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 Android 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 (kinda like jpeg corruption amirite). 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.
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. Of course, at the sort of distances combat is often fought in space, dodging light is very, very easy if you have foreknowledge of where it will be - for example, if you are a light-second away from the shooter, you have, by definition, an entire second to get off your sorry ass and move. The Speranza wasn't having any of it, and instead of missing like some plebeian battleship with its macro-cannons and lances, followed up with a chrono-gun shooting tachyons to shift the Eldar ship a nanosecond into the past to make the black hole 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.