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 casvalremdeikun wrote:

Eldenfirefly wrote:
I don't get this thread. Is there any particular reason why there shouldn't be female imperial knight pilots? There isn't any reason why a female can't pilot an imperial knight.

I find it great that we can have female IK pilots.

The initial fluff for the Imperial Knights, in their first codex, stated that only men could undergo the Ritual of Bonding. That has been changed. That is why this thread exists.

And then a giant warp storm tore a giant ass hole into regular space like 400 years ago and caused mayhem and havoc.

Maybe oh maybe things have changed?

So these things are piloted by a single human?
I thought there were crews inside, at least one person per weapon.
Also I remember from epic, that there was supposed to be a pilot for each limb and so on... at least for titans. Being operated more like a battleship than a battlesuit. Scale-wise, knights may be smaller than titans, but they are bigger than most tanks.

HMint wrote:
So these things are piloted by a single human?
I thought there were crews inside, at least one person per weapon.
Also I remember from epic, that there was supposed to be a pilot for each limb and so on... at least for titans. Being operated more like a battleship than a battlesuit. Scale-wise, knights may be smaller than titans, but they are bigger than most tanks.

That's Titan's even then the models we have are a bit small for Even titans to have the amount of crew they have in the Fluff. The models don't have a lot of space that's not already full of Gubbins and the like

And then a giant warp storm tore a giant ass hole into regular space like 400 years ago and caused mayhem and havoc.

Yep but also its been positively retconned as there are many historic female pilots, High Queens, nobles etc. All good from my point of view.

Karol wrote:
Comparing to a untrained person, and if she is peak training yes. But if you took an avarge male wall climbers, he would have a much stronger grip then her. No amount of training is going to let you ignore basic biology.

She isn't a climber. She is in calisthenics.
Also, as someone who knows average climbers, I can say "feth no, the average climber can't do what's being done in this video".
In general, she does stuff that my brother, who went to a professional circus/acrobatic school for 2 years, and love climbing, could only stand in awe of, even when he was at peak performance.
Sure, the best men in calisthenic certainly do better, I guess. But they aren't "average" by any mean.
No amount of wishful thinking is letting you ignore basic biology, including the basic biological fact that training makes you stronger.

 Sasquatch wrote:
Training does make a difference but not anywhere near as much as you would think.

I knew this couple a while back, He was a body builder (and was bloody huge!) and she had started weight training and the like about 2 years before this story takes place and was really showing results! (I think at the time she was contemplating moving into body building competitively but till then it was just something she'd enjoyed doing with her boyfriend.)

But anyways this day we'd all met at the pub and were just enjoying the evening when for a laugh his girlfriend had challenged me to an arm wrestle. Now I didn't fancy my chances because at 5 foot not a lot and with an excercise regime that involved the occasional set of stairs and lifting a few pints of a weekend! I really expected to be sent pinwheeling across the bloody room by the lady of amazonian stature sitting across the table from me! But thinking it would be a laugh at least, I put my arm on the table and was then plenty shocked when in the end I won.

Cool story bro.
But I just need to look at the video above to know that you and I both would be utterly incapable of reaching a fraction of what Maddelisk can do. Have you looked at it?
Maddelisk isn't a bodybuilder. She doesn't look at how large her muscle have become. She just look at what weight she can lift and what exercise she can do.

Isn't the whole Rite of Bonding more about subduing the psychic impressions left by the other knights in the Machine Spirit of the Knight?

It is more about indomitable will and being able to be accepted by the former pilot spirits than it is about physical, mental, or psychic stature?

Are there knights with pilots who would be offended by being usurped by a woman pilot? Sure, but if she is willful enough, she should be able to suppress those and find herself worthy being the new pilot.

If she were weak-willed and a coward, though, I doubt she would ever be able to best the Machine Spirit.

At least this argument is based more in areas where 40k clearly separates from reality. And it isn't genetics or strength or anything related to gender that does or does not make a knight pilot. Pure willpower and strength of spirit (ideals, values, etc.).

 Ginsu33 wrote:

Women infantry burn out faster than males, and they sustain more injuries. People don't grasp that the military is about CAPABILITY, not equality. You have INFANTRY drilled at what has been combat tested/proven requirements for physical endurance and said requirements push men to their limits, and people wonder why women can't, or more hilarious, think that women can do it.

I've linked reports/stats from field exercises with women and mixed units here in Dakka but no one cares because it doesn't suit their world view, even more recent the USMC tests proved that female marines in mixed male/female units performed worse than all male, and males without infantry training were more accurate with their weapons than females who had completed infantry training...

Nuff said.

Actually, there is something to be said, by the USMC:




Seems strange that they'd be actively trying to recruit women, possibly into active combat roles, after all you just posted...

Of course it makes little difference to this thread, seeing as we are discussing fantastic elements in a fantasy game about little toy soldiers. No military is ever going to build a forty foot tall humanoid robot. They are just way too impractical. If they did, what would the physical requirements be to pilot them anyways? The closest thing we have to compare it to for complexity would be a jet fighter and there are already female pilots that meet the rigorous standards for those. Furthermore, the places you actually see giant robots, female pilots aren't uncommon. Battletech has had a long history of ace female mechwarriors for example. The fact that a modern company trying to sell to as broad a market as possible would slip in that "only men can pilot knights is a big head scratcher. The fact that it was immediately missed/ignored by other writers and actively retconed in the new codex makes me think that the bias was from the writer of that codex and not something GW proper even really thought about. Hell, I only looked at this thread because I thought "is there actually a reason GW thinks there wouldn't be"? I kind of get the impression most of GW thought the exact same thing.

Listen, women warriors have existed in real life. Yes, they might be rare, so what? 40k is a fantasy game, so why doesn't giant robots make people bat an eye but women warriors as a fantastic element make people try to break out the science books? It's like trying to defend only men can be men can be SM due to testosterone levels, muscle mass, and other "science". Sorry, SM are made from magic space organs designed by psychojesus and only work on men because GW says so. Acceptable defenses are "it was the 80s", "they didn't think hulking women in heavy armor would sell", "they didn't think they could do a good enough job modeling them when SM proper came along", or "removing the restriction now would cause a massive backlash against GW". Honestly, trying to use "science" in a fantasy setting as to why girls shouldn't do X is pointless when some writer could easily add in a world where women were genetically engineered there to be better in every way than men, thousands of years ago for reasons. GW kind of already has that with the Escher gang.

Women warriors might not be your cup of tea but it's a fantasy setting, in your version you can pretend they don't even exist. On the other hand a female player might want to put down a badass female hero that represents her in the game because that's her fantasy. Mine might mean all my SM are painted with bright purple skin and sky blue hair, which the inquisition is good with because they wish they looked that cool. Ultimately the more people GW opens their setting up to, the better it is for business.

I'll be honest. I assumed the average knight was piloted by a like a group of Power Rangers. You can't have the Power Rangers without the Pink Ranger, so... yeah.

If you change the lore, and no one really cared what it was in the first place, does a fanboy still make a sound?

Still just plastic toys...

The current push to recruit females for combat roles in the US has more to do with the lack of good male candidates than it does with capability to carry a ruck. The fact that other countries field women in combat roles also has an effect. However, all told, the US needs warm bodies, willing candidates to fill needed roles on more than a thousand military installations worldwide. That’s why DARPA is funding research into powered exoskeletons to offset the weight of gear needed for the modern combat role. No one cares if you got tits if you can do the job, especially if the job is designed for anyone to do it.

SJ

Don't the Israelis have huge problems with their female recruits? Much higher drop out rates, and higher injury in same recruit groups. Plus mixed units seem to suffer a lot more wounded and dead then non mixed ones. I understand why Israel uses female soldiers, makes huge sense in their very specific situation. But I doubt all female line units would fly in any euro country. The political backlash from losing such a unit would be huge, that no politician would want to risk it.



I don't understand the Escher argument, they are stronger then escher man, who are gene defected because of a virus. But they are clearly inferior to any of the great houses, even the orlocks are better, and that says something about how "good" they are.

Karol wrote:
Don't the Israelis have huge problems with their female recruits? Much higher drop out rates, and higher injury in same recruit groups. Plus mixed units seem to suffer a lot more wounded and dead then non mixed ones. I understand why Israel uses female soldiers, makes huge sense in their very specific situation. But I doubt all female line units would fly in any euro country. The political backlash from losing such a unit would be huge, that no politician would want to risk it.

I don't understand the Escher argument, they are stronger then escher man, who are gene defected because of a virus. But they are clearly inferior to any of the great houses, even the orlocks are better, and that says something about how "good" they are.

Okay, so what does Israel's drop out rate for women in basic have to do with giant humanoid warmachines that no real military would actually build, from a fictional future? Tell me what the qualifications are for being a good giant robot pilot? So far the one thing I've seen people say is muscle and bone mass to absorb shock. Here is the thing with that, if you have a giant walking robot that can walk around in all terrain and not fall over reliably (walking isn't exactly a stable form of locomotion) and doesn't just sink into the ground, you will need great shock absorption on the pilot compartment. If you don't, then your pilot won't be happy when your 30 or 40ft tall knight falls over regardless of if they are a boy or a girl. Also there would probably a lot of motion sickness caused by the simple act of the thing walking and having to resist hits from lots of people shooting at something that is 30 to 40ft tall that they can all see. If damage from impacts is a major concern for a pilot, then you shouldn't build a giant robot. If you say that they have this technology for proper shock absorption you can also claim that because of a female pilot's genetic and cybernetic enhancements that she could stand at one end of a sports field and throw you through the goal at the other end. Also her nanotite colony can easily heal her of anything short of massive trauma. Are you seeing what I'm getting at? Giant robots are a particularly fantastic element of fiction, any pilot of one is fantastic by default.

I know that you are new to 40K, having read several of your posts in threads like the one about the GK being the worst. I don't know where you got your information about the Escher in Necromunda but I really suggest you study up on them. The big difference between gangs in Necromunda, mechanically, is in the equipment access and what bonuses they are more likely to get when they advance in a campaign. Escher are the physical equals of the other gangs with their stats. As far as background goes, their men are pretty much useless and yet they remain one of the major factions and aren't listed as one of the background houses that got wiped out at some point. If they were as weak as you claim then the other houses would have fallen on them and carved up their territory. Of course my actual argument was that any GW author could come along and write about a world were women for whatever reason were the physically superior sex, even better than normal imperial standards. The Escher are just an example of a group of women who are specifically the equals of the other factions in their setting which are predominantly represented by men, so they were worth mentioning along with this.

Now you can go on about how bad women are as soldiers are and cite things like military branches that have them, like the USMC, have different standards for women then men. This has nothing to do with the topic though. The first codex said no to female knights, it was completely ignored by GW staff, and the new codex retconed them so female knights are a thing.

As an aside, I mentioned my last roommate is a female firefighter. It is a very physically demanding job that has the exact same requirements for women as it does men, which my roommate passed with flying colors (https://www.unitedwomenfirefighters.org/faqs). If you don't think there are women who can be the physical equals of men then your sadly mistaken.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Its probably a thread that should be in the background forum actually.

Its now a reality that Knight pilots are both male and female same as in most sci-fi games with Mecha or equivalent.

Agreed, moving to 40k Background.

Skaorn wrote:
As an aside, I mentioned my last roommate is a female firefighter. It is a very physically demanding job that has the exact same requirements for women as it does men, which my roommate passed with flying colors (https://www.unitedwomenfirefighters.org/faqs). If you don't think there are women who can be the physical equals of men then your sadly mistaken.

I have a problem with statements like that, because if the male requirements are too low then there is no point to what you just said.
Second, a lot of people get hung up on the idea that the Military or people like I, think women cannot be as physically strong as men, and that misses the point.

If you take 1 male, and 1 female, both at equal capabilities, and have them as infantry, the result will be 100% that the female body will burn out long before the male body does. This is why women can be strong enough to actually enter special forces training but can never actually pass, this is why women keep sustaining injuries, can't carry all the necessary kit etc. And yes there are a handful of GI JANES that do exist, but these women can 'soldier' for a couple of days or more before they need to be taken off deployment to rest or their bodies will break.

If they said all Knights were piloted by females because the tech inside required intense micro-management and females were better suited, I wouldn't want to see a male pilot later down the track just to appeal to my gender because it would be stupid to recruit mentally slower pilots, even if the difference was minor, why would they bother for second best when they have enough female pilots for the job?

It works both ways.

It works both ways.

Except it doesn't, because society values males more and places the expectation that they're the ones to do the "real" jobs. Giving representation to the group who's not in the spotlight is different from giving representation to the groups people expect to be there.

Or to put it another way saying upholding the status quo and not upholding the status quo are the same thing is a false equivalency.

Another thing to consider is that the "best person for the job" is simply not getting selected on a knight World - many of them are based on a feudal system so you are selecting from the sons and daughters of the ruling class which is pretty small gene pool.

Now there will be some selection in that can the noble actually control and pilot the thing but its unlikely that the first born child will not get to be a pilot unless there is a major problem, it would be damaging to the House's reputation - both internally and externally if they were not.

 Ginsu33 wrote:
If they said all Knights were piloted by females because the tech inside required intense micro-management and females were better suited, I wouldn't want to see a male pilot later down the track just to appeal to my gender because it would be stupid to recruit mentally slower pilots, even if the difference was minor, why would they bother for second best when they have enough female pilots for the job?

Waaaaaaa????