Scrap the Code!

[Augustus]

If their is no defense against it wouldn't they be able to just plow from Eye straight to Terra blasting it along with the Carrion Anthem? Seems pretty straightforward.

[Kilofix]

If their is no defense against it wouldn't they be able to just plow from Eye straight to Terra blasting it along with the Carrion Anthem? Seems pretty straightforward.

 

I hypothesize that the Carrion Anthem, just like Chaos Power infused Scrap Code or even like a Daemonic Portal - needs a certain amount 'fuel' to remain active.

 

Like X number of Cultists sacrificed for Y number of hours running.

[Captain Juan Juarez]

 

Like X number of Cultists sacrificed for Y number of hours running.

 

 

Now that is algebra I could of gotten behind in school!

[Battybattybats]

I've long thought that the (racist) short story The Lord of the Dynamo by H.G. Wells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Dynamos was inspiration to GW's Adeptus Mechanicus, that and the Cargo Cult and the novel The Time Machine.
The Dark Age of Technology had progressed so far that people got lazy, the machines even designed the machines and made simple ikea-style instructions on how to build them without needing to understand them (STCs). So when it all came crashing down in Old Night they were rebuilding almost from scratch, with marvels all around but disconnected from understanding. By the Great Crusade science was starting to come back, through the orthodoxy of rote-learning without understanding. New versions of power armour were being developed, new weapons designed, tank variatiions experimented with. Then the herey set it all back even further.

We know (if i'm remembering Mechanicum correctly) that some were more vulnerable to scrapcode than others, the Noospheric enhancement appeared to be able to avoid the worst of it. So that development shielded some on Mars and the adoption of this accross the surviving loyal Mechanicum might explain the reduced effectiveness of the scrapcode attack.

Certainly i'm hoping for a lot more about the defeating of the Dark Mechanicum side of the heresy in future works that should make a lot of things clearer.

[Blarrg]

I like this thread. I was at work today and started pondering how scrap code works. With all the reasons postulated here, I can now sleep tonight instead of trying to figure it out.

[Volt]

I've always liked the explanation that the "scrap code" is actually shreds of the Men of Iron's sentience still inhabiting everything complex enough to hold even a little programming. IT's a bit hand-wavy, but if you consider the current trend towards "smart everything" it's easy to imagine how the world of 40k could have smart APCs and smart guns and smart power swords and definitely smart battle tanks and smart space ships. If all these smart devices - all of them capable of holding at least a little programming to help them optimize their performance, some of them holding a lot of programming - were infested by pieces of a race of self-aware AIs that could potentially be swayed by ritual praise and obeisance, that could lead to the situation we have in modern 40k.

 

In the 30k universe, some people kind of knew what was going on. There was the Cult Mechanicus, of course, but from what I've read most people were secular humanists and the machine priests were kind of their own weird thing, the only cult of the many that the Emperor had suppressed that was useful enough for the Emperor to allow to continue to exist. Nowadays, with the "lucky" confluence of their beliefs and the things you have to do to keep the Men of Iron shards from causing trouble, the Mechanicus's permanent influence will be hard to shake.

Why is it easier to explain scrapcode as the shreds of the Men of Iron? It makes much more sense that Daemons can manifest as computer coding (which is what Scrap Code is), no different than Doubtworm or the Plague of Unbelief. Daemons are not bound to taking corporeal forms in the materium, they can possess a body from either an organic being or inorganic (possessing everything from humans to stars), take the form of an idea (Doubtworm, Plague of Ubelief), or manifest as a computer code.

 

Makes much more sense as well, considering we've actually seen the Men of Iron before... and well..., they sucked. They got taken out by Arbites.

 

Also, scrapcode can be fought. It's called excising the infected. IE, either ripping out the infected parts of your body (if you're a cybrog) or blowing apart the machine that is compromised. And Chaos' power =/= instant victory. Given the feats for Chaos it's likely they might be able to win any time the gods wanted, but what's to gain? There's no point for the Chaos Gods to destroy the material realm, it's quite entinertaining. And have the actual Chaos Gods ever been stated to want to destroy/consume the materium? IIRC every time it's been mentioned that Chaos wants to destroy the universe, it's been said by Daemons or reffered to by Daemons. Not the actual Chaos Gods.