So this has been bugging me for awhile, but I notice that one of the recommended backgrounds for Voidborn characters is coming from a Space Hulk. When I first started playing Dark Heresy I wasn't as much into the novels of 40k as I am now, but now that I've been exposed a bit more... How is this possible?

It doesn't seem like Space Hulks are a particularly good place to live long lives and form communities, even by 40k standards. For the most part, as far as I can tell, they're typically infested with mutants, Orks, Genestealers, or worse. There's no way that a human colony could survive on one of these for any length of time, save perhaps as a Genestealer Cult or as Ork slaves. There's no reason the Imperium would bother to pick anyone up from them either, as any interaction with Space Hulks seems to be typically purge operations designed to kill basically everything inside it.

Are there examples of actual human colonies living in Space Hulks that I have somehow missed? This has been really bugging me for awhile.

AFAIR something like that was described in the "Ark of Lost Souls" DW adventure.

Yeah, there are a number of NPCs from the Ark of Lost Souls that would easily be converted into acolytes. In fact, my group's DW and DH campaigns have been linked from the start and some of the people who survived the Ark adventure have been taken in as acolytes by an NPC inquisitor based on their experiences and skills.

Extrapolate this out and there clearly could be those born on that space hulk who were eventually rescued, etc.

~ alemander

In either case the characters that would come from a background like the Ark of Lost Souls setting (I forget the name of the Space Hulk) would be mentally unstable and possibly deeply corrupted individuals. It would take great care from both the player and GM to make a viable PC hailing from such a place, especially a Space Hulk that frequents the Warp for untold amounts of time.

Mortis Thule is a very extreme example of Space Hulk. Not all of them are so dangerous and if survivors have a functional Gellar Field they might be corrupted no more than someone with Blighted Schola/Tainted Blood of Malfi origin.

For that matter, a Space Hulk is something tossed on the tides of the Warp. One could describe a ship that has suffered damage to its warp drive in the process of escaping something, and then drifted in the warp until it managed to escape the warp as a space hulk.

That said, I'd agree that any space hulk survivors/escapees would have been extremely fortunate in terms of the situation they were in on the space hulk, and none of them would be unscathed, and there would be mental scarring.

True, even the noted NPCs from the Mortis Thule were mentally scarred in one fashion or another.

But, only the insane have strength enough to prosper.

~ alemander