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That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

This is clearly false given evidence of standing structures and large stones carved and placed on a scale and with a precision unmet by current and even anticipated technologies... It is relatively easier to destroy things than to build things and given that much of today's tech derives from wartime ingenuity it is most likely given evidence cited above that we are well behind civilizations perhaps 20millennia old or more. In this grim darkness of today also there is mostly war. Mostly.

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Europe went backwards technologically during the dark ages, China stagnated, entire human civilizations collapsed at various points of time losing their technologies, we still don't know how the Romans made cement...

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Europe went backwards technologically during the dark ages, China stagnated, entire human civilizations collapsed at various points of time losing their technologies, we still don't know how the Romans made cement...

That's actually been debunked for the most part. A few details were lost, like Roman cement, but technology was passed down orally, as the written word was restricted. Viking ships were far more advanced than Roman vessels, for example, yet there are few writings of how to build them. Once the flash storage drive was invented, the prospect of losing knowledge or tech is almost unfathomable. 40K is still pushing a popular genre from the 80s, but it's gotten suspension of disbelief breaking.

I won't be buying any more marine models until their army is competitively viable and somehow integrates both old and new Marines.

I'd probably buy 1-2 units worth of primaris if I thought they'd help me win games, but right now that isn't going to happen. And if they make primaris Marines good but leave old Marines terrible, I might as well just start another army because all the old marine stuff I have is bad, so i would be starting over with primaris anyway.

I'd rather buy other units that are actually decent on the table top, and look cool without making half my collection look wonky next to them.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Europe went backwards technologically during the dark ages, China stagnated, entire human civilizations collapsed at various points of time losing their technologies, we still don't know how the Romans made cement...

The middle ages were so backward that we invented stuff like the printing press, new types of wind and water mills, the flying buttress,new types of ships, the eye glasses and the lens linked discoveries etc Just because people didn't have vulcanic soil needed to make roman cement doesn't mean middle ages made people run around in fur wearing helmets with horns.

Horned viking helmets are only for the football team, interestingly enough.

Can you imagine the impact on the story if the Imperium found a cluster of planets that never abandoned tech? I'd love to have a men of iron army.

I have just one primaris sgt. from the DI box set.

It’s a nice size but I don’t like the pose or how it’s assembled (more like a cheap press fit) and what’s with the models all looking at the ground?

Martel732 wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Europe went backwards technologically during the dark ages, China stagnated, entire human civilizations collapsed at various points of time losing their technologies, we still don't know how the Romans made cement...

That's actually been debunked for the most part. A few details were lost, like Roman cement, but technology was passed down orally, as the written word was restricted. Viking ships were far more advanced than Roman vessels, for example, yet there are few writings of how to build them. Once the flash storage drive was invented, the prospect of losing knowledge or tech is almost unfathomable. 40K is still pushing a popular genre from the 80s, but it's gotten suspension of disbelief breaking.

It doesn't really matter if you have it on a flash drive if the planet said flash drive is on gets swallowed by the warp or otherwise lost though. The imperium doesn't have galaxy wide internet access either so if the data wasn't physically duplicated and transported to another planet it's gone. Sure things are stored in tech but in the case of 40k that's much more like storing things in a book than having some server with multiple backups spread across the galaxy.

That's because it was written before the cloud existed. It's bad futurism at this point.

Martel732 wrote:
That's because it was written before the cloud existed. It's bad futurism at this point.

It doesn't really matter if it was written before the cloud existed. Even today we have places without access to electricity or the internet. Also if someone had a drive with $10,000,000 of bit coin and it was dropped to the bottom of the marianas trench, it doesn't matter if the drive survives and still technically has the data on it, it's lost. Even if we were magically able to preserve and find any data on earth, this is a fantasy setting. It doesn't matter if there are flying tanks and guns that shoot pure energy. There is magic, demons, dragons, etc. The imperium even practially pops into hell to to take shortcuts between planets. It's a little silly saying they wouldn't have lost technology because they should have wifi.

Not sure that it sillier than anything else in 40K.

 IronBrand wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's because it was written before the cloud existed. It's bad futurism at this point.

It doesn't really matter if it was written before the cloud existed. Even today we have places without access to electricity or the internet. Also if someone had a drive with $10,000,000 of bit coin and it was dropped to the bottom of the marianas trench, it doesn't matter if the drive survives and still technically has the data on it, it's lost. Even if we were magically able to preserve and find any data on earth, this is a fantasy setting. It doesn't matter if there are flying tanks and guns that shoot pure energy. There is magic, demons, dragons, etc. The imperium even practially pops into hell to to take shortcuts between planets. It's a little silly saying they wouldn't have lost technology because they should have wifi.

I have a friend whose job it is to research ways in which to keep digital file formats from going "extinct" - i.e. make sure we know how to read those files in the future. Some of which have already done so.

So that's documents created in the last 30 or so years, some of which that we don't currently know how to access.

I can easily see how in the Imperium, which spans countless worlds over thousands of years, some technology will be lost.

Some technology, I agree. But not as written. It's just nuts.

Martel732 wrote:
Some technology, I agree. But not as written. It's just nuts.

I believe recorded human history is roughly 5,000 years. As mentioned already we've even essentially lost tech as recent as 30 or so years old. The dark age of technology ended in the 25th millennium. I'd say it's more than reasonable that they managed to lose so much in roughly triple the time-span of recorded human history. Especially when you factor in things like the heresy where half of the imperium's forces turned on itself plunging it into chaos, causing the destruction or loss of forgeworlds, etc.

Karol wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

Europe went backwards technologically during the dark ages, China stagnated, entire human civilizations collapsed at various points of time losing their technologies, we still don't know how the Romans made cement...

The middle ages were so backward that we invented stuff like the printing press, new types of wind and water mills, the flying buttress,new types of ships, the eye glasses and the lens linked discoveries etc Just because people didn't have vulcanic soil needed to make roman cement doesn't mean middle ages made people run around in fur wearing helmets with horns.

Do you get that there was about 900 years between the end of the Roman Empire and the Prining Press?

Martel732 wrote:
Some technology, I agree. But not as written. It's just nuts.

maybe the DRM server went off line?

keep in mind if some organisations had their way you access information by paying them or not at all, once they go dark, or find the information no longer valuable enough and its in effect "gone", or at least hard to find, hard to find as in "here go on this quest, someone had a pirate copy" hard to find

we have, as noted previously, "bit rot" today, parchment appears to last a lot better than spinning rust, even if the information density is lower.

then you have to consider how much information we have today that assumes other information is present or known, so you have your perfect design for a perfect plasma projection weapon, you have the blueprints, you know what it will do, but you have no idea what "grade 436-b Astradium - Ogran allow" is, it was common enough when the plan was written they didn't include it - same as how say the blueprints for a car today will specify the steel, but won't include how to make it.

stuff gets fragmented.


failing that, just say a wizard did it, or some quasi-religious order has declared SD cards heresy

Personally i rather like the new.marine models. A nice upgrade to the aesthetic.

I like the Primaris models and I have added a handful to both my Space Wolves and my Blood Angels.

The only issue I have with them is their rather niche organisation. At a guess, I would say GW didn't want to outright obsolete the existing SM range by introducing Primaris equivalents that were just better in every way. Hence the Primaris range lacks conventional heavy support and melee units. The "melee" option are billed as more like super-scouts while the heavy support are either lots of plasma guns or a unit that has bolters strapped to their storm bolters.

regarding tech being lost, if you look at the history of lost technology (which I'm going to borrow a phrase from another franchise and call Lostech) you generally see a bit of a pattern emerge, Technology that was wide spread and in use by multiple parties didn't get lost. case in point we never lost the ability to make iron weapons. technology is eaither lost when it's something that no one has any use for anymore and gets forgotten (fairly rare) or something that was basicly a secret of one civilization, lost with the civilization's fall.

in 40k we do see stuff from option 2 quite a bit. "forge world X fell, they where the only forge world with STC X" So I suspect a lot of the lost tech these days comes from admech secrecy.

BrianDavion wrote:
regarding tech being lost, if you look at the history of lost technology (which I'm going to borrow a phrase from another franchise and call Lostech) you generally see a bit of a pattern emerge, Technology that was wide spread and in use by multiple parties didn't get lost. case in point we never lost the ability to make iron weapons. technology is eaither lost when it's something that no one has any use for anymore and gets forgotten (fairly rare) or something that was basicly a secret of one civilization, lost with the civilization's fall.

in 40k we do see stuff from option 2 quite a bit. "forge world X fell, they where the only forge world with STC X" So I suspect a lot of the lost tech these days comes from admech secrecy.

I think we also have to consider that the Imperium is a state where information and communication are extremely tightly controlled. People are not told something unless they need to know it, and are often told propaganda, embilishments, or straight up lies when they are told things.

How to make... say a Plasma Gun is not something you could look up on the internet, and it would not be recorded anywhere on your standard Human world. It would likely only be recorded formally in specific AdMech controlled locations.

In such circumstances, it's easy to see how such technologies could be lost when key world's fall or other disasters happen.

Roll that in with a state religion that basically forbids scientific experimentation which might otherwise be able to fill in blanks, and give it 20,000 or so years, and that's a recipe for significant lost technology.

Although to qualify that I do.prefer the old style assault and devastate models to the new investor and aggressors.

I'll add that there will certainly be a form of black market information distribution, as there is for us. It may well be possible to 'save' at risk information through such channels sometimes. But it's also important to remember that this is a state where having possession of that sort of thing is likely to get you BLAMMED on the spot without trial.

I simply cannot understand how people think Aggressors look worse than Centurions. If anything, I want to put Centurion weapons on some Aggressors!

Taken in a vacuum, an Intercessor is, visually, a better model than a Tactical marine in every possible way, save for any extra gothic detailing which is going to vary by each player's taste anyway, and is stupidly simple to add.

This happened with RT Marines too, the newer Marines are larger then they are, and the Primaris are even larger than those.

It really sucks for my beakies scale wise lol. I am tempted to get some of their kits, I've just not done it yet.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I simply cannot understand how people think Aggressors look worse than Centurions. If anything, I want to put Centurion weapons on some Aggressors!

Taken in a vacuum, an Intercessor is, visually, a better model than a Tactical marine in every possible way, save for any extra gothic detailing which is going to vary by each player's taste anyway, and is stupidly simple to add.

They are not visually uglier but they aspire to out terminate the terminator and for that heresy are ugly to the intellect.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jeff white wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's just it. Humanity has never gone backwards technogically, only politically. Even then, peasants had more rights than roman slaves. China was unaffected anyway.

This is clearly false given evidence of standing structures and large stones carved and placed on a scale and with a precision unmet by current and even anticipated technologies... It is relatively easier to destroy things than to build things and given that much of today's tech derives from wartime ingenuity it is most likely given evidence cited above that we are well behind civilizations perhaps 20millennia old or more. In this grim darkness of today also there is mostly war. Mostly.

 jeff white wrote:


They are not visually uglier but they aspire to out terminate the terminator and for that heresy are ugly to the intellect.

except they don't. there is simply no evidance agressors are intended to be the "new terminator"

So are people really arguing that the Imperium could not have lost technology that belonged to humanity that had to fight planet eating AGIs because of data stored on digital media? I saw the comments about thumb drives and the cloud but I don't think most of that would survive a serious nuclear exchange due to EMPs in modern day. Digital entities would be an even bigger can of worms.

As for people talking about Europe developing the printing press in the mid 1400s, China had movable type printing presses several hundred years before that, so about the time Europe was coming out of the Dark Ages. Is that such an impressive feat now?

Skaorn wrote:
So are people really arguing that the Imperium could not have lost technology that belonged to humanity that had to fight planet eating AGIs because of data stored on digital media? I saw the comments about thumb drives and the cloud but I don't think most of that would survive a serious nuclear exchange due to EMPs in modern day. Digital entities would be an even bigger can of worms.

As for people talking about Europe developing the printing press in the mid 1400s, China had movable type printing presses several hundred years before that, so about the time Europe was coming out of the Dark Ages. Is that such an impressive feat now?

the printing press was more aimed at the idea that Europe lost a ton of tech during the roman times. there was some stuff lost yes but no where near what we think, and some tech was developed post roman times the idea of a massive tech loss with the fall of Rome is more romance then fact

BrianDavion wrote:

 jeff white wrote:


They are not visually uglier but they aspire to out terminate the terminator and for that heresy are ugly to the intellect.

except they don't. there is simply no evidance agressors are intended to be the "new terminator"

Absolutely agree with this. They fill vastly different roles both on the tabletop and in the lore. The comparison to Centurions is far more apt.

Like literally the only similarity between Aggressors and Terminators is that they're chunkier marines. Oh, and I guess powerfists :p

I do think Primaris Terminators will happen though, but when they do they will preserve the iconic Indomitus look generally. In the same way as Intercessors still look like Marines, just scaled up and better proportioned.