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 Kap'n Krump wrote:
It would be pretty funny if they used their entropy beam and the orks in question just got stronger, bigger, and tougher. That seems like a potential disaster for the galaxy.

Its not a beam, its a naturally generated field. Its been a while, but I'm pretty sure it says that its not a piece of tech in xenology.
Also, its not an aging effect, its an entropic effect. The orks won't get older, they'll decompose. They are mushroom people afterall.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
These things sound pretty powerful. Must suck for the imperium as everything crumbles from entropy including equipment, vehicles, hive cities. And somehow these things are able to hide despite this entropy effect. By the way their ability is described they must be the easiest aliens to find. Follow the crumbling trail. Guess they don't need to eat and gak also.

While its termed an entropy field there has been no suggestion in fluff that it does anything other than accelerate aging in people.

I think I have read about it causing structures to slowly corrode and weather away. Don't remember the source though.
There's a bit about it on lexicanum

This has the side effect of aging their surroundings leading to objects such as crops turning to dust due to prolonged exposure and Humans suffering from premature aging.[8] These time distorting fields are capable of wreaking havoc on entire worlds during mass migrations which are caused by the simple presence of the Hrud.[9b]

Huh, it is a time distortion effect. I thought it worked by causing molecules to lose energy and break apart.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
I think I have read about it causing structures to slowly corrode and weather away. Don't remember the source though.
There's a bit about it on lexicanum

This has the side effect of aging their surroundings leading to objects such as crops turning to dust due to prolonged exposure and Humans suffering from premature aging.[8] These time distorting fields are capable of wreaking havoc on entire worlds during mass migrations which are caused by the simple presence of the Hrud.[9b]

Huh, it is a time distortion effect. I thought it worked by causing molecules to lose energy and break apart.

as I have been battered about a few times here Lex is not an official source, however it only talks about things like crops being effected, so LIVING things.

There's a footnote. Its from Index Astartes.
But yeah, only organics are specified. If its a time distortion field though, wouldn't it affect inorganics as well, albeit at a much slower rate?

Psienesis wrote:Those young Orks will be crumbling to dust in short order as the Hrud entropic field grows. More, they won't have any elder Boyz about to teach them the kultur.

Ork Kulture is ingrained into their DNA, there are many accounts of every ork boy on a planet being wiped out and the spores still grow back and the orks end up with the same culture. Similarl they can as pointed out later grow in the vacuum of space.

Ashiraya wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
I'll just say again - from what I know, Orks only seem to get bigger as they fight. NOT as they age.

Indeed. Probably some growth hormone mixed in the dopamine or whatever Orks get when they fight.

not exactly. as they age an ork gets bigger and stronger yes, but when they fight and win they enter a sort of supercharged growth stage and will continue to grow at the accelerated rate until they are beaten at which point they go back to slow and steady growth. I m not aware in the fluff of orks ever dying of old age they just keep growing bigger, meaner, and greener until something squashes them. I am curious if the hrud effect would even phase them or just buff them up quicker. we may never know as it would be quite unorky to no fight all your life and then when you get the proper size to crump the boss and start a waaaaggghh of your own.

Considering the fact that Astartes have been known to live 2k+ years (first High Marshall of the BTs), and the Hrud managed to cause Astartes to die of old age after only brief exposure, I find it highly unlikely that aging is what the entropy field causes. More than likely, it causes the breakdown of molecular bonds, more specifically DNA, which causes cells to die off without being replaced, thereby causing an artificial form of aging, but not geniune time distortion. This would create the illusion of time distortion for humans, since their equipment is all built to last 10,000 years, anyways, so a bit of distorted time ain't gonna ruin it, just the people using the equipment. Of course, I'm going off of secondary sources here, so I could easily be wrong.

 Ashiraya wrote:
From the Planetstrike book, the Hrud accelerated the aging of the Guardsmen they were fighting by a factor of ~200, aging them fifty years in a couple of months.

Now, this is completely massive. The Ork spores would have to draw nourishment from the soil at 200 times the rate that they usually do to keep up with the entropy. Needless to say, this is something that they probably can't.

Although the Hrud 'entropic effects' aren't clearly defined, I don't think there's any evidence they work this way. The Guardsmen who were aged (and the Iron Warriors who were aged) didn't need to consume hundreds of times the food they normally ate, nor inhale hundreds of times the oxygen they would normally require.* Given that the 'aging' experienced by both normal humans and enhanced humans didn't carry with it a massively increased metabolic rate, I don't think that there's any reason to expect that such a metabolic rate increase would be required for ork spores.

I don't know very much concrete about Hrud aging fields (or, given that I think I own everything that has been written about them, I don't think I accurately remember much), but it's plain that the field can not be some sort of accelerated time field. Geneseed doesn't mature faster in it. Normal wounds don't heal faster in it. Food in the victim's stomach doesn't get digested faster, nor does it putrify and poison the victim. The entropic field seems to either cause the effects of aging, or mimic the effects of aging. That's super-vague--but it's clear that it's not actual 'sped-up' metabolisms.

The question becomes two part: Does this field cause aging effects, or harm things in a way that mimics aging? If it's the second, it might affect orks, whether or not they naturally age.


If it's the first, then we have to ask how do orks age? We do know of old orks, like Ol' Zogwort, and others in the fluff over the years who have been described as 'wizened', 'tough as old boots', etc. However, we also know of old Space Marines, like Dante, who don't seem to be decrepit old men. There's nothing definitive to prove it, but it doesn't seem like Marines get weak and decrepit with age--but that may be because none of them have actually lived long enough to show it. If Guardsmen age fifty years in a couple of months, and Marines have a 'natural life span' of 10x a normal human (which seems reasonable as an assumption), then the Hrud field would age them 5 years in a couple of months. That's not the kind of debilitating effects the Hrud field seems to have. I think it's more reasonable to assume that it's some sort of entropic field that has damaging effects that mimic the effects of aging.


TL/DR: I don't know either, but I know it's not 'your entire metabolic rate speeds up'.

*Given that doing so would be impossible, Hrud 'aging' would just basically suffocate you in seconds.

Spoilers for Of Mars follow;



Moral of the story: If you like the galactic sector you're standing in, don't piss off the Hrud.

^ I am now conviced the Hrud''s ability can kill Orks.

Maybe the Hrud ability speeds up time, but the BL writers are just too stupid to understand how to properly implement it.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Spoilers for Of Mars follow;

Spoiler:

The best example in fluff of a Hrud migration is actually in Gods of Mars. The Magos the heroes have been hunting has been tapping a Hrud colony's entropic field to power his super terraformer. When the terraformer's containment fields are sabotaged, the Hrud come out of stasis and start to migrate away.

When Hrud migrate, they super-charge their entropic fields and use the weakened fabric of spacetime to force what's basically a mass teleport to the site they're arriving at. This has catastrophic entropic effects on the place they're leaving from, including critical existence failures of the surrounding area and rapid decay for miles around.

In Gods of Mars, the Hrud (about a million of them) deliberately overcharge this effect, partly because they want to be a long, long way away, and partly out of sheer spite. They're really pissed at the Magos who enslaved them.

The force of entropy causes the planet to collapse entirely, and the effects are widespread enough that they almost destroy the fleet in orbit before it can escape in time.

Then it reaches the sun the planet is orbiting around. That sun is then aged so extremely that it goes supernova in a matter of hours. It was previously stated to have a couple of million years left.

Moral of the story: If you like the galactic sector you're standing in, don't piss off the Hrud.

I will have to have a read of that one I think. Seems a crazy effect to have written. TO be honest I would suggest thats awful writing to have such an effect, it would be destorying worlds and SUNS! all over the place.

Gods of Mars was an awful book, to be fair.