Life span of a Knight Pilot?

[Guest]

Is there any info on the lifespan of a pilot? (Not including battle :))

[ElectricPaladin]

It's tough. I seem to recall something about linking to the Throne Mechanicus being bad for you. On the other hand, the Imperium has access to a lot of anagathics. My guess is that while the average Imperial elite can last a couple of centuries, knight pilots probably burn out at a little more than a hundred? But this is me spitballing and working off half-remembered references, so...

[JeffTibbetts]

I don't really remember anything about the Throne being rough. I just assumed they're like any other person with enough clout to get Juvenat treatments: effectively limitless. I think you have to be a dang good one to not die in combat, though. I mean, in the rules they ALWAYS blow up, so... 

[ElectricPaladin]

I don't really remember anything about the Throne being rough. I just assumed they're like any other person with enough clout to get Juvenat treatments: effectively limitless. I think you have to be a dang good one to not die in combat, though. I mean, in the rules they ALWAYS blow up, so... 

 

Well, presumably they've got emergency ejector seats or some such. Remember that dead in the game doesn't mean dead in the fiction...

[JeffTibbetts]

That's a very good point. It's easy to forget that even though marines drop like flies, that doesn't mean they're dead as such. And yeah, maybe that little hatch pops the pilot straight out. 

[Guest]

So a couple of hundred centuries is not going to be too surprising?

[Canadian_F_H]

Yeah. The throne supposedly is dangerous and exhausting, but I think this is more mental than physical, so there is an argument for shortened life span, but again countered by reguvination tech... so it's a toss up in my guess... and I'm not well versed in knight things yet...

 

 

 

Now this part is off topic imo, but y'all brought it up so my .02 thrones...

 

for death in battle, remember the game mechanic for all non vehicles is wounds. And a model us removed from play after suffering more wounds than the organism the model represents can handle and continue fighting...

 

In otherwords, a human suffering a severe enough arm or leg wound for example would be out of the fight but clearly not dead (depending on treatment). And severity depends on the model hence the toughness characteristic... and hqs and monsters are so dead hard awesome they keep fighting after say losing the immediate use of a limb aka a wound characteristic greater than 1...

 

To look at real world statistics. Casualties are usually anywhere from 2 to 1 up to 20 to 1 injured vs dead. And injuries range from out for a day or so to crippled the rest of your life...

 

So yeah ... not all your marines are dead... in fact most arent.

Edited May 12, 2016 by Canadian_F_H

[JeffTibbetts]

So a couple of hundred centuries is not going to be too surprising?

 

I think that's correct. I wouldn't bat an eyelash at it, myself. 

[Guest]

Thats cool..

 

Thank you guys :) Nice friendly Sub-Forum you guys have :)

[ElectricPaladin]

And given the ability to make adequate (or even superior) augmetics or clone new body parts, "crippled for life" doesn't even apply to many soldiers (outside of the Guard and other waves-of-meat armies, anyway).

[MagicHat]

The small hatch is an emergency exit, and if it have a yellow stripe painted across it, it means the pilot escaped the Knight after destruction and have returned, or something to that effect.

 

There is also a story somewhere, where a Pilot have been captured in battle by orks and attempts to get back to his Knight.

[Redtoof]

So a couple of hundred centuries is not going to be too surprising?

20 000 years? I'd say that's fairly surprising.

[Canadian_F_H]

 

So a couple of hundred centuries is not going to be too surprising?

20 000 years? I'd say that's fairly surprising.

Yeah...

[walter h]

I believe that it was more likely that the individual meant 200 years.

[JeffTibbetts]

Yeah, I suppose I read that as 2 centuries as well. :P 

[jeffersonian000]

In the fluff, Knight pilots tend to either die gloriously young or age into their senior years and start piloting Wardens (the original Warden was an up-armored, up-gunned defensive Knight). The current fluff has at least one Knight that is known to be hundreds of years old and no one has seen the pilot out of his Knight in centuries (Grenaticus the Green Knight).

 

What we do know is that the Throne has full life support capability, to the point that it might be able to sustain it's pilot well past a natural life span, given maintenance and re-arming when out of combat, not unlike Astartes Dreadnoughts or Titan Princeps.

 

SJ

Edited May 15, 2016 by jeffersonian000

[Guest]

Sorry my bad 2 Centuries lol.

[Magos Takatus]

I'm not sure how long they could live really. It's been fairly common to hear about Adeptus Mechanicus Magos living several hundred years but the treatments they use are described as being pretty horrific and they tend to lose their sanity over time. I'd guess at Knights being about to survive 200-250 years but I'm not sure they would survive much longer than that usually. Oh course, there's usually an exception to every rule in 40k so who knows?

[Battybattybats]

Knight worlds are also repositories of lost tech too. While some degenerated and degraded to the point they couldn't keep their knights maintained (i'd love to see someone build one with a black powder canon and crew and repairs with wood as mentioned in some materials, i think it might have been the imperial knight companion) others have the Mechanicus drooling. It would not be hard for the noble ruling class to still have some technological gems that might extend life extremely or even indefinitely, with death in combat the only way to die. Quite the fitting theme that one, with knight pilots going to ever more suicidal heroics as they strive to get killed gloriously but not wastefully or dishonorably.

[Kelborn]

So the throne itself can extend their life-span?

Interesting... I wanted to create something like an Imperial Knight / Dreadnaught mix, with the Scion permanently inherit within the Knight like a Titan princeps in his tank.

 

With this new information, I might not even need that idea if a Knights life can be preserved by the Throne.

[Tyriks]

The HH book Mechanicum talks about how it's actually disconnecting from a Knight that is stressful, not being connected. This is partially because the pilot gets accustomed to the power of the knight and partially because the machine spirit overwrites parts of their minds as they get more in tune with each other, so eventually pilots get to the point where they have to stay inside. This happens a lot quicker and more drastically for titan pilots.

[Nuclear Fridge]

I don't have access to my copy of the first version of the Codex: Imperial Knights, but I seem to recall the introductory fluff mentioning the Knight-pilot of House Griffith being about 800 years old, which implies he's been glugging down the juvenat like it's bottles of spring water.

 

The fluff also touches on the 'cold turkey' syndrome a Knight-pilot experiences whenever he (or she) is unplugged from the machine for any length of time... nightmares, shakes, physical distress, etc., etc. There's a craving to re-connect that almost certainly gets worse as the pilot ages.