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 Iron_Captain wrote:
The Crypteks and Heamonculi both, but in different areas.
Those two are lightyears beyond all others.

A lightyear is a distance. The distance light travels in a terran year...

I don't think Crypteks even need to innovate anymore. They've probably achieved complete understanding of the material universe, rivaled only by the C'tan.

Crypteks by a wide, wide margin.

Even the dumbest crypteks would stun the galaxy's best scientists and engineers with their capabilities.

In a way meks:they are born(spored really)with the knowledge of how to build sluggas.Give a tribe a few years and the stompas burst out of the jungle into your city.They can still build terminator equivlents easily:All they need is scrap,a burna,a hammer,rivets and a fungas beer.
Where as other races spend extra resources on faster vehicles they simply throw paint on the trukk and call it a day.Also unlike da Humies they come up with new ideas:Wasn't the flakka dakka made because a mek got fed up of bommas passing over his shop?Another advantage is that if an experiment blows up they probably will survive.They have figured out how to use the warp to make a tunnel that carries snotlings inside the humies organs.
How many big meks does it take to change a lightbulb?
1.True some grotz die but he'll probably invent an exploding one while he's at it.

Cyrpteks have a limited but workable form of time travel I dont see how anyone comes close to them.

Redseer wrote:
I feel CWE...

Craftworlders use mystic space elf magic instead of science and technology, so I didn't include them.

Orks can make literally anything work if they believe they can, so I giving this to them on potential value alone.

Can anybody explain why the imperial Mechanicum is better in terms of engineers then chaos? Just curious if anybody knows because between the two, I've always considered the chaos side to be superior in terms of capabilities.

Anyways, as to the usual, Necrons win again (how surprising :U). They just over-all have the best tech.

Now then, that's boring so some others.
DE- best bio-engineers friggin immortality
Dark Mechanicum- Want warp based tech? No better place than here
Tau- The quickest developing engineers!

Ork Meks

I'd have to say it depends on the area of expertise we're considering here.

'Hard' Sciences: Crypteks. As others have said, they beat the old ones using just science&technology, no warp powers
Biological Sciences: Haemonculi for certain.
Warp Studies: Dark Mechanicum (Crypteks obviously don't know how warp stuff works to the extent that someone actually working for Chaos does)

This about sums it for me here.

Anyways, as to the usual, Necrons win again (how surprising :U). They just over-all have the best tech.

In just one area, they aren't the best at everything.

Mechanicum of Mars is in decay, they rarely invent something new
Dark Mechanicum , They cheat , power source, put a demon in it
Dark Eldar Haemonculi , if it is not for pain it is not interesting.
Ork Meks , their stuff is kinda ramshackle
Tau Earth Caste , they are on the upcoming, especially since they found an earth museum ship with lots of mecha anime on it.
Necron Crypteks , highly advanced but static, we've allready invented everything!

For me it is the erased Dwarf society, probably destroyed by Mars because the dwarfs always laughed when a Mars Magos was praying to machine.

Crypteks probably don't need to advance anymore. I mean, if you can focus the 'unimaginable energies of the living universe' to splinter energy-based life forms dating back to the Big Bang and then imprison them in tiny metal cubes, you probably have achieved complete mastery over the material universe.

Orks, obviously.

They can outdo Necrons when they really try

You could say the Orks considering how much they do with how little, Its like, Station off Bill and Teds Bogus Journey made two androids in the back of the van with a soldering iron, thats probably more impressive than NASA doing things with their huge teams and labs and funding.

I suppose from a conventional standpoint i'd be dull and just say the Mechanicum of Mars because of the enormous ships and titans and things they made.

I have to give it to the Orks. They can take anyone's, and I do mean anyone's, broken tech and mot only make it work again, but make it work for them. You couldn't say the same for any other faction (for various reasons).

Feth, Orks make things that for all intents and purposes shouldn't work but do.

Crypteks for sheer technological level. However, the value of a scientist is not measured by their native technological level.

Dark Mechanicus are far better scientists than their Imperial counterparts, simply because they are not held back by the needless attachment of religion to technology. Science that would be banned as tech-heresy is fully open to them, not to mention their ability to study and experiment freely with the Warp and xeno-tech that would, again, be banned as tech-heresy.

Meks are following pre-programmed paths. It is thankful that they rarely (if ever) do anything but the simplest "science". If they had been created to think rather than create, the Orks would likely be a great deal more powerful than they already are.

The scientific capabilities of Crypteks are debatable. They seem to "study" Necron technology in a manner perhaps even more abstract than Tech-Priests, treating it like lores of sorcery (they even call things whatevermancy like idiots). That's not to say that magic, were it to exist, would not be subject to science; a wizard as normally depicted in fantasy is often a rudimentary scientist, however clouded his intellectual pursuits into the arcane might be by mysticism and superstition. For example, Illuminor Szeras is described as developing improved optics and armour configurations by dissecting various animals, not studying the optics or armours themselves. His attempts to study the soul by "experimenting" on live subjects is only described as "watching impassively as his whirring tools carve the subject apart molecule by molecule". Not exactly the most intelligent means of study, especially given the implication that he's done this procedure countless times. If feeding them to a molecular meat grinder is giving any data, why is he "watching impassively" instead of paying careful attention to the instruments and devices he should have set up to take readings? Does he record and study his findings, or does he merely hope to have an epiphany about the true nature of the soul as he watches a random organism be mulched?

I have to go with the Tau. They actually do real science and have a full understanding of their technology and the scientific process. Crypteks might, but it seems unlikely.

Also, what is the obsession with puns? Cryptek is "cryptic" and probably "crypt" + "tech". Heretek is, well, obvious. And then we have the absolutely awful pun of "Enginseer".

EDIT: I wouldn't exclude the Eldar on the basis that their technology is "too magical". Harnessing "magic" through study of its properties and how to manipulate them is no different to studying electricity or anything else to create applications for it.

I would exclude them because they are in a state of stagnation even worse than that of the Imperium, relying almost entirely on pre-existing technology and never seeming to develop any of their own. Also, we don't know how much of a Haemoculus' knowledge or ability is representative of their own scientific ability or simply (like Craftworld Eldar) an ability to use technology that they may not actually understand.

For all we know his instruments are automatically transmitting data to him. He is a robot you know.

Then why do it so many times? He particularly likes Eldar subjects and is always eager to get some, but to what end? If the fluff had been more vague about his process of study it might have been less silly, but it just seems that he subjects them to brutal torture which only results in their death and no actual knowledge. Also, there's only a few times you can repeat one experiment, especially when it's something so needlessly brutal and pointless as blending someone (there is no hint in the entry that his experiments are anything other than this, referring only to how he uses live subjects and their subsequent gory deaths).

He could have information streamed into him, but again, the entry only says he watches. Combined with his scientific advancements stemming from the study of animal parts, I'd say him actually applying a meaningful scientific process to his experiments is highly unlikely.

Probably because no two people are the same, Human or Eldar aside?

For scientific purposes, the differences hardly matter. Especially when the study is simply grinding them up or some other horrible fate in the name of "science".

No two spiders are the same. That doesn't mean that it is scientifically viable to perpetually gather spiders, put them in a blender, and call it science. If I was going to get any useful information from this experiment (and I should have some reason to make me think that I would, rather than conducting experiments on a whim), I'd definitely get it within the first hundred tests.

It'd make more sense if he was using these people as sacrifices to bargain with daemons. At least he'd be getting somewhere on the nature of the soul, even if everything a daemon says is to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
For scientific purposes, the differences hardly matter. Especially when the study is simply grinding them up or some other horrible fate in the name of "science".

No two spiders are the same. That doesn't mean that it is scientifically viable to perpetually gather spiders, put them in a blender, and call it science. If I was going to get any useful information from this experiment (and I should have some reason to make me think that I would, rather than conducting experiments on a whim), I'd definitely get it within the first hundred tests.

It'd make more sense if he was using these people as sacrifices to bargain with daemons. At least he'd be getting somewhere on the nature of the soul, even if everything a daemon says is to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

+1

Space monkeys. They outdo everyone else in all ways mechanical/engineering-wise.
Not only do they do this, they do it in ultra miniature.
Beyond their usual battlefield stuff you see, they do an inordinate amount of other things you just don't see in the codex and have to read the books for.
I have 2 words for you... Spy flies. lol

Mekz. The Necrons cant't take a pile 'o skrap an' turn it into a Warmachine

Whoever is voting for the mechanicum must have been dropped on their heads. They literally haven't invented anything in 10,000 years. They just sift through old designs and replicate the ones they deem accetable and non-heretical. Then just churn out copies. Most of them don't even understand how technology works, they think that you have to say prayers to get things to work properly, observe "rituals" which are actually just standard activation procedures and they fail to understand that Machine's AI is not some magical "machine spirit" and so have all sorts of unnessesary restrictions placed on how you can treat a device. I'd argue that they aren't even a "scientific" body as they actively punish the pursuit of new knowledge and sequester any information that may disprove current theories. They are a religion and a very backward and dogmatic one at that.

Hmm, interesting in that you ignored Bonesingers who are at least better than some on the list.

I'd say they 'overall' better than Crypteks because of their ability to study the science of the mind as well as engineering design/functionality.

But Crypteks are the best in raw science.

Heamunculi in regards to biological studies.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Admiral Valerian wrote:

Redseer wrote:
I feel CWE...

Craftworlders use mystic space elf magic instead of science and technology, so I didn't include them.

Yikes. I sense somebody knows very little about the Eldar.

 thepowerfulwill wrote:
Orks can make literally anything work if they believe they can, so I giving this to them on potential value alone.

That is not how that works.

Frozen Ocean wrote:
Also, what is the obsession with puns? Cryptek is "cryptic" and probably "crypt" + "tech". Heretek is, well, obvious. And then we have the absolutely awful pun of "Enginseer".

Are you new to 40K?
The setting is absolutely filled with puns like that. It's part of the charm.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
Meks are following pre-programmed paths.

No they aren't.

Meks have have a fundamental understanding of physics, chemistry, and mechanics programmed in to them. The path they take because of this is entirely their own choosing-- and each mek's "style" is unique to themselves, just like any human engineer.

 Frozen Ocean wrote:
why is he "watching impassively"

Because he doesn't care about the suffering or death he's inflicting.

 EVIL INC wrote:
Space monkeys. They outdo everyone else in all ways mechanical/engineering-wise.

Yep, the Jokaero are pretty explicitly stated to be the best engineers in the galaxy ('technosavants without peer'), display an understanding of fundamental physics which rivals the necrons, while also having no blind spot when it comes to the warp and are even more creative than orks.

Perfect Organism wrote:

 EVIL INC wrote:
Space monkeys. They outdo everyone else in all ways mechanical/engineering-wise.

Yep, the Jokaero are pretty explicitly stated to be the best engineers in the galaxy ('technosavants without peer'), display an understanding of fundamental physics which rivals the necrons, while also having no blind spot when it comes to the warp and are even more creative than orks.

Every Codex says it like that though. If we are to take this as true, then the most powerful army in 40K is the Eldar, the Space Marines, the Grey Knights, the Imperial Guard, the Chaos Space Marines...