Greetings brethern,

"reading gives you headaches", I guess it is true. Studied some of the background material in the core rulebook since I needed some "business entries" on Scintilla. Wanted to make sure there are some meetings here & there with envoys/commercia agents from manufactorums & guilds from the other hives, like Ambulon.

The BGM states that Ambulon is harvesting "natural resources" of Scintilla. Why I first started to think of this as chymical waste I was baffeled that I read about "oil & ore". As far as I understood the 40K universe, hive worlds had been depleted of all natural resources hundreds and thousands of years ago. While I can re-imagine that "ore" is harvested while Ambulon is grazing over the (now covered) ruins of forma cities, I have a hard time to imagine how there should be any oil left on a hive world.

Even if I would join the view of those who claim that all the dwindling-resource-warnings are greatly exaggerated (which I cleary don´t) I can´t imagine that any oil would be left on a world that had to support a vast industrie over a millenia that polluted the planet to a degree that would make the worst parts of china look like your everyday surrounding.

Any ideas how that could be? Strange theories about how over a milennia or more something could turn into oil? NOT PLANT MATERIAL! There is nothing left of it, me guesses. At least not in the wake of Ambulon (read about the jungles, but that seems to be far away from the walking city).

THANK YOU!

Ambulon probably hasn't been around for more than a couple thousand years.

If you want a "scientific" excuse for oil farming, it could be that it is slowly seeping up from deep reservoirs that are impractical to access (high cost compared to simply importing oil). So little by little the easily mineable reservoirs are being filled and Ambulon take tours of the plains siphoning up what is available from each spot. No spot fills up fast enough to make it viable to place a permanent oil rig there, but the Ambulon machine is doing fine.

And remember the Rule of Cool. Oil-mining is very fitting occupation for Ambulon. It is dirty, it makes black smoke, it requires lots of whipped serfs doing extremely dangerous work, it can sound and smell very particular and it means you can have huge amounts of highly flameable explosive liquids in barrels whenever you need a good explosion.

Mellon said:

Thank you for your reply, this is what I was asking for. I do my best to remember the "rule of cool", but my players (and me) like to have at least a little reason.

Also, note that the Wilderness section of the Scintilla entry does imply there is still some plant life on the planet, at least at the equator. (Although admittedly, it sounds like Ambulon mainly wanders rocky/desert areas.)

Gregorius21778 said:

Simple: Scintilla (and the entire Calixis Sector to boot) aren't that old at all. While certain hive worlds in the Imperium might be several millenia old (7-8000 years old) and these hive worlds are indeed covered by cityscape over the entire surface of the planet, the Calixis sector and Scintilla are far from that old.

On scintilla you can even walk in the outdoors completely unprotected (pilgrims do it all the time), if you compare that to a world like Necromunda where the hives have to be fully enclosed due to the extreme toxicity of the outdoors it's obvious that Scintilla hasn't been "sucked dry" just yet (because the resulting industrial waste from a planet that had been would have destroyed the enviroment like on Necromunda).

And even if the crude oil were to run out (which will take some time, I assure you), there will still be gazillion tons of ore to extract.

So, to summarize: Scintilla and most other hive worlds in Calixis are still quite young.

EDIT: just checked, the Calixis sector was conquered roughly a thousand years ago by lord militant Angevin, which indeed goes to show how young most worlds of Calixis are by Imperial standards. Necromunda by comparison was founded 15.000 years ago.

(all according to stuff I've read on Lexicanum)

Varnias Tybalt said:

While the Calixis Sector as the Calixis Sector is indeed quite young by Imperial standards, don't forget that it wasn't founded off a bunch of virgin worlds, it was conquered. To be conquered, there must be people to be conquered which means the worlds of the Calixis Sector were already settled and humming along before the Crusades a thousand years ago, and before it was raped and plundered by Rogue Traders for two thousand years before that. There were many blasphemous xenos empire in those days, but also quite a few settlements from the Dark Age of Technology and before. Manny of the hives were constructed or organicaly grew long before the Imperium ever came snooping about. The Hives of Solomon are ancient and predate the crusades as dose the hives of Scintilla. In most casses, worlds have already been terra formed, colonized, and exploited before the Imperium comes knocking, the Imperium just speeds up the process of completely breaking a world once they get their greedy claws in it.

As for Ambulon, if you didn't want to touch the oil aspect (not too sure how that would happen... and if you terra form a world, do you inject oil into it as well? so many questions...) the mineral mining could be as simple as scrapping along the crust of the planet scooping up rock to be broken down into gravel and fine powders to be used in rockcrete construction. I'm sure Scintilla has piles of that about ;-)

Graver said:

Oh, of course. But there's not much reason to expect the same degree of planet ****** production before the worlds in question were conquered. While some world not yet touched by the Imperium of Man might have small stellar Empires of their own and a certain degree of production output will be expected, this output will probably be doubled tenfold once the worlds in question are conquered. The Imperial warmachine demands constant toil after all, since mankind is officially at war with pretty much every alien species known, along with many human cultures considered heretics or in cahhots with Chaos.

Wouldn't it be sort of reasonable to expect that as soon as the imperium manages to dig it's claws into most conquered production facilities, it will bleed the world in question dry as fast as possible, while the relatively untouched worlds probably have a more "stable" relationship with the local enviroment?

Varnias Tybalt said:

Oh, yes, totaly agree. It's what i said in the last sentence there that you quoted ;-)

Its also possible that some planets might have spectacularly more accesable rescources than good old terra-firma. Our petrol deposits are mainly the re-compoed leavings of the incredibly fertile carboniferous era. If that era had lasted ten times as long, there might be ten times as much petrolium as there is now.

Furthermore, there is a good chance that the entire crust of the earth is littered with bubbles of oil and natural gas. The deposits we identify and exploit are simply deposits that are relatively close to the surface of the earth (or the sea floor) and happen to be easy enough to access that a sound profit model can be constructed around drilling and refining. there may be quite a bit more oil out there than is obvious right now(most of it inaccessible to modern technology), in fact production may never actually 'run dry' as some alarmists have suggested.

That stems from a misunderstanding of Hubbard's 'peak oil' combined with a discovery-channel preservationist sensibility. The Hubbard peak happens when skyrocketing demand for oil can no longer be met by rising rates of production and refinement. There aren't many geologists who think the stuff is actually going to "run out." Its growth of production will simply slow to meet rising demand, causing a corresponding spike in costs. running out of oil completely -if even possible- is likely to take a very long time (by which the demand for oil will probably slacken due to rising costs, changing technological fashions, or economic catastrophe). Humanity will likely continue to suck oil out of the crust of the earth (albeit at much lower levels than 'peak oil') for a very, very long time. Now, imagine a planet with vastly more oil than the earth.

Also, its safe to say that a planet in a more mineral rich part of the galaxy, say near the core (where countless ancient supernovas have seeded the whole region with dense stellar matter) is likely to be rich with exploitable minerals on a scale which makes the earth seem a poor cousin by comparison. Any star which formed amongst the stellar nurseries of the core and was subsequently flung into deeper space with a proto-planetary nebula in tow would carry this mineral wealth with it. In fact, such remarkably rich worlds would be the most likely candidates for terra-forming and habitation. Their unique geological wealth would make terraforming an economically viable enterprise.

In short, its possible to imagine a world with practically limitless mineral resources and vast petrol resources, particularly when mining of the deep crust and even the mantle are technologically feasible. This might explain why Scintilla is currently the economic powerhouse of the Calixis sector. (perhaps Malfi, Fenksworld, and Solomon are a bit closer to resource-exhaustion)

Vast resources on a world would be a great boon to that planet. Of course, this would only further poison said world once it finally had been completely plundered(a process taking, perhaps, a couple thousand years).