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Hello, gentlemen. We all know that 40k lore is a complex subject and a lot of people seem to have a lot of opinions that don't have a lot to do with actual background but are spread nonetheless.
So I've decided to list some of those in my blog along with some actual fluff to clear thing up.
I've finished two parts out of the three so far, but let me know what you think - maybe I'm wrong somewhere, or something need to be added.
And year, my English may suck occasionally so that's that. Anyway, here's the stuff:

PART 1


Myth #1: In 40k there's literally nothing but war - refutation
Myth #2: In the grim darkness of the far future there is no logic - refutation
Myth #3: The 40k wargame accurately represents the fluff of the universe - refutation
Myth #4: Human worlds divided during the Age of Strife only started to be unified by the Emperor after the beginning of the Great Crusade - refutation
Myth #5: During the Horus Heresy each Astartes Legion chose its side as half of them stayed loyal while the other half sided with Horus - refutation
Myth #6: After the last duel with Horus and ascension to a Golden Throne, the Emperor never contacted the outside world - refutation
Myth #7: Warhammer 40000 timeline ends at 999.M41 - refutation
Myth #8: 40k is set in our Milky Way galaxy - refutation
Myth #9: Space battles are fought at the distances of kilometers - refutation
Myth #10: All 40k spaceships are extremely big - refutation
Myth #11: All Space Hulks are inhabited by Genestealers - refutation
Myth #12: Warp-travel is the same as hyperdrive - refutation
Myth #13: Machine Spirit is the same as AI/Machine Spirit doesn't exist - refutation
Myth #14: All technology in the Imperium is based on STC and has its roots in the Dark Age of Technology - refutation
Myth #15: Lasgun is an ineffective weapon, unable to inflict real damage - refutation
Myth #16: Boltguns use caseless ammunition - refutation
Myth #17: Hive-cities only exist on Hive Worlds - refutation
Myth #18: Abhuman means Ogryn or Ratling - refutation
Myth #19: Squat race was cut from the fluff - refutation
Myth #20: Mutant equals Chaos - refutation
Myth #21: Humanity is divided to Imperials and followers of Chaos - refutation
Myth #22: Canon of Warhammer 40000 universe is set in stone - refutation

PART 2


Myth #23: Imperium is a united and solid human empire - refutation
Myth #24: Imperium controls most of the galaxy - refutation
Myth #25: Adeptus Terra are present on each and every one of the imperial worlds, and each totally controls a certain aspect of life in the Imperium - refutation
Myth #26: Imperium doesn't colonise new worlds, just loses old ones - refutation
Myth #27: Mechanicus are just an Adeptus and forge worlds are just heavily industrialised imperial planets - refutation
Myth #28: Adeptus Mechanicus do not understand the tech they produce and can only remake the technology of old - refutation
Myth #29: All tech in Imperium is produced on forge worlds and is attended to by Mechanicus - refutation
Myth #30: Collegia Titanica only includes Titans - refutation
Myth #31: Imperial Guard is the most numerous, but the most ill-trained and equipped military organisation in the Imperium - refutation
Myth #32: Astartes Chapters are required to follow the tenets of Codex Astartes - refutation
Myth #33: Astartes Chapters wage war like a regular army does - refutation
Myth #34: Astartes worship the Emperor like a god - refutation
Myth #35: Imperial Creed is a strict religion, and smallest deviations from it's teachings are routinely branded as heresy - refutation
Myth #36: All Adepta Sorroritas are Sisters of Battle - refutation
Myth #37: Inquisition is a united organisation - refutation
Myth #38: Inquisition is divided into three Ordoses - refutation
Myth #39: Exterminatus can only be declared by Inquisition - refutation
Myth #40: Adeptus Arbites is the primary police of the Imperium - refutation
Myth #41: All people in the Imperium live in a horrifying tyranny - refutation
Myth #42: 40k-era humans beleve in the ideals of 21st century - refutation
Myth #43: Everybody in the Imperium speaks the same language known as Low Gothic - refutation
Myth #44: Imperial Adeptus X has more authority then the Adeptus Y - refutation
Myth #45: There were never any traitors among Adeptus X - refutation
Myth #46: Imperium never holds negotiations with xenos races - refutation

UPD So the third part is finished, check it out:

PART 3


Myth #48: Orks are a race - refutation
Myth #49: Orkoids are intellectually and/or technologically inferior to other races - refutation
Myth #50: All ork tech and weapons are constructed in mekboys' workshops - refutation
Myth #51: Ork tech only works because orks believe it should - refutation
Myth #52: All orks prefer red colour to any other - refutation
Myth #53: Orks don't use navigation when making Warp-jumps - refutation
Myth #54: Orks are immune to the influence of Chaos and genestealer cults - refutation
Myth #55: Only tactic Tyranids use is zerg rush - refutation
Myth #56: Kroot race is fully integrated into Tau Empire - refutation
Myth #57: Tau is one of the major races - refutation
Myth #58: Philosophy of Greater Good is analogous to communism - refutation
Myth #59: All Tau are pheromone-controlled by Ethereals - refutation
Myth #60: Many Aspects and other eldar war formations only consist of members of a single sex - refutation
Myth #61: The only reason Imperium can't have peace with tau and eldar it it's own unjustified xenophobia - refutation
Myth #62: Dark eldar are a twisted version of Craftworlders - refutation
Myth #63: Commoragh is a single city in a specific location in the Webway - refutation
Myth #64: All Dark Gods' efforts are devoted to corrupting and destroying mortals - refutation
Myth #65: Chaos equals evil - refutation
Myth #66: Slaanesh is just a god of lust - refutation
Myth #67: Nurgle is just a god of diseases - refutation
Myth #68: All Khorne worshipers prefer close combat - refutation
Myth #69: All Tzeentch worshipers are sorcerers - refutation
Myth #70: First instance of Zombie Plague happened in Time of Ending due to Typhus efforts - refutation
Myth #71: All Chaos Space Marines are ten thousand years old - refutation
Myth #72: Chaos Astartes Legions still exist unchanged in M41 - refutation
Myth #73: Chaos Astartes dominate the Eye of Terror - refutation
Myth #74: All Chaos forces are based in Warp-anomalies - refutation
Myth #75: Possessed, Daemon Princes and Obliterators are all former Chaos Space Marines - refutation

This is pretty darn cool. I dont agree with everything you refute but lots of food for thought, nice work!

Thanks. I'd appreciate if you could be a bit more specific though.

This is great. I would love to see more of this stuff. Good job.

I guess this is a bit funny.

IRT:

Myth #8: 40k is set in our Milky Way galaxy - refutation

... there is no such thing as a map of the Milky Way galaxy. Our current designs of it, such as that linked in the OP, are artist's concepts. We have never, ever had an external perspective to the Milky Way, and (given current technology) would need between 1 and 2 million years to obtain one.

The idea of the Milky Way existing as a spiral-arm galaxy is a theory based on current scientific discoveries, based both on terrestrial observatories and the probes we have cast into space. It is not verified fact.

This "myth" remains true to the setting, as that is the conceit of the game.

Great stuff!

Psiennes, you are aware of telescopes as you went pretty much for the jugular in this case.

 Beaviz81 wrote:
Psiennes, you are aware of telescopes as you went pretty much for the jugular in this case.

Our "map" consists of a vertical line of light across the horizon.

I were always sure Hubble and such had something to do with it.

 Beaviz81 wrote:
I were always sure Hubble and such had something to do with it.

None of our telescopes, satellites, space-faring crafts have been out far enough to have an external view of our galaxy. Voyager 1 has gone out the farthest having just recently exited our solar system in 2013 (it was launched in 1977).

The Hubble Telescope can only look at other galaxies, not our own as it is stuck in Earth's orbit. It's kind of like being inside a glass mansion that you're stuck in one room in and every room is clustered with stuff. You can see the other glass mansions around you through the windows - and quite a bit of their content, but unless you get out of the mansion, you'll never really know the shape of your mansion nor the placement of most of the other things in the mansion.

We have been able to take a picture via microwaves of the observable universe but each galaxy/"hotspot" appears as a blob of activity without any observable differences aside from size.

This looks pretty good, but most of it's just common sense. I've only been to 40k for like 3 years, and I already knew almost all of what was mentioned. But I still learned some, so totally worth the half hour I spent reading it.

Who is that Dude next to Dantioch in the art?

Khonsu wrote:
Who is that Dude next to Dantioch in the art?

Khr Vhalen http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kyr_Vhalen

Nice! Fun read, and informative. As far as I can tell, you commited no harsh blunders ... I'll try to find the time to re-read and give you the details of any light errors (or at least stuff that could be contested ... ok, most of it could be, but you know what I mean).

It only needs more definite articles

 King Pariah wrote:

 Beaviz81 wrote:
I were always sure Hubble and such had something to do with it.

It's kind of like being inside a glass mansion that you're stuck in one room in and every room is clustered with stuff. You can see the other glass mansions around you through the windows - and quite a bit of their content, but unless you get out of the mansion, you'll never really know the shape of your mansion nor the placement of most of the other things in the mansion.

What you are saying is not entirely correct. Your analogy is however kind of correct. If you are inside a closed concrete bunker you don't know how it looks from the outside. If your mansion is all glass however, you know how it will look from the outside, because it can't look different from the outside then it does from the inside, as the boundary is transparent.

You can see the stuff that forms the galaxy also from within (the visible parts at least). And thus, by knowing its content the the positions you can create a picture of the visible part of what you have already identified. Also, you can see distant parts of it from earth for references. From a quick glance glance though most of the milky way pics seem to be taken from galaxies that are thought to be extremely similar to ours. They are not all artists renditions

The Machine Spirit is entirely superstition.

Now, that hasn't stopped some authors as depicting it as some kind of supernatural, actual spirit.

But it was originally just a really advanced computer. It was referred to as a Machine Spirit because it was a semi-autonomous computer system that could communicate in a limited manner with its operators.



40K "canon" is whatever an author wants it to be, because GW and its subsidiaries have not been able to be bothered to have a coherent editorial vision.This isn't a good thing, lol. Nobody should ever tell you "40K has no canon!" like that's a supportive argument. But it is the reality.

It's gonna be difficult to "myth bust" too much of a universe that's almost entirely myth and myths of myths,

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
The Machine Spirit is entirely superstition.

Now, that hasn't stopped some authors as depicting it as some kind of supernatural, actual spirit.

But it was originally just a really advanced computer. It was referred to as a Machine Spirit because it was a semi-autonomous computer system that could communicate in a limited manner with its operators.



40K "canon" is whatever an author wants it to be, because GW and its subsidiaries have not been able to be bothered to have a coherent editorial vision.This isn't a good thing, lol. Nobody should ever tell you "40K has no canon!" like that's a supportive argument. But it is the reality.

It's gonna be difficult to "myth bust" too much of a universe that's almost entirely myth and myths of myths,

It's not a computer. It's a human brain ripped from its body and shoved into a box and used as a processor, and a damn good one at that.

Need a more powerful machine spirit? Then get a hundred brains and wire them all up together.

Plus if you called something a AI or artificial intelligence it was heresy (men of metal..GW's literal pillaging of the dune universe) but...machine spirit is more palatable to the ADmech..and all the sweetmeat holy oil lubricating flock...lol

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
But it was originally just a really advanced computer. It was referred to as a Machine Spirit because it was a semi-autonomous computer system that could communicate in a limited manner with its operators.

You sure that it's was completely intended like that? Because Machine Spirit does not have to be the same all across the board. Basically everyone knows machine spirit of the landraider exists and has actual impact. But that doesnt exclude that most machine spirits are just superstition. I think it has to be differentiated. Some machines (mostly high value/rare ones) have actual "machine spirits" as in semi autonomous computers (never full autonomous because that would be tech heresy...). Yet everything is explained by everyone as machine spirits, because they have no better explanation why something fails or does certain things and so on. The understanding of the technology is simply not there.

Wyzilla wrote:It's not a computer. It's a human brain ripped from its body and shoved into a box and used as a processor, and a damn good one at that.

Need a more powerful machine spirit? Then get a hundred brains and wire them all up together.

Again, this is just one version of the machine spirit,and part of the "any author can write whatever they want because there's no quality control"*. The idea of it being a human brain in a box is not present in the older fluff about the machine spirit.


*I mean, Nick Kyme still gets to write stories for TBL and Graham McNeill hasn't been proscribed from penning Space Marine fiction. How could there be any quality control?

a semi autonomous system is not an artificial intelligence.
An AI learns by itself. This led to a war in the 40k past therefore it was banned, therefore its now tech heresy for reasons they might not even know anymore.

In my book, Machine spirit is the universal explanation how/why a system works.

In realworld Tank Engine x might break quickly in the same vehicle compared to Tank Engine y, because of vibrations causing resonance because of the particular eigenfrequencies in the parts of Engine x. In 40k this is interpreted as "the machine spirit was gruntled and rejected the different engine".

Rather than the IoM inventing/innovating something, they just go by trial and error (and debate about wether the machine spirits will "like/accept" the modification), rather then to actually figure out how something works and reproduce it.

Possibly.

Another explanation for "Machine Spirits" is the remains of code-strings currently infecting every electronic or computerized device in the Imperium, following the release of the most-advanced cyberwarfare systems during the war with the Men of Iron and then again during the Horus Heresy... in which time there were actual daemonic codestrings deployed.

This may mean that anything as complex as a pocket calculator, and definitely anything more complex, has some bits of resident AI code living in it. Being AI, and probably having been designed to be an aggressive AI (since its original design purpose was as an offensive attack against other computing systems), and possibly mixed with a bit of emotion-reactive Warp Energy, you get a "creature" inhabiting these machines that can be influenced by the beliefs and practices of the mortals around it.

So, for example, while the burning of the incense and the anointing of the sacred oils does not, from a purely mechanical perspective, do anything, because it is done with the belief and the intent that it will calm and soothe the Machine Spirit, it does, because the Machine Spirit contains a bit of Warp Energy that responds to such beliefs.

Keep wrote:

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
But it was originally just a really advanced computer. It was referred to as a Machine Spirit because it was a semi-autonomous computer system that could communicate in a limited manner with its operators.

You sure that it's was completely intended like that? Because Machine Spirit does not have to be the same all across the board. Basically everyone knows machine spirit of the landraider exists and has actual impact. But that doesnt exclude that most machine spirits are just superstition. I think it has to be differentiated. Some machines (mostly high value/rare ones) have actual "machine spirits" as in semi autonomous computers (never full autonomous because that would be tech heresy...). Yet everything is explained by everyone as machine spirits, because they have no better explanation why something fails or does certain things and so on. The understanding of the technology is simply not there.

Do you think that they intended for the Codex Astartes, the book written by the greatest military mind ever to live and the war bible of "one of the Imperium's greatest tacticians" was supposed to be depicted as an "If A, Then B" instruction manual for on Warfighting For Dummies that would specifically prohibit the use of improvised explosives and insist that reconnaissance forces engage the enemy wherever and whenever possible?

Or is Graham McNeill just a terrible writer of military fiction?

Though I'm not sure what you're arguing because about half of what you wrote basically echoes what I wrote in my first post. The old school fluff had people treat advanced technology like it was semi-sentient because they didn't understand it. Part of the whole Dark Ages motif and the loss of technology and regression of civilization, etc. People prayed to the machine spirits because they foolishly believed it would work.

Nowadays the "Machine Spirit" idea has been so conflated and the license so inundated with middling writers, you have growling Warhound Titans, because you know, named after a dog, so it must act like a dog. And Space Wolves should ride on actual wolves.

I can only imagine what a Reaver or Imperator Titan sounds like.

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:
Do you think that they intended for the Codex Astartes, the book written by the greatest military mind ever to live and the war bible of "one of the Imperium's greatest tacticians" was supposed to be depicted as an "If A, Then B" instruction manual for on Warfighting For Dummies that would specifically prohibit the use of improvised explosives and insist that reconnaissance forces engage the enemy wherever and whenever possible?

There's no reason why codex astartes would not include improvised explosives... (improvisation btw is not really innovation, specifically if you are schooled in what and how you can improvise...)
Improved explosives are pretty easy. You just need something that can explode, something that sets it off. Then there are different methods of achieving different effects (anti-personell, anti-armor, anti-structure, etc). Can all be schooled.
You dont need a scientist to use a wine bottle, a copper coin and some explosive to put a finger thick hole through a couple of centimeters of steelplate. You just need someone (e.g. sergeant) show you how its done once and you are good to go. That's basic combat training. Using substitutes for stuff you dont have is natural.

I meant innovation on a technical level brother. At least not something i would consider as innovation. They just dont understand the science all that much, therefore they try and see what happens, and waste hundreds of years until they get something (a new pattern) working and/or approved.

I've always seen the codex astarties as a orginizational guide, and a bit of a suntzu's art of war, offering some general guideance and specific examples of what to do in certin situations. and I've always seen the Ultramarines sticking to it as more not deviating from the orginizational aspects of it. as I;ve noticed before, the if the Ultramarines never adapted tactics and strageties they'd have been defeated the first time they encountered an opponnent that was sufficantly differnt from anyone Gulliman had ever fought. which means they would have been destroyed at the battle of mccragge

 Veteran Sergeant wrote:

Wyzilla wrote:It's not a computer. It's a human brain ripped from its body and shoved into a box and used as a processor, and a damn good one at that.

Need a more powerful machine spirit? Then get a hundred brains and wire them all up together.

Again, this is just one version of the machine spirit,and part of the "any author can write whatever they want because there's no quality control"*. The idea of it being a human brain in a box is not present in the older fluff about the machine spirit.


*I mean, Nick Kyme still gets to write stories for TBL and Graham McNeill hasn't been proscribed from penning Space Marine fiction. How could there be any quality control?

That image you just posted was a human brain in a box.

Even further back, it wasn't even human brains, but various predatory animals (in various war-machines).

 Psienesis wrote:
Even further back, it wasn't even human brains, but various predatory animals (in various war-machines).

Well that's both incredibly stupid and asking for something bad to happen.

"Honorable Brother-Sergeant Agamemnon, the Land Raider is chasing mutant rats again."

"I hate my job."

Ive read something with "cogitation power of 30.000 co/second".

30k cogitations per second... not sure as what brain that would qualify... but that level of speed is 1960's-1970's computer tech at best.
Regarding brain doing stupid things (like wanting to reproduce ) - servitors also have a brain. Except it's kinda lobotomised in an "advanced" way - meaning certain parts of the brain are disabled through surgery, so that only the functions necessary for the task are left intact.

@Veteran Sergeant
Do you have the other half of the poster by chance? I've looked for the poster in higher resolution then 600px since ages, unsuccessfull.