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Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology? They are always seeking Tech from the old days but never trying to create new stuff. Why would anyone NOT be trying to make new things if they were always in wars with something or someone? Im still pretty new to everything so I may have misread or missed something but I dont understand it

Because part of the feel of the setting is the religious overtones:

Tech is a religion unto itself. Old tech items are often revered as relics, you have to do things in a ritualistic and sanctioned way or you are a heretic. The machine spirits in older tech are fickle and might refuse to operate properly in conjunction with newer tech that doesn't follow the old ways, etc.

It's not supposed to make s use, but it is a "dark ages type setting" in which fear, ritual and tradition overrule all.

Science doesnt really exist in 40k, technology is some arcane thing in 40k. They are basically on a level of religiously tainted alchemistry. They try stuff without knowing what they are actually doing (produce gold from dirt), while interpreting what they get with religion (the spirits didnt like the treatment i gave them).

contrary to popular belief. There is actually technological advancement in the Imperium/Ad mech outside of discovering old stuff.

It just happens REALLY slowly.


For example: If you make a Tank better by say.... giving it a bigger more efficient engine or a better gun, People will question it and if its effective then perhaps they will sanction it and cover it up by claiming said tank was always able to be changed that way (its how the Predator Annihilator came to be).

Not everything is STC fragments.

Mostly its politics and other red tape.

If you create a new thing and do all the paperwork and religious sanctions (and hopefully have good standing) and jump through all the hoops... Your new thing might be accepted. If not it could be hidden away and you could "disappear".. or something worse. The thing you made would be hidden away somewhere.

Some other things to remember:

-The Imperium has been at war for 10,000 years. That kind of puts a damper on the whole "SCIENCE" thing.
-The AdMech generally hold that everything worth discovering has already been discovered, so innovation is regarded as very suspect.
-The Horus Heresy wrecked things hard. As in, Mars was a halfway-burned down library before the Heresy, and now all that's left is the scraps that you might find in the ashes and rubble.

To round that out, it's basically that they do not possess the apparatus to do "SCIENCE" on the scale that we can do today, or that some other species in the 40K setting do. They also don't have the opportunity to build such an apparatus, as they're too busy scrabbling through the ashes and remains of whatever is left from the centuries-to-millenia ravages of Old Night and the Horus Heresy... not to mention all the other wars that have occurred/are occurring in the 10,000 years the Imperium has stood.

It's because human tech has long stagnated. Sometime after the Emporer became stuck in the Golden Throne, humanity devolved back into religious barbarism and superstitious stigmatism. Their old factories and such continue to churn out the old design, probably a host of people at it's base praying and supplicating thinking that is what is powering it. Old tech still in use are revered as holy items that require a whole bunch of rites and passages and rituals performed before going out in combat with it when really pulling the trigger was all they needed to do. It's a dark time for humanity.

Here is the quote from White Dwarf 93 that explained the original aesthetic for Warhammer 40,000. It gives an insight into how humans perceive technology and how it is that the technology level has stagnated.

Technology is present, but it's not central to the way people think. Most common folk see technology as withcraft - so do the technicians!

The galaxy has been dominated by mankind since the Age of Technology. But that era is now long gone, a semi-mythical time from which come half-understood and popularly feared ideas and machines known as the old science. The creators of the advanced technology that launched a million voyages of colonisation have been dead for over twenty thousand years. Fragmented over the entire galaxy, human civilisations developed and fell in pan-human wars, interstellar strife, social division and religious fanaticism.

In Warhammer 40,000 technology takes a definite backseat, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any to be found. In fact, there's a whole range of advanced weapons, armour types and equipment. The range of technology available reflects the diversity of humanity, ranging from the primitive crossbows and slings used on feral worlds to the barely understood digital and force weapons carries by rich and powerful individuals.

Technology permeates the society of the Imperium despite the mystic aura associated with it. Warp-engines propel spacecraft into the fluid medium of the warp-space whilst the Technomats of the Adeptus Mechanicus preserve the sacred knowledge of centuries etched upon the engineered memory cortexes in their brains. Warhammer 40,000 has all the hardware you'd expect in any futuristic game, but interpreted in a radically different way.

Although thinking about is a good example of how superstitious works. There's some machines where the tech-priests must daub himself in sacred machine oil, pray to the glory of the machine god, and recite the mystical rite of activation, but machine is voice activated, and the rite of activation contains the phrase needed to start it.

Those who disobey or disbelieve end up lobotomized servants or having their skulls turned into robotic pets...

Ugh and the Cherubs! Lobotomized babies, I think those baby brains get fed to the Emporer via one of the many tubes.

Well the old tech is like holy grails/bibles and new tech is an affront to the machine god so it's very taboo to attempt to make new tech but I think 2 forge worlds are advancing their tech at a very slow rate.

 honeybadger33 wrote:
Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology? They are always seeking Tech from the old days but never trying to create new stuff. Why would anyone NOT be trying to make new things if they were always in wars with something or someone? Im still pretty new to everything so I may have misread or missed something but I dont understand it

Because Mankind reached the pinnacle of technological advancement in the Golden Age of the Imperium. Everything that has come after has been but a pale shadow of that time... and one of the things that lead to the fall from that era was the creation of AI. The Men of Iron, as they were called, were basically AI-driven robot-soldiers that turned against Mankind and drove it to the brink of extinction, and unleashed such destruction that the very basis of Mankind's collective knowledge was lost. Not just forgotten, but lost. So not only did the survivors not know what they had had, but all the records that detailed those things were destroyed as well... this is why the AdMech of M41 continues its search for an intact, complete STC, because an STC contains all the data of all the devices from that era and is, supposedly, capable of actually producing all these items.

The reason people are not allowed to invent stuff willy-nilly is, following the War with the Iron Men and then the Horus Heresy, the entire tech-base of the Imperium is absolutely riddled with sentient electronic warfare agents, data-daemons, lethal anti-personnel and anti-system programs and strings of AI code. Thus, building some new wunderkind MBT might result in something like a Super-Baneblade that is both sentient and homicidal... and has decided that it really, really doesn't like the look of your face.

Ugh and the Cherubs! Lobotomized babies, I think those baby brains get fed to the Emporer via one of the many tubes.

Cherubs are actually vat-grown organic parts, not actual babies. They're genderless.

The war of the Iron Men irrevocably scarred mankind's collective psyche. It almost led to total extinction, and a deep mistrust of technology. So only the people who are qualified are allowed to meddle with it.

They do conduct research and advancement. Its just very slow, methodical, and with great care.

Some examples of technological advancement since the Heresy. The various marks of Power Armor, each superior to the previous version. Marine portable plasma cannons/multi-meltas. Better starship designs. Better bolters.

Tech overall is in stagnation, because for every advancement something else is usually lost or just becomes harder to reproduce.

Like everyone else said, to open up the tech and tinker with it is an insult to the machine and its 'spirit'.

Although I think they do understand that they have to do it but treat it as a necessary evil.

There are examples of 'new' technology, razorbacks, for example, and until the hh series came along, stormbolters and assault cannons were relatively new. It's supposed to be a culture in decline, so I suppose not having new tech springing up all the time helps support that feeling.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Ugh and the Cherubs! Lobotomized babies, I think those baby brains get fed to the Emporer via one of the many tubes.

I was relieved to find out that Cherubs aren't actual lobotomized babies; they're grown in cloning vats. Mind you, they're awful clones and not much smarter than animals.

There's also the matter of motive. Let's look at a typical world.
The world would have a planetary governor and that world must pay a tithe. This tithe could be in ores, manufactured goods, food, or soldiers. Failure to pay the tithe in full results in the planetary governor being executed. Understandably, then, the governor is going to be interested in paying that tithe.
For the sake of example, let's say that the tithe is one million well-trained soldiers with a basic set of equipment. Too few soldiers? The governor was supposed to provide a million; failure to do so will result in the governor getting censured (possibly in a fatal manner). Is the equipment too shoddy? The governor was supposed to provide a certain level of equipment; failure to do so will result in censure. Are the troops badly trained? Censured. You get the idea. It's a good idea for the governor to provide slightly more than the minimum required (just in case there's a last-minute breakdown, unexpected loses just before the troop ships arrive, etc). However, if the governor is too generous with the tithe - e.g. handing over three million soldiers when the tithe only requires one million - then the Administratum might decide that the planet can clearly afford this new amount. The governor will be informed that next year's compulsory tithe is three million soldiers... and that failure to supply three million soldiers will result in the execution of the governor.
Knowing this, why would the governor invest in fancy new equipment for those troops? Nope, far better just to keep paying the normal tithe...

The Imperium has a vast bureaucracy, and if it's not your job to finance snazzy new research projects then you're not going to finance snazzy new research projects.

Mallich - you're missing one minor fact in that analysis. Equipment isn't the job of an Imperial world to produce. All that stuff comes from Forge Worlds.

Sometimes the Imperial World is lucky enough to recieve the equipment to equip its soldiers with before sending them off to the muster point, but often they're expected to pick up their gear when they get to the muster, and if they haven't been trained on it properly, well, they've got a few weeks in transit to get used to soldiering.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Mallich - you're missing one minor fact in that analysis. Equipment isn't the job of an Imperial world to produce. All that stuff comes from Forge Worlds.

Sometimes the Imperial World is lucky enough to recieve the equipment to equip its soldiers with before sending them off to the muster point, but often they're expected to pick up their gear when they get to the muster, and if they haven't been trained on it properly, well, they've got a few weeks in transit to get used to soldiering.

Maybe but his point remains a good one actually. the Imperial Tithe system likely doesn't enchourage exceeding expectations and likely essentially dischourages it.

 honeybadger33 wrote:
Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology? They are always seeking Tech from the old days but never trying to create new stuff. Why would anyone NOT be trying to make new things if they were always in wars with something or someone? Im still pretty new to everything so I may have misread or missed something but I dont understand it

Primarily because the authors felt a sense of stagnation and superstition of new technology would add to the sense of a grim universe.

Also as with most works of fiction, not a lot in the 40k universe holds up under close scrutiny. We're talking about universe where men choose to swing swords at all manner of alien horrors when they could just blast them to atoms from orbit

 honeybadger33 wrote:
Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology? They are always seeking Tech from the old days but never trying to create new stuff. Why would anyone NOT be trying to make new things if they were always in wars with something or someone? Im still pretty new to everything so I may have misread or missed something but I dont understand it

Because innovation was banned by the Emperor when he sealed the pact with the Mechanicus, because he knew that it would eventually lead to warp-powered tech (which would lead to chaos taint, which in turn would lead to demise of humanity). Alot of the high technology has already been designed, hence the Mechanicus' guest for complete STC.

Also, Mechanicus is constantly adapting and modifying non-standard tech to use by humans. Alot of these however won't see the light of day due to the constant infighting, politicising and backstabbing in Mechanicus. Remember that Adeptus Mechanicus is it's own organisation, practically a Imperium within the Imperium. Imperium officials have no power over Mechanicus and vice versa.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
Equipment isn't the job of an Imperial world to produce. All that stuff comes from Forge Worlds.

No, it doesn't. Many (most) of the Imperial worlds have manufacturing capabilities of their own, sometimes to point they could be considered Forge Worlds (See: Cadia and Armageddon). Most primitive worlds don't necessarily have industrial capabilities of their own, but can be industrialised relatively quickly. Remember that they need to arm their own PDF.

Imperium would crumble if each world didn't have least primitive manufacturing capabilities to sustain themselves.

Primitive Worlds could range from truly primitive, like club-wielding barbarians, up to black-powder weapons (so 19th century)... but I would hardly call such worlds "industrialized", when compared to the rest of the Imperium.

What separates a Hive World from a Forge World is less what it does and more who owns it. A Hive World is a world subject to the Imperium, a Forge World is subject to the Adeptus Mechanicus.

 honeybadger33 wrote:
Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology?

They do.

It is a commonly held misconception and player-perpetuated myth that the AdMech is super-superstitious and refuse to innovate or discover new things. In fact, fluff going all the way back to 2nd Edition and Rogue Trader talks about them researching new things. I gathered a bunch of the quotes up one time. If I can be bothered, I'll do it again.


Basically, the AdMech lost a fair amount of knowledge in the slow decline of the Imperium. But that doesn't mean they haven't been trying to get some of it back and learn new things.

Whiskey144 wrote:

-The AdMech generally hold that everything worth discovering has already been discovered, so innovation is regarded as very suspect.

While this might sound dumb, in fact the greatest Human civilization was brought down by innovation. They created AI, the AI turned on them and destroyed the first human empire.

In addition, you might say innovate a new bioweapon that gets loose and kills everyone or accidently bring a daemon into the material realm when you try and build a better tank.

Many sources point to the Adeptus Mechanicus understanding their technology perfectly well and being extremely competent scientists and engineers, though their understanding of things is coloured by their strong religious background. They're just ultra-conservative to the point that it can take centuries for any innovations to be permitted becuase they want to make absolutely sure it will not result in bad things (TM). They're like medieval guilds in that they understand their craft, but are strongly resistant to any change or moves to move power away from their grasp. Given that innovation lead to machines causing bad things, their skepticism regarding innovation is understandable.

AdMech has a boot strap problem where there are gaps in their knowledge large enough that it is way more practical to reproduce things by exact rote than to try to build a new foundation and develop an organic knowledge of things.

It's like if you had a non Newtonian fluids exam in 10 minutes and you had never studied the field. You can memorize a copy of the multiple choice answers, or you can try to study the textbook. But you only have 10 minutes. What do you choose? That's the AdMechs dellima every day

 honeybadger33 wrote:
Can someone clarify something for me? Why doesnt anyone come up with NEW technology? They are always seeking Tech from the old days but never trying to create new stuff. Why would anyone NOT be trying to make new things if they were always in wars with something or someone? Im still pretty new to everything so I may have misread or missed something but I dont understand it

NOT everything the Imperium uses are salvages of its own former 'self'... Pre-Imperial human states and polities. By the time the first 'true' Astartes was made, biogenetic engineering has created new organs. Also early bolters are the designs of the Emperor himself.

The STC grail quest is based on the beliefs that every tech human has in the 'Dark Age of Technology' is a pinnacle of science Mankind has earned. and it's easier to salvage the preexisting tech, study and replicate ones. than to research a new thing. or even study the superior alien races like Eldar, Tau and Necrons. Yet in some fluff. newer laser weapons are being 'developed' by the Admech... they still do have R&D but not through the paths of science.