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From Warhammer 40k - Lexicanum
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Often these are self sufficient, with their own food and water facilities along with several factories producing goods. Billions of people can live in a hive, and the total destruction of one is quite rare, so massive and solid is their construction. They are centres of resistance when a world is invaded, although they also tend to be fire magnets due to their size.
Perhaps even more valuable is what at first glance seems to be a byproduct of the monolithic city's design. The population of any given world* approximately doubles every 100 years. With each hive housing between 10 - 100 billion people and 5 - 20 hives per planet the sheer number of citizens is staggering. And each of those citizens is a potential soldier for the [[Emperor]]'s armies. Hives manufacture far more than mere steel and silica, they are vast factories for the most useful possible resource: people. It is no accident that hive worlds contribute the vast bulk of the recruits for the [[Imperial Guard]]. The often violent gangland lifestyle which most residents are forced to live is also semi-deliberate. Almost every recruit will already know how to handle a gun. Hive worlds also serve to populate newly discovered planets. Imperial citizens are gathered from various hive worlds (willingly or unwillingly) and shipped off to distant colonies. An example of this would be [[Medusa V]].
In common with most other Imperial worlds, Hive Worlds are often based on a very obvious class system, with a ruling class and a working class, although with populations so tightly packed there develops a lower class that become violent street gangs.
Some extensively developed Hive Worlds do not even simply consist of various enclosed arcologies surrounded by wasteland, jungle, ice, or plains. These Hive Worlds are completely urbanized and stacked with hundreds of layers of arcologies, covering the entirety of the planet, effectively being an Ecumenopolis. Holy Terra is an example of this "Super Hive World" (and may be the only one).
There are hundreds of Hive Worlds in the Imperium, including [[Armageddon]]. This was the site of three massive battles, and several of the Hives were destroyed in the fighting. During the [[Second War for Armageddon]], [[Commissar Yarrick]] took charge of the defence of Hades Hive after the disaster that [[Herman von Strab]], the commander of Armageddon, had allowed to occur. Eventually, Hades Hive was destroyed but only at a massive cost to the Ork forces. It was then bombarded from orbit and utterly destroyed at the beginning of the [[Third War for Armageddon]] by [[Ork]] [[Warboss]] [[Ghazghkull Thraka]]. He did this in revenge against Yarrick as he saw the battle at Hades to have been the beginning of the end for the Ork invasion.
