>>5457111Honestly I just relegate the poor suckers who live on Knight Worlds as essentially "entertainment slaves" whose job is to be perpetual renaissance fair reenactors for our Knights who insist on having their literal fuedal amusement parks to make them feel good. Supposedly this is more efficient and good for defense than just being like normal Imperial/Mechanicum citizens who have a fuedal style structure but a modern industrial planet. It's fine anyway, we just supply them with knight parts from our properly industrial worlds, and maybe it is easier to defend sparsley populated backwaters when you can just have knights protect the few fortresses worth protecting while the rest of the countryside is of such insignificant populace that a total loss won't really matter, we can just give all our knight worlds fresh peasants a hundred times over from a single hive world. And not even our biggest one.
Meanwhile, the denizens who live on our hive worlds and forges have it slightly better depending on your perspective. Sure there's less fresh air and more smog, and more factory labour, and more implants, but they do have access to more advanced commodities. Or in the very least they have easier access to corpsestarch and digital circuses.
It's a bit hard to say, being a wage slave in a factorum where you can die of industrial toxins vs being a fuedal slave on a field where you can die of bubonic plague because the local peasant doctor isn't allowed to use modern antibiotics. Ideally at least the former case may or may not be solved by further automation and an emphasis on servitors, so that our hives can become more like civilized worlds and the people don't have to be worked to for every inch so long as their bodies can be sent to work the factories in their stead. But it all depends if we even get the chance. For now, it will probably just be business as usual.
