So I am a long time fan of 40k and its bleak but original setting, and the other day I had the chance to read through a friends copy of Purge the Unclean. Well I enjoyed it enough to pick up the dark heresy rulebook, and as I was reading it I got to the discription of hive sibellus and was floored by the MASSIVE disparity between the DH rulebook and Purge the Unclean. The rulebook discribes it as bieng 8000 km in width (that would make it bigger than all of north america) and allthough no population is given I can conservatively say (given that gunmetals pop is 4 billion and Sibellus is described as being much much bigger) its at least 10 billion (greater than earths pop.) The city in purge is discribed like a large city, not a continent sized structure, and in reading the description I wouldnt have guessed that its also the seat of the sector commander and the sector base of the inquisition. So which is the true city? and how is it possible that there is such a diffrence in the descriptions. Also as a fan it is extremely frustrating that something like this could happen because it implies that the writters arent trying to maintain any kind of consistancy, I will give Fantasy Flight the benefit of the doubt and say its a Black Industries issue but my next question is does this sort of thing show up throughout the line or is it an issolated issue.

Welcome to "everything is canon"-40k. If you find any information that is more complex than 1+1=2 and not contradicted somewhere in a rulebook, novel or other medium, please let us know.

Other than that, a hive the size you mentioned could possibly have a lot more than 10 billion inhabitants. The highest population density reached on earth was in Kowloon Walled city with a theoretical 1,900,000 citizens per km² on 14 floors. Let's quarter that to allow for some industry and abandoned sectors and double it again because most hives have far more than 14 levels. Assuming a hive 8000*8000km, we'd get... 60,800,000,000,000 inhabitants or 60 trillion (alternatively 60 billion for people who like proper numbering systems...). If each citizen is fed one nutrient bar weighing 100g per day, you'd have to transport 6,080,000,000 tons of food per day.

I think I'll stop making Administratum jokes. Anyone who can coordinate that is to be commended, even if he sometimes forgets a few planets.

Ha!

Hell, the DH books can't even stay consistent on the issue of Hive Sibillus. There's a scenario book out, Purge the Unclean, which has a laughable "map" or diagram of Sibillus which is effectively a tall spier hive from Necromunda ( they are much taller then they are wide... let that sink in a bit....).

Either way, contradictions, Didn't Do The Research, and Writers With No Sense of Scale are all just part of the package deal when it comes to 40k. As to which Sebillus is correct, go with which ever you like better. In 40k, you just have to take your favorite interpretations of the setting, run with them, and ignore the parts that contradict the parts you like.

We got into the infrastructure nightmare in an old thread.

What it basically boils down to, IMO, 60 – 80% of any given hive is given over purely to infrastructure. Landing platforms, processing plants, highways, trains, etc, etc, etc. There is no other way to have a hive city unless there is a huge amount of wasted uninhabited and empty space. There will be multiple water tanks the size of the Empire State building inside the hive and just as many and at least as large waste tanks. The rest of the space may or may not be habitable. Most hives will probably have populations in the upper billions to lower trillions, the trillions and billions that make sense and not the proper versions.

Ultimately it boils down to the fact that nothing has ever made the actual scale of a hive city clear.

You might want to take the map that is shown as being nothing more than the inhabitable parts of the city. Go with the idea that what is shown is surrounded with or built on top of miles upon miles of rotting industrial infrastructure. Or you can go with the 40K answer of choice and say they are both correct and chalk it up to Administratum inconsistencies in records. You could probably get two adepts who believe their version is correct to come to blows over the argument.

You can lay the inconsistencies at the feet of BI, as they are the ones who wrote and published the DH and PtU books.

Here is the link to the old thread.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=70&efcid=3&efidt=52730&efpag=0#52899

In the penultimate post on the linked thread I posted an image, but it seems to have been lost to the warp. Here it is again:

Some bloke called Reason wrote a load of stuff about Sibellus a while back. Given that he's been hired as a writer for a few books in the 40k RPG line I'd say it's worth your time. Hell, even before I knew that I'd still have recommended it. It's good stuff.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=410651

I find the original stated size of the hive to be simply to big. It's a tectonic shelf that people live in! I divided the size by 10 to get a decent width. The height is subjective depending on where you are in the hive. My players, lucky enough to have stolen considerable wealth, enjoy their own spire about 6 km up. The tallest spires are 8.5 km high. The population is in the hundreds of billions (trillions seems a little much) with a lot of space being taken up with infrastructure and factories. The magistratium number in the hundreds of millions and the PDF has over a billion men at arms.

I think the diagram in the purge the unclean is only one spire of the hive, another being the lucid palace. It's not described anywhere as being a single structure. It seems that out here on the arse end of the imperium they hive's just aren't what we are used to, although the description of malfi seems to suggest it is.

That's not to say I think the figures are all correct. If it's 8000 miles across of sprawl (road ways, transit tubes, hundreds of mile wide parking lots) then the spires would be be quite far apart which I don't like the sound of.

I would still expect a much larger population. Perhaps the official planetry population of 25 billion is only a fraction of the actual population. Maybe they have to take a census themselves and and count only officially registered citizens (which of course reduces their tithe).

There's great site where those loverly nerds have done some maps of Sibellus that i think work very well.

http://www.malleus.dk/Ordo/Scintilla/Sibellus.aspx

Face Eater said:

While the maps and pictures on malleus.dk are certainly beautiful, I find something wierd about this map:

The wierd part is, shouldn the lucid palace be placed on a gigantic column that shoots up from the sea?

And also, shouldn't the tricorn be located on the northern parts of Hive Sibellus, instead of right smack in the middle like it is on the map?