Standard Template Construct

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

-Pablo Picasso

A long long time ago, the EMPRAH declared that humanity had to spread across the stars. He foresaw that humanity would need the resources of a galaxy to withstand the trials of the future: mad gods created by overindulgent jackholes, gun-toting walking foot-fungus infections, and emo robots with plasma gauss weapons.

"But your eminence," asked some foolish minister, "only a fraction of 1% of our population has the skills and knowledge to survive outside our urban hives, never mind on worlds that haven't been terraformed yet!"

"Don't worry; I have a plan. For the past century I've been seeding book publishers with the idea of writing self-help books with names like '... For Dummies' and 'An Idiot's Guide to ...', and I invested in a manufacturing company in the Ikea Norse Hive when it was called 'Sweden'. Centuries later these and many other ideas will bear fruit in a push-button, turnkey, E-Z Bake oven colony procedure tool I will call "THE STANDARD TEMPLATE CONSTRUCT" and it will enable the most humble among us to reap the benefit of the stars!"

"... E-Z Bake oven, your highness?"

"Ah, an idea before your time. Actually not one of mine; clever little thing. I liked the frosting that came with the cake mixes."

Every colony-ship of humanity carried an STC with them, with easy-to-comprehend blueprints and instructions for everything that a colony would need, from how to use local resources to harvest food or irrigate deserts, to the architecture required to build mile-high hive arcologies or tap a planet's core for the magma pumps needed on forgeworlds. This also had the intended effect of making sure that manufactured goods were compatible between colonies across the Imperium of Man, and that the cultures would stay (relatively) the same and no colony would become so different as to seem as aliens to other humans. This is the reason why everyone across the Imperium speaks the same language, among other similarities between disparate colonies.

However, the STCs were created millennia ago. And there was a Dark Age between then and now. And some smartass decided to 'port the STCs to Windows 10 to make sure it would be "more compatible with the smaller devices colony ships will be carrying." As a result, no fully intact STCs are known to have survived to the modern era. All that's left are the short passages that have been copied religiously from generation to generation in each colony, but only what that particular colony needs... if it hasn't been corrupted by thousands of years of transcription. Discovery of a new outpost of humanity is a prestigious discovery, as there's a chance that there may be parts of their STC that were preserved better than others, or even whole pages that are unseen elsewhere. Hoping beyond hope of course, there is still the possibility that an entire working, uncorrupted STC machine exists, probably on one of the worlds in the Halo Zone.

The STCs are a very important thing for the tech-priests of Mars, because they are a bunch of nutters who for the past ten thousand years have done next to nothing to promote technological progress because they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a zombie robot dragon living in Mars if used without protection. Finding an STC is thus the only possibility the Imperium has for restoring humanity to pre-technutter levels. If it manages that, it could surely wipe out all its enemies. Of course, the Mechanicus has a few good reasons for avoiding experimentation. There's more than a few planets that are now uninhabitable, or just plain gone after a magos decided to do some experimentation. See the contagion of Ganymede.

But of course, this being W40k, where status quo is god, this will never happen.

Revelations from recent STC recoveries

Scientific discovery after a dark age can be equal parts research and archeology, as a culture reclaims knowledge it has lost. The Adeptus Mechanicus is particularly interested in finding new STCs to fill in the gaps of their knowledge, to de-mystify parts of their manufacturing rituals, and to issue new and improved tools to the Imperium, and are willing to pay handsomely for even a fragment of an STC. Basically, if you find the STC for a better toaster you're set for life; find one for an entirely new weapons system and you'll probably end up being made governor of an entire planet.

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:

• The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle
• An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
• The Castigator-class Titan (whose STC turned daemonic, sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...)
• Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
• Jodorowsky's Dune (holy fuck watch it)
• The HXT-37 voltage transubstantiation cable for using 'AA' batteries in 'AAA' music players
• The 58th flavor of Heinz's ketchup
• Daemon-corrupted Men of Iron...err maybe this wasn't such a good find. Cue Ibram Gaunt BLAMMING said STC.
• A simple (durable, cheap, mono-molecular) combat knife. Two scouts found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
• Leman Russ Punisher and Eradicator (actually a case of "hey! Look at this Ancient technology I just... found. I didn't invent it at all, really")
• Various life extension methods like better juvenants, etc
• Helmets manly enough for space marine commanders
• Kamikaze neckbeard powered toaster ovens (Caestus Assault Ram)
• Baby's First Thunderhawk (affectionately called the "Stormraven Gunship" by some.)
• Super Baby-Carrier 40,000 (incomplete STC fragment, but they still managed to build the Nemesis Dreadknight out of it...)
• Miracle chocolate that somehow only manages to go to women's lovely parts. Extensively eaten by Boone
• Panacea - see the sad story below
• Dreadclaw Drop Pods. Something wasn't right with these folks Machine Spirit. Maybe they really were alive?

Notice that most of the vehicles in this list did not exist until later editions of the game. This is how Games Workshop and Forge World justify adding units to armies (Imperial armies, anyway) -- they existed all along, it's just that the Adeptus Mechanicus only recently re-discovered (or "re-discovered" and most definitely did not invent) the STC pattern encoding them. Basically, you can know how to build the vehicle, but if you don't know what programs it uses or, possibly, what specific materials to use for more sensitive components, it isn't going to do jack, or worse, it kills you.

Of course, any time that a real game-changing STC comes along, something bad happens and it gets stolen, lost, destroyed, or corrupted, because grimdark. For example, in the 5th edition Dark Eldar codex, Asdrubael Vect's Ex, Lady Malys, tricked some Orks into attacking an Industrial world that had been fortified beyond belief. Every hive on it was crammed with guardsmen, and even titan legions and Admech forces were present because they had found an STC called Panacea that would allow billions trillions quadrillions the whole of humanity to be cured of disease and poison (hint: Panacea is a literal cure-all). The Dark Eldar attempted to steal it by luring an Ork fleet to the planet where the Orks pretty much crushed all resistance (quite literally - by crash-landing on it), allowing the Dark Eldar to effortlessly take the STC (after the Orks stole it first, go figure). Of course the Dark Eldar don't use the same technology (and could not care less about cures for human diseases anyway), so at the moment it's collecting dust in Malys' Trophy Room, rather than alleviating the grimdark. At this point, we can only hope that the Dark Eldar manage to provoke the Imperium into launching a full crusade against Commorragh and rescue the STC in the process...yeah, right. that did happen before this incident, though. Vect stole a fully manned Salamanders Strike Cruiser (but wasn't stupid enough to try and board it, for obvious reasons). The Salamanders responded by figuring out how to break into the webway, tracking down the lost/hidden city of Commorragh, and butchering the fuck out of all of Vect's rivals (whom he arranged for the Strike Cruiser to be near for this very reason). They then took their Strike Cruiser back and left much of Commorragh a smoking ruin. Something Malys probably overlooked (or didn't know, somehow) upon her acquisition of this STC is that the Salamanders still know how to get into the Webway and know where Commorragh is. They also happen to like killing Dark Eldar, and now the Mechanicus and the rest of the Imperium has a very good reason to launch a full (i.e. thousands of ships and millions of Guard regiments with dozens of Space Marine Chapters) Crusade against the point-eared bastards...

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the Death Guard, Purge, and all the other forces of Nurgle surprisingly come to the aid of the Dark Eldar. That, or they'll just intervene in a desperate attempt to destroy this particular STC. After all, a literal cure-all being distributed across the galaxy would be a catastrophic blow against the Plaguefather, and it would weaken him to the point that metaplot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

The Ark Mechanicus

You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.

• SPOILERS from Priests of Mars

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

In this novel written by Graham McNeill, it is revealed that the Ark Mechanicus Speranza, an incredibly old and massive ship used by the Adeptus Mechanicus to explore new stellar territories, has some of the most advanced technological achievements of mankind encoded in its very structure. This revelation, unfortunately, was only discovered during a brief moment when one of the main protagonists of the novel, Archmagos Lexell Kotov, made some sort of spiritual connection with the Machine Spirit of the Speranza(alignment: True Neutral) in order to save the day, and he forgot what he had seen immediately after.

Which may suck, yes, but this was compensated by the fact that upon the Archmagos linking with the ship, the Speranza's AI went godmode, deploying all kind of unimaginably super-high-tech targeting systems that NOBODY knew it had, systems that were capable of functioning with 100% precision in the middle of a space-time gravitational storm, and detected and crippled fatally damaged an Eldar cruiser in ONE FUCKING SHOT using a dorsal mounted BLACK HOLE CANNON so unbelievably advanced even the Necrons would have been scratching their heads trying to understand how it worked, although the narration tells us it involves antimatter, gravitons, and dark matter.

What makes it even better is that the Eldar ship was guided by a Farseer, and thus managed to actually DODGE the weapon's blast, which was explicitly stated to be moving at the speed of light. The Speranza wasn't having any of it, and instead of missing like some plebian battleship with its macro-cannons and lances, used chrono-weaponry to shift the Eldar ship a nanosecond into the past to make the shot connect. IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN.

That's right, lads, the Ark Mechanicus ships which the Imperium already own and operate could be the answer to the missing information of the STCs and more. A shame not even an Archmagos can access the information without immediately forgetting it all once the interface with the Machine Spirit has been severed. Especially given that, once linked to the ship, Kotov realized that (perhaps all of) the Ark Mechanicus used by the Mechanicum are complete, self-updating STCs.

Still. One-shotting an eldar cruiser with sniper-precision in the middle of a space-storm that should have made locating said vessel completely impossible, much less being able to fire at it with any hope of accuracy.

Humanity's old tech was scary-powerful. How the mighty have fallen, eh? From turbo fuckyou chrono-weapons to ineffectual flashlights. That's not even grimdark. That's just outright depressing.

Indeed, also, it may or may not be because every time a higher STC device works correctly the Imperium suddenly wipes out of the table anything and we mean ANYTHING that it's thrown at them, what's up, Hivefleets? Get some space DNA-recombinant insecticide! Chaos Greater Daemons? Pff, now you DO NOT exist with my Empyrean Bomb! C'Tan shards? Let me show you what is to alter reality with my time-altering macrocannon! So yeah, if the Imperium ever gets these things working and mass-produced it's warranted at least one of the major enemy factions will be eradicated or become a minor nuisance.