How can the IoM's tech knowledge be decreasing?!?

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**waasssdddd**

As said, how can a civilisation be loosing tech, isn't it supposed to be advancing? Or did the IoM ban all smart people?

**alexwars1**

waasssdddd wrote:Or did the IoM ban all smart people?

Essentially, yes.

**Mr Hyena**

Curiosity...leads to deviant witch filth. Ignorance is the God-Emperor's greatest gift to man!

The Emperor smiles on his glorious church and Inquisition.

**Ribon Fox**

The AdMech still "invent" stuff it just takes 100s some times 1000s of years to be implemented.

**waasssdddd**

I mean, the fluff says, they have stuff, they don't know how to build anymore. How did this happen?!? Did the Emperor's secretary shred the blueprints?

Anyway they can just take the thing apart and carefully document how it's built. Is that so hard???

**lunarman**

So many threads on this in such a short space of time!

I'll quote myself from earlier:

Think of it like this:

The empire of mankind is so vast that as it spread out it was no longer feasible to collate all 'knowledge' into a central location. Instead, as different forgeworlds discovered and invented new things only the local STC stored that information. Therefore as those STC (basically big databases) are lost in warfare, or damaged the information they contain becomes irretrievable.

Now, as I understand it STCs are like big databases of blueprints, but also with a robotic factory attached to it. This explains why no one has committed the blue-print of the Space-Marine jetbike (for example) to memory. Some techmarine just has to press the jetbike button on the console and out pops a jetbike; he doesn't understand how it's made, it's just always been done automatically for him. However, when this STC is destroyed, there goes all ability to make jet-bikes!

(P.s. Mr techmarine never gets curious and looks inside the STC factory, or reverse engineers the jet-bike for three reaons:
1: It would be heresy to try and understand the creations of the ommisiah.
2: He's just not clever enough. He doesn't understand mechanics, just following instructions written down by someone before him.
3: It might displease the Machine Spirit. )

HOWEVER, stuff can be maintained by techpriests, even without understanding it. If they follow detailed instructions left behind by previous people who did understand the technology. This means that common bugs in software or mechanical faults can be fixed because you can look up how to fix it. However, when something goes more seriously wrong (or even just minorly wrong in a way that is undocumented) then Techmarines are screwed.

It's a bad world to be in!

TLDR: They don't remember how to make many things, but they don't need to. STCs will simply churn out the required technology at the press of a button; all done automatically.

Heres' the thread.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/340756.page

Essentially the imperial did ban all smart people

**nosferatu1001**

You just arent appreciating the difficulty of what you're proposing.

Take, for example, a modern day car. Most people know how to use it, but not how to build it. Not even close. MOst people dont even understand how it operates, in any detail, and certainly not the complexities of electronically controlled fuel mixing,e tc.

Now imagine there is a cataclysm....just for giggles, something akin to what happened in the middle ages. For whatever reason you lose the people who DO know how things actually work. HOw difficult would it be to relearn how to make a car? VERY difficutl, VERY difficult indeed.

For example - if you forget how to build a STEM you cant see inside a chip to understand how it operates.

You can maintain your appliances much more easily - but actual understanding is much harder.

It's called the "bootstrap" problem, and its covered in a few SciFi novels.

Now, fast forward 10,000 years: you have not just one even tkilling off knowledge, but dozens,a nd with VASTLY more complicated technology.

FInally you have the religious, dogmatic approach: the custodians of actual understanding (as opposed to knowledge) believe that everything that is "good" has already been discovered, so theyre looking to rediscover it. Anything "new", so xenos or independent research, is likely to be considered tech heresy. Which is a bad thing.

All in all you end up with stagnation or decline (the pace you lose the ability to do X is greater than your research rate into maintainnig X) in understanding.

**reds8n**

waasssdddd wrote:I mean, the fluff says, they have stuff, they don't know how to build anymore. How did this happen?!? Did the Emperor's secretary shred the blueprints?

Anyway they can just take the thing apart and carefully document how it's built. Is that so hard???

Why is this so hard to believe ? It's happened.. one could argue happening still, but that's a whole other kettle of fish... before in the real world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages

It took centuries in Europe for example for us to (re)discover things like building techniques that the Romans used in their constructions.

Many years ago in the UK we had "The Domesday project" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project#Preservation

this was in my lifetime and was a national project.. and most of this information is pretty much unobtainable, in less than one generation, in the same country.

Elvis Presley was pretty much the famous person in the world for a while, yet, for example, trying to ascertain certain things about his life -- the usual example here is the exact recipe for his favourite snack/meal -- and one is confronted with a bewildering array of similar yet ultimately contradictory claims and ideas.

Information, knowledge isn't always quite so easy to pin and hold down as people would like to think.

Anyway they can just take the thing apart and carefully document how it's built. Is that so hard???

That's pretty much how they do build things. It' they don't understand the hows and whys of what they copy.

**Pilau Rice**

nosferatu1001 wrote:

And to add a little to what Nos is saying

White Dwarf 140
By their efforts much information has been retrieved or can be reconstructed by the vigorous analysis and comparison of copies. Yet the most technically-advanced knowledge eludes the Adeptus Mechanicus, for the early colonists were mostly simple folk whose needs were practical. Only rarely did anyone bother to take copies of the theoretical and advanced work which the STC contained.

**Daba**

"Knowledge is Power" - so Adeptus Mechanicus high priests keep that to themselves.

They then pass away, and the knowledge is lost.

**Exergy**

waasssdddd wrote:As said, how can a civilisation be loosing tech, isn't it supposed to be advancing? Or did the IoM ban all smart people?

There are smart or rather educated people, they are just not enough of them. With their current numbers they can maintain a hundred times more of a thing than they could build. If the Imperial Navy was completely wiped out, Humanity could rebuild a fleet, it just would not be as large. Exact number escape me, but if there are perhaps 1000 Battleships in the fleet right now all the manpower that exists currently goes to servicing them. If you took all those men and started building new battleships you would be able to build 10 or so but it would take a very long time.
Similarly Plasma Guns are fairly common but they are not built on any regularity anymore. All the people who know how to build them are used to simply service the old ones. Over time more of them are lost in battle or to wear and tear than are refurbished but of course if it had to the Imperium could build 1 new plasma gun.

Its just about what is better for mankind right now; maintaining what it already has or making something new?

**Sir Pseudonymous**

I'm going to say the same thing I said in the last thread: the things that are most mentioned as "slowly being lost," specifically, are plasma weapons, which are hideously expensive guns that have a 16% chance of blowing up when you pull the trigger. I dare presume that if the technology to make them is being forgotten, it's because it's mothballed away as the industrial works are set to producing things that aren't suicidally insane, like lasguns and tanks.

The same principle applies against things like Titans, or anything the Space Marines use: bolters, terminator suits, land raiders; all horribly inefficient compared to what those same resources could produce elsewhere, and so slowly fading out of the limelight.

That said, both the Inquisition and Mechanicus research new things all the time (as well as attempting to reverse engineer xeno or archeo tech). These don't get put into mass production because more or less all the industrial works are completely booked through the next few centuries, if not further, and as the technology is secret, or at least not advertised, there will never be any demand for it outside those who have access to it, and thus presumably can afford to have more copies built on a small scale.

**purplefood**

Daba wrote:"Knowledge is Power" - so Adeptus Mechanicus high priests keep that to themselves.

They then pass away, and the knowledge is lost.

Nothing is lost to the Mechanicus. It is filed away and kept until there is a time where they can look upon it with a more favourable eye.