Ynneadwraith wrote:
Where did you get that their technological level wasn't much higher than current craftworlders/commorites? I'm not necessarily disputing it, but it would be interesting to read the sources. Personally, it's my belief that a lot of pre-Fall eldar technologies require significant psychic input which current day eldar cannot use for fear of She-Who-Thirsts.
As for the portrayal of Eldar in the Horus Heresy novels I'm not sure how much knowledge the writers had on Eldar to be honest. The timelines don't add up. Eldrad is shoehorned in as the head seer of Ulthwe, despite the fact that that would make him older than Vect who has extended his lifespan through unnatural means and would mean that he's much older than the general accepted age limit for an Eldar seer (a couple of thousand years). Lastly, the Staff of Ulthamar (his main weapon) is described as being passed down from head seer of Ulthwe to head seer. If Eldrad was head seer of Ulthwe in M30 then there could not have been any head seers before him (Farseers being a post-Fall thing). Doesn't make sense, and I'm inclined to believe Codex over
BL.
It's the same with Wraith constructs. I'd imagine that they were a more recent tactic as the Eldar became more desperate. I wouldn't have expected the practice to be around so soon after the Fall (although given that there isn't a specific date for the Fall having taken place, just 'cM31' there could be up to 1000 years between the two events).
The Eldar always had the technology and esoteric knowledge to build wraith constructs.They just became critically important after the Fall. As for the source, It's the Horus Heresy novel
Angel Exterminatus that featured the events I mentioned about earlier. In that novel, the traitor intruders on the Crone World of Iydris were attacked by Revenant Titans, Wraithlords, and Wraithguard. It wasn't anything to give the impression that they were more advanced than what the Eldar possessed in the 41st Millennium.
Well, every discussion I've seen so far about the technological superiority of pre-Fall Eldar and DAoT mankind has ended up as a bit of a pissing match given the lack of hard evidence, but I'm personally of the opinion that the pre-Fall Eldar were more advanced. All of the STC products hint at a lower level of technological mastery than the Eldar. It's only in places like BL novels with their Deus Ex Machina time-skipping starships that ludicrous technology is shown, which in my personal opinion is not much more than lazy novel writing...
At the height of the DAoT mankind's federation was large but not the dominant power in the galaxy, and was still in the colonisation phase. They were strong enough to lord over the other xenos in their federation, but they lagegd behind the eldar in several crucial areas (FTL travel being the primary dealbreaker, comparing warp travel to the webway).
TBH, Iracundus does a much better job of explaining that than I do!
I do agree that there are likely dozens and dozens of different epochs to Eldar pre-history though. That's very likely, and what I was trying to get at with dividing the Eldar Empire into Early, Middle and Late periods which would likely be very, very different societies. That's what I'm trying to piece together here actually, what the various epochs of the Eldar Empire might have been like.
The Eldar advanced at a very slow rate in the 65 million years since the War in Heaven, and because of their nature, their culture didn't appear to put much stock in fast advancement.
On the other hand, Humanity went from being a bunch of three foot tall upright hominids to a galactic power in the short span of four million years. And Humanity advanced at lightning pace in the 20+ thousand years since the beginning of it's space age, atomic age, superconductor revolution, computer revolution, etc, etc.
Mankind colonized worlds throughout the Dark Age of Technology. But it was past being in a "colonization phase". After the discovery of the Navigator Gene, allowing for longer Warp jumps, Mankind had united into a galaxy-wide federation, with Terra as the center of power.
The novels portraying Dark Age technology might seem like poor writing, it's still canon (for what that's worth in
40k lore).
In the Dark Age of Technology, Humanity had:
-Advanced artificial intelligence that could learn, grow, and operate on it's own in mankind's name
-Starships whose bridges were made out of "solid light"
-Nanotech weapons that could form sentient hiveminds and turn the blood of living things into a combustible substance
-Singularity weapons (Vortex weapons and black hole projectors)
-Dark matter weapons
-Handguns that could draw power from a planet's background energy/radiation
-Handguns that fired rounds with micro-nuclear warheads
-Sentient starships that controlled every aspect of it's operation, right down to fitting it's human crew with armor instantly.
-Advanced cybernetics
-Advanced terraforming
-Could destroy stars, planets, and entire star systems with little effort
-Could create black holes
-Alter the very building blocks of life and create new forms of life
-Gravity weapons
-Phased energy weapons
-Widespread immunity to all diseases and poisons
-Teleportation.
-Could access every area of a planet right down to it's very core. Had advanced geothermal power
-Build warp gates
-Had the capability to attack enemy ships in the middle of a warp jump
-"Temporal" ammo and weapons
-Possessed widespread anti-gravity technologies
-Had autonomous weapons platforms larger than an Imperator Class Titan that was sentient, and could move with the grace and speed of a living organism.
-Could create and power megalithic structures and archologies, on planets, in space, and even beneath a planet's surface that stretched for tens of thousands of kilometers, and would boggle the mind of a 21st Century observer. I wouldn't be surprised if it's revealed that Humanity could build Dyson Spheres, since Mankind by all appeareances, just before the Age of Strife, was already a Type II civilization on the Kardashev scale.
The
STC printouts still possessed by the Adeptus Mechanicus (and resulting designs) represent the "bottom of the barrel" products for hardscrabble colonies and exploration groups. It wasn't the best available to Mankind in the Dark Age of Technology, The Rhino, for example, was a cheap and easy to maintain security and exploration vehicle for backwater colonies. The original Land Raider Proteus was an armed exploration vehicle. The Baneblade is a crude extrapolation from the
STCs for a "small" tank design from that era. Terminator armor (which can't be produced anymore in the 41st Millennium) was developed by the Mechanicus from Dark Age mining power suits. It's been implied that even the advanced technology available to the Legions Astartes and Imperial Army of the Great Crusade didn't even come close to what Mankind was capable of at it's height.
In other words, Dark Age Humanity, judging just by what we have been shown, was nothing to
around with. And would have been a powerful and dangerous rival to Eldar, even at the height of their Empire.
On another note, there is a pet fan theory that the Men of Iron uprising was instigated by the slowly corrupting Eldar because Mankind was reaching parity with them. Personally, I think it was Chaos corruption. Either Tzeentchian mischief, or the actions of the Daemon Prince Pharaa'gueotla (who had been on Old Earth every since early Humans gained the capacity of intelligent thought).
It is true that that could have happened, but given the legendary arrogance of the Eldar and their deeply-ingrained xenophobia I doubt they'd have had much to do with DAoT mankind beyond a mutual non-aggression pact. However, that certainly doesn't rule out trade or politics at all.
Also, there is the possibility that they never even met. The geography of empires in 40k is only based very loosely around adjacent physical space. Its geography is actually dictated by the proximity of stable warp routes. Thus, you could theoretically have two empires that are based around adjacent star systems very close to each other physically, but never actually meet because there's no stable warp route between them.
As I pointed out before, the Eldar were an enlightened and artistic race, that before their corruption, had an appreciation for life, music, art, dance, etc. I don't believe that the xenophobia/xenocidal tendecncies you see in the post-Fall era was prevalent at that time before the corruption. Sure, you had Eldar and Human colonists on world clash with each other. But that doesn't mean that the Empire and Federation were enemies in general. They either left each other alone, or they had relations, trade, exchanged ambassadors, etc, etc., other than the early clashes (one of which was mentioned in the Path of the Eldar novels, which didn't go well for the Human forces).
"Each Craftworld originates from one of the ancient Eldar planets...Over the centuries the Craftworlds' occupants sought out other surviving Eldar amongst the far flung Exodite colonies, and even began to settle new worlds of their own. In this way the paths of the Eldar and mankind met for the first time and humans became acquainted with the most ancient and enigmatic of the galaxy's living races".
p. 5, 2nd edition Eldar Codex
And there were clashes between the two species in those early days on contact, which resulted in non-aggression pacts.
That's very interesting about the Stryxis. I've read before that they have a pathological hatred of the Eldar, and the likelihood is that's related to an event in Eldar history. Perhaps they're the descendants of the Hresh-Selain or Autochtinii, or a race that was so insignificant to the Eldar that they didn't get a mention in their history but was still a seminal event in the history of the Stryxis.
Yeah. It;s entirely possible. Unfortunately, as to be expected from
GW, they don't go into a lot of detail of why the Stryxis hate the Eldar so much, hence my speculation about bad blood in the distant past.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Iracundus wrote:
There is little suggestion of any such commerce. In fact there is evidence against it:
I haven't seen any evidence to contradict my assumption. So, I disagree with your assertion.
Each Craftworld originates from one of the ancient Eldar planets...Over the centuries the Craftworlds' occupants sought out other surviving Eldar amongst the far flung Exodite colonies, and even began to settle new worlds of their own. In this way the paths of the Eldar and mankind met for the first time and humans became acquainted with the most ancient and enigmatic of the galaxy's living races.
p. 5, 2nd edition Eldar Codex
This seems to support what I posted about the Eldar and humans co-existing in the galaxy but not really interacting prior to the Eldar Fall.
The only thing that snippet mentions is the circumstances of Human/Eldar first contact. It doesn't support any assertion that there was minimum contact between the Empire and Man's ancient Federation.
