The best explanation, and summarisation or worst?

[Voltaire]

I found this a while ago on my perusals of 1d4chan.org, because that's the most effective use of my time...

 

Here is the article: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/stc

 

Edit: I apologize in advance for the cursing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Anyway I stumbled upon a rather interesting post that explained the necessity of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and why despite many indications; it's actually a good thing for the Imperium.

 

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-Fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare :cusshole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is :cussed. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

 

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find :), nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to beat the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

 

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently :cussed with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a :cussing grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The :cussing Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seek to kill you.

 

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better :cussing please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day :cuss. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

 

This is why they do not like ANYONE :cussing with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to :cuss with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall :cussed everything up and the Heresy double-:cussed it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, and they never have.

 

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire :cussing military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

 

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

 

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I can guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

 

Since some still don't get the idea, try this.

 

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere when you need a book from it, but the book is only a simplified copy. You don't understand the real book, and you don't need to. Nobody takes the real books anywhere because why would you, when there's a whole library there?

 

Now that library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-:cussing-where near it. Where the :cuss did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and tears apart the library to stop them using it, only to be destroyed in the process. The library is leveled, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

 

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old. It isn't a shadow on the glory of the old, but it is all they have.

 

Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

 

The Adeptus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

 

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single :cuss decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a :cuss life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

 

++ The optimist believes this to be the best of all possible worlds;

The pessimist fears this to be true. ++

++ Exsisto iustus quod vereor non. ++

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Despite how vulgar an explanation this is do you feel it's accurate? I'm not attempting to troll the board, I've little to no knowledge of the Mechanicus, but I'd love to discuss this with anyone who's to talk.

[wise_crak]

i kinda agree with the article! although 'heavy handed' in the way they explain it it shows how much the imperium needs those lovable guys on mars and how much they need the imperium to find new STCs etc!

 

 

we need The Mechanicus and The Mechanicus needs us!

 

Wisey B)

[Lord_Caerolion]

Well, it isn't anywhere near as bad as they say it is, sadly. A lasgun isn't going to wilfully shoot you in the face because you forgot to do maintainance work today. Mars isn't packed full of Chaos-corrupted Servitors running rampage through old Forges. The Machine Spirit isn't the remnant of old AI "stuck inside" a calculator (which will mess up your answers if it doesn't like you).

 

The Machine Spirit is a combination of pure superstition (in the case of 'dumb' technology like guns and lighting), to complex calculating algorithms and even, in some cases, an organic intelligence wired into the computer.

 

Mars doesn't hold all technology, just all technology that's been rediscovered, and probably a crud-load more in the deepest depths of the Archives (which are kept closed because of religious fear, some slight Necron problems, and the occasional rogue Schismatical). Are the Archives filled to overflowing with rampand servitors and AI constructs? No. Will you die as soon as you step foot in them? No. Are there still the occasional dangerous thing down there? Yes.

 

Lastly, I've never heard of STC's corrupting the data so that they make "hand grenades that explode when finished", or whatever they're going on about. Every STC is useful.

 

 

The TL;DR version? Don't trust what that source says, they love their hyperbole a little too much.

[Voltaire]

What are the Iron men?

 

Also what is the exact nature of the Labyrinth?

[Silber]

The Iron Men, or Men of Iron, were a type of artificial intelligence created by mankind in the dark age of technology. They were servants and did all work, but they rebelled and were subsequentially destroyed. Linky

 

I don't think the exact nature of the Labyrinth, or Noctis Labyrinthus, is precisely known, except that (as is revealed in Mechanicum)

the Void Dragon dwells there. He was imprisoned there by the Emperor, and likely still is, though he is gathering strength.

See also this, which as should be noted contains the spoiler, too.

[Voltaire]

Hmm intriguing. I should buy the book then.

[Voltaire]

Hmm intriguing. I should buy the book then.

[Silber]

Yes you should. It's good.

[Grandmaster Anaziel]

I found this a while ago on my perusals of 1d4chan.org, because that's the most effective use of my time...

 

Here is the article: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/stc

 

Edit: I apologize in advance for the cursing.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

 

Anyway I stumbled upon a rather interesting post that explained the necessity of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and why despite many indications; it's actually a good thing for the Imperium.

 

The Mechanicus does NOT have the technology. They haven't been living on some fancy paradise planet since pre-Fall. Mars is an anarchic nightmare :cusshole the moment you leave the safe zones into the kilometres of labyrinthine corridors beneath it full of rogue machinery, self-aware and malevolent AI from before the Fall, and the daemon programs of the Heresy. EVERYTHING in the databases is :cussed. The databases are fragmented over the entire surface to the extent that it would be impossible to see one tenth of the total files in the ludicrously extended life of a Magos even assuming that they are completely safe to visit. And they are not.

 

The files have been corrupted into madness by the Fall, and the unleashing of the most potent informational warfare systems ever to exist to defeat the Iron Men. Nearly all of Mars was rendered uninhabitable, what they live in now is built on the top of the ruins. They send archeotech expeditions in to find ;), nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to beat the mind. Then came the Heresy, which was not earth-exclusive. Mars as the second most critical planet in the Imperium was the site of fighting nearly as ferocious as on Terra, with Mechanicus loyalists and Hereteks fighting tooth, nail, and mechadendrite everywhere. Ancient machines were unleashed, viruses both normal and daemonic unleashed into all the computer systems. Nearly every single stored record on Mars was rendered unusable, and those that survived are half the time self-aware and don't like you, or daemonic and actively try to kill you.

 

If you come back with a schematic, it is almost certainly gibberish, and if it isn't, it's probably corrupted into uselessness. If it does come back whole it was probably malevolently :cussed with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a :cussing grenade set to detonate the second you finish building it. Why do you think they want off-world STCs so damned much if they had them all here? The :cussing Heresy is why. Off-world they only have to contend with the Fall's war and its effects on the machinery plus twenty thousand years of degradation with no maintenance. But at least off-world it'll probably just not work instead of actively seek to kill you.

 

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better :cussing please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day ;). Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

 

This is why they do not like ANYONE :cussing with technology, because it is so rare to find anything that just works it is critical it not be compromised. That, and they do not have the actual knowledge to :D with it intelligently, just through experimentation, which inevitably leads to slaughter. Pressing buttons to see what works is fine in a 21st century computer, but it is a very stupid thing to do at the helm of a 410th century starship with the destructive power to end solar systems. The entire knowledge base of humanity was lost. Not forgotten, but outright lost. Everything at all, poof. Nobody knows anything because the Fall :cussed everything up and the Heresy double-:cussed it. To rebuild the theoretical framework needed to design new technologies that don't kill everyone near them would require starting from the ground up. They don't have the time, and they never have.

 

This gets on to the point of war and what it does to technology. Someone will parrot that it makes it go much faster. Yes, it makes practical applications of technology go much faster. It also utterly stops all research on the scientific theories behind those technologies. This means that when war chugs along for a decade or two things get done. It means when it goes on too long you run out of theories to turn into technologies, and then you run out of technologies to apply. You stagnate. When you have been fighting in a war for survival in a drastically overextended empire, this is what happens. You are desperate for any extra materiel that can possibly be produced. Half your entire :cussing military might went rogue, smashed the half that stayed, leaving you with the tattered shreds of a war machine to keep hold of an empire that was reaching straining point with an army far larger. There is no time for the sort of applied research programs that took Man twenty five thousand years to develop, in a time of unprecedented growth and prosperity.

 

This is also why the Adeptus Mechanicus insists on cargo cultism. It's because when you are dealing with things you barely understand because everything you knew about them was destroyed it is the safest and most reliable option. The rituals do not exists for mysticism, they exist because they are the most practical means of building, repairing and maintaining the equipment they have with the knowledge surviving. You don't understand why pressing that button makes it go, because the manual tried to take over your brain and the copies are all unreadable and the research base that would let you reverse-engineer it does not exist and cannot be built.

 

Why are the Tau doing so well with their technology? Because they had peace. Eight thousand years unmolested by any enemy and they were helped the entire time by the most advanced biological race in the galaxy. Give the Imperium eight thousand years of peace and I can guarantee you it will be harder than it was during the Great Crusade.

 

Since some still don't get the idea, try this.

 

Build a library, fill it with all human knowledge. You take it elsewhere when you need a book from it, but the book is only a simplified copy. You don't understand the real book, and you don't need to. Nobody takes the real books anywhere because why would you, when there's a whole library there?

 

Now that library goes rogue and the maintenance machinery starts killing everyone any-:cussing-where near it. Where the ;) did they all come from, you swear to god there weren't this many, and there weren't because they're using the library's information to fight their war. The government fights a battle that destroys the planet against these robots and tears apart the library to stop them using it, only to be destroyed in the process. The library is leveled, cast into flames, every book burned and every computer virus-laden.

 

Then comes a man who worked there. He talks to the few surviving library workers, assembles their information, and starts rebuilding a city around the library and expanding it as the librarians find little scraps of paper and fragmented bits of files that stuck together just right read something. They rebuild a library from scrap on the ashes of the old. It isn't a shadow on the glory of the old, but it is all they have.

 

Then the city turns on itself, kills its master, and the librarians turn to rage. Half of them kill the other half and destroy the remnants of the library because where they're going they won't need science. Everything burns, and the city is left to a scattered few survivors, walls open to the world, with the hungry predators circling.

 

The Adeptus Mechanicus is the sole surviving librarian, desperately scrabbling through the ashes of paper and splinters of hard drives for anything to help him and the city he needs to survive just a second longer.

 

The Imperium isn't grim because things suck by choice and could be fine if a sensible person came along. That sensible person wouldn't survive fifty seconds of the reality. The Imperium is grim because every single :cuss decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a :cuss life in the worst conditions imaginable, is the absolute best that can be done. It is a study of the worst happening to everyone and what part of your humanity must be sacrificed today just to stand a chance of survival, and all it asks is whether or not it would have perhaps been better to die.

 

++ The optimist believes this to be the best of all possible worlds;

The pessimist fears this to be true. ++

++ Exsisto iustus quod vereor non. ++

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Despite how vulgar an explanation this is do you feel it's accurate? I'm not attempting to troll the board, I've little to no knowledge of the Mechanicus, but I'd love to discuss this with anyone who's to talk.

 

That is probably the most accurate description of the Holy Mechanicus I have ever read. :)

[Lord_Caerolion]

That is probably the most accurate description of the Holy Mechanicus I have ever read. -_-

 

If by "accurate" you mean "hyperbole-filled, makes-Matt-Ward-think-it's-over-the-top, baseless overexaggeration", then yes, you're completely correct. Half of what they wrote has a kernel of truth, that much is true, but they've gone crazy with taking it further. Yes, the Iron Men had a hand in the Age of Strife, but that sure as hell doesn't mean that Mars is filled with blueprints making "grenades that explode once you finish them", lasguns won't start shooting randomly by itself because you forgot to clean it that day, or whatever the hell else they came up with.

If you scale back the hyperbole, way, waaaay back, then yeah, it's accurate. At the moment, it's basically at parody-levels of description, which is saying something for Warhammer.

[Olis]

I like the thought process behind the article, I also like the idea of tech-expeditions arming themselves to the teeth just so they stand a wisp of a chance of survival. Granted, this isn't canon but I don't think it'd be too hard for some of it to be elavated. Not all that much is contradictory, imho. ^_^

[jokaero weaponsmith]

Interesting write up . However war accelerates technological advances look at the advances during world war one and two nothing is more motivational than a gun to your head. Both sides looking for the advantage ie peace through superior firepower. I could see the idea of machine spirits taking hold too because at one stage machines did have spirit ie the iron men so believing that if you dont respect the machine spirit it might just bite you in the exhaust would hold some sway.

I also think that the idea that the adeptus never deletes anything adds to the problem every little detail recorded and cataloged couple of thousand years same data repeated and record over and over just because they havent read it before so its rerecorded, the volume of data would make it impossible to manage, stuff "lost" in the mass. And for the record Noctis Labyrinthus is a series of canyons on mars (For real) nasa has photos on the net somewhere

[Sceadwe]

Lastly, I've never heard of STC's corrupting the data so that they make "hand grenades that explode when finished", or whatever they're going on about. Every STC is useful.

 

Ever read the Gaunts Ghosts books? Can't say much more cos I can't figure out this 'spoiler' malarkey.

 

Although I would agree that ithe article is mebbe a bit over the top. I quite like the idea though, just toned down a bit.

[Captain Juan Juarez]

Lastly, I've never heard of STC's corrupting the data so that they make "hand grenades that explode when finished", or whatever they're going on about. Every STC is useful.

 

Ever read the Gaunts Ghosts books? Can't say much more cos I can't figure out this 'spoiler' malarkey.

 

Although I would agree that ithe article is mebbe a bit over the top. I quite like the idea though, just toned down a bit.

 

I've read the entire Ghosts story arc and the reference doesn't make sense.

 

 

The Men of Iron are the only comparison to be drawn, but that wasn't a function of the STC that was the fact it was a Chaos-corrupted STC. An STC doesn't degrade or corrupt in the way you think, such as physical degredation over time; it requires much more than that - such as the insidious ways of Chaos to penetrate it.

 

 

Also, "Spoiler malarky"... [] & [/] with the " spoiler " within gives you the spoiler blocks, just like the bold and italic functions.

[2.71828]

Dear Voltaire, I note that you freely lend much criticism to your work. *Right of Clear Thought for you.* Your observations are cynical and realistic. There are infrequent but significant occasions, when conditions are at their worst, but mankind is at its best.

[IronDragon66]

Very nice write up,

- Ive always loved the AdMech, and this just justifies that fascination. I always knew that there was something deeper, to the Imperium of man and why its tech is just "off." It always made no sense to me why the imperium has these warp ships that are kilometers long with massive nova cannons, and such, yet they cant recreate some of the techonology????

- This odd hole in 40k fluff, drove me to the AdMech for answers. Now I am creating a space marine army that will be fleet based and fully attatched to the mech. Their sole purpose is to search for STC's and to act as a research and development arm for the mechanicus and astartes. They will help develop new tech from the ad mech to the astartes, like a middle man between the two organizations. What better middle man than the highest tech of humanity?

[Olis]

I always knew that there was something deeper, to the Imperium of man and why its tech is just "off." It always made no sense to me why the imperium has these warp ships that are kilometers long with massive nova cannons, and such, yet they cant recreate some of the techonology????

 

The reason to that is that the Adeptus Mechanicus jealously guards technology and the knowledge to make it. If that knowledge is inaccesible for some reason (be it lost or locked away) then no-one else will be able to make said technology. Sure, they can try to reverse engineer it or copy it but ultimately the successive generations of that technology will be ersatz items at best, a shadow of it's former glory.

 

 

- This odd hole in 40k fluff, drove me to the AdMech for answers. Now I am creating a space marine army that will be fleet based and fully attatched to the mech. Their sole purpose is to search for STC's and to act as a research and development arm for the mechanicus and astartes. They will help develop new tech from the ad mech to the astartes, like a middle man between the two organizations. What better middle man than the highest tech of humanity?

 

Be careful with creating new tech, as the AdMech would be very keen firstly on keeping it for themselves (should it not be considered tech-heresy) and secondly on regulating it. Having better stuff recreated from STC data would be fine, mind you.

[IronDragon66]

Oh im not planning on creating new tech.

- I just want to make a space marine chapter that is part of the Mech. Im not gonna start developing new weird weapons and trying to play with them. I just like all the fluff and story lines of the Mech and space marines so want to combine my two warhammer 40k favorites:)

- I just invision this massive fleet of Mech and Marine ships traveling the cosmos searching for STC designs, STC computers, new alien tech, etc..... That just sounds like a project i could get wrapped up in for 50 years.