Unit Frontages - for Warhammer 40K fic

[jollyreaper]

There's also the question of how much of that would be habitable space. A real rocket is something like 90% fuel tankage.



Spaceship designs can be all over the place. Many designs trying to be real-ish end up having the habitat section tiny in comparison to the rest of the structure, proportionally like the gondola for a zeppelin.

With the submarine above, you can see that even though the crew quarters are a small part of the ship, the crew has to get pretty much everywhere inside that pressure hull.

With these giant imperial ships, perhaps it feels a bit like working the mines, like where the abandoned sections are inspected rarely and you and your partner might be the only people for miles in either direction.

If these ships are going out for years, I can't imagine them carrying all their food as stores. They're going to need some pretty extensive hydroponics which probably ties into life support. Whatever the reactors are that keep the whole thing going, they're likely gargantuan and Russian-inspired, quirky and requiring endless tinkering and massaging, always on the brink of disaster. The vast machine shops to keep the ship in spares would also take up space. Weapons, weapons, more weapons.

[Sea Skimmer]

Fresh food grown on board totally isn't grimdark. Maybe for officers only. The ratings surely have to use chainswords to fight off the 30ft maggots that infest the ships holds full of hardtack before rolling the 10,000lb crackers into unshielded gamma radiation sterilizers that make them just barely editable. Even if food isn't that bad, if you designed something like an MRE to be froze solid it ought to last fifty to a hundred years no problem.

10 year food supply would be 10,950 meals a man, times 110,000 men would be 1,204,500,000 meals. At 1.5lb each and exclusive of larger packaging like crates, this is 903,375 tons which isn't much on 200 billion ton ship. Near as I can tell 1% of ships weight for stores isn't unrealistic at all for a 20th century vessel, on this size that would be 2 billion tons. Looks like we'll have a margin for a 10 year supply of cigarettes, cloths, nails and booze.

[jollyreaper]

Growing food onboard isn't grimdark? HA!!! Ye of limited imagination!

You have the right idea with the maggots, of course. But we have to go deeper.

The Imperial sailor does his duty and flushes the loo. His sewer trout goes through miles of pipe to the cess deck where it is broken down and digested into raw nutrient stock. It flows into the algae deck. Algae grows in the nutrient soup beneath the ceaseless glow of ancient solar tubes. This nutrient soup is a giant, swampy ecosystem. It generates the air the sailors breathe. The algae serves as food for larger animals that are then eaten by larger animals still.

Amorphous, protean meat blobs roll through the swamps, absorbing everything in their path. They are hunted down and slaughtered by food services crew, protein for the sailors. Vegetation must also be harvested for a balanced diet. But there are other dangerous creatures that infest such a nutrient soup, think of the eye critter from the Death Star trash compactor. Clouds of poisonous insects that can never be properly eradicated. Other pollinators that are needed but just as deadly. And every ship's flora and fauna may start from control cultures direct from the navy but become unique in time, every ship's food tasting different, the air smelling different, a mix of machine smells and a perverted, greasy-green fecundity, an unwholesome, growing vitality, cancerous.

Now imagine that there might be other higher, tastier animals that live on this deck and are harvested and run through food processing. There's a slaughterhouse onboard and a constant stream of carcasses run through bandsaws, blades slicing and dicing, reducing whole creatures to cutlets.

Dead sailors get tossed into the swamp and quickly become part of the food cycle.

I would imagine only the officers would bring their own pre-packaged food onboard. What would be suitably grimdark is if the resulting food is completely delicious. The officer food remains stale, dull, tasteless. But there's a feeling of compromise, a line not to be crossed in eating of the ship's fare. An officer does not fraternize with the men, does not partake in their food, does not join them in their sin.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the inevitable night decks, the catacombs of the fungus. We grow our own eating shrooms in abandoned mines. Imagine the terrors that could stalk such dark corridors, absent all light except the eerie glow from the fungi, just enough to make out the shape of scuttling horrors, vanishing from the corner of your eye, the sound of chitinous legs on deckplating haunting your dreams every night.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Dead sailors get tossed into the swamp and quickly become part of the food cycle.

No no, corpse-starch rations are strictly on the low end. Many captains are quite affluent and can afford the much higher grade stale field rations for the crew.


But you guys aren't far wrong on what the depths of these ships are like. Bilges and other huge swaths of the internal structure are often abandoned, perhaps because there isn't manpower to wander around every forgotten sealed-off chamber that's never been properly repaired since it was evacuated during battle thousands of years prior. Other sections are inhabited by mutants and other things which creep in the dark, or foul entities which have crossed over during an extended transit through the Warp. Skimmer's right that a boarder could set up shop in part of the ship and continue the fight for generations, and continue to lurk on the vessel for centuries - such a thing wouldn't be unheard of!

[Ahriman238]

Alternatively, since cloning tech is used for Servitors and is apparently alright as long as they're brainless, raw soylent virdians (it's people!) are grown in tanks.

Plus jolly, you're missing the part where all the filth calls out and some critter of Papa Nurgle takes residence in the swamp.

[Simon_Jester]

It'd depend. I get the feeling that a lot of 40k ships at least see a dockyard about as often as they fight a major battle, and manpower isn't exactly a rare resource. So some ships might have huge closed-off sections. But those would mostly be things like lobotomized, half-decommissioned warships seeing a final millenium of duty as a system defense monitor because they're ruinously impractical to patch up.

Fresh food grown on board totally isn't grimdark. Maybe for officers only. The ratings surely have to use chainswords to fight off the 30ft maggots that infest the ships holds full of hardtack before rolling the 10,000lb crackers into unshielded gamma radiation sterilizers that make them just barely editable. Even if food isn't that bad, if you designed something like an MRE to be froze solid it ought to last fifty to a hundred years no problem.

On less grimdark ships, they can eat the maggots.

[jollyreaper]

Alternatively, since cloning tech is used for Servitors and is apparently alright as long as they're brainless, raw soylent virdians (it's people!) are grown in tanks.

I thought Servitors were also punishment duty. Lexx certainly had some bad ideas with regards to futuristic capital punishment. The dismemberment machine used to render prisoners into spaceship fuel was pretty squicky.

Plus jolly, you're missing the part where all the filth calls out and some critter of Papa Nurgle takes residence in the swamp.

I was only talking about the horrific, nightmare-inducing nature of a ship operating as the Emperor intended! Chaos-tainted ships are a whole 'nother codex.

I don't think anyone has really explored the idea of the Imperial ships being true cities in flight. I mean they've got ridiculous manpower requirements but it's still pretty much "Just like WWII but bigger-er and more-er."

There are a few models for what a ship as city in the grimdark of space would feel like.

My thinking is that there would be a resident population onboard, lifers, who pretty much establish the old guard. There's officers and crew, positions hereditary. Way back when the Imperium wasn't so grimdark, the ships could have had proper crew assignments and rotations with deployments of under a year. With deployments potentially keeping a ship away from home port for a generation, the wives and camp followers eventually came with.

Sometimes war or disaster thins then ranks and recruits need pressed from available populations. They're the lowest caste onboard now.

Here on Earth, the history of Chinatown ghettos was pretty fucked up since immigration policies in the States were expressly trying to keep them from properly establishing themselves, i.e. men are allowed, no women. A Chinatown resident, i.e. a man, had no chance at a family, his only sex would be from non-Chinese prostitutes (i.e. usually poor whites) plying the trade.

Such recruits would have to earn their way into acceptance and that may never happen. They would likely be in the chinatown ghettos. If both men and women are recruited, perhaps babies might still happen but they'd be born into the same positionless caste.

The camp followers, aka unlisted crew, would be part of the "town." The social dynamic would be like a feudal fortress city.

For children growing up in such a place, the "woods" would be any machine space they weren't supposed to be in.

Oh, brainfart. Just realized if we do have a warship with a city inside, it's the Macross fortress/SDF-1. Of course, it's also with 1100% more grimdark.

[Sea Skimmer]

Other pollinators that are needed but just as deadly. And every ship's flora and fauna may start from control cultures direct from the navy but become unique in time, every ship's food tasting different, the air smelling different, a mix of machine smells and a perverted, greasy-green fecundity, an unwholesome, growing vitality, cancerous.

Sorry but this all seems too logical and efficient to be accepted by 40K planners or writers. I mean... it actually would work and feed men well, so that rules it out entirely doesn't it? Grimdark can only be Grimdark when it also doesn't work! Now... so many body parts being lost in exposed machinery in the engine rooms that they rot and start forming swamps in the blood bilges, that could happen. Life would be interesting when main machinery spaces could bigger then aircraft carriers. You wouldn't just need railroads running around the ship to move gear, you might need them inside some specific compartments. God help you when the officers express is switched onto a track that leads to a magazine by a dead space rat shorting out the switch controls.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the inevitable night decks, the catacombs of the fungus. We grow our own eating shrooms in abandoned mines. Imagine the terrors that could stalk such dark corridors, absent all light except the eerie glow from the fungi, just enough to make out the shape of scuttling horrors, vanishing from the corner of your eye, the sound of chitinous legs on deckplating haunting your dreams every night.

That part, yeah, I figure the ships would be horribly infested with all kinds of stuff that even venting the compartments to deep space once a month won't kill. Actually just thinking, I bet ships this big even if well maintained would leak air like crazy from a a lot tiny holes, and you'd just have to swing by ice comets from time to time to get more water to make more air with. Maybe sealing the damn leaks is one of the things all those crewmen are for.

[jollyreaper]

Well, there's grimdark and there's grimdark. My take is that the Imperium has a solution that works. It may not be elegant, efficient or humane, but it does work. Even if life is not pleasant under the Imperium, it endures. The mutant and alien are kept at bay. Things constantly threaten to fall out of control and do so on the borders but the Inpwrium itself is not going anywhere for a very long time.

In a full-on grimdark, the whole Imperium would be falling. Our stories would be from last bastions of survivors as all coordinated resistance has ended. Earth, gone. Major hive and forgeworlds, fallen. The last survivors are in places that weren't priorities. They will come later.

For this scenario not to happen, there needs to be a modicum of success. Things do have to work, just not perfectly.

[Purple]

Personally I like to take it further than that and assume that the system is in fact working perfectly. All the inhumanity and suffering inherent in the system are not a bug but a necessary sacrifice that just has to be made due to the size of the system and the limitations of the primary actors (humans) and the equipment they have. As in, the imperial system is indeed horrible, decentralized and corrupt but it is also the best system that can be made and still work. And even it requires nothing short of divine guidance to function at all. Now that is grimdark.

[Simon_Jester]

Except it blatantly isn't the best system that can be made to work, because it worked better in the past. Which is part of the point- the Imperium is shitty because it really is in decline. During the Crusade everything worked wonderfully, with the Emperor and Primarchs overseeing it. Even with the Emperor practically dead and the Primarchs out of the picture, a few millenia back into the history, the Imperium launched large, successful offensives- it took back territory as often as it lost it. Technology was more reliable, and so on.

The system might still have been oppressive and militarized, but it wasn't a dysfunctional-fascist's wet dream the way you're making it out to be.

[Purple]

I newer said that things could not be done better from an absolute perspective. Just that things probably can not be done better with what they have at their disposal now. Humans are fallible corruptible creatures. And the bureaucracy required to run the Imperium in any way shape or form without divine control is going to be absurdly huge. During the crusade the God Emperor, emphasis on God was still very much in charge. And while he was not an outright divinity like the word might imply there was still an extremely powerful nigh divine guy who cared in charge of the system. And even after the heresy you had the combination of a good chunk of the Primarchs and inertia from the good old days keeping things together. It might be that the current state is not so much the Imperium declining as it is the Imperium settling down into a balanced state of equilibrium. As in it is becoming the only thing it can be without what amounts to divine control and without using resources it just does not have.

[jollyreaper]

Thematically, you do need a golden age to fall from to make for a good tragedy. You have what was lost and the regret which is better than just saying its always been terrible. Gondor for all it's might in Rings is a shadow of its former self.

That the God Emperor wasn't Space Hitler also helps. It reinforces the idea that things don't have to be this way, that the imperium's brutality in part stems from the failure of imagination in his disciples.

I have to admit that I'm rather taken with the notion of trying to tell a story where it feels like its set in a dangerous fantasy city with castles and dungeons, nobles and cutthroats, only it's all set inside a vast cityship. It's a flying ecosystem even the nobles who run the ship don't fully understand. Some functions can only be approached with dim wisdom, like the early farming civilizations trying to understand the seasons and weather. Why is ship sealing off this compartment? What is this new budding on the hull? Why are these systems changing their function? Or there will be scheduled cycles in the ecosystem where the ship must go into a healing dormancy and food must be gathered and preserved through the famine.

[PeZook]

Running a ship with millions of crewmen will probably look a lot more like running a country than a naval vessel. The funny thing is that it would need a lot of the same institutions that a country needs, like courts, police, records offices, businesses and industries etc.

I mean, all of these exist in some form on our own naval vessels...but they only have thousands of crewmembers at most. When one there are so many enlisted ratings that you can LOSE an aircraft carrier's worth of crew and not know about it for months...

[Zinegata]

Running a ship with millions of crewmen will probably look a lot more like running a country than a naval vessel. The funny thing is that it would need a lot of the same institutions that a country needs, like courts, police, records offices, businesses and industries etc.

I mean, all of these exist in some form on our own naval vessels...but they only have thousands of crewmembers at most. When one there are so many enlisted ratings that you can LOSE an aircraft carrier's worth of crew and not know about it for months...

Talk like this is reminding me of the Warhammer 40K fanfic where they had a battleship which was 1 AU long, and needed smaller battleships just to transport the command crew around.

[Sea Skimmer]

In the ASVS days the joke was made of a ship so big it used Death Stars for ball bearings.

[Connor MacLeod]

When your ship is the span of metro area around a big city, I tend to think a large force to repel boarding is reasonable, provided your ships aren't likely to just explode if damaged badly enough to be boarded. A fucking 30km long cruiser.... the enemy could board and fucking set up his own towns and cities and start farming if he brought dirt or composted the shit in the blackwater tanks, and begin raising a new generation of troops on board while still fighting you if you lacked the forces to sweep him out. Also random tasks like making sure all light bulbs are working would consume enormous numbers of man hours as men need maps just to find the way around a single deck. Even with fairly tall 3m decks, allowing for each deck being really thick to hold the damn thing together... a 600m tall ship would have 200 decks. That's as many decks as the Burj Dubai has floors counting the pesudo floors in the spire! But I'd expect the 30km long ship to be much taller anyway. The largest steel mill earth ever had was IIRC Sparrows Point with about 30,000 workers, and you could fit it into the belly of a beast like this and call it the shipfitters shop.

I've actually figured it owuld make more sense to just garrison IG troops on your ships if you can do that. Makes respones times faster and saves the transports for when you need more men. I mean if you have 95,000 men you can potentially carry, but you only need (say) 10K crew to run the ship and even double that to allow for margins (or make use of servitors, servitor 'usage' varies dramatically.) you could easily house some 70,000 troops onboard and use them for various purposes as well. I doubt 70K troopers are going to be any more of a discipline problem compread to 95,000 naval ratings.

Springsharped 30,000x2500x2500m solid block ship, it thinks it would displace 189,185,700,000 tons. This is for an object which floats.. space warship is likely to be denser, though its water displacement for the immersion would of course be exactly the same. I think you'd measure the amount of welding rod needed to assemble it in astronomical units.

Don't forget the rivets. All 40K starships are rivetted. Even the skulls.

As far as starship masses/densities go... while part of me still wants to argue for being heavier, I really stop caring at that point because a.) 40K has magic, and when you have Eldar who can psychically shit out virtually any tangible objects - including starships - from the warp if they need to, density becomes less of an issue and b.) given the probable nuclear yields 40K starships fling at each other, nothing less than magic metal (or magic forcefields backing said magic metal) is going to ever offer any plausible resistance, even if you stick slabs of metres thick armour over it. It's just me, but given that whether your magic metal is 2000 kg*m^3 or 19200 kg*m^3 seems pretty trivial. lol.

Fresh food grown on board totally isn't grimdark. Maybe for officers only. The ratings surely have to use chainswords to fight off the 30ft maggots that infest the ships holds full of hardtack before rolling the 10,000lb crackers into unshielded gamma radiation sterilizers that make them just barely editable. Even if food isn't that bad, if you designed something like an MRE to be froze solid it ought to last fifty to a hundred years no problem.

Funny enough one source I remember mentioned battleships having mycoprotein vats for growing food and stuff (shit steaks, I guess?) And given some of hte ecosystems I've seen on 40K starships its not inconceivable they hunt, kill and add some version of Space Rat (tm) to the mix for feeding. Or as mentioned there's always the corpse starch (Dead bodies mean water and valuable organic materials after all.... human fuel indeed.)

But if you want your grimdark: ratings aren't given utensils (Can be used as weapons) and are served their meals in hard-baked black breadbowls filled with grey, unappetizing gruel-like substance made from mystery ingredients. And they lace said food with plenty of drugs to make the ratings more docile and compliant.

[Connor MacLeod]

Except it blatantly isn't the best system that can be made to work, because it worked better in the past. Which is part of the point- the Imperium is shitty because it really is in decline. During the Crusade everything worked wonderfully, with the Emperor and Primarchs overseeing it. Even with the Emperor practically dead and the Primarchs out of the picture, a few millenia back into the history, the Imperium launched large, successful offensives- it took back territory as often as it lost it. Technology was more reliable, and so on.

The system might still have been oppressive and militarized, but it wasn't a dysfunctional-fascist's wet dream the way you're making it out to be.

That assume sthe 'previous age' was in fact a better system to begin with. The jury is still out on that (mainly because if you go by the HH it seems to be set up not unlike the way Palpy set up the Galactic Empire, except with a whole shitload less malice and games playing by the Emperor.)

In fact given the presence of the warp and its effects on things, its really hard to wonder whether a 'best option' really exists for humanity. So many problems can be traced to the warp in some way or another, after all. Esp after all the Chaso Gods come onto the scene.

[Simon_Jester]

The Galactic Empire is a damn good system compared to the Imperium, if you remove the sheer malice of the guy running it.

Also, there is one thing that the early Imperium had which is admirable: growth potential. There were serious ongoing projects to improve the best-case whose existence is at stake here (human webway, the solid core of Marines and ultimately Grey Knights intended to protect humanity from more-than-human dangers).

[Connor MacLeod]

Fucking double posts.

[Connor MacLeod]

The Galactic Empire is a damn good system compared to the Imperium, if you remove the sheer malice of the guy running it.

Does that include all the corruption, bribery, military inefficiency, political infighting and backstabbing, the exploitation of lower classes (often for the economic benefit of the galactic megacorporations), various and myriad forms of slavery, occasional deliberate destruction of entire planets and their populations, conscription, and the fact you're ruled by a guy who set everything up so that if he dies of anything, the entire system falls apart deliberately until he can recover and put it back together? A guy who, if you go by Publlius' analysis was plotting to eat everyone in the galaxy (via the force) and ascend to godhood.

At least in the Imperium you have a faint hope of things being sane at least some of the time, because of the comparatively slow/unreliable communications and travel over large distances. Whereas STar Was has fast and reliable comms over long distances, making it very easy for the political, military and/or financial giants of the galaxy to personally fuck over your life if they so choose.

Don't forget that post-Endor the SW galaxy has a habit of falling apart and putting itself back together with such regularity you could do a drinking game to it.

Also, there is one thing that the early Imperium had which is admirable: growth potential. There were serious ongoing projects to improve the best-case whose existence is at stake here (human webway, the solid core of Marines and ultimately Grey Knights intended to protect humanity from more-than-human dangers).

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the Horus Heresy novels, and if so, which ones? There are some 'positive' aspects to the Imperium yes, but there was also alot of hidden tensions and deceits - thing which played a part in how/why the Heresy came about, in fact.

For example, there was the fact that 'compliance' during the Great Crusade was often a euphemism for basically brutally and painfully conquering anyone human who didn't want to join, and then rebuilding their planet in the Imperium's image (complete with propoganda, manipulation and even historical revisionism. that's a big part of what the Iterators and Remembrancers were there for, in fact.) The Marines were a double edged sword. Yes they were perpetually defenders of humanity, but there was an arrogance/worship thing that caused friction, especially when it came to the Primarchs/Astartes and the bureacracy on earth. Pre-Heresy, there was a strong belief amongst some of the Primarchs and Astartes that the Emperor had 'abandoned' the Astartes, handed over control of the Imperium they had fought for and built to the politicians and bureaucrats.

And since Astartes were often used as the forces to often decisively crush opposition on resisting planets, they also tended to generate alot of ill-will in those they conquered.

[Simon_Jester]

The Galactic Empire is a damn good system compared to the Imperium, if you remove the sheer malice of the guy running it.

Does that include all the corruption, bribery, military inefficiency, political infighting and backstabbing, the exploitation of lower classes (often for the economic benefit of the galactic megacorporations), various and myriad forms of slavery, occasional deliberate destruction of entire planets and their populations, conscription...

Yes. Because the 40k Imperium has all those things too. Only more so, with an extra helping of crap and hopelessness. The lower classes are even more exploited and enslaved, the military and politics are still inefficient and backstabby, and it's all slathered with theocratic trappings to keep anyone from trying to change it for fear of Chaos blowing up the galaxy.

and the fact you're ruled by a guy who set everything up so that if he dies of anything, the entire system falls apart deliberately until he can recover and put it back together? A guy who, if you go by Publlius' analysis was plotting to eat everyone in the galaxy (via the force) and ascend to godhood.

This part falls under "remove the sheer malice of the guy running it." The God-Emperor at least tried to create a political system that could survive his death, even if he didn't expect to die- and it kept chugging for ten thousand years, so it kind of worked. He wasn't trying to eat everyone, he was engaged in serious projects for improving the situation.

Don't forget that post-Endor the SW galaxy has a habit of falling apart and putting itself back together with such regularity you could do a drinking game to it.

Absolutely. Palpatine was a dick, and his personal ambition took a Galactic Republic stable on millenial timescales, and plunged it into a civil war that's taking centuries to resolve itself, with round after round of conflict.

But that's all on Palpatine personally.

Also, there is one thing that the early Imperium had which is admirable: growth potential. There were serious ongoing projects to improve the best-case whose existence is at stake here (human webway, the solid core of Marines and ultimately Grey Knights intended to protect humanity from more-than-human dangers).

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the Horus Heresy novels, and if so, which ones? There are some 'positive' aspects to the Imperium yes, but there was also alot of hidden tensions and deceits - thing which played a part in how/why the Heresy came about, in fact.

Sure- it wasn't all smiles and sunshine (Warhammer 30k, for crying out loud!)

What I'm getting at is that it was not such a bad government, compared either to what came before or after it in its own setting. 40K humanity would indisputably have been better off if it had lasted longer and not gotten wrecked by the Heresy, which is part of the grimdark- there was a golden age, even if it had its vices, and that golden age ended and can never really come back.

For example, there was the fact that 'compliance' during the Great Crusade was often a euphemism for basically brutally and painfully conquering anyone human who didn't want to join, and then rebuilding their planet in the Imperium's image (complete with propoganda, manipulation and even historical revisionism. that's a big part of what the Iterators and Remembrancers were there for, in fact.) The Marines were a double edged sword. Yes they were perpetually defenders of humanity, but there was an arrogance/worship thing that caused friction, especially when it came to the Primarchs/Astartes and the bureacracy on earth. Pre-Heresy, there was a strong belief amongst some of the Primarchs and Astartes that the Emperor had 'abandoned' the Astartes, handed over control of the Imperium they had fought for and built to the politicians and bureaucrats.

And since Astartes were often used as the forces to often decisively crush opposition on resisting planets, they also tended to generate alot of ill-will in those they conquered.

I agree. There were a lot of problems, it was not a great government, I would not prefer it to, say, the Star Trek Federation.

But it was at least capable of providing security, without being totally stagnant and doomed. Which is more than you can say for its successor state of ten thousand years later. There are degrees of "bad government," as when you compare the Roman Empire of 100 AD to the Western Roman Empire of 400 AD. Both could be very nasty and oppressive to huge numbers of people, but at least one was functional and not in a slow irreversible decline.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yes. Because the 40k Imperium has all those things too. Only more so, with an extra helping of crap and hopelessness. The lower classes are even more exploited and enslaved, the military and politics are still inefficient and backstabby, and it's all slathered with theocratic trappings to keep anyone from trying to change it for fear of Chaos blowing up the galaxy.

Depends on your example, I suppose. In Star Wars for example, there was Toprawa, for example. AS bad (or worse) than anything the Imperium did. Or Gholondreine-B, which had its planetary oceans sucked up and carted off by Palpy because they (IIRC) offended him. The fact they have faster and more reliable communications and fTL make that sort of dickery worse and even more all-encompassing. Whereas despite how corrupt, inept, and grimdark the Administratum is, there's very little it can do to an Agri world on the other side of the galaxy (at least, from Terra.) About the only difference between Imperium and Empire (and hence its only real advantage, aside from the fact their omnipotent magical superrulers are completely different mentality wise) is that there is a limit to how muck fucking with the galaxy the Imperium itself can do.

This part falls under "remove the sheer malice of the guy running it." The God-Emperor at least tried to create a political system that could survive his death, even if he didn't expect to die- and it kept chugging for ten thousand years, so it kind of worked. He wasn't trying to eat everyone, he was engaged in serious projects for improving the situation.

If you remove Palpy, then the system as a whole falls apart and chaos and madness ensue until you find something oyu can put in its place. And given the failure of the NR to do even that in the decades since toppling Palpy, he must have REALLY fucked the galaxy up something fierce. That takes some genius, that does. Although the Republic was hardly better.

Absolutely. Palpatine was a dick, and his personal ambition took a Galactic Republic stable on millenial timescales, and plunged it into a civil war that's taking centuries to resolve itself, with round after round of conflict.

But that's all on Palpatine personally.

Again I'm not sure the Republic was massively better. Stable, yes, but that's about the only advantage it has over the GE. Of course, for a given value of 'stable', so is the Imperium (EG you don't count shit like whole Segmentums declaring rebellion or the Regin of Blood.) The Imperium has no real equivalent to shit like KDY or the Tagge consortium or shit like that. Or Black Sun and other various criminal organizations.

Sure- it wasn't all smiles and sunshine (Warhammer 30k, for crying out loud!)

What I'm getting at is that it was not such a bad government, compared either to what came before or after it in its own setting. 40K humanity would indisputably have been better off if it had lasted longer and not gotten wrecked by the Heresy, which is part of the grimdark- there was a golden age, even if it had its vices, and that golden age ended and can never really come back.

I think the problem is it depends on what you define 'good' and 'bad' as. People also say the same thing about the GE (or the 'modern' Imperium) 'not being all that bad' either, and it glosses over the problems inherent in both. Likewise, there's problmes (different problems) in the pre-Heresy Imperium that prevent it from being the sort of 'Golden age' it is made out to be. I mean fuck, some of the main 'differences' between the two is that you simply subtract 'God' from the Emperor's title, you have fanatical ideology instead of fanatical religion, still just as xenophobic, and instead of priests you have rhetorical orators and philosophers who try to manipulating you into their way of thinking through speeches rather than sermons. 'Imperial Truth' is not all that different from 'Imperial Creed' even after 10,000 years.

I agree. There were a lot of problems, it was not a great government, I would not prefer it to, say, the Star Trek Federation.

In 40K terms, the Eldar would probably be the least grimdark. Or the tau, although with successive editions the tau have gotten alot less happy, bright and cheery. The Tau will do some of the same things the Imperium does to conquer a world it wants (and you have about as much choice) but they're much better at making you feel better about it afterwards (As long as you do what they say. Although reeducation and reprogramming camps are probably better than being killed as a heretic.)

But it was at least capable of providing security, without being totally stagnant and doomed. Which is more than you can say for its successor state of ten thousand years later. There are degrees of "bad government," as when you compare the Roman Empire of 100 AD to the Western Roman Empire of 400 AD. Both could be very nasty and oppressive to huge numbers of people, but at least one was functional and not in a slow irreversible decline.

I'm not totally sure about that either. Warp travel seemed relatively more stable (and possibly faster), but the nature of the Crusade and the aftermath of conquests tended to create problems, and I'm pretty sure there's more than one example in the HH novels of an Imperial world getting conquereda nd having to be protected/retaken again by the Crusade forces.

Part of the problem is much of the HH POV comes from those on the fleet or people on Terra, which tends to skew your views about how 'great' the Imperium actually was.

Although another good 'example' is what happened with the Word Bearers in First Heretic (and what turned them to Chaos.) The 'Benevolent' Emperor turns the whole of the Ultramarines Legion loose on a single world to make an example of how religious worship of Big E will not be tolerated. Virtually masscared the population of the whole planet, destroyed their cities, etc. and then made a humilitating example of Lorgar and the Word Bearers as a whole on the ashes of said planet. And when Lorgar and the rest turned on their conquests and started purging them (which included mass extinciton bombardments, genocides, etc.) Big E and the rest never batted an eye apparently.

You could also draw objections to groups like the Night Lords, the World Eaters, etc. being tolerated despite the savagery and bloodthirstiness with which they would conduct their 'compliances.'

In the end, you can argue about the particulars of the good/bad for either Imperium or GE, but what it really comes down to is arguing whether its worse to be dissolved slowly in weak acid or to be crucified.