What if a imperial world can't pay his tributes?

Usually they will demand tithes, but realtively small ones, in the form of whatever local resources or manpower they do have.

The Imperium doesn't really try to uplift feudal or feral or whatever worlds.

Tribute can be things like rocks. Vegetation, agricultural goods, or just feral world levies that are given Lasguns and sent into meatgrinders.

In on case, a small mechanicus outpost and an orbital station built an entire Lunar warcruiser off the tribute of a feral world. It took about a century, but it happened.

>Razing the entre planet
>Destroying useful infrastructure
>Wasting military assets
>Killing off useful workers

You'll hear a knock at the door. Don't attempt to escape out the window because the little red dots will be looking for you.

Send in a few Administratutm and Mecanicus teams to survey the planet and see if there is anything useful.

Find the biggest tribes and bribe them with shiny shit and make sure they know that whatever religion they follow is actually the God Emperor and that the God Emperor is blessing them with all this cool shit.

Find other tribes and do the same thing.

Stand back and watch the tribes do their thing while you set up an extraction point for them to bring it to.

Let natural selection do it's thing.

There's a story in the old Gothic rulebook about a planet of this technology level being used solely for hard labour. Its population work for generations, harvesting materiel for collection and transport up to the orbital shipyard hanging in orbit around the planet.

After a good century or two of work, the primitive tribesmen on the planet's surface watch as a star appears to unmoor itself from the night sky and streak off into the unknown. This is taken as a sign that they have pleased their God-Emperor, and in a sense they have, as that star was a Lunar class warship that they provided all the necessary materials for.

Depends on the severity. If it's a slight error, the governor and/or their family may be punished or sanctioned. In more extreme cases, they and/or their entire administration might be executed and replaced.

Related to
's question a bit.
How much leeway does the Imperium give for a world that had some kind of disaster happen to it? Say Orks invade, and they're fought off but the campaign is years or decades long and now the planet suddenly had a quarter of the population and most of the infrastructure gone.

Do they still demand tithes at the same rate? Is there any form or something the planetary governor can fill out with the administratum pointing out extenuating circumstances? Is it a case by case thing?

There was a story about a Inquisitor complaining about Space Marines destroying the infrastructure of a world because the governor rebelled and the Inquisitor wrote it because he wanted the Administratum would not be so harsh at the planet because it failed to give the tithe.
So I guess is the High Lords/Guilliman who has the last word.

In case of war the planet falls under martial law and then is repaired so it can go back to paying taxes.

I am now thinking of a situation where a world has 75% off of tithes because of an invasion that happened centuries ago, and the paperwork only just got through.

Rocks aren't free citizen

They would take slaves. Because the Imperium is only interest is perpetuation chaos to ensure its continued existence.

No planet has the right to avoid tithes. Krieg got the shit bombed out of it for 500 years straight and they still pay the tithes. Hell, they OVERPAY tithes.

I could definitely see this happening.

If the world is dangerous enough to almost be a deathworld, or the culture is sufficiently violent, it may become an Astartes recruiting world.

>Your desire to destroy loyal human life is regrettable, though the empire has many to spare, but your willingness to destroy perfectly functional infrastructure is unforgivable and tantamount to theft from The Emperor himself. Your gross inefficiency in the management of The Emperor's resources has been noted. You can more efficiently serve his grace as a servitor. Come this way.

If the world fails to meet the estimated Tithe amount then there will be investigation. Low level inquisitorial agents often get tasked onto this sort of thing since a shortfall can indicate something nefarious is afoot.
If they've been hit with simple bad luck (freak weather ruining the harvest, mines being exhausted, epidemic disease, etc) then the administratum just assesses the new state of things. If they have rampant corruption that's causing them to fall short, or there's internal strife between factions then the governor/government are held accountable. They rule as they see fit in The Emperor's stead, but one of the very few rules is 'Pay your taxes'.

Even the Imperium's not so stupid as to execute a planetary governor once every year just because the planet is recovering from being in the path of an Ork Waaagh a few years back. People saying a shortfall is grounds for purging a planet are meme spouting retards. They purge planets to clear out chaos or genestealer infestation, not because of economic problems.

It depends on the writer really. Shadowsword has tithers not giving a shit that several tithes in a few years has left the planet underpopulated and undermanned, having its indutries die, and end up in war when the governor rebels and refuses to give yet another tithe for the Macharius Crusade.

Other writers will have the Imperium reconsider and be reasonable. Sometimrs they will, sometimes they won't. As always in 40k, "everything" is possible.

Unless they call pull off some extraordinary scapegoating, the planet's upper management is going to get sacked and replaced. (and by sacked I mean publicly executed)

Administratum sends clerks to audit the world, its finances, and make adjustments to production.

These adjustments usually involve the execution of the Governor for treason or gross ineptitude.

If the circumstances demand it, they MAY see fit to decrease its tithe grade, however that will only be done where it is manifestly evident that it is physically impossible to maintain the current grade, regardless of how much austerity the population is forced to endure.

Changing the planet's tithe is an incredibly grave decision, which has the potential to win or lose wars.

> is what the meme imperium would do, stupidly wasteful and utterly pointless.
It really only happens when Chaos is involved. Otherwise it's just the ruling family that gets replaced.

They make good soldiers, though you don't get many from worlds like that.

There's also that story in the BFG rulebook where a barely-developed world pays its tithes of mined ore for generations, and it gets taken up into an orbital shipyard. One day, the world's inhabitants see a new star flare up and travel across the sky as the cruiser built with their ore is commissioned.

Er, sorry, beat me to it.

On a feral world (paleolithic, neolithic, bronze age tech level), the only worthwhile resource is its people.
So their tithe is in men who are either pressed into the imperial guard or get recruited into astrtes.

A tithe of people.
The tribes all know that, when the Red Star comes down from the heavens - usually about once a generation - it is time for the Great Games.
The tribes all gather on neutral ground, for the Servants of the High-God himself, the Throne Lord, have arrived. After a week of great contests, the best and bravest warriors have been chosen - they shall be lifted into the heavens, to fight and feast with the blessing of the Throne Lord! And so, the Red Star leaves, and the tribes return to their bickering ways.
A couple months later, the barely-trained regiment shows up on some devastated hive world and lasts about three hours against the greenskins. The tithe has been paid.

In case of a xenos invasion the planet's on it's own.

A bronze age population could also provide the imperium with valuable commodities such as minerals and food. IRL the civilisations before the bronze age collapse was actually pretty gd damn sophisticated with trade routes stretching far and wide. Tin is reasonably rare and thus states had to maintain trade connections with distant peoples. The prominent cities of the middle east were also populated with numbers in the hundred thousand which the region wouldn't see again in many centuries.

Then someone gets shot. Maybe many someones

There's also a world where the only valuable resource is a plant. Every cycle the leader of the tribe that brings the biggest quantity is crowned king. Dont know how well i remember it but thought it was neat.

THIS THIS THIS

Exactly. The Imperium is harsh and extreme, but they aren't completely stupid and idiotic.

Replacement of the governmental elites. Reclassification of the world if necessary. Salvar ended up as prison world because of this.

At the same time the Imperium is willing to employ cruelty on a massive scale if a planet messes up royally, but that of course is characteristic of life in the 41st Millennium. A good example is the Badab War, when you had lords in the Karthago Sector who had the right and duty to transport resources from the Maelstrom Zone to the rest of the Imperium. It's all on the wiki, but when the war finally broke out after the Karthan Lords resorted to immensely stupid methods to fulfill their quota when the Maelstrom Zone stopped sending cargo, the Lords were executed and the inhabitants of the Karthago Sector were pressed into indentured servitude for generations until their debt was repaid. So the Imperium is absolutely unconcerned with actually being humane, but it isn't going to resort to Exterminatus when the whole point is to make an unprofitable world profitable. And if anyone who wants the actual wiki description - "As for the Karthans, their own role in contributing to and worsening the unfolding events of the Secession smacked at best of gross arrogance, but more likely wanton ambition and misrule. Legatine investigations carried out at Sidon Ultra, capital of the Karthago Sector, confirmed these suspicions. They found the Imperial Commander and Karthan Sector Governor, Satrap Tanit Koenig culpable for provoking the war, and she and the worlds she commanded were brutally punished. Tanit Koenig and her ruling clique were subsequently executed, and the Karthans were made to pay for their transgressions, with the entire 14 billion strong population of Sidon Ultra committed to indentured servitude for six generations in payment of outstanding debt. Full scale Administratum rectification audits and Adeptus Arbites Moral Enforcement pogroms soon began moving outwards across the Kathargo Sector as tithe costs and reparations to the Adeptus Terra were extracted forcibly from the Karthan worlds, a process that is still ongoing to the present day."

This sounds like a setiing

I don't think they would kill the governor if the problem is not his fault. Otherwise every planetary defence would lead to a commanders death.

I imagine there's a very active market for capturing and selling various savage animals from "prehistoric" planets.

Noblemen, space marines, elite Imperial Guard and Inquisitorial agents... they all like to have space saber tooth tigers and space tyrannosaurs - for hunting, gladiatorial combat or just as attack pets.

there are many types of tithe, some pay in men, some food or raw material etc