Pacific wrote:
I also wouldn't equate it with just 'horrible fascism' of an utterly totalitarian state that purges it's own citizens routinely (although that is part of it). Instead, for me (and this is going back to 1st edition) it was always meant to be about the loss of hope.
Humanity had it's one, great chance at ascending to something greater and they blew it. Now, all that remains is war. And, it's 40,000 years in the future, so we're still doing it!
It sprung very much from the old late 80s British satire of 2000AD, of William Gibson, of Dune and of Thatcher's Great Britain - a negative image of Roddenbury's Star Trek - but it was all so bleak that you had to have some satirical humour in there, which you see dotted around Rogue Trader and the books that came out at that time.
Over the years you have these concepts (that were very much meant to be tongue in cheek) - entire world sentenced to destruction via killer virus and orbital bombardment - because of a single case of Chaos etc. actually become a serious concept.
And so that almost 'comedic' interpretation (of how bad things are, deliberately over the top) became an actual reality within the game world. I think we saw that a lot from the change from 1st to 2nd edition, although bits did still remain (the Orks essentially being football hooligans and London dockers and having a selection of mk1 exploding legs, up until 3rd/4th editions).
You'll see Rick Priestly, Dan Abnett talk about this in the same way, and it's something that has diverged as a setting as the game, miniatures and background have developed over the past decade where the part about 'loss of hope' has receded into the background (and there have been quite a few discussions in the Background section about this topic).
'New Designs' of armour and vehicles being discovered that are an improvement on what went before, troops that are 'immune' to Chaos (!)
Heroes that were dead ("frozen in status at the moment of their death, the fatal wound still visible") have been replaced by 10" high miniatures resplendent in brilliant primary colours.
The level of 'enemy' has been turned up to 11 too, but there isn't the same overriding atmosphere of pending doom that surrounded earlier editions, and it's now taken on an aspect of Alliance vs. Horde helping to prompt a never-ending selection of new rules and miniatures.
Perhaps what sums it up more than anything else is the Crimson Fists, who went from being all but annihilated by their own missiles accidentally landing on their own troops in Rogue Trader (them being destroyed on the front page of the rulebook, but fighting on till the last which was the heroic bit!) to now still being about and fighting as a chapter.
