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The Adeptus Mechanicus is NOT like a modern think tank or research institute. People need to stop thinking that research is a given and automatic thing that will happen. One has to drop modern preconceptions and viewpoints of what is "stupid". The Adeptus Mechanicus gained power through the preservation of knowledge. Like clergy during the Dark Ages, information from antiquity was collected and recopied and preserved. Preservation by necessity requires them to try to and keep things the same. The attitude of the Adeptus Mechanicus is like that of the old blind monk in the movie In the Name of the Rose: to recover the lost Golden Age by recovering and preserving the knowledge of antiquity, but not by generating new knowledge or by disseminating it to the general public. They hoard information and lock it up. That kind of paradigm is the precisely the sort that stifles innovation.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is like a mystery cult. The only people that gain access to schematics are those already initiated into the cult. The average line worker in a factory is going to have no idea how their product is put together, even if they are a naturally intelligent person. The Imperium does not value knowledge and education for the masses. Any sufficiently bright person is either going to be recruited and initiated into the cult, in which case he becomes part of the self perpetuating paradigm, or they are going to end up undiscovered and live an uneducated life where their potential for any significant widespread innovation is virtually nothing.

The Imperium due to its vast size, is actually not under pressure, except at the grand strategic level (i.e. the Imperium as a whole). On an individual sector or world level, whole generations or wars elsewhere can pass without affecting the lives of other Imperial worlds. For a Forge World at peace and not under immediate attack, there is no real pressure or urgency to innovate or die. When the Adeptus Mechanicus and the larger Imperium can simply send more men, more tanks, more whatever at a problem, many things can be solved through application of more numbers and more force.

Nor can the ideology of the Adeptus Mechanicus is not something that can be simply brushed aside as dumb. Remember this is a humanity that did go through a rebellion by the Men of Iron, and only barely survived. Such events could have traumatized humanity in the same way that in the Dune universe the Butlerian Jihad was a reaction to the rebellion of the thinking machines. The failure of science and rationalism to prevent the Age of Strife also is historical and can serve as proof that such a mindset has failed. Such modern views of thinking are a discredited ideology in the 40K era. Rather blind faith and ignorance have been exalted as virtues. As it is, the Adeptus Mechanicus stands apart from the Imperium and has a mixed relationship with the rest of the Imperium due to its association with technology.

Brother Coa wrote:

McNinja wrote:
Books are not the pinnacle of technology. Books were invented to allow us to store information. That is all. They were a damn important invention, but now we have Tablets and smartphones and PCs that also allow us to do the same thing and more. If STCs are books, then the Tablet or smartphone is what they could be.

You do know that information stored on CD's and Hard Drives will be lost over time? Because of the properties of that devices, information on them fade in time, while books can last very long time ( 1000 years or ~if preserved properly ).


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And it is said ~ times that we can't compare Imeprium with us. Sure they can improve tech and had all their citizens drive flying cars and have big homes, if they are not in war for like more then 10.000 years.
Emperor wanted to return Mankind in the Golden Age again, with him gone that dream has also gone. And until peace is restored to the galaxy there will be none to little improvement when it comes to technology.
As for the question if they are dumb - they are. Planetary Governors are dumb as zombie, same thing goes for Imperial Commanders and Commissars.
Mechanicus aren't dumb - just ignorant.
Others are somewhat smart, but without real position of power they are locked in that situation.

I very much agree with that last statement.

Also, Hard Drives and CDs can also last a long time, but even those are becoming obsolete with the advent of the cloud. If it is important, it will be preserved. Nowdays we have google and several thousand wikis that hold information on the internet. Books will never become an obsolete format, but others will rise and equal books in terms of language storage. If you throw a CD into a box an leave it there, the CD will last for a very, very long time, far longer than a book if you were to throw it in a box and leave it there. There will be zero data degredation, and even though technology is progressing so that some CDs are not useable on with todays operating systems, there are always way to find emulators or even old computers (the one thing books have over CDs: the format will never be obsolete enough that you need something to read it, unless the language changes significantly).

The difficulty of outdoing or improving existing tech doesn't mean they don't do it, it just means they don't do it fast. Decades or centuries of research to develop a new standard, as long or longer in controlled testing to make sure it's as reliable and useful as the existing standard, etc. Of course, there are still emergency crash programs to produce something tailored to deal with an immediate threat, or more likely jury rig something they already have to work differently, but that sort of thing doesn't tend to produce results that are good in enough ways to become standards in and of themselves.

It's Space Marines that don't innovate at all, because they're explicitly prohibited from innovation, on the grounds that rogue states of mutant supersoldiers that have been intentionally crippled with a manual of terrible tactics and ineffective weapons and armaments, to prevent them from ever being a threat to the Imperium proper again, innovating would lead to dangerous circumstances.

Brother Coa wrote:
As for the question if they are dumb - they are. Planetary Governors are dumb as zombie, same thing goes for Imperial Commanders and Commissars.

See the guy with the funny hat?
Seems the commisariat wants to talk to you....

McNinja wrote:Also, Hard Drives and CDs can also last a long time, but even those are becoming obsolete with the advent of the cloud. If it is important, it will be preserved. Nowdays we have google and several thousand wikis that hold information on the internet. Books will never become an obsolete format, but others will rise and equal books in terms of language storage.

Wikis can't compete with books on validity.
Your "cloud" isn't safe from warfare. The first to die is the truth and apocalyptic worldwide warfare would blast your "cloud" and wikis apart.
40k is exactly located in a post "networked" era.
Its a sci-fantasy combo of technology, where you have books and torches and crystalline datacores and fusion reactors at once.
Not a place for advanced tech of the future of our own reality. Whatever is known is at the whim of GW. Not logic or common sense.

McNinja wrote:If you throw a CD into a box an leave it there, the CD will last for a very, very long time, far longer than a book if you were to throw it in a box and leave it there.

No.
CD's degrade and are not error free. These correction modes of modern storage devices won't be neccessary if they would be as perfect as you seem to think. A nice scratch or breaking it pretty much ends the usabilitiy of such data storage.
Scraps of info written across a surface ( books, tablets of stone, etc, ) survive for ages. Archeologists are fine with things "set in stone" as this lasts where technicalsolutions would be unreadable now.

McNinja wrote:There will be zero data degredation, and even though technology is progressing so that some CDs are not useable on with todays operating systems, there are always way to find emulators or even old computers (the one thing books have over CDs: the format will never be obsolete enough that you need something to read it, unless the language changes significantly).

Zero data degradation is a myth. Ask one who owns really old games. Without perfect copies a lot of the old stuff would be lost already.
CD are worthless without a device to read them. Books just needs the human eye...a device every human has 'inbuilt'...




The issue of the IoM isn't to have data stored, its to access it. Millenia of collecting data amount to unimaginable masses.
As a bureaucracy and tendency to be avid collectors there may be more 'lost' in the seas of info than really lost. Data cores dwarfing your average scyscraper aren't unheard of. Even back in the day of the crusade digging out data was a challenge.
Generation "google" isn't aware of the time consuming research were looking at in the background of 40k IMO.

McNinja wrote:
Also, Hard Drives and CDs can also last a long time,

"Following the test procedures of the International Standards Organization (ISO) quality media manufacturers have been able to document data life-spans ranging from 50-200 years."
"There are conflicting claims and consumer beliefs on which media is best for data retention of 30, 50, 100 years - green, gold, blue dye or gold/silver reflective layer."
"If you have purchased quality media from a quality manufacturer, you are still not assured of 50-100 years of data life!"

That was from audioholics magazine, article "CD and DVD Longevity: How Long Will They Last?" by Andy Marken
Hard Disk depends, 5, 10, maybe 15 years before he stop working or before some sector segments became corruptible.

but even those are becoming obsolete with the advent of the cloud. If it is important, it will be preserved.

Because people still write things in books and that is why we will have everything preserved if Internet fall one day.

Nowadays we have google and several thousand wikis that hold information on the internet.

Hit all main servers with EMP blast and good buy internet and all that data.

Hazard30 wrote:From what I understand the Imperium only gets new technology if they find the blueprints or whatever?

This is a false understanding. The Imperium gets new technology from research. They just have a bunch of red tape and extremely stringent testing protocols.

just think a few more centuries of dark ages and then IoM hits a Renaissance where davinci is reborn and fixes all of the STC's and men everywhere learn to be grey knight psychics... or ya know nothing changes and people keep dying for no good reason

Those guys appear all the time. It's a big empire. They just get executed for heresy to be on the safe side.

Dumb?

As a box of hammers, baby.

Also hidebound by dogma and fundamentalism.
Which doesn't help.