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 Netsurfer733 wrote:
So wait, when was this then? Long before even the *Horus* Heresy they decided to just recover old, lost information? That would actually make the most sense, but I just want to be sure. I'm very curious about their history, if anyone knows any details about the timeline for them this far back (up until now).

It would've been some time during the Age of Strife. At the end of the Dark Age of Technology, AI's everywhere rose up and began the great war with the Men of Iron. At the same time the warp was growing more turbulant with the massive increase in psyker births, leading to huge numbers of daemonic possession and corruption. The Age of Strife shattered all of human technology and left the Machine Cult with thousands of years of picking up the pieces. This began the quest for STC scraps. THEN the Horus Heresy came and shattered what reconstruction effort had been going on. So it was during the Age of Strife that the first shift from innovation to techno-archaeology began. The Horus Heresy just set that effort back thousands of years.

This thread pretty much summed up why i prefer every and any of the xenos races over the human ones in the series.

Everything is just controlled by a superstition that goes as far as "if you mention it, it will happen" kind of fear.

Dracoknight wrote:
This thread pretty much summed up why i prefer every and any of the xenos races over the human ones in the series.

Everything is just controlled by a superstition that goes as far as "if you mention it, it will happen" kind of fear.

Slaanesh is basically Voldmorte ("She who must not be named") to the Eldar, though..

jareddm wrote:

 Netsurfer733 wrote:
So wait, when was this then? Long before even the *Horus* Heresy they decided to just recover old, lost information? That would actually make the most sense, but I just want to be sure. I'm very curious about their history, if anyone knows any details about the timeline for them this far back (up until now).

It would've been some time during the Age of Strife. At the end of the Dark Age of Technology, AI's everywhere rose up and began the great war with the Men of Iron. At the same time the warp was growing more turbulant with the massive increase in psyker births, leading to huge numbers of daemonic possession and corruption. The Age of Strife shattered all of human technology and left the Machine Cult with thousands of years of picking up the pieces. This began the quest for STC scraps. THEN the Horus Heresy came and shattered what reconstruction effort had been going on. So it was during the Age of Strife that the first shift from innovation to techno-archaeology began. The Horus Heresy just set that effort back thousands of years.

I suppose then it's easy to see why they would continue their search for STC's, and then with time that eternal task becomes a holy one, at which point superstition of a sort could easily take root, too. Clearly by then they were not so machine-brained, yet

In any case, my understanding is that the Cult Mechanicus was limited rather strictly to Mars during the Dark Age of Technology (when they probably also formed, as well). Right? They didn't have any influence anywhere else by then, really? (In other words, they basically regained what everyone else lost, and they happened to lose as well, somehow, despite how they never lost their planet of Mars...)

 Netsurfer733 wrote:
(In other words, they basically regained what everyone else lost, and they happened to lose as well, somehow, despite how they never lost their planet of Mars...)

The Adeptus Mechanicus aren't the High Librarians of Knowledge. Most of those died when the Men of Iron fought mankind. The Library was destroyed too, both physically smashed and infected with viral AI software.

The survivors started picking up pieces - burned pages, damaged hard drives etc. Then the Horus Heresy hit Mars and the librarians fought each other to the death. The remnants of the Library were also destroyed. Again.

Present-day AdMech are sifting through the scattered pieces left after two devastating wars.

It's like trying to piece together history up to today from whatever books you have in your local library - after you first rip the covers off all the books, set the library on fire and then extinguish the fire with dynamite. .

I fully suspect that many of the the Adeptus Mechanicus do innovate new technology and weapons and then just claim they discovered some lost ancient technology. Who would know the difference?

 Dannyevilguy wrote:
I fully suspect that many of the the Adeptus Mechanicus do innovate new technology and weapons and then just claim they discovered some lost ancient technology. Who would know the difference?

Considering even STC technology takes hundreds of years of scrutiny, testing, and examination back on Mars before it's released to the greater Imperium, I'd say the AdMech would know the difference.

 Netsurfer733 wrote:

jareddm wrote:

 Netsurfer733 wrote:
So wait, when was this then? Long before even the *Horus* Heresy they decided to just recover old, lost information? That would actually make the most sense, but I just want to be sure. I'm very curious about their history, if anyone knows any details about the timeline for them this far back (up until now).

It would've been some time during the Age of Strife. At the end of the Dark Age of Technology, AI's everywhere rose up and began the great war with the Men of Iron. At the same time the warp was growing more turbulant with the massive increase in psyker births, leading to huge numbers of daemonic possession and corruption. The Age of Strife shattered all of human technology and left the Machine Cult with thousands of years of picking up the pieces. This began the quest for STC scraps. THEN the Horus Heresy came and shattered what reconstruction effort had been going on. So it was during the Age of Strife that the first shift from innovation to techno-archaeology began. The Horus Heresy just set that effort back thousands of years.

I suppose then it's easy to see why they would continue their search for STC's, and then with time that eternal task becomes a holy one, at which point superstition of a sort could easily take root, too. Clearly by then they were not so machine-brained, yet

In any case, my understanding is that the Cult Mechanicus was limited rather strictly to Mars during the Dark Age of Technology (when they probably also formed, as well). Right? They didn't have any influence anywhere else by then, really? (In other words, they basically regained what everyone else lost, and they happened to lose as well, somehow, despite how they never lost their planet of Mars...)

Mars was terraformed into a blue and green paradise long before the dark age of technology only to be nuked repeatedly and nearly destroyed in war during the age of strife. The cult mechanicus formed after the dark age of technology, as the martians rebuilt their world after it had been horrifically destroyed.

Keep in mind that the STC are more like saying the technology of "cellphone" or "car". These are broad technologies as proven by the chimera STC being produced in 100s of different patterns and variations. How often do we really make a huge change that redefines an entire technology group? (historically, honestly the current progression of tech is crazy fast compared to historical trends)

For all we know the STC for a voxcaster has had millions of revisions, improvements, and cost reductions due to a huge amount of scientific work.

Also keep in mind that knowledge is difficult to share (travel and info sharing are closer to 1700's standards from solar system to solar system).

Additionally the IoM is constantly in a state of warfare where they have to figure out what they are even fighting. Can you imagine all the scientific work it would take if you had to figure out daemons spilling out of the warp one week and then turn around to figure out tyranids the next week. Just the effort to classify all the tyranids would be a scientific achievement of a generation.

There is some mystification of tech and "do NOT open your lasgun" going around but alot of this could have to do with the wildly different tech levels on the "innumerable" planets of the IoM. If you recruited a bunch of stone age to medievel tech level guys to fight for you (keep in mind alot of the hive city poor are educated in religion/civics and may or may not know how to even read or count) and gave them lasguns how are you planning on explaining everything to them so they go kill some nids? I could see why explaining that the lasgun is a "sacred" relic of the emperor and so should not be "defiled" by modification would be attractive. Once you teach this to a segment of relatively affluent (IG) segment of your population that will have a lot of children who they will teach...I think you get the idea it will propagate.

 ansacs wrote:


Additionally the IoM is constantly in a state of warfare where they have to figure out what they are even fighting. Can you imagine all the scientific work it would take if you had to figure out daemons spilling out of the warp one week and then turn around to figure out tyranids the next week. Just the effort to classify all the tyranids would be a scientific achievement of a generation.

The warfare and shear size of the empire are the main problem.
If things werent so grim, the mechanicus could use their limited resources to standardize production processes and focus on a more limited array of products.
If the empire wasnt so large, the mechanicus could pool their limited resources to improve the level of tech availible.

Think about cars. Every auto manufacturer is always trying to reduce the number of parts and platforms it offers to make manufacture easier, repairs easier, and the quality of their products higher. Reducing the number of parts though requires engineers to design new cross platform parts and then factories to manufacture said parts and then thousands of mechanics to replace said parts. Being an auto mechanic is difficult enough today, when you might have to service 100 different types of cars with different parts, different computer systems, and different ages.(if you ever had a 25+ year old car you know that anything that needs fixing is hard to find parts for and you might have to do a custom job for even the simplest fixes) Now imagine that instead of 100 different types of cars from 10 different manufacturers you have 10,000 different types of cars from 5,000 different manufacturers and that some of the cars are 5,000 years old. Also imagine that instead of being in a vibrant economy like ours today that can support thousands of auto mechanics for every city that you live in a very poor society that has 2-3 auto shops for a city the size of london.

Take a plasma rifle. These things are more complex than 99.9% of the population can understand. The few people in the empire who can understand them are too busy fixing the broken ones to figure out how to improve a flawed design. Each one they fix becomes slightly different and in future more difficult to repair.