic byproducts of industry. Their populations are densely concentrated, their lives a short and miserable toil unless they reject it entirely and throw in their lot with the numerous gangs and other outcasts that exist in the cracks."

"Necromunda is host to several thousand hive cities, some vast in scale and home to billions, others decrepit and populated only by the dead. Below a hive’s functioning levels lies a honeycomb of ancient domes, tunnels, ruins and structures from Necromunda’s long-dead past. These ruins lie at the very bottom of each city, below the clan-dominated manufactory zones and the ash wastes: they are the undercities, the oldest and deepest parts of Necromunda’s hives."

Hive Worlds like Necromunda have several thousand hive cities, many of which have populations of Billions.