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[Loud Whispers]

MSH, wouldn't dead worlds have various exports from salvagers and scavengers? For example, a dead world that is so heavily polluted with metals would be great for extraction same way we can mine the topsoils of heavily polluted areas for heavy metals, or illegal tech scrounging or siphoning off all the metals unleashed from the core of a planet that got exterminatus'd

[pisskop]

i would think the illegality would stop that
or the uncertainty of profit

[nenjin]

MSH, wouldn't dead worlds have various exports from salvagers and scavengers? For example, a dead world that is so heavily polluted with metals would be great for extraction same way we can mine the topsoils of heavily polluted areas for heavy metals, or illegal tech scrounging or siphoning off all the metals unleashed from the core of a planet that got exterminatus'd

Scavengers would likely not be able to collect enough scrap weight to make it worth the effort to buy it off them. Tons probably doesn't cut it in 40k, it's probably more like giga-tons.

The tech hunting might be worth it if it's not too damaged or corrupted but chances are irradiated scavengers lack the knowledge of the expertise to know what they're looking at.

So it's hard to count either of those as a stable export. Certainly not enough to make a tithe anyways unless it's happening on a global scale. An entire planet of scrap salvagers? I guess it's not outside the realm of possibility.

[Grim Portent]

There is a market for smaller quantities of things in 40k. Not all purchasing is done at the planetary scale or in the weights of tonnes and higher, some arms manufacturers, smaller business owners, small interstellar shipping groups and similar all trade in quantities of goods far smaller than the important merchants do.

To these guys a piece of junk like a salvaged plasma pistol power coil is potentially worth a lot of cash, because it can be juryrigged into a crude plasma weapon and sold to powerful gangers for a small fortune.

Adamantium scraps from a ruined fortress may be too insignificant for the Mechanicus, Administratum or Rogue Traders to go after, but a guy who owns a barely warp capable shuttle and who earns a living ferrying passengers and cargo in a small area could pick them up and sell them to a planet scale arms manufacturer to make some bespoke gear for nobles.

The same is broadly true for all resources in 40k, someone is willing to scrape by gathering up and selling the leftovers from more powerful people, but it's such a small and slow process that it takes millenia for an abadoned and ruined world to be picked clean of what scraps remain.

[nenjin]

Local system only. I find it hard to believe any trader of worth can make it efficient or profitable to travel to multiple dead systems just to buy scrap off of ragged bands of scavengers. Plasma tech isn't so rare it's solid gold. If it can be fielded by a middle range commander in the IG, it's not an incredibly hot commodity, unless it's an older heresy mark or DAoT mark.

[GiglameshDespair]

In Ravenor a cabal of smugglers make huge amounts of money pillaging large cogitators off a world that got warpstorm'd. A secondary industry of tainted glass shards which act like drugs when you look into them also arises.

Yeah, just scrap iron isn't worth it - but materials like old technology, adamantium, art, holy artefacts, unholy artefacts for the opposite clientele are all highly valuable and  worth salvaging.

[nenjin]

And when such things are found, it tends to bring the Mechanicum and/or professionals running.

[Grim Portent]

Not really, most such finds are small and inconsequential to them. The Mechanicus doesn't care if someone finds a half working high power cogitator in the middle of nowhere, it cares if they find a few thousand on a former Mechanicus outpost. The Ecclesiarchy won't send a fleet out to verify a box claiming to contain a shirt once owned by a saint. Stuff like that is beneath their notice compared to the actually valuable stuff. They basically just let it get collected by other people and only collect it once it passes into their immediate domain, and only if it's worth the expense of getting it. Plenty of holy relics, military artifacts and ancient pieces of tech getting passed around hive nobility, most of which came from the higher grade of scavvies.

And yes, plasma is worth more than it's weight in gold to a normal person, and is so hard to acquire that most people have never even seen such weapons. The guardsmen who have such gear are few and far between in the lore. Hell, one of the defining features of the Dark Angels marines is that they found a big enough stash of plasma a long time back that they can almost equip every unit with multiple plasma support weapons, other chapters are lucky to have enough to equip a full company's support weapons with them. In Dark Heresy it's something like 2 years wages for a well paid labourer to buy a shoddy one, and those two years wages only barely cover food and housing as it is. Not to mention finding someone with one for sale is nearly impossible for the average guy with no contacts.

[nenjin]

The Ecclesiarchy won't send a fleet out to verify a box claiming to contain a shirt once owned by a saint.

That seems like exactly the kind of thing the Ecclesiarchy would send a ship out for. Not for, like, a street vendor, but anything above that? Seems reasonable.

The guardsmen who have such gear are few and far between in the lore.

They really, really aren't. It's not standard issue, but when your garden variety IG captain/major/colonel has one...an STC it's not.

In Dark Heresy it's something like 2 years wages for a well paid labourer to buy a shoddy one, and those two years wages only barely cover food and housing as it is. Not to mention finding someone with one for sale is nearly impossible for the average guy with no contacts.

Yeah but we're talking about the value of plasma to NOT indentured workers. We're talking the value of it to guys flying starships light years and being responsible for a crew of 20,000 people. It takes me 3 years of wages buy a new car. That doesn't make my SINGLE Toyota Corolla worth serious cash to an exporter. (Btw I work in the used truck parts and car business, so I can very easily see the line between "small time schmoe who buys people's wrecked vehicles for salvage" and "guy who owns a multi-million dollar business and buys fleets of trucks at a time.")

I maintain the only people finds of that scope are of value to are small time intra-system local traders.

The Rogue Trader book pretty much makes this clear. Single things, solitary objects, are not worth the time unless they are so stupidly rare and old they pay for the whole trip themselves, just on notoriety and opportunity. Scrap and single finds, even of stuff like plasma-tech weaponary, are of value to single, limited scope traders, who at best are  on the lower end of the totem pole in a trading conglomerate.

[Grim Portent]

The Ecclesiarchy won't send a fleet out to verify a box claiming to contain a shirt once owned by a saint.

That seems like exactly the kind of thing the Ecclesiarchy would send a ship out for. Not for, like, a street vendor, but anything above that? Seems reasonable.

The ecclesiarchy has better things to do than collect lost artifacts of dubious authenticity belonging to minor saints. There are literally thousands of saints in the Imperium, most of them only known of on one or two planets, and for every genuine relic there are a few billion fake ones. The time it would take to check them out is better spent from the perspective of the ecclesiarchs who have access to any spacecraft.

The guardsmen who have such gear are few and far between in the lore.

They really, really aren't. It's not standard issue, but when your garden variety IG captain/major/colonel has one...an STC it's not.

It's still so rare that a regiment of thousands usually has no more than three plasma weapons in their entire arsenal, and those are usually mediocre ones by the standard of plasma. The only people in the entire Imperium who are actually supposed to have lots of them are Dark Angels and the Mechanicus.

In Dark Heresy it's something like 2 years wages for a well paid labourer to buy a shoddy one, and those two years wages only barely cover food and housing as it is. Not to mention finding someone with one for sale is nearly impossible for the average guy with no contacts.

Yeah but we're talking about the value of plasma to NOT indentured workers. We're talking the value of it to guys flying starships light years and being responsible for a crew of 20,000 people. It takes me 3 years of wages buy a new car. That doesn't make my SINGLE Toyota Corolla worth serious cash to an exporter. (Btw I work in the used truck parts and car business, so I can very easily see the line between "small time schmoe who buys people's wrecked vehicles for salvage" and "guy who owns a multi-million dollar business and buys fleets of trucks at a time.")

I maintain the only people finds of that scope are of value to are small time intra-system local traders.

The Rogue Trader book pretty much makes this clear. Single things, solitary objects, are not worth the time unless they are so stupidly rare and old they pay for the whole trip themselves, just on notoriety and opportunity. Scrap and single finds, even of stuff like plasma-tech weaponary, are of value to single, limited scope traders, who at best are  on the lower end of the totem pole in a trading conglomerate.

There are plenty of spacecraft captains far below the rank of Rogue Traders and even the Merchant Fleets who are still warp capable. They feature in a few of the books. They have little dozen or so man spaceships that can make short warp jumps based on mapped out routes and make a living ferrying passengers, transporting small amounts of cargo or trying to find valuable salvage. One of them in one of the old Grey Knight novels spent a few months carrying cargo from one system to another through several risky warp jumps in a ship with a junky gellar field, another is in Death of Anatagonis and was willing to make a mapped warp jump because he had paying passengers who wanted to travel to other systems.

Such ships probably make up the bulk of the Imperium's warp capable craft while still being a minority of it's actual shipping, since any junker who can save up for/salvage a warp capable shuttle can become one, but mostly they then just scrape by doing odd jobs for people with enough money to make it worth the fuel costs for trips. If a guy like that thinks he might be able to salvage a plasma cannon or powerful shield generator from a wrecked fortress world or abandoned governor's pleasure palace he'll leap at it, it's probably worth roughly as much as his spacecraft is if it's in good condition.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

MSH, wouldn't dead worlds have various exports from salvagers and scavengers? For example, a dead world that is so heavily polluted with metals would be great for extraction same way we can mine the topsoils of heavily polluted areas for heavy metals, or illegal tech scrounging or siphoning off all the metals unleashed from the core of a planet that got exterminatus'd

As was mentioned, with the way Imperial resource lines are it's almost inherently unprofitable to do something like this. The Imperium's main externality is human bodies, a problem that can't be solved mostly by throwing human bodies at is a hard one for them.

With how the Imperium is, Dead Worlds are particular things. We're not talking about a devastation of society thing, even the most severe cracks can still be reduced to Feral Worlds instead. Dead Worlds are those that have literally no human life left on them, with the hardiness of humans this generally means the world's atmosphere has been destroyed.

The atmospheric failure creates the largest problem, because it means that you can't just release a million slaves to crawl across the world on broken legs with paintbrushes collecting heavy metals residue. It has to be a high-tech operation at the least.

A point to make is that the Imperium's resource lines are somewhat functional under realism but also strictly irrational. How should a spacefaring empire collect resources? From stars and gas giants. Everything else is minuscule and unimportant. Planets are for localization at best, but with the presence of the warp and the grimdark social stratification the Imperium can't set that up. The only reference to star harvesting or even significant space-based industry is the Mechanicus drawing plasma from solar coronas.

In the end, Dead Worlds are just kind of useless because they really don't have a lot of resources, you can't throw humans at the problem to solve it autonomously, and anything singularly interesting or invaluable is going to have a Research Station dedicated to it instead.

[GiglameshDespair]

What?

Stars and gas giants can provide some materials, sure, but the majority of resources the Imperium needs aren't going to be gathereable from stars and gas giants.

The thing is for the benefits of recovering anythig valuable the Imperium can effectively release your million cripples with paint brushes. A genetor could adapt them ffor more hostile enviroments (as happened in canon), the savs are equipped with air tanks kr void suits.
I can't imagine it's impossible or requires more advanced tech any more than space mining does and space mining is quite defintely a thing in the Imperium as well.

Dead worlds are dead. That doesn't mean they have nothing of value worth exploiting.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

A proper interstellar society would soon enough realize that the quantity of energy and materials needed can be gathered from scooping stars and gas giants so far outstrips that of planets that it isn't even comparable. Similarly, industrial facilities are better placed in space than on planets. But the Imperium is grimdark and does not realize this.

Dead worlds have things of value but it's like all the uranium and gold in Earth's oceans: getting it is uselessly unprofitable.

[Taricus]

Until you realise that the imperium needs heavy metals and other such elements, stuff that you can't harvest from stars or gas giants.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The difference between a non-grimdark interstellar society and the Imperium is one that will continue to arise issues for this discussion. Yes, you need things that are rare or inconvenient to harvest from stars and gas giants. But the energy provided to your society by stars and gas giants is effectively limitless and therefore makes those other materials just a matter of time.

But the Imperium doesn't do this, making the matter irrelevant.