Pictures of hive cities: help needed!

[Malika]

Hi guys,

Been delving a bit through the forum here, really loved the discussion on the volumes. Thing is that I've been getting 'visions' of me trying to build a model of a hive city and I'm in need of some inspiration. My question to you guys is: what would you imagine such a city to look like? Thing is that I'm planning to build a complete hive spire, meaning that you'll see the entire structure, but might miss out of details like as windows and such.

So yeah, I'm basically looking for any kind of interesting stuff that might help me out and inspire; be it articles, photos, videos, artwork, etc. Preferably official stuff as well, but it's tricky to find it all.

Let me start off:

 

[spafe]

What scale are you thinking of building one too? cos the planetary empires is a model of a hive.... but if you mean at similar scale to necro played at....would it be easier to buy a sky scraper, as thats prob an rough idea of the height in that world...maybe....

 

[Malika]

I was thinking of something along the lines of 1:25,000 or 1:50,000 scaled. That would sort of be BFG scale I guess?

 

[spafe]

theres much debate about whats really practical/would be possible for the hive, so I'm jsut gonna go of a simple description of some hives breaching the planets atsmosphere, then a quick google says ours is approx 300 miles....

therefore at 1:25,000 it would be approx 1.93 meters (300 miles = roughly 482.8Km, *100 =48280M / 25,000 =1.9312M). so your looking at approx 2 M tall, and that will give you a useable model similar to :

Hope that helps a tad.

 

[Malika]

Hmm, it seems you've added another zero behind the measurements of a hive. I mean, Hive Primus seems to be about 10 miles high if we have to believe the Necromunda rulebook. According to the Confrontation book the diameter of an individual Hive is around 30 miles.

But I'd imagine the additional zeros to increase the size make sense when compared to the dimensions of the BFG ships...

 

[spafe]

The necro rule book diagram is very very....suspect when it comes to its numbers.... the sheer idea that the numbers of people it could hold are anywhere near the billions and billions that it is reported to... well yeah, it could... but it would then be solely dedicated to living areas, no factories, no maunfacture, no waste disposal, no power generation, etc etc...

I went with the description that some hives break atmosphere, then took our atmosphere as a go by for the planet of necromunda. I think you could approach this in two ways, either stick with description of populations and go big, or stick with the dimensions given by the book and reduce the population to range in millions rather than billions...

 

[Malika]

I guess that would depend on the hive, I've also got a feeling that you might be mixing up an individual hive with an entire hive world. Here is an interesting quote on population density taken from the Anargo Sector Project:

In the background hive cities generally seem to peak at a height of a few kilometres, I usually take 4-5km as being an average peak height for a typical hive city. Comparing that to the peak heights of cities today you can fit a lot more people in the same area as a present day city with that extra height. Taking New York City as an example, if we take the wider New York urban area (8700km^2) and increase the population density to that of New York City proper (10600/km^2) to create a 'super-New York' you get a city with a population of 92 million in a city that, if circular, would be 105km in diameter. The tallest building in New York is however only about 400m tall, only a tenth of the peak height of a typical hive city. If we then stack ten of our 'super-New Yorks' on top of each other we obtain a city with a population of just less than a billion in the same area as the present day New York city. Of course you could argue that the densities I've just created in my New York Hive, which drop to zero immediately outside are unreasonable, but even if you double the diameter to 200km you still have a population of almost a billion in an area the size of Belgium, with a population density not much higher than present day Manhattan. Admittedly a single megastructure hive with a footprint the size of Belgium might be a bit unreasonable and thus a population of over a billion might be a tall order for a single megastructure hive but it is doesn't seem unrealistic for a large gradual growth hive city, and a large megastructure hive (diameter 20km, height 4km) could plausibly break 100million.

Now if we increase the height, you've already got something totally different of course. Also, feeding such a population might not work on purely importing food, it would be more akin to this.

As for Hive Primus, I would imagine these hives to be parts of clusters, meaning that a population of 'billions' might be possible for the entire cluster then, rather than the single spire.

 

[spafe]

The billions thing was from the upper hive levels of a hive traizer (however its spelt)... now on most of teh diagrams of hives ive seen the upper levels have been the smaller part of it...and they have been the wealthier part so you can assume higher space per head in these affulent areas...

Your new york example, thats a diameter of 105 km, thats over double the diameter of the hive, so lets say the 4km height, but with half (ignoring the random extra) the diameter, well that means under half a billion...

this doesnt add up to me if then we go for 16 km (10 miles) high we get 2 billion. this could be refered to as billions I'll give you that, but all the imagery IMO says we should be talking a lot more than that...

Like I said, there is a lot of debate on what would be practical in terms of sheer numbers, regardless of infrastructure, as the amount of useable room will also go down the further you build as supports have to be greater, beams bigger etc...

I do however really ecnourage you to make a choice of which bits you are going to listen to and follow then make that model, as i think it would be epic!

 

[yarrow]

For the record, if only half a billion people were fighting for resources in a dilapidated factory the size of New York state I'm sure it would still seem crowded.

Sent from my HUAWEI Y300-0100 using Tapatalk

 

[djmothra]

There's a cool city in Thunderbirds 2086

 

[Malika]

Oooh, that's a weird one! Cool!

What about the Launchspire by Henry Smith, Adam Woodward, Paul Attkins?

And these:

Citadel Skyscraper by Victor Kopieikin, Pavlo Zabotin:

 

[Haafstag]

Now if we increase the height, you've already got something totally different of course. Also, feeding such a population might not work on purely importing food, it would be more akin to this.

As an aside, thanks for this little link - I'd totally forgotten about this guy but some of the stuff he has on his site is full-blown awesomeness.

 

[Malika]

We've been working on a separate project named Sciror (more info here), which you should definitely check out if you're into Philip's stuff!

 

[Malika]

 

[Malika]

 

[Malika]

From the upcoming Lords Inquisitor fan film:

 

[neil101]

Aplogies for the threadomancy, but i find this topic facinating, i created a blogpost on the subject last year , but it has since been deleted , i thought it would be cool to add the stuff to this forum post.

I did some minor calculations on the size of a hive at 28mm scale and came up with the shard in london as a similar size.. and the only real object i found that was 12 miles high 19 km was a pyroclastic cloud from a volcano. Everest is the highest object on earth at 5.5 miles 8.8km and munda would dwarf that at 12 miles or 19 km high. although even with a 3 mile under hive that still puts the hive at 9 miles high ! my calculations may be wrong though ! ;-)

 

[spafe]

They are some great comparison pics man! I love the one with the battleship in it! lol

 

[LeakingGreyMatter]

Great thread for inspiration

 

[Malika]