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Votann

2022-04-22T23:16:55Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639:

{{Cleanup}}

[[File:Votann.jpg|thumb|Crazy AI dwarf minds never looked so good]]

{{Topquote|Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a [Votann]. We are close to gods, and on the far side. ‘We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.|An ancient Votann speaking with a (soon to be dead) tech-priest}}

The Votann (also known as Ancestor Cores) are massive AI constructs that are venerated like ancestors by [[Leagues of Votann|Leagues that share their name]]. These are closely guarded secret, for [[Adeptus Mechanicus|reasons]] that should be obvious, and while the word itself might be known to outsiders, the precise meaning is know only to the Kin.

Each Votann is a massive repository of knowledge. This knowledge concerns topics all the way from [[Necrons|Science and Engineering]], to [[Just as planned|Military theory]] and [[Creed|Strategy]], and even [[Orks|Philosophy]] and [[ratlings|Genealogy]]. They're even some [[Standard Template Construct|STC]] fragments in there, big 'uns too, from the sound of it. Basically, if you have a question, then these things can probably answer it. All these constructs are absolutely priceless relics, essential to their League, and the members of each League are more than willing to lay down their lives to protect their Leagues' Votann, and probably another Leagues too, if push comes to shove.

Unfortunately, even these majestic devices were not designed to last forever, and over time, more and more of their memory has been used up. This has caused many Votann to slow, and develop idiosyncrasies, even what you might call personalities, and response times have become painfully slow, sometimes taking decades or even centuries for them to answer complex questions. Their minds may have a bandwidth greater than sneaker-net, but that bandwidth comes at the expense of three hundred billion millisecond ping times (to all the IT guys in the audience, just ignore how tortured this analogy is).

==Trivia==
The name Votann is pretty obviously derived from Wotan, the German name for the god most famously known as Odin (remember that Germans pronounce W's as V's). Presumably this is a reference to his role as a god of runes and wisdom.

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[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]]
[[Category:Dwarves]]
[[Category:Squats]]
[[Category:Under Development]]

Standard Template Construct

2022-04-22T23:16:14Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* Revelations from recent STC recoveries */

[[File:STC rogue trader.jpg|thumb|400px]]
{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]
* All of [[House Van Saar]]’s tech. Though they have to pretend they’re just sitting on a hoard of archeotech to avoid being discovered and targeted by the Imperium or Mechanicus.

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]] as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and [[Votann|Ancestor Cores]] when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

Standard Template Construct

2022-04-22T23:15:42Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* Revelations from recent STC recoveries */

[[File:STC rogue trader.jpg|thumb|400px]]
{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]
* All of [[House Van Saar]]’s tech. Though they have to pretend they’re just sitting on a hoard of archeotech to avoid being discovered and targeted by the Imperium or Mechanicus.

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]] as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and [[Votann Ancestor Cores]] when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

Standard Template Construct

2022-04-22T17:47:24Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* Revelations from recent STC recoveries */

[[File:STC rogue trader.jpg|thumb|400px]]
{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]
* All of [[House Van Saar]]’s tech. Though they have to pretend they’re just sitting on a hoard of archeotech to avoid being discovered and targeted by the Imperium or Mechanicus.

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]] as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and Ancestor Cores when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

Standard Template Construct

2022-04-22T16:26:12Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* Revelations from recent STC recoveries */

[[File:STC rogue trader.jpg|thumb|400px]]
{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]
* All of [[House Van Saar]]’s tech. Though they have to pretend they’re just sitting on a hoard of archeotech to avoid being discovered and targeted by the Imperium or Mechanicus.

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]]as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and Ancestor Cores when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

Standard Template Construct

2022-04-22T16:24:41Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* Revelations from recent STC recoveries */

[[File:STC rogue trader.jpg|thumb|400px]]
{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]
* All of [[House Van Saar]]’s tech. Though they have to pretend they’re just sitting on a hoard of archeotech to avoid being discovered and targeted by the Imperium or Mechanicus.

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]]as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and Ancestor Machines when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

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{{topquote|Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.|Pablo Picasso}}

A long long time ago, the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|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 [[Dark Eldar|overindulgent]] [[Eldar|jackholes]], gun-toting [[Orks|walking foot-fungus infections]], and [[Necron|emo robots]] with <strike>plasma</strike> [[gauss]] weapons. A shame he didn't keep any of this nifty tool in his pocket or something just in case. A little foresight would've been appreciated, m'lord.

"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 of Technology|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 (officially) 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 <s>they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings</s> any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a [[Void Dragon|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]]. Basically, Golden Age humanity was so damn advanced that dicking with its tech without understanding it is insanely dangerous. Imagine if we lost nearly all of our scientific and technological knowledge to the point your average Joe didn't know how to use a cell phone. Now, he finds a factory and tries to use it. You can imagine what would happen. Even worse, this could cripple the factory from being used by people who come along who actually ''do'' know how to use it. AdMech paranoia about people fucking with new technology makes a little more sense now, doesn't it?

<s>But of course, this being 40k, where status quo is god, the damn things are lost forever.</s> GW has finally gotten around to moving the timeline along, and while there has yet to be recent STC recovery, possibility is out there now. Though, the Emperor probably knows full-well that the Ark Mechanicus ships are STCs because he's the motherfucking Emperor. Who is smart enough to understand telling the Mechanicus something the cogboys would hear as "right there is all the knowledge and power you need to conquer humanity and turn everyone into slaves or servitors, have fun". Even more so that a complete STC is meant to be used to build up to Golden Age standards from absolute scratch if necessary. Which means one of them would completely negate the power of the Mechanicus and its place in the Imperium. Unless it's controlled by the Mechanicus, in which case it would be abused to control the Imperium and force the Machine Cult on everyone. Which is funny because the Machine Cult strongly resembles Christianity: Omnissiach = Jesus (extra irony that Emps either ''is'' Jesus or a thirteenth disciple), Machine God = God (and fits perfectly with God as the creator of the Cosmic Machine that is the universe). See Mechanism for real life Machine Cult like stuff.

On the bright side, there would also be plenty of cogboys who believe in upholding humanity over political power or conquest. Especially after ten thousand years of "humanity first and always" indoctrination added to normal Machine Cult lore, which they didn't have until the Emperor came along. On top of ''that'' the Emperor is the Omnissiah <s>(though, probably not all Tech-Priest believe this).</s> {{BLAM|''*BLAM* 01010100 01100101 01100011 01101000 00101101 01001000 01100101 01110010 01100101 01110011 01111001! ''}}So, we'd have a techno civil war (probably destroying the STCs anyway) and the Imperium would be greatly reduced in size (still several times larger than everyone but the Orks combined) and advanced enough to make the height of the Great Crusade look primitive but still nothing compared to the Golden Age and no more STCs. Yay. At least then the AdMech might know enough and have enough tools to get back to performing science and experimenting in safe ways with enough data to get a sort of general idea for the direction of STC technology. They'd puzzle the truth of things out eventually so the humanity and the Imperium would be better off anyway. Especially now with the Eldar alliance as maybe they'd see keeping at least one STC intact and in the hands of Guilliman as a good thing worth fighting for in order to ensure the destruction of everyone but the Imperium. Hey, they know they can at least trust Guilliman to keep his word and prevent their extermination but everyone else would gladly kill them.

== 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 (What would happen if you found a complete working one I wonder......).

Among the recent discoveries from recovered STCs:
* The Land Crawler all-terrain soil cultivator vehicle (if by "recent" you mean "late Great Crusade era")
* An artificial sweetener that doesn't have an aftertaste like foot sweat
* The Castigator-class [[Titan (Warhammer 40,000)|Titan]] ([[Grimdark|whose STC turned daemonic]], sidenote however that some Knight houses still possess some schematics but keep them close to their hearts...because using them to fuck the enemies of Man is beyond their severely limited comprehension. Or the designs will turn on you and murder everyone you love...)
* Cultural archives badly lost over the years but basically going back to before M0
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-oBEGF7uwE 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 [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|Ibram Gaunt]] {{BLAM|BLAMMING}} said STC.
* A simple (durable, cheap, [[monowire|mono-molecular]]) combat knife. Two IMPERIAL GUARDSMEN (!) found it and were rewarded with a planet each!
* [[Leman Russ Punisher]] and [[Leman Russ Eradicator|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?
* [[Imperial Knight]]s
* [[Crassus Armored Assault Transport|Praetor missile launcher]]
* [[Nephilim Jetfighter]]'s engine
* [[Space Marine Hunter|Hunter]]
* [[Immolator]]
* [[Astraeus Super-Heavy Tank]]
* [[Goliath Truck]]

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 <strike>billions</strike> <strike>trillions</strike> <strike>quadrillions</strike> 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...<s>yeah, right.</s> [[Asdrubael Vect|that did happen]] before this incident, though.

Of course, this would all be doomed to fail once the [[Death Guard]], [[The Purge|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 plot development would be necessary, something that GW will avoid at all costs.

As a side note, Magos Delphan Gruss is an explorator who is convinced from studying STC legends that there exists an artefact called the Omnicopaeia. Rumoured to be either a data storage device containing either every STC invented or every STC related to psychic powers, it was rumoured to be on the Daemon World known as Hell's Teeth in 998.M41 with billions of Skitarii mobilized for a recovery operation.

With the reintroduction of the [[Squats]]as Leagues of Votann, it’s revealed that the Votann that play a central part in their culture are basically massive versions of the STC AI cores in the Ark Mechanicus ships that they call [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=warhammer-40,000&utm_content=blpregallery230422&fbclid=IwAR3W7xpTaRA3WxzWNc0-rbNDz7e5K5goZy56Md1t_jcCR_HjwkaObCsAqdQ Votann] in front of outsiders and Ancestor Machines when among only their own kind.

== Baron von EvilSatan's AdMech/STC copypasta ==
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 shithole 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 fucked. 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 shit, nearly all of them never come back. The sheer number of rogue war machine running around in there is sufficient to rape 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 fucked with so that instead of a Lasgun power cell it's a fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day shit. 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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucked everything up and the Heresy double-fucked 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 fucking 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-fucking-where near it. Where the fuck 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 shit decision, every single sacrifice, every single death, every single man woman and child suffering a shit 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.

Written by Baron von EvilSatan

== The Ark Mechanicus (SPOILERS FOR PRIEST OF MARS) ==
''You are Ark Mechanicus. You are Speranza. You are the bringer of hope in this hopeless age.''

{{Spoilers}}

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 <strike>crippled</strike> fatally damaged an [[Eldar]] cruiser in [[awesome|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 Eldar|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. [[awesome|IT FUCKING TELEPORTED AN ENEMY SHIP THROUGH TIME SO IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO TURN AND FIRE AGAIN]].

Another conclusion that some reading this scene have come up with is that the black holes the Speranza fires also mess with time themselves, and that the end result shifts the target back in time a few nanoseconds, forcing two iterations to exist at the same place and time, destroying both. This thing can basically telefrag enemies, like some kind of continent sized Doomguy. Regardless of whether this explanation or the one above are correct, both are badass.

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'' [[Powergamer| 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 [[lasgun|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 that uses quantum-whatever to preemptively neutralize your evolutionary countermeasures! 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, like it was in the Golden Age Of Technology.

(Provided the Necrons, Orks or Chaos/Dark Mechanicum don't produce their own variants. Talk about a Grimdark Arms-Race!) If the enemies haven’t advanced for tens of millions of years, they’re not going to. The Necrons don't have to, because they literally have 60 million years on mankind (albeit those who stayed awake all that time went a little nuts). Sixty million years and still primitive compared to peak Dark Age humanity. Man we’re fucked up seeing as our cool tech are almost all doomsday devices.

The best part, though, is that we now can gleefully point out how ridiculously primitive the Eldar are. Remember: the Dark Eldar maintained the technology of the height of the Eldar empire, so they haven't regressed technologically. They're also insanely primitive compared to Dark Age humanity. So, the Eldar probably know that (not having lost history, probably) and it would explain their snobbery. They're fucking jealous and intimidated because they ''know'' how scary, stupidly, ''utterly'' '''beautifully''' '''''overpowered''''' humanity can really be. To add insult to injury, when Eldar fight even mere Imperial Guard, they suffer heavy casualties even if they win (and they sometimes lose to the Guard, let alone Astartes). Heck, Vect’s plan to get rid of his rivals by instigating an Imperial invasion of Commorragh nearly backfired when just a few elements of like two Chapters laid waste to the city.

Eh, that last part about the Eldar being 'primitive' in comparison to Dark Age Humanity is debatable. It's important to keep in mind that while Dark Age humans had a lot of really awesome shit kicking around, ''a lot of them fucking died when those same machines rebelled against them'' (noting the machines went nuts or were corrupted does not argue against the Eldar being less advanced). In the same book that the Ark Mechanicus one-shots the Eldar cruiser, it only does so because it ''can'', not because it's beholden to the Tech-Priest that's talking to it, or has some particular fondness for humanity. This motherfucker is TRUE NEUTRAL. It even tells the tech-priest that it doesn't care if it gets destroyed, because it will somehow continue even without its physical container. This machine does not give a SINGLE, ''SOLITARY'' FUCK about you. This is a rogue AI with the capability of generating pinpoint time-travelling singularities on a whim, with no sympathies or attachments to anything. And it doesn't go around blowing everything up because, well, it just doesn't and don't ask it why it doesn't. It's quite possible that the Eldar fully had the capability of creating ships with the same capabilities, but chose not to, because frankly it sounds like a really dumb fucking idea. Also keep in mind that the Fall of the Eldar wasn't caused by their technology, but by their culture becoming overly decadent and depraved. Eldar tech had progressed to a point of virtual stagnation, because what do you really need to invent when you've satisfied every need for your society? In the fluff, the Eldar had an interstellar empire around the same time humanity was figuring out agriculture, and that empire lasted until the Fall in ~M29. Meanwhile, humanity had ''already'' destroyed their own interstellar empires by around M25 (well, no, they didn't, Chaos, aliens, and the Eldar's fuckup destroyed said empire/federation, not human mistakes). Which kind of goes a long way in justifying the Eldar's views that humanity is a child race of reckless idiots (because the Eldar blame humanity for the consequences of the eldar's mistakes). Neither side really wins, though, since while humanity followed the rule of cool and had a brief but more kickass empire than the Eldar, Eldar tech stagnated and their empire survived long enough to devolve into orgy cults so fucked up they created an evil god. Again, no real winners here.
[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]][[Category:Imperial]][[Category:Adeptus Mechanicus]]

Squat

2022-04-22T16:13:44Z

2607:FB90:6E61:915E:F404:F2EB:9F08:7639: /* 2022: Squats are back on the menu */

{{Oldschool}}
[[File:DSC02968.jpg|450px|right|thumb|A space dorf. [[Dwarf Fortress|Lives like one. Dies like one.]]]]

{{Topquote|THE SQUATS LIVE! <nowiki>*</nowiki>'''STOMP! STOMP!'''<nowiki>*</nowiki> SQUATS LIVE! <nowiki>*</nowiki>'''STOMP! STOMP!'''<nowiki>*</nowiki>|The Motto that all Squat players react with after seeing the <s>[[Kharadron Overlords|Kharadron Overlords]]</s> <s>Squats</s> [[Leagues of Votann]] in <s>[[Age of Sigmar]]</s> <s>[[Necromunda]]</s> [[Warhammer 40,000|mainline 40k]]}}

{{Topquote|I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole. Diggy, diggy hole, diggy, diggy hole|an ancient Terran song created by humans who were called The Yogscast in M3.}}

{{Topquote| ROCK. AND. STOOOOOONE!|Squat battlecry belonging to the brotherhood known as [[Deep Rock Galactic]].}}

You can't spell Imperial without Imp. If you spell them both correctly.

A '''Squat''' is a space [[dwarf|Dorf]] (''Homo sapiens rotundus''). They <s>used to exist</s> have returned to [[Warhammer 40,000]] (THEY’RE FUCKING BACK BABY!) (with a planned Codex mentioned in the ''Second Edition'' Codex: Imperial Guard); in fluff, their worlds supplemented the capabilities of [[Forge World]]s, and were independent of the technology-worship of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]]. As such, they also retained their sovereignty. For some reason, their aesthetic also included a heavy dose of 1970's-80's American "outlaw" biker-club subculture. We suppose this is because, as we all know, GW loves to mish and mash, but above all, because it is [[Awesome|muhfuggin badass]].

"Squat" is also sometimes used as a verb by fans of Warhammer 40k. This refers to the removal of the Squats from both the game and the [[fluff]] behind it; in particular, some people believe that other armies will be "squatted" from 40k, which is to say, their model line will be removed and they will no longer be [[Zoats|playable]] in 40k. There have been cries of "they're getting squatted!" for basically every army that wasn't updated within two years, including, but not limited to, [[Dark Eldar]], [[Necrons]], [[Sisters of Battle]], and [[Black Templars]] (we're also pretty confident that if [[Robin Cruddace| a Certain Imperial Guard player]] had the power to he would squat the [[Tyranid|Space bugs]] in an instant, he certainly tried during 6th Edition - and now he's back again in 8th Ed ''Theres also rumors of this in 9th edition with talk of Tyranids attempting to Siege Terra with mentions of them being close to the solar system in the latest psychic awakening!'' ) So far, this has mostly been proven false; both Dark Eldar and Necrons got new codices, and Sisters were released in plastic in 2019. Meanwhile, the Black Templars have been rolled up into the Space Marines, but, importantly, ''they still exist.'' Of the Chapters included, Templars are easily the most divergent, and although some of the fluff has been retconned, it was usually in a fairly logical way (how do you get around if you hate [[Astropath]]s and [[Navigator]]s, anyway?). As such, all those whining "they're getting squatted!" are pretty silly, and you're probably hearing them on [[Warseer]].

HOWEVER...

In Age of Sigmar, the entire [[Tomb Kings]] faction was squatted, followed by the [[Bretonnia]] faction, with the entire model ranges being moved to the "Last Chance to Buy" section. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth. ......And then GW added points for them in the GHB 2019 release, so you can now at least play them without your opponent grumbling too loudly. As of mid-2019, the [[High Elves (Warhammer)|High Elves]] also got the axe, next, [[Age_of_Sigmar/Tactics/Old/Death/Legions_of_Nagash|Legions of Nagash]], [[Chaos Dwarfs]], all replaced by their AoS versions.

Over in 40k, [[Eldar Corsairs]] and [[Death Korps of Krieg]] got a similar treatment during the transition to 8th Edition, with their entire model line going out of production and most of their army list getting killed off with it.
Check [[Warhammer Legends]] for some salvage.

BUT...

The [[Death Korps of Krieg]] received new and improved, plastic models with the release of Kill Team Octarius. That, combined with the slew of <s>event exclusive</s> Catachan characters, we could be seeing a complete refresh of the older guard ranges. But one thing's for sure: Krieg ain't getting Squatted.

'''[https://youtu.be/FBFgZzYEr-8 HOLY MOTHER OF FUCK THEY'RE ACTUALLY BACK!]'''

==History==
[[Image:Squats.jpg|thumb|A page from the Tome of <s>[[Skub]]</s> [[Awesome]]]]
The [[Squats]] (Homo sapiens rotundus) were mentioned in the original "[[Warhammer_40,000:_Rogue_Trader|Rogue Trader]]" 1987 book and later received their full Army List in the articles published in [[White Dwarf]] number 111 in February 1989. The Army List was later collected with other articles in the softback bound "Compendium" (also known as "Red Book" or "Red Compendium") which was released in Summer/Fall of that same year (and actually were the last item of the Compendium, the original article having been published on WD mere months before). The army list was centered around the Warlord and its retinue which could be equipped either with ceremonial mesh or [[Carapace Armor|carapace armour]] or with Terminator-grade Exo-armour (which made the unit virtually unstoppable by anything save Daemons, Terminators, Eldar Avatar or Exarchs and the heaviest of weapons), it could field ten trooper squads (clan warriors) which could select ad-libitum heavy weapons paying a very limited cost for them and Engineers' Guild bikes (complete with some vaguely Hell's Angels style imagery in the First Edition book), sidecars and trikes which provided hit and run power due to swivel mounted heavy weaponry. Vehicles and Robots were also available at premium points cost (less than other human armies paid) due to the recognized technical savviness of the Squats, Adeptus Mechanicus envoys and Living Ancestor (venerable Squats who were literally millennia old) added more flavour to the troop choice.

===Squats in Epic===
[[Image:SquatArmy.jpg|thumb|right|They built giant guns to compensate for not having giant guns. Note also the [[Mole Mortar Team|Moles]] and Hellbore that GW forgot about around the same time.]]
[[Image:SquatCyclops.jpg|thumb|right|The Squats laugh at your pathetic Baneblade and obvious mediocrity in the trouser department.]]

While in 40K the Squats were roughly half an army, in [[Epic]] they really worked. As well as the biker companies you suddenly had access to an enormous supply of hardware with which the Squats would punish anyone who said they were compensating for something. These included [[Goliath Mega-Cannon|giant tracked mortars,]] [[Land Train|Land Trains,]] and massive tracked crawlers with Void Shields that were basically the Squat version of Titans; one, the [[Cyclops War Machine|Cyclops,]] was armed with what the modern fluff calls a Lance and could burn through multiple shields before hitting the target. Which is a little odd, because current fluff explains that the whole point of a ship's weapons batteries is to drop enemy shields so they can be finished off with lances (which are supposed to suck against void shields). Then again, the squats have always been more advanced. They had [[Overlord Armoured Airship|ironclad airships,]] [[Iron Eagle Gyrocopter|helicopters]] back when most Epic armies had no aircraft at all, and generally ruled.

===Chaos Squats===
{{Heresy}}
Think that Squats had it bad? Well, these guys are pretty much the Squats ''of'' the Squats. Just as Fantasy had its [[Chaos Dwarfs]], so too did Squats have their Chaotically-inclined counterparts (alas, without hats). While there were no real rules for them on the tabletop, miniatures were released, because this was still when Citadel put out miniatures for things that didn't necessarily have gaming rules. They were allied to [[Chaos Space Marines]] and maintained their equipment, including building Titans and [[Daemon Engine|Daemon Engines]], in a role later taken over by the [[Dark Mechanicus]]. Some Squats fell to chaos during the Horus Heresy and fought for Horus. They were banished to the Eye of Terror along with the Traitor Legions when Horus was defeated. Also, Squats who fall to Chaos are willing to fight as mercenaries for Orks and Eldar... for some reason. Congratulations, you've just read everything there is to know about Chaos Squats that was ever written.

===When suddenly...===
They were eaten by [[Tyranid]]s. It is popularly believed that [[Games Workshop]] sends out teams to assassinate, kidnap, or otherwise inconvenience anyone who dares mention them. One possibility is that [[Dwarf Fortress|the Squat nobles demanded that some impossible-to-acquire item be put in each of their rooms, and thus locked up the entire working class of Squats, and the whole race starved.]] Another theory is that [[Creed]] is [[Just as planned|using his tactical genius to hide them until the final showdown with Chaos.]] It's kinda likely that, what with their "We haz teknologeez!", being Dwarves, drinking, not being assholes, and generally not being depressing, [[Games Workshop]] decided they weren't [[grimdark]] enuff, and subsequently fed them to the Tyranids (who exist to eat Games Workshop's mistakes, obviously), and at the same time branding the mention of <censored for heresy> as [[heresy]]. Heresy - the perfect excuse to [[retcon]]!

Squats are now /tg/'s version of the Candleja [[meme]] I'll end that right there. Anyway since mentioning them gets [[Inquisition|GW to send death squads after you]] the two memes cancel one another out.

==== A rare case of GW being completely honest ====
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060129002420/http://forums.specialist-games.com/epic/forum_b/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=2532&whichpage=3 This] is from 2004, back when honesty was A Thing, it seems:

''I know I shouldn't get drawn on this... but... can't... resist''

''Seriously, a couple of points just so you can have an informed debate based on the real reasons that Squats are no longer available. Be warned, it is going to be hard reading for people that like the Squat background.''

''First of all, Squats were *not* dropped because they were not selling well. There were then, and are now, plenty of other figure ranges that sell in the sort of % quantities that the Squats pulled down, especially when you look across all of the ranges produced by GW rather than just those for 40K.''

''No, the reason that the Squats were dropped was because the creatives in the Studio (people like me, Rick, Andy C, Gav etc) felt that we had failed to do the Dwarf 'archetype' justice in its 40K incarnation. From the name of the race (Squats - what *were* we thinking?!?!) through to the short bikers motif, we had managed to turn what was a proud and noble race in Warhammer and the other literary forms where the archetype exists, into a joke race in 40K. We only fully realized what we had done when we were working on the 2nd edition of 40K. Try as we might, we just couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the Squats. The mistake we made then (deeply regretted since) was to leave them in the background and the 'get you by' army list book that appeared. With hindsight, we should have dropped the Squats back then, and saved ourselves a lot of grief later on.''

''Anyway, the Squats made it into 2nd edition, and since we were doing army books for each of the races, we started to try and figure out what to do with them. Unfortunately we just couldn't figure out a way to update them and get them to work that we felt was good enough. The 'art' of working on an army as a designer is to find the thing that you think is cool and exciting about an army, and work it up into a strong theme. This 'muse' didn't strike any of us, and so, rather than bring out a second-rate product simply re-hashing the old background, we kept doing other army books instead, with stuff we did feel inspired by.''

''Now, while this was all going on for 40K, we were actually doing some rather good stuff for the Squats in Epic. On this scale there was a natural tendency to focus on the big 'hand-made' war machines the Squat artisans produced, and this created an army with a feel that was very different to the biker hordes in 40K. However, this tended to reinforce the problems we saw in the Squat background rather than alleviate them, underlining what we *should* have done with the Squats in 40K.''

''In the end (and it took years to really get to the roots of the problem) this led to a realisation that we were going to have to drop the Squats in their 'Squat' form from the 40K background. There was little point having a major race that we weren't willing to make an army book for, and their inclusion in the background meant that people kept asking us when we'd do a Squat Codex. Instead we decided that we'd write the Squats out of the background by saying that their [[Squat Homeworlds|Homeworlds]] had been devoured by a Tyranid Hivefleet. This would give us the option in the future to return to making a race based on the Squat archetype for 40K. This race was given the name of Demiurg, and a certain amount of preliminary work was done to get a 'feel' for what the race would be like. At present the only hint of the Demiurg in 40K is the Demiurg spaceship for BFG. However, we do have this race 'in our back pocket' as a possible new race for 40K, or an interesting character model in Inquisitor, or whatever. So far the Demiurg have lost out to other projects, and it may be that their time never actually comes, as they will have to win through on their merits, not simply because we once made some Squat models in the past. At present, I have to say that it is more likely that they *don't* make the cut than do, as there is a certain prejudice these days to simply taking races from Warhammer and cross them over to 40K like we did in the early days, so it may be that the Squats/Demiurg end up remaining a footnote in the history of the 40K galaxy. Only time will tell...''

''I'll finish off by saying that whatever we decide to do 'officially', there is nothing stopping players with Squat armies from using them, either in Epic or 40k for that matter. There is no GW 'rule' against using old Citadel Miniatures, as long as you use them with existing army lists and in a way that won't cause confusion for other players. I recommend taking a positive stand by saying "Have you seen these cool old models? They're called the Squats and GW used to make them back in the late eighties/early nineties. I love 'em, so I count them as Imperial Guard and use them with the current rules..." Put like this I can't imagine that anyone would stop you from using your army.''

''Best regards,''

''Jervis Johnson''<br>''Head Fanatic ''

==== Some Context ====
[[File:Warhammer 40k squats DRW40k 04 by DaRealWurld40k.jpg|thumb|right|SILENCE, HERETIC! There is no tiny, little bearded man there! Nope! No Squats or tiny little bearded man here at all!]]

Note that all of the Squat material from the Rogue Trader era was written by [[Bryan Ansell|Bryan]], [[Nigel Stillman|Nigel]], and [[Graeme Davis]]. [[Jervis Johnson|Jervis]], [[Rick Priestley|Rick]], [[Andy Chambers|Andy]], et. al. never wrote anything new for the Squats in Warhammer 40,000. So their lack of enthusiasms wasn't because the fluff was objectively ''bad'' - it just wasn't ''theirs''.

The Squats Codex was explicitly mentioned in Codex Imperial Guard (1995), and implicitly mentioned from the first codex ever (Codex Space Wolves, 1993) and every Imperial codex up to and including Codex Angels of Death (1996), plus Codex Eldar (1994). The only Imperial codexes which did not mention Codex Squats were Codex Sisters of Battle and Codex Assassins - both from 1997, the last year of 2nd Edition and the point at which 3rd Edition would already have been well into development. So the decision to eliminate the Squats didn't actually happen until they had already decided to move to a whole new edition.

As this was the transition to the infamous Black Period of total and constant [[Grimdark]], perhaps it's for the best that the writers of the day didn't like them (or simply had no idea where to go so decided to nip it in the bud while fluff what [[TVTropes]] would term Early Installment Weirdness was being sorted out), so they didn't feel obligated to [[C.S. Goto|fuck them over in suspiciously extreme detail or fluffrape them into total irrelevance]].

Also, Jervis's comment on the Specialist Games forum is actually the only place where it says that the Squats were eaten by Tyranids - in all official sources, they simply stopped mentioning them. But in fact, Jervis and others did continue to mention them after they were removed, in various semi-official places, such as the Citadel Journal (where he simply said that the [[Squat Homeworlds]] were "taken over" by the Imperium).

Following Jervis's statement on the Specialist Games forum, Games Workshop began auto-banning anyone who even mentioned Squats on their forums. But not long after that they closed all of their forums anyway.

==== Then what ever happened to the Demiurg? ====
Essentially? Nothing. They were given all of two mentions in recent memory: first as a footnote on a list of [[Tau]] auxiliaries, then as a small enclave of asteroid miners that [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka]] killed by accident while fighting some Bad Moonz. Their latest appearance is in the Battlefleet Gothic: Armada video games, where two Demiurg vessels appear as auxiliaries to the Tau fleet. While how canon the games are is of some dispute: Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II, where they also appear, takes place during the "Gathering Storm". So presumably them (or at least some factions/mercenaries) working with the Tau is their 'official' canon as of right now.

In fact, the Demiurg are mentioned as getting along with the Squats, trading Energy Drills to them. This is most likely due to the Squats being not-quite part of the Imperium and sharing similar stature and interest in mining.

====What Happened According to /tg/====
Space [[Boatmurdered]]. Attempts to thwart the Tyranids with "fuck the world" levers failed. Casualties.... Too many.

[[Squat Crusade: The Musical|Or are trying to rebuild]]

== Squats continue to rear their [[Neckbeard|bearded]] heads ==
Games Workshop continues to show us that somewhere and somehow, a chained-up, barely-fed fluff-custodian is employed at the GW headquarters. He apparently gets loose every so often, and as evidence we present the tidbit he snuck in to the 6th Edition Rulebook.

Apparently, on page 405, the rulebook mentions Squats as a race of [[abhuman]]s, akin to Ogryn or Ratlings.

[http://i.imgur.com/WfOL7.jpg The Squat Reference]

Fanmade armylists for the Squats exists, the one most played and best playtested hosted over at 40konline.com, on their "Lost and Damned"-board.

They also have their own Facebook group, but searching for "squat" literally fills your screen with ass. [[Just As Planned|Beware]].

In the Seventh Edition rulebook, Squats are also mentioned in a list of known abhumans (along with a bunch of feline thingies). They're not even in the list of the extinct and dying out ones!!!

This trend was continued in the Eighth Edition corebook (page 279) and thus it seems that the idea of Squats being extinct may have been ''greatly'' exaggerated. Cue hopes of Squats making a triumphant return.

An entire video game has been made about the squats! Sure the Tyranids look a little weird but they'll still eat you like a Ratling at a buffet. https://www.deeprockgalactic.com/ Play now and die horribly while trying to mine gold on some Emperor forsaken planet.

==2022: Squats are back on the menu==
[[File:We_Back_Motherfuckers!.jpg|300px|right|thumb|Y'all bitches miss me yet?]]
{{topquote|What? You thought we were joking?|Confirmation trailer}}
{{topquote|HOLY SHIT THEY ARE ACTUALLY BACK!|Everybody's reaction when they saw the news}}
{{topquote|THEY HAVE RETURNED THE GREAT BEARDED SPESS DWORFZ RETURN!|Every Squat Player's reaction when they saw the news}}
{{topquote|So uhhhh... what happens now?|Duncan upon breaking the clock like a wazzock}}
{{topquote|/TG/ GETS SHIT DONE!!|Some dipshit Australian Necron main}}

It has been done.

Through the act of some unseen, indescribably powerful force, it has finally been done.

The [[Meme]] was finally broken. The Squats were....unsquatted....in Necromunda only, but still. We did the unthinkable, we brought a race that has been decommissioned for over 20 goddamned years back into tabletop gaming. Mother of Christ' titties [[Lulz|we actually got back Spess Dorfs before Plastic Sisters.]]

The first new Squat in decades was called Grendl Grendlsen. His lore mentioned that his mercenary unit was wiped out, leading him to become a bounty hunter in the underhive. Roughly a year after his release ''another'' new Squat model was announced, an ammo-jack hanger-on named Ragnir Gunnstein.

So far they are only playable for Necromunda, with them serving a variety of roles. But the chances of having an actual Squat Codex for 8th Edition is still iffy, with the Squats being confined to specialist games being most likely. But so far we are quite content with them returning. Shit man, GeeDubs have seriously been pulling the moves lately.

And so, finally, after 20 years of waiting...

'''SQUATS LIVE'''

There's also a persistent rumour that they'll come back as a <strike>Astra Militarum</strike> <strike>Imperial Guard</strike> Endless horde of bodies 'theme' alongside plastic [[Attilan Rough Riders]], [[Death Korps of Krieg]] and [[Tallarn Desert Raiders]]. Yeah right. Additionally, some very easy to miss fluff in the rear of the core Rulebook for 8th Edition actually refers to Squats as a species of abhuman.

'''AND IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH:'''

Following the release of the final book Psychic Awakening: Pariah some eagle-eyed folks noted a plot hook in it involving an Adeptus Mechanicus ship in the periphery of the Galactic Core getting their ship caught in a weaponized gravitational field. As the person making the vox transmission tries to make sense of what's going on he notices the gravitational field is emanating from a nearby ship bearing the markings of what's supposed to be an extinct race "the Squa...."
[[File:Leak Squats.png|275px|thumb|right|Leak confirming that Squats are in the works.]]

So it looks like there is at least one ship's worth of the stunty abhumans out there alive and kicking and they are pissed! Whether this is to tease a full-blown Squat army reveal remains to be seen.

'''WAIT A SEC!'''

With the release of ''plastic'' [[Death Korps of Krieg|Kriegers]] and the Forgeworld Squats now in fond memory, it's looking to be good news for our bearded booze boys. Combine that with the [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mUvOQq5rRo leaked release schedule], well, we might be getting ourselves even more Squats!

Correction: [https://youtu.be/9x-iR9CTzRI| shit's confirmed officially] <s>could also be a prank since it's April 1st</s>
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBFgZzYEr-8 It's not.] They have been reintroduced as the [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/02/what-april-fools-the-41st-millenniums-next-faction-is-real-heres-a-model-to-prove-it/ Leagues of Votann] with a [https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/04/22/the-leagues-of-votann-are-coming-but-what-actually-is-a-votann/ better preservation] of DAOT Humanity’s technology and an uneasy relationship with the Imperium of Man and their superstitious cousins (with the Mechanicus likely considering some of the stunties’ tech to be heretekal) but fight alongside them due to both having more pressing concerns from mutual enemies seeking to kill them both. [[Ynnari|That logic sounds kinda familiar…]]

Deleted leaks (that kinda hold up) and [https://spikeybits.com/2021/10/rumors-40k-squats-finding-their-way-back.html Rumors] from Bolter and Chainsword suggest that we'll be getting something similar to what they did for the Sisters: a limited-run box with an HQ, troops and an elite choice in <strike>Exo</strike>Egg-armor, plus the codex. The only news on a release date so far is "in a few months", so before the Fall, at least. [[Living Ancestor|Veterans who remember the OG Epic models]] and [[Neckbeard|beardlings]] alike should appreciate the fact that the League is getting a codex before [[Daemons of Chaos|some]] [[World Eaters|other]] [[Imperial Guard|guys]] even got a release date

==Alternatives==
[[Mantic Games]] make a range of models called [[Forge Fathers]] which are space-dwarfs for their sci-fi game [[Warpath]], so if you want a Squat army you can have one! They're in 28mm so they could be used for 40K (use the Space Marine list and make up some appropriate house rules). As of now they have tanks, fully posable troopers and terminators too.

'''Hasslefree Miniatures''' make a range of models called "Grymm" which are dwarf space soldiers. They have close combat, light infantry, heavy infantry, specialists, and commander models. They even have a dwarf walker mech[http://www.hfminis.co.uk/shop?category=miniatures].

A Kickstarter worth your attention for models[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1693348960/metal-beards-tabletop-dwarf-army] for an army of armoured dwarfs is a good option. Though it may have ended by the time you read this.

'''Ramshackle Games''' also produces biker gang and Land Train proxies. [http://www.ramshacklegames.co.uk/newrel.html]

There's also the "Scrunt" by Olleys Armies Wargame Miniatures.

'''[[Wargames Atlantic]]''' have also recently (at the time of writing) released 'EinherJar' as apart of their Death Fields line who are essentially Nordic space dorfs that live on a high-gravity planet.

And now thanks to [[Age of Sigmar]] you got the [[Kharadron Overlords]], [[Awesome|they are steam-armoured flying pirate dwarfs]]! There is a running gag that states that the Kharadron Overlords are surviving Squats who had fled Warhammer 40,000 into Warhammer Age of Sigmar due to how 40k the Kharadron models look. Time to get the conversions up and running! We recommend one of the space marine codexs that can take flying transport or flyer heavy Tempestus so you can use all those sweet Æther ships. This is probably your best bet if you want to use your army at official games.

For playing Squats with the Horus Heresy books. The Imperial Militia and Cults army list will allow players to create a decent proxy. Buy a Force Commander, give him the Survivors of the Dark Age and Abhuman Helots Provenances of War. This allows you to use [[Rhino|Rhinos]] and the [[Land Raider Proteus]] as dedicated transports. For small amount of points you can upgrade the Rotor Cannons and Las-weapons of Grenadier and Platoon Command Cadre squads. Since both squads have access to Bolters and Grenade Launchers most players will take them instead.
Ogryns outside of the Solar Auxilia suck if you're not taking Power Weapons. Due to their low BS of two. Three Enginseer Auxilia Adepts and fully kitted out Servo-Automata with Phased Plasma-fusils or GLs are the superior and more fluffy Elite option.

== Gallery ==

<gallery>
File:Squat-ammo-jack-necromunda-4.jpg|Ragnir Gunnstein reporting for duty!
File:Spacedorfs.png|OH FUCK YES
File:Bikersquats.jpg|space dorf bikers B-B-BAD TO THE BONE (this was a whole thing)
File:Spacedorf2.png|Legally Badass
Image:Resin_Glory.jpg|The Squats make their triumphant return with a new resin model.
Image:Grymm_lmg.jpg|I'm surprised you dwarf nuts haven't found these Hasslefree minis yet lol. I don't like dwarfs much myself but I wouldn't mind fighting beside ''these'' guys.
Image:Grymm_Light_Infantry_Squad_(Bareheaded).jpg
Image:Grymm_Light_Infantry_Squad(helmeted).jpg
Image:Grymm_Heavy_Infantry_Squad_(Helmeted).jpg
Image:Grymm_admiral.jpg
Image:Grymm WALKER.jpg| "[[meme|METAL GEAR?!]]"
Image:Grymm_Light_Infantry_Platoon.jpg
image:Grymm_Heavy_Infantry_Platoon.jpg
Image:1207616355827.jpg|Welcome to the club, Sisters.
Image:Squats rally.jpg|Rally to m
Image:ripsquats.jpg
Image:squats_are_common.jpg|"Squats are common inhabitants in the Imperium..."
Image:Squat Codex.jpg|You may include troops but we won't.
File:Squats combat Cards citadel Cc spacewar 06 gorun.png|Militant-armored-cybernetic-warrior-space-midgets? Yep. They cover all the bases in the 41st millennium. (Or they used to...)
Image:The results.jpg|When the Squats were rediscovered, the Imperium's first reaction was to argue over who was to blame for losing them.
Image:Squat_Cyclops1024.jpg|[[Awesome|Squat Cyclops in all its glory]]
Image:GWquisition.jpg
Image:This never happened.jpg|If anyone asks, I didn't put this picture here. In fact, if anyone asks, deny this picture exi-
Image:Tmdyxxq7bm851.jpg|thumb|<s>POSSIBLE HINT OF SQUAT ARMY RETURN</s> <s>No, no, you see, they were going to say that ship belongs to squads of Primaris lieutenants!</s> {{BLAM}}{{BLAM}} Confirmed they are definitely back!
File:Alexey-kruglov-skwat.jpg |
File:Squat Soldier.jpg|A basic Leagues of Votann soldier, dressed in [[StarCraft|gear]] that would put a Space Marine to shame
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