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Do Ork machines have spirits as described for Imperial technology?

Or do Imperial machines only have spirits because of their biological basis - thus meaning Ork machines are just machines as we know them today?

Since Ork stuff is said to be unreliable and unpredictable, it's possible all the Machine Spirits in are pissed because the Orks don't really look after their machines much.

 TheManWithNoPlan wrote:
Do Ork machines have spirits as described for Imperial technology?

Or do Imperial machines only have spirits because of their biological basis - thus meaning Ork machines are just machines as we know them today?

You're trying to objectively describe religious attributes as tangible concepts.

Standard Imperial doctrine is that xenos technology has either no spirit or a xenos spirit, and in either case they must be handled carefully and never used.

Given that Orks see their Stompas and Gargants as effigies of Mork/Gork'll/both I suppose it's possible they could be imbued with some kind of spirit. Certainly they seem to be a focus for Orky Waaagh power. I've never heard of even a Gargant being inhabited by the same kind of spirit that an Imperial Titan harbors. Orks seem to mostly control their devices with a bewildering array of buttons, switches and control handles.

Although fluff does describe Killa Kans and some Ork Deffdreds as having their operators wired in, nothing has ever described them as having them fight to control their walkers the way an Imperial Princeps does.

If one of these belching monstrosities did in fact have a Machine Spirit you can bet it would be nigh uncontrollable. I'd picture a roaring, howling whirlwind of destruction that would only be marginally more inclined to kill non-Orks than it's own creators. Very Khorne-like.

As far as other Ork vehicles having a Machine Spirit/limited AI? Not so much. For all the kustomizin' they lavish on their vehicles they don't regard them with religious awe. They certainly are incapable of semi-independent action the way, say, Landraiders are.

Actually, I don't think an Orky Machine Spirit would be that hard for an Ork - or a Grot for the Kans - to control, for one simple reason: Unlike humanity, an Ork will pretty much want the same thing as the machine anyway.

It'll all be tied to the Waaaagh! energy. Orks aren't holding on to ancient relics from some past golden era. They cobble them together on the spot from scrap. I don't really see them imbuing them with spirits in the process nor seen any fluff that mentions it. What the fluff does mention about Ork tek is that the more Waaaaagh! energy flowing the more complex and bigger the machines end up being. Latent skills in meks get unlocked in some fashion the more driven by Waaaagh! energy leading up to Stompas and Gargants which is pointed out as effigies of their gods. Perhaps in some fashion this Waaaaagh! energy is imbuing Ork tek with 'spirit'.

No, Ork tech doesn't have machine spirits like Imperial technology.

Which doesn't mean it doesn't have some sort of spiritual component - ork guns are badly machined and use crappy ammo, yet work well because the orks think bad-ass sound equals a killy gun. They have a low-level psychic field around them that helps the crude and improbable ork tech work better for them than if an Imperial TechPriest tried to make it work. An ork (or even a score of orks) wont make a stick become a grenade or a gun, but if they believe the mek's latest creation looks and sounds bad-ass enough it just might not blow up in the hands of the Warboss handling it.

Also I'd like to add that Ork tek is a bit more sophisticated then just buttons and levers. Sure there is plenty of those but the recipients of Killer Kans and Deff Dredds are neurologically wired into the machines. It takes a mek and painboy to get walkers made and piloted.

I found this piece while browsing:

Why do you think they seek to placate the Machine Spirit? It's because it exists. The fragments of trillions of self-aware programs, flourishing during the Dark Age of Technology and shattered by Man in his war with the Iron men, imprisoning the few who had not set themselves irrevocably into the machinery, a prison smashed wide open by the Heresy. Everything that can hold programming in the Imperium has a shard of a program in it. EVERYTHING. And you'd better fething please it or it will do everything in its power to make your day gak. Sure, if it's a Lasgun it'll just not work or start shooting off rounds by itself, but if you piss off a Land Raider you can say bye-bye to half a continent. They apply these principles to things without spirits by habit, since they're so used to dealing with tanks that if not talked to just right might go rogue and annihilate the Manufactorum before they can be killed.

I don't know if it's canon or not, but it means that Machine Spirit is exclusive to human pre-Age of Strife tech, the remaining scraps of AI that were driven insane. I doubt Orks create AIs or even know much about programming, so i'd say that their tech doesn't have anything like Machine Spirit.

It's not canon. It's someone on this forum trying to explain the Machine Spirit without having to admit that the Cult Mechanicus is an animistic belief that, because the Warp is a thing, is somewhat true.

I always thought of Machine Spirits as some form of programing or AI (artificial Intelligence) because most of the tech the imperium has and builds is based off of a common blueprint. To look at it from a computer programming view the more advanced and complex the machine the better its Code but at the same time as your code becomes longer and longer it becomes harder to make sufficient error conditions(failsafes) to prevent errors or crashes. It also becomes easier to make mistakes. On something simple to program like a lasgun which would have an infinitely shorter code than a titan there is much less code required and therefore much less potential for error. In general I think of the imperiums machines as computers with really bad user interfaces that are Not user friendly.

With that in mind I highly doubt orks program anything on their machines much less have a uniform way of doing so. Where the Imperiums machines are run by and operated from/with a cpu everything orks make is manual. So to answer the question no I don't think ork machines have a machine spirit as the umies do.